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Student protests, 1972-1973

1972-01-30 New York Times Magazine Article: ""Metamorphosis Of A Campus Radical"" Page 8

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Bowen over tuition increases, suggesting they were to pay teachers who didn't teach. He threatened court action based on Lernfreiheit, a free EX-PRESIDENT - As student president in 1969. Boston's Jim Sutton promoted student economic power. He is "daddy" to the straights. dom to learn, which he explained to the dubious Bowen, dated from the founding of the University of Paris. The core of Sutton's reasoning is still the concept of the medieval university. It's the only human kind, he says, one in which students hire, and fire their instructors. Sutton further believes that student power depends on freedom from the tyranny of the university treasury. Soon after he was elected student body president in '69, he conceived and established a student corporation, Iowa Student Agencies. which today runs a dozen profitable same heroism their fathers had seen in sports or on the battlefield itself. Nevertheless, the S.D.S. saw students as in need of education. "Consciousness raising" they called it, trying to make the kids aware they could do things. At Iowa the S.D.S and its associated Hawkeye Student party handed out leaflets, demonstrated, risked being busted, made militancy important and exciting. Four years ago, in November 1967, the core group of S.D.S concluded that the university had no business being hospitable to the military or related industry and decided to harass the visiting Marine recruiters. A graduate assistant, aided by a student nurse, got the consciousness awakening off to a bloody start. A quart of the reddest was siphoned from a dozen willing arms, used as ink for a giant antiwar petition, and the balance spilled on the steps of the Union, a student center, where the pickets tramped it back and forth. While 2,000 students watched from across the street, a salient of jocks tried to clear a path to the Marines inside the Union. At least one freshman, until the movement uncommitted, was moved to join the protest by the sight of a well-known football player and fraternity man slugging a peace marcher. The say ended in the arrest of 108 pickets. A month later, on Dec. 5 the S.D.S. decided to storm the Dow representatives interviewing at the Union. For this performance, "Mr. Death" was played by David Grant a black student from St. Louis who recently changed freshman and a hawk "was getting into stuff about the way I hadn't heard in high school or read in The Des Moines register. I began reading the S.D.S. handouts and Ramparts. The issues were fresh and important and I began to think I could do something about them." Debbie Bayer, also a freshman that year, but wholly committed, recalls: "It was really nice then. They were the bad guys and we were the good guys. Everybody who was a writer or an artist or smoked dope was us. All liberals and radicals came together as friends, and everybody who got arrested was cool, and we knew what was happening." Debbie is from Chicago. Her crinkly hair, parted in the middle, falls in corkscrews to her shoulders. A generous warmth pinks her cheeks as she talks. "We were really awakening consciousness," she says "More people were beginning to smoke dope. That's very political and rebellious you know, middle class people doing something illegal. Dope in your pocket changes your whole point of view. You've been taught to trust police and fear black people, and then you begin to turn it around and become aware of all the injustice." The revolutionary cycle has turned through its first phase of consciousness raising and coming together om the transcendent issue of the war. Nevertheless, formal politics bumbled on. largely unaffected and in March 1970, the usual few thousand students who bothered to vote to "get on a mike and tell 'em to leave. You're the student body president." Bo was of two minds. While his sympathies lay with the insurgents, his job made him an arm of university authority. With obvious ambivalence, he urged the crowd to break up, and it did so, sullenly, as police arrived. Over that weekend the radical groups set up tables in the dormitories where they handed out leaflets and rapped. Just as the smoke grew denser at the sessions, so did the tension, to hang in combustible layers over the town. On Monday, the torch was flung. At 12:30 in the afternoon four students were shot and killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State University, and evening brought the scene into awed circles gathered around television sets in the Union, On the screen the Hulk had witnessed its assassination at the hand of the Federal Government and concluded the radicals had been right all along: The Establishment was a conspiracy of Government and corporation against the young. But the essential emotion was not vindictive; it was exalted, pure one. There was a new sense of community a feeling that students at Iowa were not isolated, were one with other universities across the land. There was hope involved, a belief that young people could take control of their own situation and and do responsible things. Finally, their cause now had its martyrs and with them, a righteous zeal. dents marched to the National Guard Armory in Iowa City, then through town, bashing in store windows as they went and skirmishing with police. By dawn there were 50 arrests. However, the focus of campus attention went to the nationwide student strike to protest the Cambodian invasion. The campus newspaper, The Daily Iowan, was first to propose it, and on Tuesday may 5, student president Beller announced the strike would begin the following day. Willard Boyd, who had succeeded Bowen as university president, urged that the day be one of personal conscience and "above all else, a day of peace." On the eve of the strike about 4,000 students gathered at the Pentacrest. The Old Capitol's white columns had been sprayed with great Day-Glo letters, "R.O.T.C." and from its steps speakers bullhorned the old consciousness raising slogans. But there was no longer a need. The Hulk was not only awake. it was trembling with emotions it had no idea how to release. This was the moment both straights and radicals thought might never come, and ironically,neither had a plan for it . The important events which now occurred were spontaneous. Hearing that vigilante groups were on their way from Northern Iowa, Bill Schmidt, a Californian and Howie Weinberg, a bush bearded New Yorker, prepared to combat violence. They proclaimed themselves "the monitors" recruited friends, ties white bands on their arms, set up a medical tent, called univeristy hospi 16 "Metamorphosis of A Campus Radical" 8 (of 12) THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE Jan 30, 1972
 
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