A build-up year, not the peak
On American campuses 1967 was a year of rising tension rather than of the most famous confrontations. The occupation of Columbia University took place in April 1968, and the killings at Kent State in May 1970. In 1967 protest was spreading from a few centres, mainly Berkeley and a handful of elite campuses, to hundreds of colleges, and it was changing character: from petitioning and teach-ins toward blocking recruiters and resisting the draft.
The legacy of Berkeley
The Free Speech Movement of 1964 had established several ideas that 1967 activists took for granted. Students could organise politically on campus; they could use civil disobedience, including sit-ins, against administrators; and a university could be treated as a political institution rather than a neutral one. The movement began as a dispute over rules limiting political advocacy and fundraising on campus and ended with a mass sit-in at Sproul Hall in December 1964 and several hundred arrests. Berkeley stayed volatile afterwards, including a student strike in late 1966 that began over a Navy recruiting table.
Recruiters and Dow Chemical
Recruiting became the standard flashpoint in 1967. Companies and agencies that interviewed seniors on campus were challenged on the grounds that the university was lending its facilities to the war. Dow Chemical, a maker of napalm used by US forces in Vietnam, was the best-known target, along with military and intelligence recruiters.
The most widely reported clash came at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in mid-October 1967. A sit-in against Dow interviewers was broken up by police using clubs and tear gas, and a number of students were reportedly injured. The episode shocked many on a campus that had not been regarded as especially radical. Similar sit-ins and blockades over Dow or CIA recruiting were reported at other universities, including Harvard and Brown, in the autumn, though the details varied from campus to campus.
Some of the disputes were as much about process as about the war. Administrators who called police onto campus often found that moderate students then joined the protest, a pattern that would repeat on a larger scale in 1968.
An earlier shock came in February 1967, when the magazine Ramparts and then major newspapers reported that the CIA had secretly funded the National Student Association for years. The disclosure damaged trust in student organisations and strengthened radical claims that universities and government were entangled.
ROTC and academic credit
Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programmes were a second target. Many state universities had required ROTC for male students for decades, and during the 1960s a good number of them dropped the requirement. Students and some faculty also argued about whether military courses deserved academic credit and whether officers should hold professorial titles. These campaigns grew much stronger in 1968-70, when ROTC buildings were sometimes burned or occupied, but the arguments over credit and compulsion were already on campus agendas in 1967.
Class rank and the draft
Because undergraduates generally qualified for deferment, the draft also entered the university’s administrative machinery. In 1966 the Selective Service draft system had encouraged colleges to report class rankings and administer a qualifying test, so that lower-ranked men could lose their deferments. The University of Chicago sit-in of May 1966 protested the release of rankings to draft boards, and the dispute continued into 1967 on other campuses. Critics said it made professors and registrars part of the draft, and turned grades into a matter of military risk.
By autumn 1967 the draft was more openly a target. A national “Stop the Draft Week” in October included large protests at the Oakland induction centre, and later that month the March on the Pentagon drew tens of thousands, many of them students. Late in October the head of the Selective Service System, General Lewis Hershey, reportedly urged local boards to reconsider the deferments of those who interfered with the draft, which many students took as a threat.
Who was organising
Students for a Democratic Society grew quickly in 1967, as did smaller local groups and antiwar committees. Not every activist belonged to a radical organisation, however. A large share of campus protesters in 1967 were liberals or pacifists, and polls of students in these years generally showed that most were not involved in demonstrations at all. Black student unions and groups were also forming, and in 1967 student activism over race was beginning to converge with the antiwar movement. Black students at Howard University, for example, reportedly confronted Hershey when he spoke there in the spring.
What changed after 1967
Several things made the next year different. The Tet Offensive in January 1968 shook confidence in the war, and Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to seek re-election in March 1968 raised hopes and then disappointments. The movement’s mass base grew in 1968-70, along with rising campus radicalism and, in some places, violence. Looking back, 1967 matters as the point at which resistance to recruiters, ROTC and the draft became routine parts of campus life, setting patterns that Columbia and later campuses would follow.