Thursday, March 28, 2024

History forgot campus richer activist past

Several semesters into writing this column, I fear it’s becoming predictable. The villains are becoming tediously familiar. I mean, how many paragraphs can I moan about the Wicked Warlock of the Right George W. and his band of cowboy evangelists before I start fantasizing about being an expatriate? Or at least start to entertain shutting up, but then who would mean old Republicans belittle anonymously through e-mail every two weeks?

Pontificating about politics can easily lose its allure and sometimes feel woefully futile. There’s not always much good news and the bad news is consistently disagreeable, like cafeteria food. And it’s not very rewarding to be a political dissident in our town. It can be alienating and frustrating. Most students cozy around a plastic cup of beer and chat about “Temptation Island,” not talk smack about Vice President Dick Cheney. People like sweatshop protesters seem lower in the campus caste system than fashion victims and the kids who play role-playing card games and swig Surge for fun.

It’s not easy being a democratic citizen in a town where seemingly everyone’s only alliance is to green. That’s why this column is dedicated to our community members who juggle the exhausting responsibility of being an employee and or student and activist and get little admiration for it. They deserve some good news, or at least a morale boost because from coverage in this paper to the McPherson administration’s platitudes, they have been marginalized, misunderstood and ignored.

So as a thanks and a valentine to the students who run the info shops, who keep optimism in the face of the legal-system meat grinder, who read and talk, who march and party with the same charisma and vigor, who sacrifice and are spit on by those who are afraid to make the sacrifices to squelch the crises in our lives, I offer a story.

This is a reminder that the tradition of student activism at MSU should be cherished for the venerable tradition it is.

This is a story of our own university. Most think the drunken tantrums that collapsed into riots a few years ago are the campus’ most notable period of dissent. But actually, the most spirited, tear-gas tinged protests in our country in the late 1960s and ’70s surrounded the Union and East Lansing City Hall.

These demonstrations were on behalf of issues, both serious and not. Our contemporary campus is a reflection of the vigilance of those students; this very newspaper became independent from the university’s control and our student government gained actual leverage as a result of our activist-predecessors’ insistence.

A bulk of the protests were concerned with MSU’s relationship to South Vietnam, a shrouded chapter of our university’s history. Ngo Dinh Diem, the despotic leader of South Vietnam, was a political science graduate student at MSU before ruling the republic propped up by American interests. The Eisenhower administration lured Diem away from the United States to rule his homeland in 1954. Diem enticed his mentor, MSU Professor Wesley Fishel, to be his adviser and MSU became involved with building South Vietnam until 1962, a year before Diem was assassinated.

With 1,000 employees and a $25 million budget, the MSU Vietnam Project trained bureaucrats and the police force and equipped the regime with mortars, grenade launchers and tear-gas grenades. The project died when faculty members in the project began to criticize it in visible publications.

The quiet alliance, exposed by a Ramparts magazine article in 1966, buoyed the MSU protest movement, which was already growing. MSU’s Students for a Democratic Society, while representing a minority of the university’s population, was one of the biggest chapters in the nation and stimulated marches that attracted sometimes thousands. SDS had an office on Grand River Avenue and a newsletter full of ideological discussions, event advertisements and, I must say, enough use of the words “radical” and “revolution” to scare away most grandmas.

Auto workers’ unions, the Democratic Party, professors, politicians and community members joined in solidarity to the students. Our campus boasted 12,000 people who participated in the April 1970 strike of students against American domestic and foreign policies regarding the war and its dissenters.

During this era, students were determined to make the university fit their progressive ideals and respond to accountability calls that any public institution should be subject to. They refused antiquated social policies, like making men wear ties to cafeteria dinners and held a 1,500-person kiss-in during 1967 to debunk policies on public petting.They bolstered support for the Black Panthers, nations suffering from capitalist exploitation, more student influence in the East Lansing City Council and an end to draconian drug laws.

They also endured the setbacks current protest movements grapple with: Violent and nonviolent factions, the difficulty accessing avenues for change regarding national and international issues, the limited gains rewarded for months of passionately organizing and arrests.

Some of the students who were visionaries in MSU’s protest renaissance even have managed to shirk the pragmatism that sometimes comes with maturity and support the new generations.

In fact, one of those students of the ’60s is still so exempt from jaded middle age, he asked me to pass this story on to you.

Erica Saelens, State News wire editor, can be reached at saelense@msu.edu

Discussion

Share and discuss “History forgot campus richer activist past” on social media.