On May 6, 1969 at 3:15 p.m., Dartmouth College was in a veritable state of chaos.
Carrying "hammers, nails, and padlocks" a group of 75 students ran into Parkhurst and calmly explained to those inside that they were about to take the building over. As Corey Wishengrad '96 states in his senior honors thesis "Incinerating a Dog and Other Stories of Protest at Dartmouth College, 1966-1971," "the activists entered the building, methodically filled its offices, explained that those inside were in the midst of a takeover, and told them they must leave."
When Dean Thaddeus Seymour refused to leave the building, David Green '71, then a sophomore and a leader of the protest, replied "Fuck you," after which, according to Wishengrad, "the students locked arms, formed a human chain and forcibly removed the Dean of the College." When Albert I. Dickinson, the Dean of Freshmen, refused to vacate his desk chair, the protestors picked the chair up and carried it outside with the Dean still in it.
The infamous takeover of Parkhurst by a group of students in 1969 was intended to protest the College administration's position on ROTC. The students were arrested the next morning. Putting this scene into a modern context is hard to imagine. Though there have admittedly been numerous protests on campus in recent years, almost all have been demure in comparison to the takeover of '69 . Can you imagine the 200 students who marched from AZD to Parkhurst on January 17th in support of equal social spaces on campus rushing the president's office or carrying a dean out of the building in his chair? It seems unlikely -- almost laughable.
One of the most prominent protests in recent years occurred on May 1, 2006. Students gathered peacefully on the Green in support of rights for illegal immigrants. Opposition to this movement became more and more vocal until it culminated in a Dartmouth Review"funded plane flying over the protest with a banner that read "Illegals are Criminals -- Send them Back!" This highly controversial move brought out supporters of the original protestors and led to an increased number of students attending the lectures in support of illegal immigrants held later that day.
So, what has changed since 1969? There's still a war going on and it's still overseas. There are thousands of atrocities in the world. Even in a heated controversy, students fail to reach the radical levels of '60s protest. Why are we, as a student body, so complacent? Why aren't we angrier?
The most obvious difference between then and now is the draft. Is it simply because the war no longer affects us and the friends and family who live in our upper-middle-class bubble that we are apathetic? Do we no longer care because we are no longer the ones fighting and dying? The question Wishengrad asked in 1996 in the epilogue of his thesis is still extremely relevant today: "What happened to the anti-war activists and where are they now?"
"It's boring to say we're apathetic," said Jeffrey Milloy '09. "I don't feel...personally that there are any issues affecting my life directly. It seems like...the draft had a lot of effect on life." When asked what would spur him to participate in an act as grandiose as the takeover of Parkhurst, he replied, "I really think it would have to affect me of someone I knew, unfortunately."
Lexi Heywood '11 reports a different view. "I think that part of it is the culture of young people isn't quite as radical [now]...and a lot of the things they were protesting have been met," she said. She also went on to explain that she didn't agree with the more extreme forms of protest, such as the takeover of Parkhurst in '69.
"I would not have been a protester [in the Parkhurst takeover] which is not to say that I don't think protests...have a place," she explained. "People are [protesting] half just because they want to be doing something instead of caring about their issues."
John Kopper, a professor of comparative literature at Dartmouth who was a high school student during the '60s, tries to reconcile the differences between then and now by citing the cultural distinctiveness of the Vietnam era. "The sixties were an anomaly, a unique decade," he said. "[In high school] I thought, 'The world is changing permanently.'" When he arrived at college he noticed that each incoming class of students became progressively less radical. "People a few years older than I was thought I was a conventional conservative and I thought people a few years younger than me were conventional conservatives."
Are we apathetic? Scared? Conservative? One element that is noticeably absent in student protests today is the old notion of a grand struggle against "The Man." As David Green '71 told Wishengrad of his involvement in the Parkhurst takeover, he reminisced about his noble view of rebellion: "We had these romantic images of revolution and takeovers and challenging authority."
It is possible that tales of Kent State and the like have scared our generation away from active participation. However, it is also possible that the "romantic images of revolution" that pervaded the '60s have vanished, only to be replaced by a kind of stiff pragmatism. No one wants to get shot like the protestors at Kent State or even arrested like the protestors at Parkhurst. The modern view seems to be that the cost of freedom of speech is too high to be put into use very often.
