The Cauldron Bubbles,
A University Emerges
Northeastern's Era of Protest
By Linda Smith Rhoads, Sarah J. Shoenfeld,
and Dolly Smith Wilson
Never was the title of Northeastern University's yearbook,
the Cauldron, more appropriate than in 1971. Filled with images of conflict-between
students and administrators, students and police, and among students themselves-the
book provides much more than a record of student life within the university.
Throughout its pages, month-by-month lists of world events line up against
corresponding lists of campus milestones. A famous 1970 image of a horror-struck
young woman kneeling over the lifeless body of a Kent State University
student is the focal point of the book's cover. Political and cultural
figures of various persuasions-including JFK, Tiny Tim, Richard Nixon,
Ho Chi Minh, Bob Hope, Martin Luther King Jr., and Snoopy-blend into the
crowd gathered for graduation ceremonies, as if they, too, had watched
over the education of the class of '71.
In a way, they had, for never before in the history of U.S. higher education
had events outside of university walls formed such a large part of the
learning within them. Students were learning about society, sex, politics,
and self. Their lives were changing, and so were their universities, Northeastern
more than most. As it transformed itself from a commuter school into a
major research institution, Northeastern was suffering growing pains. The
physical plant was expanding, as was the bureaucracy required to administer
it. The mushrooming student population now had a tinge of color as well
as a more female cast.
Some administrators, faculty, and students were content with the status
quo; others were thinking seriously about the changes needed to make the
kind of university they wanted to call their own. Conflict seemed inevitable,
but it might have simmered had not world events turned up the heat. The
class of '71, as the Cauldron makes clear, was at a boil.
Gathering the Coals
Yearbooks and newspapers of the previous decade give few indications
of impending confrontation. Student publications from the mid-1950s through
the early '60s are filled with play-by-plays of football and basketball
games, reports of fraternity antics, photos of homecoming parades, and
fashion advice for the collegiate set. The '62 Cauldron focuses on turtle
races, not political races.
While it prided itself on opening up the professional world to its students,
Northeastern's administration closely regulated their lives while on campus.
Just like other coed universities, it imposed rules regarding how women
dressed (no slacks on campus), where students lived (single-sex dorms),
who visited whom (no dorm visitation between men and women), the tidiness
of their living space (no unmade beds), what they did within it (no card
playing), and how late they stayed out (midnight for coeds). For
the majority of students-those still commuting to Northeastern-most
of these policies were moot. As the decade progressed, however, more and
more students were taking up residence at the Boston campus. Like a cautious
parent, the university watched over them, and few were sufficiently annoyed
to press the contradiction between being treated like children and being
expected to work like adults. Some grumbled; some quietly obeyed; most
simply found their way around the rules.
The need for order among students was paramount as the university entered
a period of explosive growth. When Asa Knowles was inaugurated in 1959,
Northeastern was contained within eleven buildings on fifteen acres of
land; dorm space accommodated no more than 100 students. In 1961, Knowles
announced a development plan to raise $40 million and double the number
of campus buildings. Dormitories sprang up, and the student center was
renovated. With an infusion of federal funds, new buildings were constructed
to house the medical and scientific programs favored by an ambitious administration
and a government eager to educate a work force to fight the Cold War.
In the spring of 1964, the Burlington campus, built with major federal
funding on a former Nike missile site, opened for business. Although constructed
to address the educational needs of the expanding industry along Route
128, the campus also helped the university cope with overcrowding in Boston.
In 1964, half of all freshmen were assigned exclusively to the Burlington
campus. As early as 1957, a period when President Carl Ell was buying up
property around Northeastern, the Student Council had formed a committee
to review how the university's "rapid expansion" might affect
student life. By 1964, reported the Cauldron, the whirlwind left some students
feeling flattened.
Although many of Boston's larger colleges and universities had a more
cosmopolitan flavor than Northeastern, whose class of '71 represented only
twenty-seven states and fifteen foreign countries, even those N.U. students
who seldom ventured beyond the Fenway or across the Charles felt that their
universe was expanding. "All of a sudden at Northeastern you were
getting more minority students; all of a sudden you were getting more women,"
recalls Donna Halper, LA'69, MEd'70, MA'73. "Gradually different kinds
of students who had not been there five years earlier were starting to
come in with their ideas, their beliefs, and their expectations. Some of
them did come from homes where it was acceptable to be different or unusual."
Through an expanded liberal arts curriculum, students were being encouraged
to engage and discuss the differences they were encountering. While the
administration's emphasis on growth was focused on the sciences, the number
of majors in the fields of the humanities and the social and natural sciences
increased 300 percent between 1959 and 1975, with liberal arts providing
stiff competition to engineering in the entering class of '71 (875 prospective
majors to 1,000).
Striking the Match
In January 1968, Central Intelligence Agency Director
Richard Helms reported to President Lyndon Johnson that "of the six
million students enrolled in the more than 2,100 colleges and universities
in the United States, the overwhelming majority are politically apathetic
or staunchly conservative. Except on the issue of selective service, the
student community appears generally to support the Administration more
strongly than the population as a whole." Whatever the general accuracy
of Helms's information (four months later Johnson declined to stand for
reelection, in part because of pressure to abandon the war), Helms had
certainly pegged Northeastern. Of those undergraduates sufficiently motivated
to vote in a poll sponsored by the Interfraternity Council, the Northeastern
News reported in February 1968 that the "Majority Favor Viet Escalation."
Such a vote would not have been unexpected at the university boasting
the nation's largest voluntary Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC)
unit, with more than 1,600 members in 1968. Their presence was palpable.
"You could hear them parading in the Fens while you were holding class,"
recalls history professor emeritus Norbert Fullington. ROTC, which prepared
ordinary citizens to serve as short-term military officers, received strong
support from Asa Knowles, who believed that a citizen army, not a professional
one, was fundamental to America's freedom and strength.
Yet ROTC would soon become a lightning rod for antiwar activists on
Northeastern's campus, just as it did elsewhere throughout the city and
the nation. The organization spearheading that sentiment on N.U.'s campus
and across the U.S. was Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Although
N.U.'s chapter would never number more than about fifty members, it was
skilled at mobilizing protest. In December 1965, 2,000 students packed
the main quad in a News-sponsored event designed to demonstrate support
for the country's Vietnam policy. They were picketed by fifteen courageous,
or perhaps foolhardy, antiwar demonstrators The numbers were in the favor
of groups like the Young Republicans, Young Americans for Freedom, and
Students for Goldwater.
SDS remained undaunted. The following May, its second "Viet-Critique"
drew more than 200 students. The event was cosponsored by SDS's less radical
spin-off, the Northeastern Committee to End the War in Vietnam. In February
1967, SDS held a sit-in to protest student recruiting by Dow Chemical Corporation,
a manufacturer of napalm. Later that month, SDS accused an ROTC instructor
of encouraging his cadets to provide information on the political beliefs
of university faculty. The Student Council was moved to petition the Faculty
Senate to review the university's policy of granting academic credit for
ROTC courses. The plea was heard; the College of Liberal Arts voted to
suspend credit for advanced ROTC courses the following fall.
Although speakers were pelted with insults, eggs, and firecrackers during
an April 1967 SDS rally, by October 600 students attended a demonstration
to condemn the war. ROTC was being debated in venues across campus by faculty
and students, and SDS stepped up its efforts against the military organization.
In April 1968, 300 spectators watched as a mock unit called the American
Death Company, commanded by a Sergeant Pig, marched alongside ROTC troops
during their regular drills in the Fens. The next week 1,000 people crowded
into the quad as SDS again protested ROTC. A fight ensued. Both the administration
and the Student Council issued pleas for restraint.
SDS considered the time ripe for action. On May 13, forty to fifty demonstrators
staged a sit-in in the Interfaith Lounge. Police were on the scene largely
to keep counterprotesters from turning the situation into a melee. Twenty-five
football players, supporters of ROTC, were talked out of charging the lounge
by coach Joe Zabilski, while other students in the quad hurled eggs at
the building. Administrative restraint, faculty assurances, and a steady
supply of soda accompanied by a lack of bathroom facilities brought the
sit-in to a peaceful end after five hours. But SDS's goal was advanced:
in May the faculty of the College of Liberal Arts voted unanimously to
abolish all credit for ROTC and recommended that the organization be banished
from campus.
Fires Burning
In its first meeting of the 196970 academic year, SDS split along
fault lines evident in the national organization. As a radical faction-the
Weathermen-gained control, confrontation took precedence over education.
The relationship between SDS and Student Government grew ever more strained
as the administration called upon Student Government to manage dissent
more effectively.
Despite the hostility, former Student Government president Vincent Lembo,
LA'73, L'76, who is currently vice president and university counsel, believes
that from an ideological point of view, what SDS was doing had to be done.
"Anytime you have sudden, violent change, there has got to be a small
cadre of people on the cutting edge of that change. That was certainly
true in the civil rights movement. It was certainly true in the antiwar
effort. Even SDS itself understood that, because they split off to the
Weathermen, who thought that what SDS was doing was too conservative,"
he says. "We knew they [SDS] were giving us the opportunity to educate
students. From that point of view, we were very much on the same team."
In July 1969, the Student Council voted to join the National Vietnam
War Moratorium. After receiving a petition signed by 4,019 students to
suspend classes on October 15, the Faculty Senate approved the measure
and President Knowles gave it his support. Activities took place on campus,
although most students joined the 100,000 protesters packed into Boston
Common.
In January 1970, antiwar activists at N.U. were presented with two major,
high-visibility opportunities. A General Electric on-campus recruiting
session, heavily denounced in leaflets spread across campus beforehand,
drew 200 demonstraters, both striking GE workers and students demonstrating
solidarity with them. Two days later, on January 29, S. I. Hayakawa, the
conservative, outspoken president of San Francisco State University, was
to appear on campus.
Student Council and SDS worked together to organize a responsible rally:
silently blowing bubbles as Hayakawa spoke. Other protesters, hecklers,
did not subscribe to the plan, but still the event went forward. Hayakawa
greeted the audience with a black power salute, a provocative act that
aroused but did not enflame the audience. Outside on the quad, however,
disgruntled activists, barred from the filled-to-capacity auditorium, grew
restless. Police, present at Knowles's request, were edgy. Out of the crowd
a rock flew at a policeman, and the scene exploded into violence.
Students were beaten by police and dragged across the quad or chased
down Huntington Avenue and St. Stephen Street. Many took refuge in the
women's dorms nearby or in St. Anne's Church. In the end, five students
required hospitalization and thirty were arrested. Sympathetic faculty
members spent the night bailing them out of jail. Nineteen students were
eventually charged, but most of them were acquitted.
A Student Truth Movement was endorsed by the Student Council to investigate
the matter. Knowles, facing angry students on the quad the next day, agreed
to provide legal counsel and medical care for students involved in the
melee and to conduct his own investigation.
The following few months of 1970 were filled with protests, speeches,
and bomb scares. An appearance by Abbie Hoffman was canceled by the administration,
which claimed it couldn't guarantee his safety after the Hayakawa debacle.
A Black Panther chapter was formed in April after Malcolm X's widow, Betty
Shabazz, spoke on campus. Drawing 900 students, she criticized whites'
involvement in the black movement. A week later, when black writer and
activist Amiri Baraka (who had changed his name from LeRoi Jones in 1968)
addressed an audience in Alumni Auditorium, whites were directed to the
balcony. (No such segregation occurred when Baraka appeared in Blackman
Auditorium in February 1998.) More than 300 students rallied in the quad
in support of Bobby Seale, then on trial for activities related to the
1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.
In April, 2,125 students voted in a referendum on the war. Seventy-four
percent supported immediate withdrawal from Vietnam; only ten percent had
taken that position a mere two years earlier. On the thirtieth of that
month, President Nixon announced that the United States had invaded Cambodia.
Students were outraged. On Monday, May 4, four students were shot to death
by National Guardsmen at Kent State. Shock waves pulsed from the epicenter
in Ohio across campuses throughout the nation. Ten days later another quake
shook the country when police and highway patrolmen fired on a dormitory
at Jackson State University, an all-black college in Mississippi, killing
two and injuring nine others within. Students everywhere were distraught,
frightened, angered, moved.
Patricia Hagadorn, BB'71, recounts her experience: "A couple of
months before Kent State, I had had it. I was so sick and tired of the
idea that we were pouring lives and dollars and resources into something
that was so obviously a lost cause and in retrospect was not something
that we ever should have been involved in. Then Kent State happened and
the world just swung off its axis for a few days." Hagadorn, who describes
herself then as "politically conservative" but "rabid on
the topic of not blindly accepting authority," believes that "it
could have happened on the quad at Northeastern, and we all knew it and
we knew it instantaneously and it scared the britches off of us. Nobody
knew what was going to happen after that, because we were enraged; we were
deeply frightened. Suddenly all of the momentum that had been gaining in
our lives all through our college careers came to an abrupt halt. We all
stood there, and everyone had to choose a direction. There was nobody who
wasn't galvanized into having to take a stand."
The stand many took was to strike. More than 300 campuses across the
nation closed for a least a day; sixty were out of session for several
weeks or more. On Tuesday, the day following the Kent State incident, 3,000
students from Northeastern joined 22,000 others to march on the State House.
A memorial demonstration was held at Harvard University's Soldiers' Field
on Wednesday. That same day, Northeastern students voted 4,619 to 1,529
to declare a strike.
Although convulsed by procedural questions, a faculty meeting the next
day, May 7, resolved to "discontinue normal academic activities indefinitely
. . . and the faculty will be free to apply their expertise on campus and
in the community." Faculty who chose to hold classes and students
who chose to attend them were free to do so, and students who required
further class-time hours to receive certification would be accommodated.
On Sunday night, May 10, violence again erupted at Northeastern. With
classes suspended, some students seized the moment. Raucous block parties
on Hemenway Street extended well into the night. Older residents, sick
of the relentless noise, called police, who reacted in what even the restrained
New York Times referred to as a police riot. More than 100 Boston Tactical
Police arrived to disperse 300 students. Police showed little discrimination
in whom they attacked. Victims included the assistant director of university
housing and a blind man and his wife who were simply trying to unlock their
door. Too afraid to venture outside, the couple was trapped in the building
for hours before they received medical care. The Boston police commissioner,
who at first denied any wrongdoing, later admitted that police, "overzealous
in carrying out their duties," had used "unnecessary force."
Concerned faculty members, appalled at the incident and wary that Knowles
was more alienated by than protective of the students in his charge, patrolled
Hemenway Street to afford some measure of security for the students. They
also organized a watch around the Greenleaf Building, the ROTC headquarters
where the tactical police were housed on campus, in an attempt to forestall
any further conflicts.
The strike at Northeastern lasted until May 15, but classes that term
never really got back to normal. The following fall, perhaps due to an
anti-ROTC rally mounted during orientation week, only 110 of 3,196 entering
freshmen joined the organization. Yet activism at Northeastern had largely
evaporated over the warm summer months. The percentage of students identifying
themselves as radical declined from eight points in the spring of 1970
to three in the fall. Students were spent. The fears aroused by Kent State
and the fatigue and distractions of constant protest had taken their toll.
As a recession disrupted the economy and jobs grew scarce, priorities shifted
at campuses throughout the nation. "My graduating class in 1969 was
the last one where all the kids thought that 'if I've got a college degree,
I'll find work right away,' " Donna Halper notes. "Up until then
that was pretty much a truism, but after us, it was 'forget it.' "
The last major protest at Northeastern, in May 1972, again involved
ROTC. Three persons were arrested: a student, an instructor, and the national
secretary of SDS, who had no affiliation with Northeastern. About the same
time 350 students marched on ROTC headquarters in the Greenleaf Building,
and additional incidents sprang up over campus. The entire campaign collapsed,
however, when the university trustees voted unanimously, once and for all,
that ROTC would remain at Northeastern.
But for that small aberration, by the fall of 1970, the '60s were over
at Northeastern.
A University Emerging
In September 1966, President Asa Knowles had addressed
the incoming class of 1971. As befitted his role, he charged them to "do
well." "Success in your academic studies is important,"
he went on, "but in this day and age, the even greater task before
you is that of finding yourselves as individuals and developing a sound
philosophy of life."
He charted the course: "To find yourself socially and intellectually
as an adult, you must ask yourself, 'Who am I?' and 'What am I?'-then have
the courage to face an honest answer . . . Learn to discern true intellectual
leadership. Learn that there is much to be gained from observation outside
the classrooms . . . Do not hesitate to put your finger on the pulse of
urban society. Feel the beat!"
The advice, reprinted in the '71 Cauldron, was well taken, more so than
Knowles ever dreamed it would be or, certainly, wished. He had, however,
created the structure in which real questioning could occur and from which
a true university could emerge. Even administrators who came under student
criticism, like the late Gilbert MacDonald, vice president for student
affairs, in time understood that the students had made a valid claim for
the university's attention. "In retrospect, it probably was a good
thing. It changed the university for the better, I think," he said
in 1996. "Formerly, we thought we were being awfully good to the kids
but we were rigid-there's no question about it, and students didn't have
the freedom they deserved and that they have now. But it was difficult
to go through and doubly difficult because it made us change our thinking
entirely. It was a landmark period in more than just violence; it was a
change in the whole philosophy of the university. For that, I think, good!"
Students had struggled to develop a sound philosophy of life, and in
so doing, they had challenged the university to do so as well. In the '71
Cauldron, graduates reflected on their previous five years at Northeastern.
Sally Campbell (a recreation major) commented, "The uproar and turmoil
caused by the exasperating, debatable topics of the times taught me lessons
of life no lecturer or textbook had expressed so clearly." William
Darby (civil engineering) noted, "As individuals, we have learned
to evaluate and question rather than merely to accept. Our instruction
has come from people: teachers, students, friends, parents, and events."
"Although this questioning has led to demonstration and violence,"
declared David Alessandri (accounting), "I feel assured that society
is the benefactor through the awakening power these events have created."
But along with change comes responsibility. "The past half-decade
has seen great changes in many areas that have a direct bearing on each
individual in society," reflected Joseph Arsenault (civil engineering).
"These changes are due to the realization that improvement of the
present system is necessary and possible. However, with the institution
of changes comes the responsibility to see that the changes function as
intended."
Glenn Gately (marketing) sounded a similar note but was unsure how his
words would resound through history. "The most significant thing about
my five years at Northeastern was the amazing awareness that the student
world had for what surrounded it. I'll never forget the cries of injustice
and the attempts and suggestions that my contemporaries made. In years
to come, these words I have written may seem foolish, but only time will
tell."
Robert MacKay, himself a young historian, was more confident of his
ability to project future verdicts. "19661971: Interesting times,"
was all he wrote. Indeed.
The class of '71, as well as other classes that cycled through the '60s,
had thrust Northeastern into the world, not only the world of work but
also the world of ideas, of heated debate, of moral choice. They had taken
Asa Knowles's impressive structural improvements and infused them with
meaning by urging Northeastern to prepare them for a life broader and deeper
than mere vocation. They had asked Northeastern to be no less comprehensive
than it advertised itself to be. They had demanded that it be a university.
Linda Smith Rhoads is coeditor of the New England Quarterly. Sarah
J. Shoenfeld and Dolly Smith Wilson, AS'92, MA'97, researched Northeastern
in the '60s while students in the history department. Esther Gross's contributions
are also noted. This article is excerpted from a book of essays celebrating
Northeastern's centennial, edited by Rhoads. The book will be available
this fall and may be ordered by calling 617-373-1998.
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