A self-proclaimed student radical visited Dunn Meadow on Tuesday for the first time in a long time. \nGuy Loftman, who was student-body president from 1967 to 1968, posed for photographs at the Memorial Pillar and Centennial Steps in Dunn Meadow, where free-speech forums were routinely held 40 years ago. \n“I can smile as big as anybody,” Loftman joked while posing for a picture in a spot where he frowned about 40 years ago. “I bet there is no file in the archives bigger than my FBI file.”\nLoftman, who’s now a Bloomington attorney, was referring to the Counter Intelligence Program that tracked radical student leaders in the 1960s and early 1970s.\nRadical students led such profound protests that former IU student Mary Ann Wynkoop documented them in her book, “Dissent in the Heartland: The Sixties at Indiana University.” \n“Midwestern students felt the most impact (of student demonstrations and protests) because they ran so counter to what they were taught in school,” Wynkoop said. “Bloomington had a deep-seated conservative element in it, and the idea of challenging authority was really revolutionary for Midwesterners.” \nIU designated Dunn Meadow as the official campus assembly ground on May 7, 1963. The campus assembly ground was for “members of the community to express themselves freely on all subjects, within the limits of applicable laws and regulations, with or without advance notice,” according to the proposal, now housed in the University archives. Since 1963, Dunn Meadow has been the location of hundreds of protests and assemblies, from anti-war demonstrations to the farewell speech of ex-IU basketball coach Bob Knight in 2000. \nHowever, many students of the past said students of today have lost touch with the power of protest, said Douglas Wissing, an IU alumnus who has written about student protest on the campus.. While student protest still exists, it’s not as profound or as visible as it once was in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, \n“Today, protest is orderly, mainly middle-class and middle-aged people,” Wissing said. “The deficit of students is sad and shocking.”\n \nViolent protests, radical leaders \nBy 1967, the anti-Vietnam War sentiment was reaching its pinnacle, and students began to target not only the government, but also private companies that aided the war, such as the Dow Chemical Co. Dow Chemical manufactured the napalm used in Vietnam as a weapon against the Viet Cong and the people living there. When representatives from the company came to IU for recruitment, about 125 students gathered in the hallway outside the office of then-IU President Elvis J. Stahr. The objective of the sit-in was to “strive for intellectual integrity (of the University) and to stop IU complacence with those who needed napalm,” according to an article in the Nov. 1, 1967, issue of the Indiana Daily Student. That particular demonstration led to 37 student arrests.\nLoftman, student body president and a political radical at the time, said he didn’t play a role in protesting Dow, but was certainly involved in the aftermath.\n“From my perspective, it happened without my guidance,” Loftman said. “I was not a participant, not arrested.”\nLoftman said the Dow Chemical protest was one of the first student sit-ins at IU, which may have accounted for police beating the students with batons and arresting them.\n“The police freaked out,” Loftman said. “That was the first time that I can remember any police violence against student demonstrators.”\nAfter the arrests, Loftman spent the following days getting the demonstrators out of jail, another first for him during his presidency.\nAt the end of it all, Loftman enlisted the help of a professor who put up his house as collateral so the 37 demonstrators could get out on bail. \nDuring Loftman’s presidential term, he organized more than three dozen student demonstrations, relying on leaflets and flyers to rally students. Loftman was a “student power” advocate and focused his energy on gaining student rights, as well as speaking out against the Vietnam War.\n“Almost everybody who was out there really didn’t like the war in Vietnam,” Loftman said. “It was very unpopular and intrusive. The draft came into your living room.”\nLoftman cites the military draft as the primary reason students opposed the war, but he points out it wasn’t the only issue.\n“For every 100 people protesting, there were 100 different motivations,” Loftman said. “... Plus, half the protesters were women, and they weren’t going to get drafted. It wasn’t just ‘I might get drafted,’ it was ‘You might get drafted.’”\nAfter his student-body presidential term was up in 1968, he told the IDS that his greatest accomplishment was changing students’ attitudes and sparking greater political awareness in them.\n“What is important is how (students) relate to society, how they view themselves in relation to the world,” Loftman said in 1968. \nThe change in attitudes he effected allowed the student body to get more organized in the 1970s.
‘Power to the people’ \nAccording to a 1970 Gallup poll detailed in the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal, student unrest had replaced the Vietnam War as the No. 1 issue with the American people. In Bloomington, 1970 was the year Keith Parker and Mike King won the election for student-body president and vice president on the United Student Movement ticket.\nParker was a fearless president in a culture of perpetual fear.\n“I had my apartment shot into and the windshield in my car shot through,” said Parker, now the assistant vice chancellor for government and community relations at the University of California at Los Angeles. “But when you are 21 or 22, you are never afraid of anything.”\nParker, who cites Malcolm X as one of his personal heroes, affiliated himself with the Black Panther Party.\nLike Loftman, Parker was considered a radical student-body president.\n“(Loftman and I) were different generations,” Parker said. "We were both progressives, but he was the first."\nDue to the pioneering efforts of student-body presidents before him and the United States’ increasingly unpopular involvement in Vietnam, the student body was ready and willing to protest, perhaps more than ever before.\n“The war was a tremendous waste of human lives,” Parker said. “It took away the country’s ability to focus on poverty and lack of education.”\nThis prompted Parker to spread leaflets across campus with guidelines for proper protest attire and a nonviolent philosophy to keep students out of jail. Part of the flyer read: “Remember, non-violence is our best tactic right now. If you’re busted, don’t resist. We’ll get you out. Don’t get your head busted too. ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!!”\nBesides organizing mass protests, Parker founded Student Legal Services during his presidency, a resource students still use today.\n“The lesson is all politics are local,” Parker said. “You have to look at your immediate issues and address those, and when you address those, you will build the foundation necessary for bigger politics.”\nHowever, Parker said he doesn’t blame students today for not being as politically active as his generation. Today, there is no draft, and students have more rights.\n“You can’t apply the same criteria of political activism to this generation as you did to my generation,” Parker said.\n \nThe evolution\nWhile student protest has died down in recent years, it has not died out. In December 2006, two members of the IU community, graduate student Giri Krishnan and IU researcher Suresh Marru, rallied students to protest Dow Chemical on the 22nd anniversary of the Bhopal, India, tragedy by staging a mock funeral procession down Indiana Avenue, according to a Dec. 4, 2006, IDS article. The two also protested in November 2006 when the company came to recruit potential employees.\nThe company was allegedly responsible for a chemical leak in 1984 that killed 3,000 people in India. Since then, it’s estimated that more than 50,000 people have permanent disabilities from chemicals leaking into the water supply.\nHarini Gopalakrishnan, a graduate student who helped organize the protest, said its goal was to raise awareness among students about Dow Chemical so they could make an informed decision about the company. She said the demonstration was a success.\n“We collected lots of signatures, and lots of students said they would not be working for the company,” she said.\nWynkoop, the author of student activism at IU, said she is cautiously optimistic about the future of student protest on college campuses.\n“It’s not going to be the same (as 40 years ago), but that doesn’t mean there is not a significant progressive student population,” Wynkoop said. “I won’t give up on it. The spirit is still alive.”
The future\nCurrent IU Student Association President Betsy Henke said student protest is still alive in Bloomington, even if the students aren’t taking it to the streets.\n“IU’s campus and the Bloomington community welcomes the expression and opinions in a public manner, regardless if individuals agree or highly disagree on the message,” Henke said in an e-mail interview. “... Though we have not seen the tremendous rallying or protesting that swamped Dunn Meadow during the early ‘70s, I believe that the underlying foundation for this type of free speech still stands today.”\nBut Wissing said he wants public protest to become “cool” again – and that if young people want freedom and liberty, they must be willing to pay the price. He said it’s in the best interest of students to get involved in participatory democracy. He said that starts with voting, but even sending e-mails to senators and representatives is a start.\nAccording to the 2004 U.S. census, 36 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds voted in the 2000 presidential election. That number skyrocketed to 47 percent in 2004.\nBut Wissing isn’t satisfied with the numbers. Voting is a fundamental part of any democracy, he said, and young people not participating is a shame.\n“You have to remember, in the ‘70s, 18-year-olds just got the right to vote,” Wissing said. “I am shocked out how low voting turnout is for young people today.”\nWynkoop said she believes students aren’t as involved today because the modern student is more pressed for time. She said she thinks more college students have jobs today than 40 years ago. \nHenke said that because there are so many different groups with different agendas, it’s hard for students to organize a mass protest. She also said the issue of a military draft, less threatening today, played a role in protests back then.\nLoftman agrees the draft was a factor, but he said students generally have less to complain about today.\n“If today women had to be in the dorms at 11 p.m., men had to wear a tie to dinner in the residence hall on Sundays and students were losing loved ones in the war,” Loftman said, “Dunn Meadow would be filled with student protesters.”
