“Students began to do the normal things you do when you start to question authority,” he said. “The classrooms were permeable. It was an exciting time and in some ways I wish it would have never ended.”

The Vietnam War was vastly different than the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq today, he said, especially in terms of how students were affected by the draft.

At the time, students not enrolled in college were drafted. When the need for soldiers in Vietnam grew larger than the supply the draft could provide, the government made a grade-point average requirement for those escaping the draft, meaning students with lower grades could still be drafted, Garskof said.

Many professors were questioned by the administration for following suit, he said, noting professors didn’t want their students to get drafted because of one opinion on a paper or project.

“Me, personally, I said, ‘I’m not giving nothing but A’s,’” he said. “And that didn’t make the university happy.”

Acting out

MSU alumna and former ATL professor Etta Abrahams was arrested along with 58 other student activists in May 1965 for sitting in the middle of Abbot Road in front of City Hall while protesting the fact that East Lansing didn’t have an opening housing ordinance.

“A student named Sandra Jenkins who was African American had rented a room in a woman’s house in East Lansing,” Abrahams said. “Her friend had rented the room for the two of them and when she saw Jenkins was African American she refused to rent the room.”

This individual incident sparked the protest in which Abrahams was arrested.

“It didn’t affect my graduation, or my getting a job,” she said. “It did, however, concern my parents.”

Over time, the ordinance was finally passed.

The curfew hours required of female students was another issue students wrestled with in the 1960s, Abrahams said. At the time, MSU had to approve off-campus housing for female students, who then had to sign in and out with a supervisor who lived with them. Women were required to sign in by 11 p.m. on weeknights and 1 a.m. on weekends, Garskof said.

“It was a very ugly mood in East Lansing at that time,” Abrahams said. “It was difficult living there. When we tried to demonstrate peacefully, there were people who would shout things at us.”

A female student in trouble for staying out after hours came to Garskof months before the hours system came to an end in East Lansing, asking him to represent her in what he called “some kind of student kangaroo court.” Garskof complied and went with her to the hearing to argue such hours were unfair and invoked gender discrimination.

“She won the case,” he said. “And that was the beginning of the end of hours.”

Back to the roots

An active part of the Root and Branch publication during his time at MSU, alumnus and current Grand Haven, Mich., resident Thom Peterson remembered activism as a large part of his experience in East Lansing.

Root and Branch was a student publication that argued activism was better pursued by getting down to the root of a problem, rather than bludgeoning one’s way through change, Peterson said.

“We essentially agreed with the Orange Power movement,” he said. “The idea that the university had to babysit students, we were offended by that idea.”

Peterson also remembers when undercover CIA work done by MSU professors was exposed to the general public.

“The idea that there was this sort of undercover participation by MSU (in the war) as an institution was kind of kept hush-hush and someone blew the lid off that as a corruption of democratic ideals,” he said. “As students, we felt that was a level of corruption quite deep into the institution that needed to be addressed.”

Students were positive about change, Peterson remembered.

“We were cynical about the things we were discovering in the adult world,” he said. “We thought that could be solved very simply by taking a more loving attitude about it. It was a shock to me what the university was doing — just another disgusting revolution of growing up, I suppose.”

Walking out

It was November 1965 and just as the Vietnam War was beginning to grab public attention, things started brewing in The State News newsroom. The State News was not at the time independent of the university.

When State News editors walked out of the newsroom after the editor-in-chief blocked publication of an anti-war editorial piece, general assignment reporter Andy Mollison stepped up to cover the story.

Now a retiree in Niles, Mich., Mollison remembers the administration supporting the editor’s decision to block content, as most administration officials were not against the war.

“A lot of students walked out and started an alternative newspaper, called The Paper,” he said.

The Paper wasn’t a daily, but produced political content off-campus to sell to students on campus.

“The administration said it was not an authorized student publication and couldn’t be distributed on campus,” Mollison said. “They were really doing that because they didn’t agree with the content.”

After students protested, and because their First Amendment rights trumped the university’s wishes, The Paper was able to continue publication, he said.

“It was another lesson learned by the administration,” he said.

And it was a life-changing experience for Mollison, who met his wife Char on the job. She had helped found The Paper.

“I met her, proposed a week later and six months later she said yes and we’ve been married since 1967,” he said. “She’s the only person I’ve ever proposed to. I wasn’t in the habit of just randomly proposing. I think it was her legs.”