Colleges and universities in America had more students than ever before, and these institutions often tried to restrict student behavior to maintain order on the campuses. To combat this, many college students became active in causes that promoted free speech, student input in the curriculum, and an end to archaic social restrictions. Students joined the antiwar movement because they did not want to fight in a foreign civil war that they believed did not concern them or because they were morally opposed to all war. Others disliked the war because it diverted funds and attention away from problems in the U.
Intellectual growth and gaining a liberal perspective at college caused many students to become active in the antiwar movement.
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Another attractive feature of the opposition movement was the fact that it was a popular social event. As one student [ who? Most student antiwar organizations were locally or campus-based because they were easier to organize and participate in than national groups. Common antiwar demonstrations for college students featured attempts to sever ties between the war machine and universities through burning draft cards , protesting universities furnishing grades to draft boards, and protesting military and Dow Chemical job fairs on campus.
Protests grew after the Kent State shootings , radicalizing more and more students. By the early s, most student protest movements died down due to President Nixon's de-escalation of the war, the economic downturn, and disillusionment with the powerlessness of the antiwar movement. Many artists during the s and s opposed the war and used their creativity and careers to visibly oppose the war.
Their pieces often incorporated imagery based on the tragic events of the war as well as the disparity between life in Vietnam and life in the United States. Visual artists Ronald Haeberle , Peter Saul , and Nancy Spero , among others, used war equipment, like guns and helicopters, in their works while incorporating important political and war figures, portraying to the nation exactly who was responsible for the violence. Filmmakers such as Lenny Lipton , Jerry Abrams, Peter Gessner, and David Ringo created documentary-style movies featuring actual footage from the antiwar marches to raise awareness about the war and the diverse opposition movement.
Playwrights like Frank O'Hara , Sam Shepard , Robert Lowell , Megan Terry , Grant Duay, and Kenneth Bernard used theater as a vehicle for portraying their thoughts about the Vietnam War, often satirizing the role of America in the world and juxtaposing the horrific effects of war with normal scenes of life. Regardless of medium, antiwar artists ranged from pacifists to violent radicals and caused Americans to think more critically about the war. Art as war opposition was quite popular in the early years of the war, but soon faded as political activism became the more common and most visible way of opposing the war.
Women were a large part of the antiwar movement, even though they were sometimes relegated to second-class status within the organizations or faced sexism within opposition groups. Female soldiers serving in Vietnam joined the movement to battle the war and sexism, racism, and the established military bureaucracy by writing articles for antiwar and antimilitary newspapers. Mothers and older generations of women joined the opposition movement, as advocates for peace and people opposed to the effects of the war and the draft on the generation of young men.
These women saw the draft as one of the most disliked parts of the war machine and sought to undermine the war itself through undermining the draft. Another Mother for Peace and WSP often held free draft counseling centers to give young men legal and illegal methods to oppose the draft.
The government often saw middle-aged women involved in such organizations as the most dangerous members of the opposition movement because they were ordinary citizens who quickly and efficiently mobilized.
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Many women in America sympathized with the Vietnamese civilians affected by the war and joined the opposition movement. They protested the use of napalm, a highly flammable jelly weapon created by the Dow Chemical Company and used as a weapon during the war, by boycotting Saran Wrap, another product made by the company. Faced with the sexism sometimes found in the antiwar movement, New Left, and Civil Rights Movement, some women created their own organizations to establish true equality of the sexes.
Some of frustrations of younger women became apparent during the antiwar movement: African-American leaders of earlier decades like W. Du Bois were often anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist. By the middle of the decade, open condemnation of the war became more common, with figures like Malcolm X and Robert Parris Moses speaking out. Soon Martin Luther King, Jr. When SNCC-backed Georgia Representative Julian Bond acknowledged his agreement with the anti-war statement, he was refused his seat by the State of Georgia, an injustice which he successfully appealed up to the Supreme Court.
Some participants in ghetto rebellions of the era had already associated their actions with opposition to the Vietnam War, and SNCC first disrupted an Atlanta draft board in August Black antiwar groups opposed the war for similar reasons as white groups, but often protested in separate events and sometimes did not cooperate with the ideas of white antiwar leadership.
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As a result, black enlisted men themselves protested and began the resistance movement among veterans. After taking measures to reduce the fatalities, apparently in response to widespread protest, the military brought the proportion of blacks down to Within these groups, however, many African American women were seen as subordinate members by black male leaders. Many Asian Americans were strongly opposed to the Vietnam War.
They saw the war as being a bigger action of U. One of the major reasons leading to their significance was that the BAACAW was "highly organized, holding biweekly ninety-minute meetings of the Coordinating Committee at which each regional would submit detailed reports and action plans. The anti-war sentiment by Asian Americans was fueled by the racial inequality that they faced in the United States. As historian Daryl Maeda notes, "the antiwar movement articulated Asian Americans' racial commonality with Vietnamese people in two distinctly gendered ways: They were referred to as gooks and had a racialized identity in comparison to their non-Asian counterparts.
There was also the hypersexualization of Vietnamese women which in turn affected how Asian American women in the military were treated. This in turn led to women's leadership in the Asian American antiwar movement.
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Patsy Chan, a "Third World" activist, said at an antiwar rally in San Francisco, "We, as Third World women [express] our militant solidarity with our brothers and sisters from Indochina. We, as Third World people know of the struggle the Indochinese are waging against imperialism, because we share that common enemy in the United States. Both Boggs and Kochiyama were inspired by the civil rights movement of the s and "a growing number of Asian Americans began to push forward a new era in radical Asian American politics.
There were also Asian American musicians who traveled around the United States to oppose the imperialist actions of the American government, specifically their involvement in Vietnam. Through this play, "Escueta establishes equivalencies between his protagonist, a Filipino American soldier named Andy, and the Vietnamese people. Steve Louie remembers that while the white antiwar movement had 'this moral thing about no killing,' Asian Americans sought to bring attention to 'a bigger issue The clergy, often a forgotten group during the opposition to the Vietnam War, played a large role as well.
The clergy covered any of the religious leaders and members including individuals such as Martin Luther King Jr. In his speech "Beyond Vietnam" King stated, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent. The involvement of the clergy did not stop at King though. The analysis entitled "Social Movement Participation: Clergy and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement" expands upon the anti-war movement by taking King, a single religious figurehead, and explaining the movement from the entire clergy's perspective.
The clergy were often forgotten though throughout this opposition. The analysis refers to that fact by saying, "The research concerning clergy anti-war participation is even more barren than the literature on student activism. Based on the results found, they most certainly did not believe in the war and wished to help end it.
Michael Freidland is able to completely tell the story in his chapter entitled, "A Voice of Moderation: Clergy and the Anti-War Movement: In basic summary, each specific clergy from each religion had their own view of the war and how they dealt with it, but as a whole, the clergy was completely against the war. Protest to American participation in the Vietnam War was a movement that many popular musicians appropriated, which was a stark contrast to the pro-war compositions of artists during World War II.
While composers created pieces affronting the war, they were not limited to their music. Often protesters were being arrested and participating in peace marches and popular musicians were among their ranks. As the war continued, and with the new media coverage, the movement snowballed and popular music reflected this. As early as the summer of , music-based protest against the American involvement in Southeast Asia began with works like P. Sloan 's folk rock song Eve of Destruction , recorded by Barry McGuire as one of the earliest musical protests against the Vietnam War.
A key figure on the rock end of the antiwar spectrum was Jimi Hendrix — Hendrix had a huge following among the youth culture exploring itself through drugs and experiencing itself through rock music. He was not an official protestor of the war; one of Hendrix's biographers contends that Hendrix, being a former soldier, sympathized with the anticommunist view.
With the song " Machine Gun ", dedicated to those fighting in Vietnam, this protest of violence is manifest. Songs such as "Star Spangled Banner" showed individuals that "you can love your country, but hate the government. Although this song was not on music charts probably because it was too radical, it was performed at many public events including the famous Woodstock music festival It was said that "the happy beat and insouciance of the vocalist are in odd juxtaposition to the lyrics that reinforce the sad fact that the American public was being forced into realizing that Vietnam was no longer a remote place on the other side of the world, and the damage it was doing to the country could no longer be considered collateral, involving someone else.
Along with singer-songwriter Phil Ochs , who attended and organized anti-war events and wrote such songs as "I Ain't Marching Anymore" and "The War Is Over", another key historical figure of the antiwar movement was Bob Dylan. Folk and Rock were critical aspects of counterculture during the Vietnam War [67] both were genres that Dylan would dabble in. His success in writing protest songs came from his pre-existing popularity, as he did not initially intend on doing so. Midwestern Isolationist", quotes Todd Gitlin, a leader of a student movement at the time, in saying "Whether he liked it or not, Dylan sang for us.
We followed his career as if he were singing our songs. To complement "Blowin' in the Wind" Dylan's song "The Times they are A-Changin'" alludes to a new method of governing that is necessary and warns those who currently participate in government that the change is imminent. Dylan tells the "senators and congressmen [to] please heed the call. John Lennon , former member of the Beatles, did most of his activism in his solo career with wife Yoko Ono.
World War I casualties
Given his immense fame due to the success of the Beatles, he was a very prominent movement figure with the constant media and press attention. Still being proactive on their honeymoon, the newlyweds controversially held a sit-in, where they sat in bed for a week answering press questions.
They held numerous sit-ins, one where they first introduced their song "Give Peace a Chance". Lennon and Ono's song overshadowed many previous held anthems, as it became known as the ultimate anthem of peace in the s, with their words "all we are saying Berkeley Heights, New Jersey: Gruesome images of two anti-war activists who set themselves on fire in November provided iconic images of how strongly some people felt that the war was immoral. Both protests were conscious imitations of earlier and ongoing Buddhist protests in South Vietnam.
Protests against the Vietnam War took place in the late s and early s. The protests were part of a movement in opposition to the Vietnam War and took place mainly in the United States. The growing anti-war movement alarmed many in the U. Anti-war demonstrators disrupted the meeting and 50 were arrested. In the essay Chomsky argued that much responsibility for the war lay with liberal intellectuals and technical experts who were providing what he saw as pseudoscientific justification for the policies of the U. The execution provided an iconic image that helped sway public opinion in the United States against the war.
The events of Tet in early as a whole were also remarkable in shifting public opinion regarding the war. While the Tet Offensive provided the U. On October 15, , hundreds of thousands of people took part in National Moratorium anti-war demonstrations across the United States; the demonstrations prompted many workers to call in sick from their jobs and adolescents nationwide engaged in truancy from school.
However, the proportion of individuals doing either who actually participated in the demonstrations is uncertain. A second round of "Moratorium" demonstrations was held on November 15, but was less well-attended. Civil Affairs units, while remaining armed and under direct military control, engaged in what came to be known as " nation-building ": This policy of attempting to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, however, often was at odds with other aspects of the war which sometimes served to antagonize many Vietnamese civilians and provided ammunition to the anti-war movement.
These included the emphasis on " body count " as a way of measuring military success on the battlefield, civilian casualties during the bombing of villages symbolized by journalist Peter Arnett 's famous quote, "it was necessary to destroy the village to save it" , and the killing of civilians in such incidents as the My Lai massacre. In the documentary Hearts and Minds sought to portray the devastation the war was causing to the South Vietnamese people, and won an Academy Award for best documentary amid considerable controversy. The South Vietnamese government also antagonized many of its citizens with its suppression of political opposition, through such measures as holding large numbers of political prisoners, torturing political opponents, and holding a one-man election for President in Covert counter-terror programs and semi-covert ones such as the Phoenix Program attempted, with the help of anthropologists, to isolate rural South Vietnamese villages and affect the loyalty of the residents.
Despite the increasingly depressing news of the war, many Americans continued to support President Johnson's endeavors. Aside from the domino theory mentioned above, there was a feeling that the goal of preventing a communist takeover of a pro-Western government in South Vietnam was a noble objective. Many Americans were also concerned about saving face in the event of disengaging from the war or, as President Richard M.
Nixon later put it, "achieving Peace with Honor. However, anti-war feelings also began to rise. Many Americans opposed the war on moral grounds, appalled by the devastation and violence of the war. Others claimed the conflict was a war against Vietnamese independence, or an intervention in a foreign civil war ; others opposed it because they felt it lacked clear objectives and appeared to be unwinnable.
Many anti-war activists were themselves Vietnam veterans , as evidenced by the organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War. By this time, it had also become commonplace for the most radical anti-war demonstrators to prominently display the flag of the Viet Cong "enemy", an act which alienated many who were otherwise morally opposed to the war. In , President Lyndon B. Johnson began his re-election campaign. Eugene McCarthy ran against him for the nomination on an anti-war platform.
McCarthy did not win the first primary election in New Hampshire , but he did surprisingly well against an incumbent. The resulting blow to the Johnson campaign, taken together with other factors, led the President to make a surprise announcement in a March 31 televised speech that he was pulling out of the race. He also announced the initiation of the Paris Peace Negotiations with Vietnam in that speech. Then, on August 4, , U. After breaking with Johnson's pro-war stance, Robert F.
Kennedy entered the race on March 16 and ran for the nomination on an anti-war platform. Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey , also ran for the nomination, promising to continue to support the South Vietnamese government. Protests bringing attention to " the draft " began on May 5, Student activists at the University of California, Berkeley marched on the Berkeley Draft board and forty students staged the first public burning of a draft card in the United States.
Another nineteen cards were burnt on May 22 at a demonstration following the Berkeley teach-in. At that time, only a fraction of all men of draft age were actually conscripted , but the Selective Service System office "Draft Board" in each locality had broad discretion on whom to draft and whom to exempt where there was no clear guideline for exemption. In late July , Johnson doubled the number of young men to be drafted per month from 17, to 35,, and on August 31, signed a law making it a crime to burn a draft card.
On October 15, the student-run National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam in New York staged the first draft card burning to result in an arrest under the new law. In , the continued operation of a seemingly unfair draft system then calling as many as 40, men for induction each month fueled a burgeoning draft resistance movement. The draft favored white, middle-class men, which allowed an economically and racially discriminating draft to force young African American men to serve in rates that were disproportionately higher than the general population.
Although in there was a smaller field of draft eligible black men—29 percent versus 63 percent of draft eligible white men—64 percent of black men were chosen to serve in the war through conscription, compared to only 31 percent of eligible white men. On October 16, , draft card turn-ins were held across the country, yielding more than 1, draft cards, later returned to the Justice Department as an act of civil disobedience.
Resisters expected to be prosecuted immediately, but Attorney General Ramsey Clark instead prosecuted a group of ringleaders including Dr. By the late s, one quarter of all court cases dealt with the draft, including men accused of draft-dodging and men petitioning for the status of conscientious objector. The charges of unfairness led to the institution of a draft lottery for the year in which a young man's birthday determined his relative risk of being drafted September 14 was the birthday at the top of the draft list for ; the following year July 9 held this distinction.
The first draft lottery since World War II in the United States was held on 1 December and was met with large protests and a great deal of controversy; statistical analysis indicated that the methodology of the lotteries unintentionally disadvantaged men with late year birthdays. Over 30, people left the country and went to Canada, Sweden, and Mexico to avoid the draft.
To gain an exemption or deferment, many men attended college, though they had to remain in college until their 26th birthday to be certain of avoiding the draft. Some men were rejected by the military as 4-F unfit for service failing to meet physical, mental, or moral standards. All of these issues raised concerns about the fairness of who got selected for involuntary service, since it was often the poor or those without connections who were drafted. Ironically, in light of modern political issues, a certain exemption was a convincing claim of homosexuality , but very few men attempted this because of the stigma involved.
Also, conviction for certain crimes earned an exclusion, the topic of the anti-war song " Alice's Restaurant " by Arlo Guthrie. Even many of those who never received a deferment or exemption never served, simply because the pool of eligible men was so huge compared to the number required for service, that the draft boards never got around to drafting them when a new crop of men became available until or because they had high lottery numbers and later. Of those soldiers who served during the war, there was increasing opposition to the conflict amongst GIs, [78] which resulted in fragging and many other activities which hampered the US's ability to wage war effectively.
Most of those subjected to the draft were too young to vote or drink in most states, and the image of young people being forced to risk their lives in the military without the privileges of enfranchisement or the ability to drink alcohol legally also successfully pressured legislators to lower the voting age nationally and the drinking age in many states. Student opposition groups on many college and university campuses seized campus administration offices, and in several instances forced the expulsion of ROTC programs from the campus.
Some Americans who were not subject to the draft protested the conscription of their tax dollars for the war effort. War tax resistance , once mostly isolated to solitary anarchists like Henry David Thoreau and religious pacifists like the Quakers , became a more mainstream protest tactic. As of , an estimated ,—, people were refusing to pay the excise taxes on their telephone bills, and another 20, were resisting part or all of their income tax bills.
Among the tax resisters were Joan Baez and Noam Chomsky. Momentum from the protest organizations and the war's impact on the environment became focal point of issues to an overwhelmingly main force for the growth of an environmental movement in the United States. In October the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on resolutions urging President Johnson to request an emergency session of the United Nations security council to consider proposals for ending the war. In January , just weeks into his first term, Congressman Ron Dellums set up a Vietnam war crimes exhibit in an annex to his Congressional office.
The exhibit featured four large posters depicting atrocities committed by American soldiers embellished with red paint. This was followed shortly thereafter by four days of hearings on " war crimes " in Vietnam, which began April Dellums, assisted by the Citizens Commission of Inquiry , [83] had called for formal investigations into the allegations, but Congress chose not to endorse these proceedings. As such, the hearings were ad hoc and only informational in nature.
As a condition of room use, press and camera presence were not permitted, but the proceedings were transcribed. In addition to [Ron Dellums] Dem-CA , an additional 19 Congressional representatives took part in the hearings, including: The transcripts describe alleged details of U. Some tactics were described as "gruesome", such as the severing of ears from corpses to verify body count. The new school would require full-time enrollment during the first year and limit majors only to fields with strong employment opportunities.
The curriculum, with a heavy emphasis on math and literacy skills, would be intended to prepare students for the jobs in the changing New York City labor market. Under current CUNY policies, the curriculum for community colleges is developed from the ground up by faculty, within academic departments. Unlike many other community college systems across the country, faculty governance bodies in CUNY have had considerable control over curriculum, instruction, degree requirements, hiring, firing, tenure, promotion, and peer review. But that degree of involvement may be changing.
Will there be any decision making possible in this overdesigned, overdetermined framework? Anne Friedman, a tenured professor of development skills at the Borough of Manhattan Community College who serves on a panel helping to establish the new college, is also concerned that the administration has yet to determine how the college will be governed— whether there will be a faculty senate, academic departments, and faculty-elected department chairs, rather than appointed department heads.
The CUNY administration also has yet to say whether the college will be staffed by full-time tenure-track faculty, contingent faculty, or faculty from other CUNY campuses. This leaves faculty members such as Friedman wondering what role they will have in Faculty, he says, are deeply involved with developing the new college. Six faculty members from campus senates as well as the university faculty senate chair serve as advisers to the full-time planning team. Twenty-eight faculty members serve on working committees that were convened in October.
A second round of committee meetings in which faculty will be represented will be convened this spring to develop models for the summer program, an office of partnerships, governance, and majors. The governance plans, says Mogulescu, will be developed in consultation with the leadership of the university faculty senate. But Beaky says will be here very soon. Curriculum battles have sprung up as well in south Texas at the Alamo Community College District, a system of five independently accredited institutions that serve about a hundred thousand students see Robert J.
The colleges range from the historically black St. Leslie, are considering the possibility of pursuing accreditation as a single institution. That curriculum, says board chair Denver McClendon, makes it easier for students to take courses at campuses across the system. They maintain that their input was rejected on portions of the core curriculum. For example, the faculty and the administration differed over whether a three-credit class in computer literacy should be part of the new curriculum. Faculty sat on the Computer Literacy Task Force, which recommended it be included as a three-credit class.
But that recommendation was rejected by Vice Chancellor Robert Aguero, who decided that instruction in computer skills should be embedded in other course offerings and did not require a stand-alone class. The curriculum controversy is part of a broader dispute over the direction of the community college system there. Faculty say Leslie has created a top-heavy administration, botched two accreditation efforts for Northeast Lakeview College, and failed to encourage dialogue with college employees, students, and the community.
Board chair McClendon referred questions to Aguero, who did not return calls seeking comment. Community colleges are by definition the institutions of higher education that are closest to the communities. They serve a diverse student body, from students right out of high school to older adults returning to college after years in the workforce. They have open enrollments and provide developmental learning support for students whose academic skills need to be raised to collegiate standards.
Many colleges have elected boards and derive significant revenue from local taxes, including levies specifically directed for college funding. And most retain close ties with local corporations, which look to community colleges to train workers for jobs in their companies. There, community colleges work closely with industry to develop training courses that may feed into degree-granting programs. The wind-energy industry in turned to Columbia Gorge Community College, in The Dalles, when national and international companies began to erect massive wind turbines there.
They needed technicians to run the foot-high windmills, with their turbines and complex hydraulic, mechanical, and electronic systems. A federal grant funded two engineering faculty positions, and the wind industry provided equipment and financial support. By , the program had two cohorts of students— forty each semester—who could earn a one-year certificate. An estimated 65 percent did just that. College president Stephen Scott says the company representatives spoke about what the students needed to be able to do, and the faculty then built a curriculum around those needs.
Wake Technical now has four hundred students in the program. While the classes at Wake Technical are part of a degree-granting program, other community colleges develop noncredit classes for industry, and those courses later migrate into a degree-granting program. Cisco continues to work with community colleges to develop courses.
When President Obama announced his community college initiative in July at Macomb Community College, Cisco was working with Macomb on developing a course on health information networking. Nevertheless, educators warn that corporate involvement in developing curricula may have a negative impact on what is taught in the classroom. His e-mail address is davidmckaywilson aol.
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I'm interested in joining your organization, but I would first like to know what specific protections and benefits would result from my joining. Any information you provide will be greatly appreciated. Aside from these benefits for individuals, the AAUP does a wide range of work that benefits the profession at large as well as work on behalf of faculty on contingent appointments, which includes the majority of faculty members teaching at community colleges.
We also have a committee exlusively focused on community colleges.
Please contact us by email at aaup aaup. We welcome your comments. See our commenting policy. Skip to main content. Secondary menu Login Contact. Search form Search Submit. From eliminating tenure and stifling academic freedom to relying on a corporate curriculum, recent developments at community colleges have taken their toll. By David McKay Wilson. The Battle Rages in Kentucky But the growing reliance on contingent faculty is a clear threat to academic freedom in U. Remember the Alamo Curriculum battles have sprung up as well in south Texas at the Alamo Community College District, a system of five independently accredited institutions that serve about a hundred thousand students see Robert J.
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