Civil rights. White racism. Black identity. These were among the issues that transformed Wittenberg from 1963-1974. Changes in campus life, governance and the academic program also occurred, and although some students and faculty remained boxed into the familiar during this turbulent era, others tackled the challenges head on, thus intensifying the process of change as Wittenberg began to break out of its past.
Professor Emeritus of History Charles Chatfield, who previously described how the Vietnam War broke in on Wittenberg (Fall 2000), now takes readers back to Wittenberg’s “Sixties” — a time charged with urgency and emotion that would alter the university for years to come.
story by Chalres Chatfield
photos courtesy of The Witt yearbook and University Communication
The notion of the “Sixties” evokes national stereotypes of social and political upheaval.
There were significant changes in that era, of course, but they were neither all dramatic nor contained in a decade. And still, from 1963 to about 1974, Wittenberg experienced a period of rapid change that we may call its “Sixties.”
What changed then that really counted? Was college life accompanied by protest and confrontation? By Black Power? Student Power? Feminism? Marxism? A long-hair, jeans-dressing, drug-popping, rock-bopping counterculture? And by the way, where were the faculty and administration all that time?
Well, like almost all of higher education, Wittenberg was breaking from established patterns.
The number and distribution of students and faculty, student lifestyle and social regulations, sports and athletics changed. The campus roles of African Americans and women, independents and Greeks altered, along with the way these groups saw themselves. There were changes in campus activities, in the curriculum and calendar, in teaching styles, student and faculty governance, and even the campus. There was a discernable shift in the orientation of Wittenberg as a liberal arts college.
The changes during Wittenberg’s Sixties created frustration, anxiety and exhilaration for students, faculty and administrators. Interaction among these groups made change an intensely self-conscious process because it heightened issues of identity. That was one theme throughout the era. A second was the difficulty of containing change: the process threatened to get out of hand, and that increased campus tension.
In time, responsibility became more shared and governance restructured. Relationships between students and faculty grew somewhat less formal, the community’s outlook more cosmopolitan, learning better oriented to the modern world. All that was hard to see for those of us at Wittenberg then because the process was indeed accompanied by turbulence and was aggravated by the Vietnam War as it broke upon our ivy-covered world.
Pressing the Box
In 1963 freshmen donned their beanies and entered a college regulated by rules and traditions, the college described with vibrant nostalgia by David Arnold ’59 in the Wittenberg Magazine (Spring 2000). It was Alma Mater and fraternity-sorority sing, Homecoming and football, Tiger fever, spring pinnings and campus legends. It was the intellectual domain of a faculty “weighty with dignity.” And even though dorms had lives of their own, the campus was the social domain of its Greeks.
Above all, Wittenberg in the Fifties was the domain of President Clarence C. Stoughton (1949-1963). Ruddy and red-haired, he had a rough wit and cherished tradition, especially Lutheran tradition. “Prexy,” most called him; “Papa,” a few said privately because of the affectionate paternalism with which he administered the college. He built Faculty Court because he wanted professors to live close to campus. “We are a family,” he said, “a community, where the essence of our living is sharing of insights and aims and experiences.”
Prexy was an effective fund-raiser who envisioned Wittenberg as a quality small university—as the premier Lutheran institution of higher learning. From 1949, when he took office, he doubled the number of campus buildings and launched a major expansion of students and faculty. He valued the national recognition attained in football and basketball and by the Wittenberg Choir. In 1959 his board of directors renamed Wittenberg a university, recognizing its professional degree programs in music, divinity, education, business administration, nursing, home economics and the fine arts. Following a heart ailment early in 1959, Stoughton seemed to pursue his vision ever more intensely and arbitrarily, pressing the box outward in many ways.
Still, he sought to contain his aspiration for a university within Wittenberg’s traditional college style and orientation. His attempt created a tension that increased following his retirement in June 1963. His successor was the professor of psychology that he had promoted to be dean of the college, John N. Stauffer (1963-1968).
Tall and soft-spoken, Stauffer was highly regarded by the faculty for his intellect, integrity and breadth of view. Early in his presidency he strode between rows of professors lined up for convocation at the lower entrance of the Weaver Chapel tower. The two doors were etched with representations of “knowledge” and “life” respectively. Jerry Graham, a young political science teacher, opened a door and said, “enter the portal of knowledge.” Stauffer didn’t miss a step. He opened the other door and replied, “I prefer life.”
The new president announced that there would be broad changes at Wittenberg. Speaking to the board on June 17, 1963, he projected two years of planning and five years of development for every aspect of the institution. He encouraged the faculty to take on more responsibility, rotating department chairs and supporting younger proessors in leadership roles. He appointed a Long Range Curriculum Study Committee and named Allan O. Pfnister (dean 1963-1967 and provost to 1969), a college curriculum specialist from the University of Michigan, to shepherd the whole process of review and innovation. Both men stressed systematic planning and calibrated transition.
Neither could have anticipated the scope, pace and tensions of the changes they forecast, and no one expected the extent to which racial issues would disrupt and refocus Wittenberg.
Challenging Racial Discrimination: Civil Rights to White Racism
The story of civil rights actually began in the Fifties, of course, with films such as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and the drama of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery, Ala. Carried on TV, the movement touched consciences at Wittenberg. In 1959 the faculty and the Student Senate passed anti-discrimination resolutions. Soon student sit-ins and boycotts swept across the South and gave students elsewhere lessons in social change.
Wittenberg’s first civil rights group was Students Advancing Freedom and Equality (SAFE), formed in the fall of 1963. Enlisting perhaps 1 percent of the student body, SAFE challenged racial blackballing by Greek groups for about five years. There was no problem, the Greeks insisted, because there were so few Negro students (as African Americans were called then), and anyway it was pointless to fight national organizations over discriminatory rules. Behind that façade, fraternities and sororities did grapple with race.
Delta Sigma Phi and Phi Mu Delta were commended by the faculty for pledging Al Thrasher ’64 and Bob Cherry ’64, for example, but Sherman Hicks ’68 was denied by Beta Theta Pi because of his race after some of the brothers had worked hard to get him to pledge. A few of them dropped out of the fraternity, and Hicks was left “with scars” even though he joined the Delta Sigs. Alpha Xi Delta asked its national for permission to pledge Negroes in case the issue arose. The request was refused, and the women but narrowly voted to keep their affiliation. Several of them, disillusioned and hurt, drifted away. SAFE publicly urged President Stauffer to set nondiscriminatory standards for Greek groups and to recruit more Negro students and faculty. Stauffer was genuinely affirmative in principle, but only gradually did he and the faculty become pro-active. African American enrollment increased, and in 1967 faculty and staff began to raise funds for disadvantaged students.
Wittenberg men broke discrimination in nearby barbershops by boycotting them (perhaps this was the origin of long hair?), while in 1964 some 30 SAFE students began to tutor under-achieving pupils in the Springfield schools. Starting in 1966, a Wittenberg Upward Bound program augmented the tutoring. Both projects enlisted faculty and students, aligned the campus and community in service, and addressed educational inequality.
Still, Wittenberg remained essentially white in a society where white bastions were under siege. That reality prompted the Wittenberg Christian Council, the World Affairs and Academic Affairs committees of Student Senate, Union Board and SAFE to sponsor a three-day seminar on “The Negro in America” in the winter of 1968. They showed films, showcased African American music, sponsored discussions, enlisted faculty speakers, and brought in speakers such as activist Dick Gregory. The seminar got its historic force, though, from the concluding testimony of black students Lemoine Rice ’69 and Hicks.
Their Wittenberg education had been valuable, they agreed, but the narrow-mindedness here had been stifling, painful. “Yes, I have been accepted,” Hicks said, “but only because supposedly I wasn’t ‘like most Negroes.’ This is an insult to me and to the Negro race.”
Concerned Black Students (CBS) had come together informally the previous fall. Now they addressed the campus. Only a quarter of resident students had attended any part of the seminar, they observed:
“Could it be that the average white student at Wittenberg is totally unmoved by the problems which plague our society? . . . Open your minds. . . . The Negro of today . . . demands a type of respect that has been denied to his forefathers and will not stop until he receives it. We are enraged with the artificial atmosphere of this campus.”
For all its good intentions, the “Negro in America” seminar itself embodied the problem that Hicks and CBS exposed: it treated “The Negro” as an objective fact, not a subjective reality.
White Racism and Black Power
Within two months of the 1968 “Negro in America” seminar, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Riots scarred 110 American cities that April. Sparked by other issues, student activists disrupted several campuses and closed down Columbia University for a week. Robert J. Kennedy was murdered. Street violence marred the Democratic convention at Chicago in August. When Wittenberg opened that fall, a faculty-student committee began to develop a policy regarding student demonstrations. Apprehension was in the air.
A small, predominantly white Students Against White Racism (SAWR) was formed in November, partly in response to a talk by Al Thrasher, then director of community relations for Springfield. SAWR gave fresh meaning to the phrase, “the white man’s burden.” The problem was not only discrimination, it was white racism. Paraphrasing Pogo, SAWR wrote. “We have met the enemy and we are they.”
Also in November, CBS was formally recognized as a campus organization. Almost immediately its 45 members insisted on accountability for the consequences of white racism at Wittenberg. On Friday, Dec. 6, 1968, they presented a set of demands to Provost Pfnister. CBS recognized the university’s stated commitment to social responsibility, but argued that its efforts had been so modest as to be “irrelevant” to the social revolution engulfing the nation.
Redemption must start with confession, CBS insisted. In order to make its repudiation of racism credible, Wittenberg must acknowledge that historically and currently it was compromised by racism. There followed a list of specific demands. The college should increase the proportion of black students and faculty to 12 percent, and increase black staff. It should hire a black counselor and a recruiter for black students, admit two specific applicants, and encourage student contributions to a scholarship fund for disadvantaged students. It should make the black experience integral to the curriculum and a possible study concentration. There should be black cheerleaders, two holidays commemorating black leaders, and a social and cultural gathering place for black students. Exchange programs with black colleges should be expanded.
Stauffer had resigned the previous year, and administrative responsibility was now vested with the provost, Allan Pfnister, and vice presidents Emerson Reck and Roland Matthies. The provost turned his full attention to the crisis. In mid-December he took the CBS demands to the faculty, urging that they expressed the current social and cultural revolution in attitudes to authority, to minority group roles, and to “relationships between black and white communities.” After four hours of discussion, the professors assured CBS of their readiness to work together, but they referred specific demands to committees.
On Monday, Jan. 13, CBS president Ron Woods ’69 met for two hours with senior administrators, but there was no resolution. The next morning 37 black students walked from Reci to the Student Union (now the Benham-Pence Student Center), from which they left for the Afro-American Institute at Antioch College.
A flurry of meetings followed. Faculty and student leaders approved inviting the Office of Civil Rights of HEW to assess civil rights on the campus. SAWR and other student groups voiced support for CBS. At a previously scheduled Thursday evening address in the field house, activist Father James Groppi took one minute to endorse the black students and then left to join them. The crowd of 1,200 responded with mixed applause, anger and shocked silence.
Pfnister, meanwhile, was negotiating intensely, even meeting with black student leaders at a coffeehouse outside of Springfield. Other administrators feared for his safety. Various people let him know how wrong he was to sympathize with the students. He pressed on with the work, engaged but ever more tired. Friday morning he faced a crowd of students overflowing the chapel. The most vociferous ones were hostile, and it was all he could do to close the meeting with order. He was exhausted. At another tense meeting that afternoon faculty members threatened to undo his efforts because they felt not fully consulted.
Somehow a response was finalized and given to CBS Saturday morning. In it the university recognized that “racism does exist within the Wittenberg community.” It deplored “any expression of racism, individual or group, conscious or unconscious,” and it addressed specific demands in ways that the black students could regard as grounds for action. They returned that afternoon.
Campus discussion continued throughout the term, sometimes in the Black House that the university provided, and which CBS fixed up. The sophomore class arranged a three-day seminar on black awareness. School publications were revised in line with the equal opportunity recommendations of the HEW review. Nearly $30,000 was raised from the university community for scholarships. Black student enrollment gradually increased, and black faculty were sought. The Interfraternity Council adopted a nondiscrimination statement, notifying its national offices of its action, while the faculty required each fraternity and sorority to file such a statement with the university.
If identity is the ultimate civil right, then to live it authentically is power. In the process of framing their Dec. 6 demands, Concerned Black Students had found their identity as black Americans and (they said explicitly) as Wittenbergers. In the Jan. 14 walk-out they were empowered.
Reflecting on their demands, Provost Pfnister had addressed the faculty at the end of January. He quoted from a colleague: “It is not only the individual hurt, unpleasant and frustrating as it is, that they suffer. It is the fact that they share deeply the pain of the group of which they are a part.” Then the provost spoke for himself.
“As some of us became more and more involved in working with the issues and as the week wore on, we became more and more emotionally sensitive,” he said. “I felt that the whole university community was involved in the problem and that somehow or other it had to feel, and somehow or other it had to respond with commitment to any solutions reached.” Because the community had responded, because it had set in motion a process of resolution, Pfnister said, he now felt free to resign and accept a long-tendered position at the University of Denver.
And the cultural identity of Wittenberg? The school had repudiated discrimination and affirmed pluralism. But wasn’t its new Black House potentially a cultural island? Although it would welcome white students upon occasion, it could be reserved exclusively for CBS (it was not a residence). Logically, wasn’t that a kind of discrimination? Political scientist William Buscemi drew a distinction between a “logic of the mind” and a “logic of the heart.” Here the “logic of the heart” should govern, he urged. Wittenberg should be an equal opportunity and plural culture within which its black minority could both find haven and reach out to the campus.
A vision of community at Wittenberg absorbed the black revolution in American society, and that story reached its climax in 1968-1970, just when the war in Vietnam broke in most forcefully. Other factors in the calculus of change added to the turbulence of those years, threatening academic priorities and administrative control. The shifting norms of an increasingly plural society challenged not only blacks, but also most students and faculty.
Changing the Campus Climate
One spring night in 1967 a slight freshman coed dashed up to the door of Hanley Hall, only to find it locked — seconds after the 10 p.m. curfew. Her dorm record was good, and normally a few minutes would be overlooked, but she was penalized to the limit. Ever afterward she believed it was because her date was black.
Everything was related in the swirl of student life: race relations and dorm hours, visitation rules and sports, dress code and student governance, rushing and other activities. Even a tradition as venerable as the Alma Mater was vulnerable. But the cusp of change was social regulations, especially as they affected women.
We who joined the faculty between 1961 and 1963 found our students to be friendly, courteous, respectful and not much younger than we. Then, as now, they smiled in passing. On campus the boys were neatly dressed in slacks and shirts with collars, even in suit and tie for various fraternity occasions — or Melvin Laatsch’s political science classes. The girls wore skirts and blouses, or sweaters in winter. Blue jeans were acceptable only in laboratories, shorts not at all. Slacks or Bermudas could be worn in the Student Union and library but never on Sundays or in town. The campus felt familiar to those of us who had attended small colleges, and we didn’t realize that dress was prescribed not only by tradition but also by the Student Handbook.
We enjoyed chaperoning occasional sorority dances and dorm parties, where the students dressed up a level, except for hayrides, of course. Even if we chatted mainly with other chaperones, we shared something of student social life. We would have appreciated being invited even had we known that until 1967 all social functions were required to register two chaperone couples.
Sometimes students cared for our kids or came as groups to our homes. We wrote notes or phoned to admit coeds to their dorms if the hour got late. Women could not leave their dorms before 7 a.m. without permission, and they had to be in the dorm by specific hours at night, as early as 10 p.m. and as late as midnight. We took that for granted. After all, women’s dorm hours had been part of our own college life. Sororities and fraternities too, and we understood the fellowship that many Greeks cherished, even as we consoled tearful girls who had been blackballed and excluded. We had no idea then how quickly and in how many ways campus life would alter.
Social Regulations
The dress code was perhaps the most visible regulation, especially for women. By 1966 students were only advised to dress in “a clean, neat and appropriate fashion” at their discretion, except that attire was still specified for meals. Tim Lott ’73 recalls that in his freshman year (1969) “the big thing for [Pi Kappa Alpha] men to do was to wear their fraternity pins (mine was this big gaudy thing of diamonds and rubies) on their Peters jacket, which was worn over a shirt and tie.” By springtime, he adds, all but a few members of his class “looked as though they had supporting roles in the movie Woodstock.”
Even dining hall regulations were dropped in 1971. Aside from complying with “Ohio State Board of Health regulations,” students were encouraged to “maintain an atmosphere conducive to enjoyable dining by dressing in a clean and neat manner, and by wearing more formal attire for Sunday dinner and other special meals.” Less formal by then, the students were as friendly and courteous as ever.
Women’s dorm hours were contested most persistently. They were a matter of college policy, of course, not student behavior. Most girls at least occasionally used a window, a friend’s help, or the “pencil-in-the-door” trick to bypass curfew. Fire alarms might bring a boy or two to the street, clad in a girl’s robe. Each escapade only aggravated the disparities between rules and real life.
The system was unwieldy because the rules varied from freshmen to seniors, and because of an elaborate set of penalties for infractions. Gradually, and under pressure from students, the college extended the night curfew hours. In 1967 senior women who were 21 or had parental permission could get a key to their dorm, which they had to return by 8 o’clock the next morning. Keys were provided to juniors the following year. By 1970-1971, hours were “left to individual discretion” for upperclass women.
Visitation rules for women in men’s residences underwent a similar shift. Through 1966-1967 women could not “visit men in off-campus housing except [with] parents or the landlord present as chaperones.” The following year the chaperone requirement was dropped for women who had parental permission or were 21 years old. In 1970 women were permitted to “visit off-campus daily or weekends at their own discretion.” Limitations were the responsibility of “the student and her parents.” As for visitation rules within dorms and sororities, each residence group drew up its own rules, subject to review by the Residence Hall Association and the college.
Alcohol regulations in 1965 simply forbade the possession or use of alcoholic beverages on campus or at a university-related function anywhere. Eight years later there was a Rathskeller in the basement of the Student Union that sold soft drinks and, subject to Ohio age limits, 3.2 beer!
By then Wittenberg guidelines focused “on the behavior of a student rather than simply on the consumption or possession of an alcoholic beverage.” Acceptable sites for drinking were specified, however, and functions were proscribed if imbibing was the main purpose. On that ground Tower Hall was denied a permit for a weekend “Beer Blast” in 1970. Of course, alcohol abuse by individuals and social groups, especially fraternities, continued to be a problem.
Drugs were not even mentioned in the 1965 Student Handbook, but an alumnus recalls the smell of pot when he “walked across campus in the evenings” four years later. Mostly it was “just a social thing that did not really impact day-to-day student life,” he added. Some of the faculty then encountered the heavy, sweet aroma at student parties to which they were invited.
Accordingly, the subject of drugs was treated fully in the 1973-1974 Handbook. Most of the material explained the relevant laws from the Ohio State code, to which students were accountable. Trafficking in illegal drugs was cause for suspension but, in keeping with the general shift toward individual accountability, discipline was based on specific circumstances. Moreover, as in the sections on alcohol, the Handbook urged the use of university counseling services, such as the Drug Information Group (DIG) formed in 1972 using trained student volunteers. Serious drug abuse remained an individual problem, while dope or pot was mainstreamed into the fraternity culture as a passing fad.
Sports
Who, having been at Wittenberg in the early Sixties, can forget the energy with which football and basketball were charged? Cheering fans packed stands on each side of the football field on crisp autumn Saturday afternoons. The marching band performed at halftime, and Wittenberg teams won game after game, title upon title — except in1970, when the team forfeited its 9-0 record because a player had hidden his ineligibility for the whole season.
This was the era of Bill Edwards ’31 (coach 1955-1969, and athletics director to 1973) and the beginning of the Dave Maurer era (1969-1982). Edwards won national awards and was repeatedly honored as Ohio Coach of the Year. Maurer’s teams dominated the Ohio Athletic Conference throughout the Seventies. Meanwhile, basketball held court in the old field house. Fans screamed as their team stepped through the mouth of a great tiger face, and the din continued with play. Even after the addition of expanding bleachers, the field house was over-crowded throughout the era of Eldon Miller ’61 (coach 1962-1970).
Wittenberg men competed in other varsity sports as well, including track, wrestling, golf, swimming, tennis and softball. Women played intercollegiate basketball, tennis, swimming, softball and field hockey. And both men and women engaged in “club sports” where they competed with students of other colleges, together with a wide range of intramural sports (women even competed in “posture”). Recreational athletics flourished in the shadow of football and basketball.
The pressure for women’s sports was growing, but there was still a huge discrepancy in the support provided to men and women athletes. Of the $87,260 sports budget for 1973-1974, only $3,468 went to women’s sports (in 1968 it had been less than $1,000). The women’s tennis team lacked uniforms that year, while the women’s basketball and volleyball teams used the same outfits, and the field hockey and lacrosse teams shared the same kilts. Male athletes followed away games with good dinners; the women got McDonalds. Male sports had first priority for practice facilities. The university did strengthen its support of women’s athletics in the Seventies after the 1972 Title IX Educational Amendments to the 1964 Civil Rights Act mandated equity in the resources devoted to men’s and women’s sports.
Communities of Change
Weaver Chapel, still new when Stoughton retired, was a towering symbol of the Christian community he cherished. During his administration many of us took our turns at chapel, speaking from the elevated pulpit to large numbers of students below.
No sooner had Pastor Ralph Kreuger added Sunday morning services to daily chapel than his successor, Robert Karsten (1965-1972), began adapting the chapel program to a changing environment. When a new college calendar ended fall term before the Christmas season, which had highlighted the chapel year, Karsten and his music colleagues Elmer Blackmer and Fred Jackisch countered with a well attended Advent service. A shift of daily chapel from just before lunch to 9:30 a.m. was temporary, but the resulting decline in chapel attendance was irreversible. Students now found it legitimate to question religion, when they did not simply ignore it. Cultural expectations were changing, and secularization was a national trend not confined to young people. Moreover, the religion department, once a resource for Christianizing campus life, responded to the academic priorities driving other departments; it avoided apologetics and added non-western religions.
Karsten responded with a diversified chapel ministry. He added Catholic and Jewish students to his purview. He brought speakers on religious and ethical subjects to campus. He administered evening communion weekly and ministered to a group of devout Christian students who organized as the Wittenberg Christian Council. Also associated with the chapel, a Wittenberg Christian Student Fellowship raised $45,000 in scholarships for poverty students between 1968 and 1970 alone. Counseling on personal concerns and social issues such as the draft rounded out a chapel program that reflected the diversity and fragmentation of the student body. Campus ministry came down from the elevated pulpit to meet students where they were.
Greek letter organizations dominated the social life and student governance of the campus we knew in 1963. Sometimes they seemed to compete with us for our students. Rush began with the arrival of the freshmen. From then on, fraternity and sorority events were the main stuff of organized social activity, despite dorm activities.
It was Greeks that mainly colored Homecoming with their house displays, and they set the tone at game time. They flooded the campus with their games and programs during “Greek Week.” Their singing highlighted Parents Weekend. Fraternity men serenaded girls at dormitories. They competed feverishly in intramural sports. “It’s All Greek,” a 1965 Torch column was virtually a list of campus activities. That was the problem for independents: they had access to a far less rich social life than Greeks. Moreover, for sophomores Greek houses were the only alternative to dorms.
The in-house life of the sororities and (sometimes raucous) fraternities constituted a fellowship of status, and Greek groups were the guardians of culture and tradition. The sororities, for example, sponsored a style show on appropriate dress for all campus occasions. Their community service projects exemplified social values. Alma Mater candidates virtually comprised a sorority elite.
Everything was related in student life, and racial discrimination made Greek groups vulnerable from 1959 to 1969. The system was challenged on other grounds too (and on other campuses). Fraternities especially were stigmatized for excessive partying and drinking; sororities for exclusiveness; both for blackballing, hazing and distracting freshmen from their studies. Much of the impulse for change came from within, notably in the case of hazing where older, denigrating practices gave way to labor and memory work. Fraternities found it increasingly difficult to replace housemothers, who had provided a tangible civility to house life that dissipated in the early Seventies.
It is difficult to know how much life within their houses altered during Wittenberg’s Sixties, in part because lifestyle varied greatly from group to group, though the authority of arbitrary tradition seemed to wane. What clearly did change was the role of Greeks on campus.
By 1966-1967 rushing was deferred to winter term. Greeks were defensive, their social life the subject of debate in the Torch and of study by faculty committees. One year the IFC sponsored a Sunday afternoon of open houses for faculty and administration. No one came. Being ignored must have hurt even more than being challenged. Criticism of the Greek system was sharpest when the campus was in greatest turmoil — 1969 through 1970. By the end of the era a Torch article by Pam Zilenziger ’76 described Greeks and independents as having two different but equally legitimate lifestyles. By then Wittenberg offered independents a much richer co-curricular life than they had a decade before.
Campus activities also expanded. A strong university series of outside speakers and presentations was supplemented by the chapel and academic departments, as well as by the faculty Quest and Question lectures. Students were funded for their own speakers and entertainment. Student theatre moved from Blair to Tower Hall and, directed by Bob Wills, it often presented issue-oriented plays. Along with dorm-sponsored socials and parties, there were clubs and organizations of all kinds.
Early in the decade students strummed guitars and sang folk songs around the campus, sometimes with their teachers. The Wittenberg Choir was doing Hootenannies. Various folk, protest and rock groups performed on campus, while social dancing became ever less formal. The country club model of tux, gown and corsage evenings faded along with formal dance steps. By 1965 the early Beetles and American rock and roll band music were popular along with the twist. With the end of the decade some dances featured the psychedelic — strobe lights and individuals gyrating to loud, often hard rock music.
In 1966 the Wittenberg Choir circumnavigated the world, even flying over Vietnam where war raged below. “The trip was an incredible experience for a 21-year-old boy from Ohio who had never been more than 200 or 300 miles from his home,” Tom Orvis ’67 recalls. International awareness began to pervade the campus. The provost defended Wittenberg study-abroad programs in England and Mexico, sent faculty abroad, helped lay the groundwork for East Asian Studies, and funded a study-abroad office. Students returning from abroad were freshly aware of campus isolation, and some of them joined with international students to organize an annual International Fair.
A different kind of festival was launched in 1966 — W-Day, a surprise release from classes for frolicking, games, or just cruising. As an annual tradition it became increasingly formalized, but its excesses also generated opposition: in 1974 it barely survived a student government vote. That year another festival was christened, “Agora.” Anticipated in a 1967 fair created by a handful of students and professors, it became a celebratory marketplace of arts, activities and ideas. Agora remains a Wittenberg tradition; W-Day’s excess led to its demise late in the Seventies.
Sub-Cultures of Awareness, pockets of shared intellectual and aesthetic excitement, formed as the Vietnam War and other social issues and ideas broke upon Wittenberg. The Torch both reflected and stimulated that development. When freshman Pat McCubbin ’70 considered working on the Torch, her resident adviser warned her that “the people who ran the paper were ‘different,’ not in the mainstream of campus life.” Nonetheless, McCubbin joined an editorial team with intellectual vitality. Sue Keese, for one, measured the campus against contemporary thought; David Buehler ’67 introduced underground film; Greeley Miklashek ’67 wrote on world affairs; and Carl Jensen ’68 assessed campus politics and causes — a few of the outstanding Torch columnists of the era. After the 1970 retirement of Emerson Reck, vice president for public relations, Torch editors no longer had to submit their material to an administrator’s meticulous scrutiny.
A student-run coffeehouse emerged in 1966 to stage Wittenberg’s gentle version of a literary counterculture. Student organizers, notably Buehler, Dean Deter ’67 and Linda G. Ready ’67, received support from Pastor Karsten. “Witt’s End” — great name! — then occupied the first floor of a duplex on North Fountain. In one corner was a raised platform for student musicians and poets, with the theatre core and student writers clustered around. “Most issues were discussed there,” Ready recalls, though the Grill Room of the Student Union also was a hangout for discussions on contemporary ideas.
A few nodes of political activism and awareness emerged. One was the persistent movement for civil rights and African American identity. Another was the anti-war movement (described in the Fall 2000 feature titled “Breaking In”). These movements converged in 1967-1970.
Loosely aligned with them was a small, lively and argumentative group of activists who self-consciously eschewed the student establishment, which they still viewed as Greek. They formed their own social bonds over politics, debating for hours the theoretical question of whether or not systems could be changed effectively from within, but also engaging in direct action. One faction saw war and sexism as issues of powerlessness, and advocated economic co-ops as a route to economic power and equality.
Ecology was added to the activist agenda about 1969. It gained adherents and organization rapidly, in part because it sought environmental change within the political system. With backing from faculty and links to Springfield groups, an Environmental Action Group organized weeklong Earth Week teach-ins from 1969 to 1971.
Feminism was also an activist cause. Jeanne Mackey ’72 linked dorm hours to repressive stereotypic roles for women and both to race: “Just as white people can never truly be free until the blacks are free, so men can not be free until women can liberate themselves.” In the spring of 1971 a Women’s Liberation group cooperated with Union Board to sponsor a “Focus on Women Week” of consciousness-raising for women. For men, too. Among activities that might help men appreciate women’s plight, advised the week’s sponsors, one was to “hold your legs together every time you sit down for a whole day.” With several other students, Mackey eschewed the image of “bra-burning, men-hating, frustrated females.” The issue was identity, men’s and women’s.
Women’s Liberation moved from awareness to action the following year. Among other things, it sponsored programs on sexuality and birth control, and affiliated with the Springfield branch of a regional pregnancy counseling service. Women’s emphasis week was conducted annually through 1974. Meanwhile, a $20,000 grant from the Lutheran Church of America funded a program formed primarily by faculty women to develop bibliography, courses and workshops for both students and Springfield women. All this activity left some women feeling denigrated for choosing the traditional role of mother and homemaker.
Even the annual Alma Mater award changed. Her nomination and election broadened from the sorority elite to women’s honor societies and then to the entire campus. The once rich pageantry of her crowning seemed minimal in 1971-1972 to Alma Mater Eden Alexander ’72. At the traditional Honors Convocation, she rued, the Alma Mater used to come forward wearing a robe in a formal ceremony, “and the other candidates were torch-bearers or something.” Her own recognition had been merely announced at an honors luncheon, her contacts mainly with the Alumni Association. Others, including former Alma Mater Margaret Ermarth, were glad the “queen-bit” had been dropped and, as Jane Powell ’70 (president of Mortar Board) said,brought down from “a pedestal” to be “part of us.”
All the changes in the campus climate — and the process by which they were made — raised questions of identity. What does it mean to be a student in an academic community, and what is a college to its students? What does it mean to be an African American, or a white accomplice to racism? A college woman or a male accomplice to the stereotyping of women? An ecologically responsible consumer? What is my responsibility as a citizen and potential soldier in a war widely viewed as wrong? What makes me a Greek or an independent, and what difference does it make? Many of the students who thought through any of those questions discovered the moral relativism of plural identities.
The Process of Change: Initiative and Confrontation
President Stauffer opened the 1965 school year by declaring it the “Year of the Student.” That was the kind of challenge that student leaders welcomed as they pressed for changes, especially in social regulations and campus governance. Somehow, student initiative escalated into confrontation. It happened on campuses from Columbia to Berkeley. It was not what the president had intended.
To be sure, students had always challenged unwanted rules simply by breaking them now and then. Thus they carried the onus for the discrepancy between expectation and practice, between rules and behavior. Their alternative was to change the rules.
Examples of student-initiated change abound. However, students could not change university policy unilaterally, and so issues of regulations sparked challenges about authority and jurisdiction. Campus leaders interpreted regulations as archaic in loco parentis — the university was trying to act as an absentee parent, they said. In the spring of 1967 fully a fifth of the undergraduates subscribed to a petition that was handed to President Stauffer. Demanding “Student Power,” it read in part, “We . . . accept individual responsibility for our social conduct, and therefore desire the reconstruction of all University established social regulations.”
The president appointed a university-wide commission on Campus Life to make comprehensive recommendations but, nonetheless, the contest over responsibility became polarized. In June the board of directors drew a line on student dissent, endorsing a policy statement prepared by the president. The college must be adapted to each new era, Stauffer wrote, but it cannot be rebuilt “to suit the preferences of each student generation.” Freedom of speech must be preserved, but a student who cannot accept the college program has the “freedom” to leave. Student leaders returning that fall were rankled by the board’s assertion.
Returning professors began to review a board-sponsored application for an ROTC unit, which the administration had made during the summer. The faculty voted its disapproval of ROTC, but in January 1968 the board reapplied for it anyway. About the same time, Student Senate voted disapproval of the board’s policy statement on student rights. Then, at the end of February, the president asked the board to reconsider that policy statement, noting that the American Association of Colleges had since adopted a historic statement of student rights and freedoms that was clearer and more positive (more liberal) than the June statement. About a week later Stauffer announced that he would resign to become president of his alma mater, Juniata College. The announcement came as a surprise to his closest associates at Wittenberg.
Certainly the idea of returning to lead his alma mater was very attractive. But the move also offered relief from excruciating pressures at Wittenberg. Stauffer had instigated changes in campus life and governance, but they had led to conflicts over accountability that threatened his sense of administrative responsibility (challenges that rippled through higher education nationally). And he worried about his health. Anxiety was in the air.
A month after Stauffer resigned, Lyndon Johnson stunned the nation by leaving the presidential race. About the time of his speech there was a fatal shooting in the Student Union. Wittenberg students and “townies” were involved, and the violence led to a tense campus debate about community access to the Union. When Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down a few days later, troubled students gravitated to the chapel and filled it. Pastor Karsten offered what assurance he could. Graduation that year, in the wake of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination and perhaps in the uncertainty left by John Stauffer’s departure, was in the view of the yearbook, “more solemn than joyful.” Within six more months the race issue at Wittenberg climaxed in the CBS confrontation and walk-out.
The Process of Change: Broadening Responsibility
Confrontation did not become violent at Wittenberg. It was part of adapting the process of reconciling differences to new circumstances. Traditionally, that process had been fairly simple because the lines of authority were clear. At the outset of the Sixties, for instance, the women’s residence council proposed and Heimtraut Dietrich approved. Or not. Associate dean for women students throughout the whole period, Dietrich could seem formal, even stern if one missed the sly sense of humor that sometimes danced in her eyes and creased the corners of her mouth. She was devoted to the church, Wittenberg and “her” young women (whom she counseled to “keep both feet on the floor” during a dorm date). She believed in both traditions and regulations, but she adapted to new situations, to an increasingly professional student services staff and even to faculty involvement.
The process of resolving differences became ever more complex as Wittenberg became larger and more diverse, while at the same time it encouraged fuller participation in decision making. Involvement for those of us on the faculty meant committees. Led by a vigorous Executive Committee, we created a governance structure that gave us a voice in all aspects of campus and academic life, together with a consultative role in administration. There were committees on academic and co-curricular programs, curriculum and scheduling events; committees on personnel policy, admissions and budget, liaison with the board of directors; and committees on many aspects of student life. But there was such a thing as too much participation. By 1969, when the bulk of change was in place, faculty governance had become so complex that it was necessary to form a Committee to Study Committee Structure!
Essentially, that committee system was the structure of expanding faculty responsibility in the growing college. Every committee played some role in reconciling differences and making decisions. Facilitated by Stauffer and Pfnister, faculty involvement virtually created the modern Wittenberg. But by the same terms, any committee report could arouse debate in a faculty meeting, whether over principle or turf. Divisions were occasionally sharp, political gamesmanship sometimes compromised problem solving.
Allan Pfnister worried about that. He sensed a “terribly strong” fear of administrative initiative, a holdover from Stoughton’s style of leadership (when, for example, Prexy imposed Saturday classes over the expressed voice of his faculty). Pfnister distanced himself from that style, insisting that “the university is more than the administration.” Sometimes he even turned his back on the faculty while critical votes were tallied. More important, he cultivated broad participation in decision making, though he sometimes feared that the faculty had transferred its old suspicion of administration to its own committees. “You will always demand review,” he observed, but you must make “more room for discretionary action by elected and appointed faculty representatives.”
Student governance also became stronger and more fully articulated than it had been in the Fifties. Student Senate, the residence hall associations (men’s and women’s eventually combined), Union Board, Greek groups, honor societies — those were forums where dissent was clarified. From them issues were taken to the deans of students and to the faculty. Often the student governance meant numbing debates in Student Senate and drawn-out negotiations with the deans. Sometimes it spawned contests over jurisdiction, as between Student Senate and the residence association. In any case, responsibility for campus life was gradually redistributed so that it was shared more fully than before.
Students won voice and sometimes vote on faculty committees, for instance, and were even brought formally into the hiring process. At length, a Wittenberg Council was constituted to represent both students and faculty members, while Student Senate and the faculty each had its own respective jurisdiction. The system was clumsy, and the fact that it lasted for 12 years, 1968-1980, conveys real determination o institutionalize complementary roles for students and faculty.
There was something of a fetish for solving problems through communication. Historian Richard Ortquist recalls a long, inconclusive discussion with one student, Ingrid Sponberg ’75. Frustrated, she finally exclaimed, “we’re just not listening to one another.” “Oh we hear each other all right,” Ortquist replied, “We just disagree.” Communication alone did not solve everything. When Student Senate sponsored its weeklong “Days of Dialogue” forum in 1967, for instance, it provided a platform for the Student Power petition, which in turn became a focal point for confrontation. And CBS confronted the campus in the same troubled December of 1968 when students, faculty and board members came together for a day of exchange designated “W.I.T.T.” (We’re In This Together). However well issues might be focused through communication, disagreements eventually had to be resolved decisively.
The process of channeling dissent into communication and institutional change was tested on Parents Weekend 1969 when senior John C. Lobach was caught on a second story ledge of North Hall one night and apprehended by security officers. Taken to their car, he broke and ran. A shot meant for the boy’s legs struck him fatally in the back. Tension mounted as word of his death spread. Sophomore Dan Kurtzman ’71 conducted a 53-hour fast at Reci in order to provoke a student stand, and some 100 students joined him overnight. At this point Pfnister took a student referendum on a Senate demand for temporary disarming (most students approved some sort of arms). By autumn, after extensive study, the university had reorganized its security force, making it both stronger and more professional.
The sharpest test came about a year after Lobach’s death, when President Nixon ordered troops into Cambodia. Some students marched on Reci in protest. One of the staff exclaimed, “If they come in the door I am going out the window!”
The protest disbanded quietly, but a few days later the college exploded over the shootings at Kent State. While campuses across America were closing, Wittenberg students channeled their anger into a Parents Weekend teach-in and dialogue among themselves, their faculty and their parents. The university community had learned to process dissent in the new social context of education.
Tradition and regulations remained — they were the legacy of Wittenberg’s past and its norm. David T. Anderson ’71 made that point in his introduction to the 1971-1972 Student Handbook. Then past president of the Student Government Association, he wrote, “The mature student will then look honestly at these regulations, upholding some, and challenging others, but always doing so with the thought in mind that the concept of community cannot exist without the expectation of behavior.” Behavior and norms would be contested in the rest of the century, but with respect to campus life, Wittenberg had begun to institutionalize the very process of dissent, creating complementary roles for its students, faculty and administration.
The New Academic Program
“The heart of it all,” as we say in Ohio, was the academic program. At least it was the core concern for those of us on the faculty, and for John Stauffer when he projected a new Wittenberg. In all fairness, academic learning was primary for most students, too. Changes in campus life seemed to be driven to the fore by student initiative and protest, though, and repeatedly things threatened to get out of hand. By contrast, revision of the academic program proceeded quite deliberately with the provost’s help.
Lean and slightly austere in appearance, Pfnister became widely admired and respected, but not well known by many. He was dedicated and hardworking. His warmth and humor was best found one-on-one. His mind was a disciplined instrument, and problem solving was both his career and avocation. Adroitly shepherded by this dean, a faculty curriculum committee worked hard to fashion the integrated, comprehensive academic program that was implemented in 1966-1967.
Calendar and Curriculum
The new curriculum was framed by a calendar of three approximately equal terms. A student normally took three courses during each of them: hence the “3-3-3” calendar. Most classes were scheduled at a given hour across the week, during which a professor could vary classroom approaches without losing continuity.
By focusing attention on studies more sharply than before, the new calendar increased the intensity of learning. That was its strength, but also its disadvantage. Some professors found it unsuited to research and laboratory seminars where writing and experiments required substantial time to develop. Many students felt under constant pressure, with frequent tests and deadlines, the price of more concentrated study.
How could a new curriculum be constructed on the same axis as the calendar, with flexibility and focus? A scene from that era comes vividly to mind. Afternoon sunlight etched the half circle of tinted windows in the second floor room of Reci that once served as a chapel, then as a lecture hall where I had taught. My faculty colleagues were seated there, some lounging, some leaning forward expectantly. Margaret Ermarth, poised and willowy, her white hair coiled as neatly as her speech was precise, addressed the group as secretary of the Long Range Curriculum Study Committee. We must choose, she said, between two approaches to institutional requirements in the new curriculum. We could adopt an “integrated studies plan” in which students would be required to take specific courses designed to be a foundation for the liberal arts. Or we could opt for a “distributed studies plan” in which students would choose among courses representative of intellectual tools (writing, language, mathematics) and of conceptual areas (cultural heritage, social relations, aesthetic experience, natural environment, religious dynamic).
We chose a distributed studies curriculum. Why? The simplest answer is that it was much easier for a committee to designate a collection of courses designed by individual teachers than for it to fashion specific courses for faculty approval. An elective approach also minimized inevitable battles over academic turf. There were, however, other reasons for it.
For one thing, it responded to rapidly exploding fields of knowledge. The natural sciences were being driven by new technologies and were generating ever more specialized knowledge and methods. The humanities and social sciences were pressed to accommodate non-western heritages and new paradigms. Under the old curriculum, courses that were required of all students had dominated teaching time, sharply limiting diversity in departmental offerings. This was particularly serious for those of us who wanted to teach the specialized areas in which we had done graduate research. Now we could offer courses in our own fields by adapting them to the “distributed studies” requirements. In the process we also facilitated curriculum innovation and experimentation.
Conceptualizing requirements as blocks of related courses from which one or two were chosen also encouraged interdisciplinary approaches. It facilitated courses such as “Man and the Land” and “Man and the City,” not to mention concentrations in such areas as environmental, urban, East Asian, Russian, women’s and future studies (and a recurrent but frustrated attempt to staff black studies). In all these respects the curriculum became newly dynamic, innovative and flexible.
The distributed studies curriculum responded to students, too. Their enrollment affected what courses were offered, after all. The new curriculum gave them a wide range of courses and multiple ways to meet requirements. It enabled them to progress at their own pace and induced them to treat learning as a challenge by placing out of courses or earning credit by examination, or by risking courses on a pass-fail basis. Thus the new curriculum complemented the strong emphasis on individual choice in campus life.
Finally, the elective approach made it easier for us to respond to issues breaking in on Wittenberg: the war in Vietnam and the revolution in race relations, feminism and women’s liberation, fresh awareness of environmental degradation, mistrust of arbitrary authority and broadening participation in the decision making. Such subjects were treated in courses with a clear relevance to the contemporary world. In that measure the academic program absorbed social changes and buffered the conflicts that attended them.
Relationships
Our classroom styles and teacher-student relationships also began to shift, largely as a result of educational technology, a younger faculty, and a shift in the cultural paradigms of authority and certainty.
Technology was perhaps the most visible influence on classroom styles, although now it looks antique. Who remembers the mimeograph machine that enabled us to provide handouts and, with opaque and overhead projectors, supplemented the chalkboard? Hand-held calculators worked magic in math and science. Computer technology was introduced. Vinyl records became a staple of music education and, with tape cassettes, enhanced literature in English and history. Photographic slides supplemented sound, while taped exercises facilitated language labs. Simulation games were incorporated in political science and sociology.
Technological changes probably quickened the pace in some classrooms, hough this is impossible to document. It does seem likely that students came to expect faster-paced and more visual lectures, as television became more widespread and less attached to the slower style of theatre.
The faculty became younger on the average from about 1958 to 1974 so that we more closely approached the age, and perhaps the outlook, of our students. For many of us, the graduate seminars was our model of learning. Not that all teachers ever had been wedded to formal lectures nearly as much as students expected them to be. But now many of us responded to some felt pressure — of our own or from the community one hardly knew — to introduce Socratic dialogue, group discussion and role-play into classes. So-called objective, multiple-choice tests lost favor to in-class or take-home essays. We participated in faculty development programs to enhance teaching skills, especially interactive forms of instruction. Often we asked, “how can I get my students to participate more, to be more involved in the learning process?”
Attitudes to authority and certainty in the academic program and campus life mirrored a profound shift in American culture from black and white to shades of gray.
Perhaps an illustration will help. In the fall of 2000 a veteran of the Vietnam War shared his experience with a Wittenberg history class. He tried to explain how he had volunteered for service. “You have to realize,” he said, “that I grew up in a culture you cannot know. For all of us then, there was either right or wrong, true or false, and there were authorities — including professors — who told us what was right and true. When an authority like the president said the war was right, we accepted that as true.” The students understood what the war veteran said, but few of them could think the way he had thought.
During the Sixties college students encountered a world that seemed relative, relational, even tragic and unaccountable. Increasingly their new worldview was not only an intellectual thing, a classroom thing. It was the experience of the world beyond ivy walls.
Little wonder, then, that some students were confused, or that others internalized the experience of their society in a CBS walk-out, in myriad challenges to seemingly arbitrary rules, in women’s and environmental actions, in draft counseling and anti-war protest.
Here were young people experiencing truth as shades of gray not only in the classroom but also on campus and in society. In their personal lives discovering the moral relativism of plural identities invalidated either/or, black/white ethics. Such students were not about to take a dean’s authority or an instructor’s for granted. Among them were those who would even evaluate and criticize their professors — indeed insisted on doing so. In fact, the faculty instituted a permanent course evaluation system, after years of discussion, only when a handful of Myers Hall residents organized and distributed their own rough survey in 1969.
For most of us on Wittenberg’s faculty in the Sixties, relative and relational thinking affected how we researched and taught — not so much either-or as insofar-as, William James had said. It made many of us receptive to newly assertive students, some of whom broke out of a formal teacher-student relationship (a few teachers even encouraged students to address them by first name). It was possible to be co-learners with those students, whether we explored ambiguous academic or social issues (such as the draft), and whether in our offices, in classes, or in freshmen seminars.
Conversely, change could be difficult. Some of our colleagues found the new attitudes disturbing. They welcomed inquiry, to be sure, but assertiveness perhaps unsettled images, formed no doubt in their own college years, of teachers awakening young minds to the excitement of fresh ideas. Moreover, the politicized college was as disturbing as the polarized nation. Worse, knowing friends on other campuses who were intimidated, even humiliated in their classrooms, professors could be distressed by the new student mood. “I just wished it would go away,” one recalls.
Allan Pfnister counseled his faculty colleagues to accept the new relationship. “While we as faculty have tried, I don’t think we have been as sensitive as we need to be of the needs of students as fellow scholars,” he said to his faculty colleagues, “and we had better get around to thinking in such terms.”
Exiting an Era
By the time Pfnister resigned in 1969, most of the era’s institutional changes were in place. It remained to consolidate and refine them.
While looking for a successor to John Stauffer, the board of directors vested authority in the three senior administrators — Pfnister, Matthies and Reck. Officially they were an Administrative Committee. We called them the troika. William Kinnison was secretary — essentially executive secretary, since he was expected to attend to many details. Pfnister hired Erno Dahl from Texas Lutheran to be academic dean (1967-1969; provost 1969-1976).
In the spring of 1969 the board named G. Kenneth Andeen president over the sharp internal objections of the “troika,” Pastor Robert Karsten and a few others. Andeen had some experience in college administration, but it proved not to be his calling. He was a well intentioned, pastoral sort of person, charming in a conventional sort of way, but he frequently deferred hard decisions, sometimes leaving campus to avoid them. Soon the board restructured the administration into a cabinet-like system, at least partly to compensate for the inadequacies of the president. In 1974 he was released.
It is quite possible that Andeen’s tenure strengthened campus governance. Issues were either resolved without him or deferred. There was time to absorb the innumerable changes of the previous six years and adjust to a declining student pool. There was time for William Kinnison, the vice president for university affairs, to prepare for the position of acting president when Andeen was released in 1974, and then to become Wittenberg’s 11th president, ending an era.
Change was contested in the years between Stoughton’s administration and Kinnison’s. It escaped initial expectations. Students, faculty, administrators, board members — all were sometimes frustrated and anxious, occasionally exhilarated, and often perplexed. They were forging new roles on campus. Their interaction sharpened issues of identity, making change an intensely self-conscious process. The era resulted in less formal relationships, more shared responsibility, a more cosmopolitan and diverse campus, and a kind of learning adapted to both contemporary academic disciplines and the modern world. That was often unclear at the time because turbulence did indeed accompany change. About 1971 the nation wearied of both war and public protest. On campus dispute faded into discussion, and changes became institutionalized. Explicitly relieved, the college community returned to a more relaxed mood.
The preferred college foolishness at the beginning of the period was the water fight, perhaps a panty raid. At the era’s end the college fad was streaking. Following reports of streaking on other campuses in the spring of 1974, a handful of students mimicked the practice at Wittenberg. They ran together and at night, except for one memorable streak through a faculty meeting. Rumor had preceded them, and attendance in Bayley Auditorium was large. The west door opened and perhaps three boys and a girl (the number is not recorded), clad only in ski masks, jogged along the walkway dividing the upper tier of seats from the lower, and exited through the east door. Dean of the College Erno Dahl was presiding. When the students had left he shouted, “why didn’t someone tell me this was going to happen?” Pointing to the east door — the exit, he added, “I’d have locked the door!”
Between 1963 and 1974 Wittenberg experienced an era of rapid social and intellectual change. Once begun, change could not be contained. Until it had run its course, in the words of Jean Paul Sartre and the allusion of Erno Dahl, there was no exit.
In many ways, and under intense pressure from both a social revolution in race relations and a contested war that were breaking in on the campus, the college was breaking out of its past. Many students and faculty — even those least involved — were touched by the events of the Sixties. Wittenberg itself was transformed as it adapted Prexy Stoughton’s vision of the college community as the “sharing of insights and aims and experiences” to a fresh social and academic context. That struggle touches the community yet today.