Politics and Protest on College Campuses

Brenna Miller   

Welcome to History Talk, the podcast that brings together a panel of experts to discuss current events in historical perspective. I'm your host, Brenna Miller.

 

Jessica Vinas-Nelson  

And I'm your other host, Jessica Vinas-Nelson. In the last few years controversies has exploded on college campuses. From protests over alt-right speakers, to the #MeToo movement and sexual assault on campuses, and campus corporate partnerships, students have engaged in a host of politically charged issues in recent years.

 

Brenna Miller   

Last year, protests erupted on campuses over President Trump's inauguration and the Muslim travel ban. And protests at Berkeley and the University of Washington turned violent after controversial political commentator, Milo Yiannopoulos, was invited to speak on campus. Since then other schools have had battles over controversial speakers too and recently Kent State officials barred an invitation for white supremacist, Richard Spencer, to speak on the anniversary of the 1970 Kent State school shooting. But from Kent State to Berkeley to our very own Ohio State University activism on college campuses is nothing new.

 

Jessica Vinas-Nelson  

How do campus protests break out? To what extent can campuses serve as launching points for social change? And how can learning about past campus protests help us navigate on campus controversies today? Today we have two guests with us to discuss the past and present of politics and protests on college campuses. In the studio with us, we have Bill Shkurti, Ohio State University former Vice President for business and finance and author of "The Ohio State University in the ‘60s: The Unraveling of the Old Order".

 

Bill Shkurti  

Hello. Glad to be here.

 

Brenna Miller   

And also here with us is Dr. David Steigerwald, a professor of history at The Ohio State University, where he focuses on 20th century American history, particularly the Vietnam War and the ‘60s.

 

David Steigerwald   

Hi There.

 

Jessica Vinas-Nelson  

Thanks for joining us today. When most people think about the history of campus protest, they think about the 1960s. Is that when campus protests originated or do they have a longer history?

 

David Steigerwald   

They have a longer history, as most things do. You can go in the American experience well back into the early 19th century. Harvard for one was known to be a place where believe it or not students were bumptious and aggressive. So the campus has always had a reputation of being somewhat unsettled. We can see college campus protests in the World War I era through the ‘30s. I mean, for example, the northeastern schools during the ‘30s were really quite riven with left wing protests and City College in New York is famous for the fights both food fights and outright bare-knuckled brawls between the trots and the Stalinist with the other left wingers just kind of standing in the corners watching. So it wasn't unique to the ‘60s that student protests erupted. But they probably never did in quite the same size and scope and notoriety as in the ‘60s.

 

Bill Shkurti  

Yeah, and in fact, speaking of Ohio State being in the Midwest, they were a little more gentile than some of the places that David just mentioned. But in fact, during the ‘30s, there was some big protests here at Ohio State against compulsory military training or what we now know as ROTC. But it really took on a whole different momentum and scope in the 1960s.

 

Brenna Miller   

So it was such a pronounced history of campus protests and student activism, then is there a particular reason why these sorts of issues coalesce on college campuses?

 

Bill Shkurti  

I think it's a combination two things First of all, universities in this country and least many parts of the free world, consider themselves places where new ideas are welcomed, debate is welcome, discussion is welcome, activism is encouraged. And then when you get a bunch of young people together, who believe in things and want to learn and want to express themselves, you have the ingredients that can lead to a lot of activists’ behavior.

 

David Steigerwald   

Yeah, I agree with that. One of the comparative things to be said about American universities, however, is that they've never been legally or institutionally independent to the same extent that they are in places like France and in the Spanish speaking world, where campuses really are supposed to be autonomous, or they often are. So to some extent, American campuses are structurally not so well suited as they might be to autonomous politics and protest. Or maybe that's the reason why there's more.

 

Bill Shkurti  

Yeah.

 

Jessica Vinas-Nelson  

Well, so what were the most significant campus protests of the 1960s? And what were they about?

 

Bill Shkurti  

Big part of it was civil rights protected regarding the treatment of African Americans both on campus and countrywide. Second package is around the military. And that would involve both compulsory military training or ROTC. It also involves military recruiting on campus, involved the draft and as the decade went on, it would involve protests against the Vietnam War. The third group and involve the issue of free speech, who was allowed on campus who was not allowed, why and what happened. A fourth bundle of issues involve the treatment of dissenters. And that became more and more important as the big crackdown occurred in the later part of the ‘60s. And the fifth, were kind of a mixed bag of unpredictable things. Here, there was a big protest against the decision by the faculty council not to go to the Rose Bowl. There was also protests that flared up over an arrest over a jaywalking ticket. And there was a protest, believe it or not, over the administration's handling of a change in the leadership at the Lantern. So it's all kinds of different things. And protest was in the air in the ‘60s, it definitely was felt here.

 

David Steigerwald   

So the real tricky question is, why was it in the air? And the answer to that rests in the social and cultural and to some extent, intellectual history of postwar America into the ‘50s and then bleeding into the ‘60s. There were cultural and social underpinnings of middle-class white Americans lives that that population that was bound to go to the university that conduced to certain kinds of interpretations of the environment around them. I'm thinking particularly about the growth of a regimented life in an increasingly bureaucratized, society. Suburbanized homogeneity, that bred a kind of sense of loneliness, and, and conformity. And along with conformity the other side of the coin of conformity, according to the social scientists was always apathy, a kind of dead-end world, encased around young people who were going into the college in the early ‘60s, and the sensitive and the idealistic, and the well-read among them, understood that this world that they were asked to inherit, in those famous words of the Port Huron statement, the statement of the students for democratic society was really a stifling one. And so when the issues that Bill just so nicely summed up, presented themselves, there was a certain part of that particular generation that was primed already to question but not just question, but to act against.

 

Bill Shkurti  

Let me build on that, because the generational aspect of the protests in the ‘60s is extremely important. So this is the generation of people born right after World War Two, who became college age in the mid-60s. And they were born and raised in a period of tremendous material prosperity, even middle-class kids. But there was an enormous contradiction, they their parents, have since been called the greatest generation, and in some ways, justifiably so. But as the students grew older, and recognize what was going on around them, they saw an enormous amount of hypocrisy in what was going on in society. So that even though society was materially well off, there was a corruption of spirit going on. It was great for white male Americans. But in fact, women were held back, black and brown people were held back, there were rules that had to be followed that favored one group over another. And as this group became older and more aware, they felt that they should do something about it.

 

David Steigerwald   

I want to respond to that, if I may, Bill has laid out a, I think, a sincere and yet overly flattering view of what was motivating the protests of the ‘60s. And I don't mean to be critical in these remarks, but there were personal experiences, rather than reaction to these hypocrisies and injustices that were around them that had primed the early activists and even mid and maybe even more, so the late ‘60s activists to engage in the things they engaged in. And I really want to insist on the structural paradoxes of the world that they grew up in, whether the post war order was one of the most widely shared affluence that any human society had ever created. But that affluence was created, through institutions that were themselves pretty stifling. It was a bur, increasingly bureaucratized, Incorporated, mass produced world that really denied easy access to creativity, that encouraged autonomy. And that was the one of the big catch words, as you remember, of the ‘60s rebels, autonomy and authenticity. The world that they were reacting against, was one of one that they believe that many of them understood as having denied them personally, the control over their lives that they thought human beings should have. This seems to me to sort of proceed both temporarily, but I'm thinking more psychologically, their concerns about the institutionalized injustices that American society obviously had, when it became impossible to ignore those injustices. And as you've noted, already, it was especially the civil rights movement that opened the eyes. They could easily understand things like the civil rights movement through that prism of alienation.

 

Bill Shkurti  

And I guess I don't disagree totally, alienation was a big part of it for a lot of different reasons. But when we talk about “they” or “them,” when we talk about college students in the ‘60s, it's a pretty wide and diverse group of people and opinions that was also going on yet you had conservative students, you had liberal students. But every now and then something would happen that would pull many people together in a way in the ‘60s that was very unique and has not since been repeated.

 

Brenna Miller   

Can you explain a couple of specific protests that particularly stand out and that were memorable?

 

David Steigerwald   

Why don't I take Berkeley, Bill, and you have Ohio State?

 

Bill Shkurti  

Sure.

 

David Steigerwald   

Berkeley was, was home to growing base of activists as early as the late ‘50s. There was a famous confrontation between Berkeley students and San Francisco Police in 1960. Where they had gone over across the bay to protest the House on American Activities Committee, holding hearings on subversion in California. And the San Francisco Police just assaulted them on the front steps of City Hall. And that actually was the first altercation between college activists and the authorities, the law-and-order crowd in all of the ‘60s so it was already a kind of hotbed of dissent, when in 1963, and then even more in ‘64, critical mass of Berkeley students went to help register voters in Mississippi, along with the committee on freedom organizations and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And they went back home to school, both enlivened and inspired by what they had done. At the beginning of fall term in 1964. The authorities on campus decided to shut down a strip of sidewalk that since the 1930s, had been relegated for student political activity, organizing activities, tables, to hand out leaflets, soapbox speakers and so forth. And so they shut it down. And you had this this group of students a wide variety of students that included students for Goldwater, so that was the beginning of the Free Speech Movement. It immediately elicited an occupation of the administration building, they were wrenched out of the building, Berkeley police surrounded well came to campus and just showed a presence. At that moment, a graduate student or maybe he'd already dropped out of school. He was one of those campus hangers about a guy named Jack Weinberg who got into an altercation a scuffle with a couple of Berkeley patrolman, who promptly arrested him and threw him in the back of the car. Several students who were around saw this happen and they surrounded the car, more students came suddenly the few turned into dozens and dozens turned into 100. And taking shifts over the course of about two days, Berkeley students kept the two the two policemen and Weinberg captive. So they were using the squad car as a podium for speeches, one of which included the soon to be famous leader of the Free Speech Movement, Mario Savio, this moved into the full Fall term the university they took action against the leaders of the Free Speech Movement, including expelling Savio and a handful of others. And that only emboldened more student activism. This ran its course into December, the end of the term where there was another very large-scale occupation of Sproul Hall. At that moment, Mario Savio gave a gave one of the most famous speeches of the decade his, you've got to throw your body against the machine against the levers of power speech. And the university relented somewhat they kept him expelled for the time being. But going into the next term and wanting to quiet the campus, the administration capitulated across the board, and Free Speech Movement didn't exactly petered out, but it certainly lost its edge because the university had more or less given them what they were asking for.

 

Bill Shkurti  

So this occurred in California in December of 1964.

 

David Steigerwald   

The whole fall of '64.

 

Bill Shkurti  

Yeah fall of ‘64 early part of ‘65. Now, it's the spring of 1965, just a couple months later, at OSU, you had some political activism in protest prior to that, but nothing to the degree Berkeley had had. But you had a group of students at OSU, including a gentleman by the name of Jeff Schwartz, who had done registering black voters in Louisiana over Freedom Summer, and he and a couple other colleagues wanted to do something about, the university had something called the speaker's rule, which said the President could ban a speaker from campus if the president thought that speaker was subversive. So they developed the free speech front, which was similar deliberately to the name Free Speech Movement, in Berkeley. And in fact, in April, they made a series of demands to the administration, although the rallies were very peaceful, and they actually did an occupation of the administration building. But I interviewed Jeff Schwartz for my book, and he said, one of the things is that he understood Columbus, Ohio was not California, he was afraid that if this if the protesters didn't conduct themselves properly, the Columbus Dispatch, which was very conservative, and other elements of campus would use that as a distraction away from the issue. He and the other leaders of the free speech front here in Columbus told their students when they came in, to sit in the administration building to wear coats and ties to behave themselves. And so they did a sit in for about a day. And then they decided to leave, and they cleaned up after themselves, still the administration didn't do anything. So they came back a second day, and stayed in the administration building after it closed. Now at Berkeley, that was the flashpoint of the confrontation, because that's when the police came in to try and forcibly drag students out of the building. So the question is, what are the OSU administration going to do? So the students sat in overnight, the administration watched, but they didn't do anything. So it's very different than what Berkeley did. So they did continue peaceful protests. Nothing happened over the spring. But over the summer, a lot of machinations went on behind the scenes. And when school came school started in the fall, the Board of Trustees met, and on the President's recommendation changed the speaker's rule to essentially allow any speaker other than someone who advocated directly violence on campus, and it's settled the issue. So the issue got settled at Ohio State without one student being arrested, one penny of property damage. What was not known at the time but found out behind the scenes. In California, the person who pushed the administration to clear out the students out of the administration building was the Liberal Democratic Governor, Pat Brown. In Ohio, you had a Republican, somewhat conservative governor, Jim Rhodes, who essentially kept his hands off with the administration did but behind the scenes, we now know to get a resolution of this issue without Ohio State turning into a Berkeley because he wanted to sell the wonderful world of Ohio as a place for businesses to locate and felt if we had a big eruption, like they did at Berkeley, it would hurt. Now, five years later, Governor Rhodes was involved in the lead up to the Kent State incidents and shootings. But it's kind of interesting, Ohio State had the next biggest protest after Berkeley. But it had a very different outcome, because there was restraint on both sides. Now, you would have thought people would have learned from that. But instead, as the decade went on, the desire to confront became greater and greater.

 

David Steigerwald   

What's interesting about both those cases, is not just that they were both free speech protests, but that they were both really localized eruptions, having to do very specifically with very specific conditions in very specific places. Right. But we both know that once the war got rolling, then campuses across the country began to, to witness and be scenes of student protests. And so at that point, those issues were not quite so localized.

 

Jessica Vinas-Nelson  

So how did the issues today about free speech compare to the issues then?

 

Bill Shkurti  

That's kind of interesting, I you know, that it was the barring of so-called subversives, which are generally left wing or communist speakers. The controversy today seems to be over white nationalists and some of the ultra, right people, and the fact that it isn't what they say it's all the violence that accompanies. Well, maybe it is part of what they say, there's a part of me that says, a university needs to be open to different voices. And in some way, you build these people up by banning them, it's better to let them talk and people to hear how silly they are, on the other hand, is someone who, when I was still working was ultimately responsible next to the President for University security. You worry about people like that coming on campus and flaming things, and then somebody gets seriously injured or killed and then you ask yourself, is there something I could have done to stop it?

 

David Steigerwald   

I'm largely with Bill on this, if Richard Spencer wants to sit out on the sidewalk at 15th and High. Have at it, because I believe free speech is really important. I'm still of the view, though, that the university community has a right to control who speaks on campus. The big difference here between what we're talking about in the ‘60s, the free speech rule, particularly in the ‘60s and Ohio State, was that the President had the right to ban people whom students invited that endorsed student groups couldn't invite whomever they wanted. That's not what's happening here. Nobody from Ohio State invited Richard Spencer to come here. And no one invited him from Kent State student groups. Nobody invited him from the University of Cincinnati student groups. He's got some lawyer from Michigan who's going around the country threatening suits, if universities don't open their facilities to them and that's a very different thing. But I see no reason why the university should be compelled to open their facilities to anybody who's got an aggressive lawyer.

 

Jessica Vinas-Nelson  

So how did these protests morph into antiwar protests?

 

Bill Shkurti  

Well, because the war grew in terms of its impact on society. So at the beginning of the ‘60s, it was only a few advisors by the middle of the ‘60s it started to be ground troops. The military had to switch put more emphasis on the draft. As long as you stayed in college, you could get an exemption to stay out of the draft, there were still a lot of antiwar sentiment, and the protests against the draft and the military went on at the same time. The interesting thing about Ohio State is you have antiwar protests here. They started in the fall of '65 with two people and grew some as the decade went on, you also have the country's largest ROTC detachment dead people both who fought the war and fought against the war here on the campus at the same time,

 

David Steigerwald   

I want to take the war back to my comments about the cultural and social underpinnings of student activism. One of the great theoretical and organizing challenges that the new left had for itself was, why are we being radical after all, we're not really being oppressed? So the new left had to figure out whether they were being radical for other people, such as African Americans, or whether there was something really more serious that was generating their activism, the war gave them that reason. And it wasn't just the war was immoral. It was now they're coming to get us. And so the war, personalized government intrusion into lives, and I think you could argue oppression, after all, what is a more severe intrusion by the state into an individual life than conscription into the armed services? And that actually was born out in the way that in a lot of the rhetoric of the protest, not with my life, you don't, was one of the SDS rallying cries, but I think the war as it grew, and as the draft became more prominent, was really the catalyst to bringing together those somewhat diffuse personal concerns and the cultural backgrounds as well as the theoretical challenge of why we are political.

 

Bill Shkurti  

It is to appoint, and there was a great phrase, because then 18-year-olds couldn't vote. So the line was old enough to kill but not for voting, that also energized students. But the campus, particularly the OSU campus, and I was here at the time was, oddly, in some ways insulated from that, because it could, if you wanted to stay out of the draft, all you had to do is stay in school, and then after your four years, or over, go on to graduate school, or law school or whatever, and then you'd be too old to be drafted. So in some ways, the campus was protected. And the antiwar movement here was had a great deal of difficulty getting any traction among the majority of students, and they got increasingly frustrated. And then in February of 1968, the country changed the draft laws and abolish deferments for graduate students that all of a sudden made the war much more personal. So now this starts to build as the decade goes on, and protests which had been peaceful, start to turn violent, you had the big one in Columbia, where the students actually took over the administration building and then had to be hauled out by force. And with TV and radio and mass media, everybody's now seeing that and it's in the air.

 

David Steigerwald   

Columbia was one of the big ones. So the University of Wisconsin saw protests in '66, and '67, as well as the notorious bombing in 1969, which was carried out I mean, the perpetrators of that were, were not students, they were locals, kind of hangers on to the local radical student movement. The war's escalation provided at least the kind of tenor and tone in American life, against which the largest and most fractious of the campus protests and that's

 

Bill Shkurti  

And that's a good point the war became a combination of the war itself as it escalated. There was also a lot of unrest in the black community, because after the Civil Rights Act, I think people expected things to be better, and they weren't. There was also rising tide of crime. So you had in some people's mind on the left the circle of violence, it started with government sanctioned violence in Vietnam, and then police and law enforcement violence against protesters at home. On one side, on the other side, you had Mr. And Mrs. Average America, who looked at this and said," No, it's the protesters creating the violence, and they're disrespectful of America. And they're threatening our way of life". So all of a sudden, now the country is very much divided, and a real sense that the country is coming apart.

 

Jessica Vinas-Nelson  

So what happens at Kent State?

 

Bill Shkurti  

When I think of this period, I think of the term blowback, so you had more aggressive protests on campuses, students became more and more upset against the war, which in turn led them to a more reaction from the people Richard Nixon called "the silent majority". The average Americans who didn't necessarily live in a big city and who may have qualms about the war but didn't approve the way War protesters were acting. So you had a real appeal to what was called law and order. In fact, that's how Richard Nixon got elected in 1968. By this time, then the protests are escalating, but President Nixon had gotten elected, promising to bring an honorable end to the war. Though he wasn't very specific about it. Beginning in mid-1969, in fact, he did start to withdraw troops from Vietnam. But at that point, President Nixon authorized what he called an incursion, not an invasion and meant they were temporarily send troops across the border in Cambodia to go after enemy sanctuaries. Well, that looked like a widening of the war and that set off a whole series of antiwar protests. And among the places where there were some protests was in Kent, Ohio, and some students were protesting war. Some other students were out on bars on Friday night, and they trashed the downtown. Governor Rhoads whose term was ending was running for the Republican nomination for Senate. He then showed up in Cleveland and held a press conference that's Sunday after the students and non-students had done some damage. They'd burned down the ROTC building on the Kent campus and made a very inflammatory speech. And he ordered martial law on the campus without consulting with the campus president and ordered the National Guard to restore order. There was a peaceful protest scheduled for that Monday, that would be Monday, May 4, at about noon, students did gather, the National Guard told him that the protest was unlawful under those conditions and wanted him to move the students didn't move there was some back and forth. And then for reasons that have never clearly been determined, the National Guardsmen who had loaded rifles turned and fired on a crowd of unarmed students, killing four of them, wounding 13, no wounding nine, I think, one of them seriously. And it was just a horrible scene, what a lot of people don't realize there were also serious protests and confrontation here in Ohio. But they occurred before the Kent State events. And that was more of a reaction against an overreaction by the police with tear gas against a student strike, which had been called against the war and against a variety of other things. But it was a very divisive period, a very dark period in American history.

 

David Steigerwald   

We've spent probably 8 years or more just talking back and forth about exactly what happened at Kent State and to figure out, among other things, why the guard shot at Kent State and not at Ohio State, and Bill found the answer. So it was guard protocol that they did crowd control with live at live ammunition. I mean, is that stupid or what? But in any event, this particular guy named Abramson had his men with loaded rifles, but he told them not to put the bullet

 

Bill Shkurti  

It's called chambering a round.

 

David Steigerwald   

Yeah, didn't chamber the rounds. But the leadership, the officers at Kent had their guys be ready to shoot. And so it really boils down to a momentary Fog of War kind of thing where the failure of decent leadership at Kent State cost lives.

 

Brenna Miller   

Since the protests of the 1960s what have college protests been like, in the interim to today? Have there been other notable protests have they changed?

 

David Steigerwald   

Nothing of the size and scope, and I gotta say, historic importance. They've been intermittent. They've been episodic. They've been sporadic. One thinks of the anti-apartheid, boycott South Africa, campus protests in the ‘70s and ‘80s. And protests at places in the ‘90s over the curriculum of all things. They just never had the real weight of what was happening in the ‘60s, I think.

 

Bill Shkurti  

Yeah. And I think there are a couple there's both good reasons and bad reasons. The good reasons are there some reforms that came out of the ‘60s that took some of the steam out of that, the giving 18-year-olds the vote, the end of the draft moved to an all-volunteer military, a big one was a change in the way police and law enforcement handled big crowds. So they went more to community policing. So the police weren't in most cases weren't the provocation. Those were good things that removed some of the reasons that protests occurred. You wonder, though, there I mean, there are a lot of things with society that are wrong and need to be improved. But students seem more concerned with themselves than they do with the collective good of the country. In fact, the whole country seems that way, right now.

 

David Steigerwald   

So I want to say something different. To some extent, college in the 1960s was a luxury. Today, it is anything but, it's a debt trap. And a debt trap for students whose economic security after college is anything but assured as it was for the bulk of college graduates in the 1960s. So our students today are simply in a much more precarious position than their parents were in the ‘60s. However, I've remained frustrated with them that in that they really do have material demands, and collective self-interest that they ought to be pushing very hard against their political leaders and representatives and I remain frustrated that they don't do that. I think that there should be a nationwide student movement to bring down tuition. I think there should be a station a nationwide student movement to protest the cuts in higher education that have been drastic and state after state, including Ohio over the last 20 years. And I'm disheartened at the quiescence that I see.

 

Bill Shkurti  

But he's right. There was in the spring of 1970. A lot of people don't realize there was a march, that OSU people helped organize down to the statehouse to protest high tuition because of low state support. And it was very peaceful. And the legislature ignored it.

 

Jessica Vinas-Nelson  

Are college protests effective then are they still effective tools? And have they ever been? Are they appropriate places to launch serious demands against the social system?

 

Bill Shkurti  

And we say yes and no on that one. But I think they helped shorten the Vietnam War, I thought they helped bring an end to the draft. I thought they were a basis for the environmental movement. And I thought they helped remove a lot of restrictions on black people, and also opened up doors to women and other people who had been discriminated against. But it came at a price and the price was for that small element of the protesters, who we would call the crazies, the people that wanted to deliberately provoke a confrontation, it created a blowback that took away some of what games that already had been occurred, and turned Middle America against protesters in some way and made it easier for the politicians who didn't want to do those things to come out against them in the name of law and order.

 

David Steigerwald   

So I want to think about this as a political theorist. And the question really, is whether university campuses are so essential to the functioning of contemporary America, that disruption in them would disrupt the system? And my answer is sort of like bills. Yes. And no, I don't think that campuses that universities are really great places from which to launch serious social movements, in part because so many fellow Americans don't think that college students are serious about these kinds of things. Or if they if they do start to get disruptive, it's just those kids again, and this is a clear result of the division in American society, that Bill has illustrated here. But there's also something I think functional about the universities that they aren't necessarily institutions that are that are central to the day today, governance of American society a nor are they completely essential to the functioning of the economic system. In indirect ways and roundabout fashion, they are because the economy, supposedly knowledge high tech economy relies obviously on college educated people. But the institution's themselves, I'm not convinced are essential. And I just ask you, I mean, if we all organized the sit in at Ohio State and all 55,000, or 75,000 of us sat down for 44 days, what would change? Compare that to the sit-down strike in the GM factories in Flint and the 1930s, '37. And remind yourself how disruptive those points of production protests were. So there's become something abstract and diffuse, even opaque about the way power functions in our high tech world. That makes it really hard to pinpoint the place out of which a really effective revolutionary movement can be launched. The ‘60s had the effect of broadening the inclusion of "we" on campus, but the frustrating thing is that it stands for campus more than American society. In at least the medium run maybe in the long run, America is learning to widen the circle as well. There's both a kind of insularity in those changes, and nonetheless, a broadening as well.

 

Brenna Miller   

So to a certain extent, campuses still struggle with the problem of these being ivory tower issues, but they can have broader effects?

 

David Steigerwald   

Yeah, that's that's my sense of things?

 

Bill Shkurti  

On campuses is change agents. To me one of the most fascinating stories out of the ‘60s was all that ruckus to get 18-year-olds to vote. There were a group of OSU students then who started a campaign called register here in the summer of 1970. The first municipal election to be held that 18-year-olds could vote in in this area was the mayor's race here in Columbus. And the previous mayor, who was a democrat had won big time in 1967, he was up for reelection. When the results came in election night. He was narrowly defeated by a Republican opponent Mayor Tom Moody And when they check the election results, they found out that the number of voters had swelled in two areas in the black community and in the campus community, both of which had felt the short end of the stick from Columbus police. So it flipped the election. Once that happened. It started to change the attitude of the city of Columbus and the university towards each other, become a much more supportive relationship in the Columbus police today, a very different from the Columbus police of 1970 and are much more community oriented and supportive of the students as are the campus police. And that traces back I think, to that student activism, so when students organize and exercise or traditional ways of exercising power, which includes voting, they can make a difference.

 

Brenna Miller   

All right, we'll wrap it up. On that note, thank you to our two guests, Bill Shkurti and David Steigerwald.

 

Jessica Vinas-Nelson  

Thanks, everyone. This episode of History Talk podcast was brought to you by Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective. An online publication of the public history initiative, and the Goldberg Center and the history department at The Ohio State University in Columbus and Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, our main editors are Steven Conn and Nicholas Breyfogle. Our audio and technical advisor is Paul Kotheimer, our audio producers and hosts are Brenna Miller and Jessica Vinas-Nelson. Song and band information can be found on our website. You can find our podcasts and more on our website origins.osu.edu on iTunes and on Soundcloud and Stitcher. And as always, you can find us on Twitter and Facebook. Thanks for listening.