First published 2012 by Paradigm Publishers
Published 2016 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wiley, Norbert.
Uprising at Bowling Green : how the quiet fifties became the political sixties / by Norbert Wiley, Joseph B. Perry, Jr., Arthur G. Neal ; foreword by Randall Collins.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59451-934-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Bowling Green State UniversityHistory. 2. College studentsPolitical activityOhioBowling GreenHistory. 3. Student movementsOhioBowling GreenHistory. I. Perry, Joseph B. II. Neal, Arthur G. III. Title.
LD4191.O62W55 2012
378.19810977116dc23
2011048830
ISBN 13 : 978-1-59451-934-5 (hbk)
ISBN 13 : 978-1-59451-935-2 (pbk)
Designed and Typeset by Straight Creek Bookmakers.
Imagine a university campus where there are wide green lawns but students are prohibited from walking across and have to stay on the paved walkways around them. Where students cant kiss goodnight outside the dorms and are expelled for drinking alcohol anywhere, even off campus, except in their parents homes. Where female students arent allowed to hold hands with their boyfriends and are locked in their dorms in the evening. Where the president checks to see that the faculty are in their offices by 8:00 a.m., and his wife peers in their windows and relays complaints to department heads if their offices are messy. Where attending faculty meetings is compulsory but only the president has the right to speak. This was Bowling Green University as of 1961.
This was the place where the first student protest of the 1960s happened. It was also the most successful of all student protests: The president was forced to resign, the rules were changed, and an authoritarian, traditional institution was transformed into a contemporary one.
Paradoxically, it might seem, this came about as the result of a rather short and mild phase of collective behaviora couple of excited crowd confrontations, a few hours of mildly chaotic excitement without violence or property destruction, some speechmaking, a one-day boycott of classes. It began with a playful fraternity water fight, as students gathered outside on the first mild spring day. The authorities became alarmed because a crowd had gathered to watch, but they refused to disperse, and the dean who personally tried to force the students back to their rooms by wading into the crowd and pushing them had little success. On the microlevel of direct confrontation, he was not being obeyed. Emboldened by the disparity in numbers, the crowd backed up before the deans physical aggression but closed in behind him as a wall of students. As we know from microsociological study of violence, a single antagonist against a group of more than three or four persons is likely to be taken as a weak victim and to be repeatedly and unmercifully attacked, and in this case the disparity was close to one hundred to one.
This was one of the turning points that escalated the conflict. In each case the pattern was the same: The authoritarian officials of Bowling Green, used to overawing everyone else by unrelenting performance of total dominance, could not back down, and continued escalating even in situations where a temporary withdrawal would have defused the situation. At the end of the water fight, one of the young fraternity pledges, full of excitement, came up behind the dean and doused him with a water balloon. In effect it was bringing the dean into the fun of the water fight, but he undoubtedly did not see it that way; it would have been a victory for the students definition of the situation and a loss of his dignified and authoritative status. With this denouement, the confrontation with the dean ended, and the students rushed away. They were charged up with the energy of a little symbolic victory, and they had a goal: Running across the grassin defiance of another annoying, trivial rulethey headed for the girls dorms, where they tried to rescue them from being locked in. Failing at this, they tried a local riot script, to block the highway near the campus, which had been done four years before in a fraternity protest against the drinking rules.
After a few hours of excitement, the crowd action petered out. It could have ended like this, a little upsurge of collective effervescence in the mode of campus ruckuses against authority. These have existed in strict colleges all the way back to the town-and-gown riots of the medieval universities and brawls between drunken students and proctors at Oxford catching them sneaking into college after closing hours at night. The American version was the spring vacation riot, usually at a popular gathering place such as the beach town Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where in the 1950s (and later) thousands of students would gather for revelry during spring break, typically getting into a good-natured riot when police tried to disperse an especially noisy crowd. (In my younger days, the tradition was the annual Labor Day riot, typically end-of-summer partying at Lake George in upstate New York, where local police would try to break up a crowd of noisy students and a few hours rampage would result.)
But at Bowling Green in spring 1961, another step occurred that transformed the carousing-versus-authorities riot into something more principled and of wider-reaching consequence. The day after the water-balloon incident, a crowd of students gathered outside the main campus building and were addressed by adultsincluding some sympathetic ones, a campus minister and a philosophy professor, who framed their issue as one of free speech and human dignity. They discussed further courses of action and decided upon a one-day boycott of classes. This was done the following day. The action culminated that evening when a crowd became angry that the student council had vacillated on supporting them; the president tried to disperse the crowd, but he was jeered, and later, as the students milled around and lit bonfires, the president was burned in effigy. But the spring break began the next day and students went home. Things quieted down and a number of students were expelled for their actions. This should have posed an insurmountable obstacle to keeping the protest going, since the emotional power of a mass movement depends on being able to assemble excited crowds and keep up the sense of crisis. Lack of continuity over time is what dooms momentary crowd outbursts to ineffectiveness, which is why student riots had happened from time to time since at least the year 1200 without being more than a colorful tradition.
