The Ohio State University in the Sixties: The Unraveling of the Old Order

by WILLIAM J. SHKURTI

Overview

At 5:30 p.m. on May 6, 1970, an embattled Ohio State University President Novice G. Fawcett took the unprecedented step of closing down the university. Despite the presence of more than 1,500 armed highway patrol officers, Ohio National Guardsmen, deputy sheriffs, and Columbus city police, university and state officials feared they could not maintain order in the face of growing student protests. Students, faculty, and staff were ordered to leave; administrative offices, classrooms, and laboratories were closed. The campus was sealed off. Never in the first one hundred years of the university’s existence had such a drastic step been necessary.
 
Just a year earlier the campus seemed immune to such disruptions. President Nixon considered it safe enough to plan an address at commencement. Yet a year later the campus erupted into a spasm of violent protest exceeding even that of traditional hot spots like Berkeley and Wisconsin. How could conditions have changed so dramatically in just a few short months?
 
Using contemporary news stories, long overlooked archival materials, and first-person interviews, The Ohio State University in the Sixties explores how these tensions built up over years, why they converged when they did and how they forever changed the university.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814213070
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	08/30/2016
Series:	Trillium Books
Edition description:	1
Pages:	390
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

William J. Shkurti is retired from The Ohio State University. His most recent positions have been Senior Vice President for Business and Finance from 2000 to 2010 and Vice President for Finance from 1990 to 2000. He was also an undergraduate at OSU from 1964 to 1968. Currently, Bill is an adjunct professor at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs.

Read an Excerpt

The Ohio State University was founded in 1870 as one of the country’s original 29 land grant universities, the only one of its kind in Ohio. These universities were a product of the 1862 Morrill Act, which sought to broaden access to higher education across the country. In exchange for the coveted federal and state designation, land grant universities would seek to create and broadly disseminate knowledge useful to society, especially in agriculture and the mechanical arts.

Prior to the 1960s Ohio State thrived under this mandate. It grew steadily, emerging as a modern research university after World War II. First, war-related research brought an influx of federal dollars. After the war thousands of veterans flocked to campuses under the GI Bill. Ohio State’s enrollment doubled from a wartime low of 6,500 in the fall of 1943 to more than 13,000 in 1945, then nearly doubled again before peaking at 25,400 in 1947. The rapid growth strained people and facilities, but produced a generation of educated Americans who, after more than 20 years of economic depression, war, and postwar adjustment, were ready for a period of stability. Americans at all levels of society, but particularly the growing middle class, knew they were better off than their parents had been and that their children’s future was even brighter.

No place better represented the aspirations of the growing middle class than the nation’s great public universities. Relatively accessible and inexpensive, they offered a quality education that proved the surest path to a good life. Ohio State had the nation’s 10th largest enrollment at the end of the 1950s. Located in the middle of the country, in the capital of the fifth most populous state, it represented a commitment to middleclass values of hard work and orderly progress.

Columbus’s population of nearly 500,000 made it the 28th largest city in the country in 1960. Bigger than the likes of Ann Arbor, Bloomington, or Madison, Columbus was not overwhelmed by the university’s size. Yet the city was not so big that it was hard to control. The conservative business establishment ran a tight ship that didn’t tolerate much in the way of dissenting viewpoints.

Ohio State’s board of trustees—seven men nominated by the governor and approved by the Ohio Senate—served as the university’s ultimate governing authority. The trustees hired and fired the president and approved the budget, all major hires, and major policy changes. They delegated to the president responsibility for day-to-day operations of the university. He in turn was assisted by an eight-member cabinet that included the vice president for instruction and faculty, vice president for business and finance, executive dean for student relations, and other experts. In this sense the structure of the university was similar to that of large corporations and government organizations of the time.

The university also included 1,300 full-time tenure-track faculty members who expected to make academic policy and—to some degree, both by tradition and legislation—be deferred to in academic matters by the president and the board.

As the 1960s began Novice Gail Fawcett had been Ohio State’s president for three years. Born in 1909 on a farm near the small town of Gambier, Ohio, Fawcett was conservative in outlook and reserved in demeanor. He was a physically imposing 6-foot-2 and played center on his high school basketball team. Fawcett had planned to go into business after graduating from nearby Kenyon College. With his options limited by the Great Depression, however, he returned to Gambier High School as a teacher. By age 25 he was superintendent of the Gambier school system. He earned a master’s degree from Ohio State in 1937.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Preface xiii

Prologue Ohio State in the Fifties 2

1 New Frontiers (1960-61) 12

2 Going Nuclear (1961-62) 38

3 In Dreams (1962-63) 62

4 Winds of Change (1963-64) 82

5 Boomer Invasion (1964-65) 112

6 The End of the Speakers Rule (1965) 136

7 Soaring (1965-66) 156

8 The Beat Goes On (1966-67) 188

9 Down the Rabbit Hole (1967-68) 220

10 Come Together (1968-69) 260

11 Road to Armageddon (1969-70) 288

12 Centennial Chaos (April-August 1970) 312

Epilogue Living with the Sixties 346

Conclusion Life in the Middle of the Road 378

Notes 389

Bibliographic Note 423

Index 429

Editorial Reviews

"'Those were the days, my friend /; We thought they'd never end.' "William Shkurti's new book on the 1960s at Ohio State jet propels us through possibly the most dramatic decade in the life of the university. What a trip it was. Shkurti evenhandedly captures the many moods, ironies, and small acts of heroism of this period, when the university also was undergoing the most rapid growth of its history." --Emily Foster, retired as associate vice president for university relations at The Ohio State University and author of after a career in journalism and public relations. She has published three books of history, including The Ohio State University District: A Neighborhood History.


"Bill Shkurti has been a Buckeye for more than fifty years, first as an undergrad--class of '68--and grad student, then as a dedicated member of OSU's senior staff. Now he's serving the university again--this time by giving it the honest, complex, compelling history it deserves. If you want to understand Ohio State, you have to read this terrific book." --Kevin Boyle, William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University and author of Arc of Justice, winner of the 2004 National Book Award in nonfiction


"In The Ohio State University in the Sixties, Bill Shkurti draws on extensive print resources and many, many people to tell the complete story of Ohio State in the turbulent '60s. And what a story it is. Why all those student demonstrations? Why the twelve-day closure in spring '70? What significant changes got made in the early '70s? What impact has that period had on higher education today? The reader is fully engaged; the story and its importance all become clear." --Joan Leitzel, Professor of Mathematics Emeritus, The Ohio State University, and President Emeritus, University of New Hampshire

"Shkurti's research and sourcing are impeccable. He relates what's happening on campus to national and world events and to the seismic generational and technological changes during the '60s. And his easy, lively writing style makes for pleasurable reading." --Lee Leonard, former Ohio Statehouse reporter and columnist with The Columbus Dispatch

"This is the best account of OSU in the 1960s that I've seen. Bill Shkurti has presented a thorough account of the issues and events of the period. These were controversial times, and this book respects different points of view. Particularly noteworthy is the use of the student newspaper, the Lantern, to shed light on the student perspective. His experiences as a former student and later as a vice president has enabled him to present a very balanced and accurate work. . . . Check the pictures. You may see someone you know!" --Raimund E. Goerler, author of The Ohio State University: An Illustrated History (OSU Press)

"Meticulously researched, colorfully told, The Ohio StateUniversity in the Sixties is indispensable to understanding the transformation of higher education in a turbulent era." --Mike Curtin, retired editor, The Columbus Dispatch

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