‘Dissent in the Heartland’ looks at IU student protest in the 1960s

Read the first chapter of this new IU Press book online

By Susan Williams

But in the region of farmland, conservative politics and traditional values, IU students in Bloomington were stirring as well. During the next decade, they would help to change the social and political climates of the country and redefine higher education.

One of the new fall catalog offerings at the IU Press is Dissent in the Heartland which examines student protest at IU against the backdrop of similar activities across the nation. The book is written by Mary Ann Wynkoop, associate director of American studies and assistant professor of history at the University of Missouri—Kansas City. Its content is based upon various sources, including FBI files and interviews.

According to Wynkoop, what was sown in the dust of McCarthyism and nurtured by the actions of young black students who called for the end of racial discrimination, actually was born at IU before protest at Berkeley started getting headlines.

During the Cuban missile crisis, Oct. 4, 1962, under the university’s new president Elvis Stahr, a group of 30 students protested U.S. aggression in Cuba. One of its leaders was a member of the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA).

About 2,000 students and townspeople watched as the protestors marched down Kirkwood Avenue toward the courthouse square. Fistfights broke out, and the protestors retreated to the library where the larger group jeered outside and sang the Star Spangled Banner.

A Monroe County prosecutor demanded that the YSA be banished from campus, but Stahr and his faculty backed the students’ right to express their views. The prosecutor responded by inditing three students under the Indiana Anti-Subversive Act (1951) which made the assembly of two or more people for the purpose of advocating the overthrow of the state government a felony. His actions, however, gained national attention and were seen as more politically than lawfully motivated. The charges were eventually dropped.

But dissenting students at IU and across the country challenged centralized authority and demanded a hand in shaping their universities. At IU, anti-ROTC activists protested the university’s ROTC requirement and won. Curfews for women were eliminated. And eventually bigger issues—Vietnam, feminism and civil rights—were tackled.

Authority was challenged, changes were made and things were never the same at IU or anywhere else.

IU Press has loaded the first chapter of Wynkoop’s book. Adobe Acrobat Reader software is required. Read the chapter online at this Web site:
http://www.indiana.edu/~iupress/books/0-253-34118-3.shtml