Cold War University by Matthew Levin

Author:Matthew Levin [Levin, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press

Ellen Lehman’s statement echoed many Americans’ moral outrage against the war, and while the State Department protest was the first of its kind for the antiwar movement in Madison, it was certainly not the last. Just a few months later, eleven Wisconsin students were arrested at Truax Air Force Base outside of Madison as they attempted to perform a citizen’s arrest of the base commander. The next year, the draft sit-in was the culmination of a campus politics that had been building since the 1950s at the same time that it was a sign of things to come. With students occupying the Administration Building for more than seventy-two hours to protest the university’s cooperation with the Selective Service System, they demonstrated the emergence of a mass protest movement on campus, with the participation of hundreds of students at the sit-in and thousands for the Bascom Hill meeting and rally. At the same time, they highlighted the impact of direct action politics and the compelling moral idealism that had emerged with the civil rights, peace, and antiwar movements since the beginning of the decade. The sit-in ended peacefully, with some suggesting that Madison was somehow different from Berkeley and other campuses where protests had turned to violence, but the restraint that both sides had shown would not last. Any chance of a coalition between students and faculty was particularly weakened, with many faculty complaining of students’ “coercive” behavior and many students accusing the faculty of “betrayal” for taking no action other than the formation of an official committee to review university policy.47

Finally, the sit-in points to the intersection of student activism and the realities of Cold War–era higher education. The protest movement that had developed in the early sixties was focused on civil rights, free speech, President Johnson’s handling of Vietnam, and other national issues, but it would ultimately turn its attention to the University of Wisconsin’s Cold War moorings even as it continued to be fueled by the Cold War’s impact on the structures of higher education. Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement was the New Left’s first major assault on higher education, but the Berkeley confrontation would be replayed again and again at universities across the nation. Wisconsin administrators, like their colleagues at other universities, rejected students’ characterization of the university as an agent of the federal government, but despite their claims of neutrality and no matter that many of these officials privately opposed the war, students would not be moved. The late sixties would see a huge expansion of the New Left, with students funneling their energy in many different directions, but the issue of the Cold War, and especially the role of higher education in the development and execution of American foreign policy, would remain near the center of the era’s activism.

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