April-May 1970: a retrospective diary of the Ohio State protests

John Faulkner (1940-

At the time of the events recorded here I was a faculty member at OSU with the rank of Instructor in the Department of English.

Wednesday April 29

My classes (Critical Writing and Introduction to Fiction) this Quarter were scheduled by the department for early and mid-morning, which in Spring Quarter probably gave me a higher than typical percentage of conscientious students and which proved to have other advantages once the demonstrations began. This day I went back to my apartment for lunch but then returned to campus before three to attend an English Department Policy Committee meeting in a large Denney Hall classroom. After nearly an hour we were requested to evacuate the building. Outside on 17th Avenue young people--probably not all students--had blocked the street at one end. At the other, police were firing tear gas canisters, a few of which protesters threw back. I spotted one of my former students, a pleasant girl from Omaha, who appeared to be not a protester but an excited spectator. Later I heard that there had been an earlier incident near the southern extremity of the campus.

Thursday April 30

Having completed my early classes, I was free for most of the day. Before class Patricia Jordan, a senior, a member of student government and a responsible young woman, mentioned that three places she had been last night had been tear-gassed. Off campus, I was told, the Columbus police had run amuck, gassing such unsubversive places as the United Christian Center and even fraternities. The effect, of course, was to involve many kids who would otherwise have remained spectators. Eventually Columbus’s volatile mayor, M. E. Sensenbrenner, would be silenced; all statements would be issued by his more prudent safety director, James Hughes, and, with the arrival of the State Highway Patrol and National Guard, the Columbus Police would be relegated to a minor role.

Outside Denney Hall pedestrian traffic was heavy, and on the Oval (the oversized lawn a block away at the center of the OSU campus) were more people, mostly in clusters of spectators, than I’d ever seen there. Disposed around the Oval were State Highway Patrolmen, sinister in their gas masks, and National Guardsmen. One could walk into small, faint clouds of tear gas rising from the grass. The gas was doing in most of the flowers planted in profusion to celebrate OSU’s centennial. At the east entrance to Denney Hall I had seen an upside-down waste basket upon which was a paper cup, a bottle, and some kleenex with a sign reading “soda/wash your eyes.”

2

I had joined a faculty organization whose members were identified by green ribbons and whose purpose was to act as intermediaries whenever it might do good and to keep people from getting hurt (and maybe killed, it would appear in a few days) by intervening in dangerous confrontations. Its leaders were both from the English Department, Wally Maurer, a Canadian Dryden scholar, and Bob Canzoneri, the director of the creative writing program. Both were almost continually in negotiation with the upper administration. In the following week, I came to admire Canzoneri, especially, for his constancy in perceiving and responding to people as individuals. In heated situations, this was a rare discipline which I have ever since identified as one of the distinctive virtues of the practice of fiction.

Having no extended instructions and only occasional small errands to perform, I spent an hour or so mostly just observing at one site, such as a building at which there was picketing, or another, perhaps a segment of the oval where someone might be addressing eighty to a hundred students. I had brought my camera with me thinking that later I would like to have some photographs of this extraordinary event, maybe a few to send to my father and step-mother who had visited Columbus only two weeks before. After a day or two I left it home, it finally having dawned on me that protesters might conclude I was some sort of evidence gatherer. To allow other Green Ribbon members to have supper with their families, I, being single, stayed on at campus until dusk. It was announced that a curfew had been imposed on campus and on a fairly wide area surrounding it from nine (I think) until seven a.m. Violators could expect to be jailed. I missed the national news that night but was told that the OSU protests had been covered, as they would continue to be until displaced by the Kent State shootings.

Friday May 1st-Saturday, May 2nd

Three kinds of protesters were involved in the coalescing leadership of the protests. One was a small women’s group. In 1970 they were negligible; as the decade proceeded they would not remain so. Larger and more vocal was a black protest group. One of its leaders who struck me as reliable in his dealing with us and responsible in persuading his marshals to keep black demonstrators within boundaries the Highway Patrol was setting was a freshman, Michael White. In his senior year, he would become Ohio State’s first black student body president, and he later was elected Mayor of Cleveland. Far the largest and least predictable group was the anti-war protestors, itself a not-very-organized coalition of groups and individuals having varied aims. In addition to these, as might be expected, there were people with more anarchic agendas and numbers of sensation seekers, not all of them OSU students.

The revolution, of course, never really began until close to noon--too many people always had been up too late the night before. Still, after my long day Thursday, I was quite tired by late Friday afternoon. I drove back to my apartment, tried to get some impression how the network news programs were portraying events at OSU, had the easiest supper I could prepare, and went to sleep by quarter of eight. The phone rang around ten.

The caller was Bill Gibson, an associate professor whose specialty like mine was Eighteenth-Century English Literature and who had been my closest companion in Green Ribbon activities. There had been, he said, a troubling incident: a police car, patrolling off campus 3 appeared to have been fired upon from a roof--or possibly it had only been hit by a rock. He couldn’t be sure. Anyhow, he thought we needed to have a few more Green Ribbon members on campus so that some could drive to sites of any further incidents. Could I come down to Hughes Hall, the Fine Arts building, where we had set up a center? Since I would be in violation of the curfew and had no idea whether policemen I might encounter would recognize my green ribbon, I was wary driving down, but I was not stopped. Shortly after I arrived, Bill and another member went out in a car with a large green ribbon tied to its antenna to see what was happening. When they returned he reported nothing much. At that, most of the remaining members, who’d been on campus all day, went home, leaving Bill and me to carry on until morning.

Around one, he decided that it was time for another reconnaissance. The campus was deserted. However, when we turned north on High Street, we found a young hitch-hiker, standing utterly alone in the brightly-lighted street. Aware that he could be arrested just for being there, we stopped and picked him up. He turned out to be the son of an Ohio State faculty member on leave from the army. He had returned to Columbus that night, not only unaware of the curfew but of the protests as well. We drove him just outside the curfew area to Riverside Hospital where he would likely find a pay phone from which to call home for a ride. Then we cruised through empty streets a while longer before returning to Hughes.

About 5:40 or so, just before the first light began to appear, we went out again. All was quiet until we spotted a female student walking warily east of High Street toward the campus. When we approached, she increased her pace and turned down a side street, so we trailed her at a distance to be sure she wasn’t stopped for curfew violation as she entered the campus. Soon we saw a couple of male students. They accepted our offer of a ride and, in telling us where they were headed, explained the appearance of these young people so early on a Saturday morning. They were members of a class in Ornithology, and their teacher, disregarding the curfew, had refused to cancel his scheduled dawn bird watch. On our way back to High Street, we spotted several more students, so we found a patrolman, identified ourselves, and shaking our heads at this idiocy, told him what to expect. Promising nothing, he reluctantly agreed that the kids were probably harmless. Upon our return to Hughes, Bill went home, and I stayed on alone for two or three hours more until a couple of Green Ribbon members I didn’t know showed up.

Monday May 4

This day changed everything. The evening news, both local and national, led off with reports that a unit of the Ohio National Guard had fired on protesters at Kent State and had killed four. While its displacement of Ohio State from national attention was probably to be welcomed, that news made everyone aware of what could happen on a much larger scale here, where, though a couple of dozen people had been brought to the hospital, casualties so far had not been especially serious. The Guard unit at Kent State had originally been called out to patrol northern Ohio highways where a dissident group of teamsters had been firing on truck drivers who had settled in a strike and returned to the road. The guardsmen had been mustered to face armed opponents and then had been shifted to Kent. Over the weekend, Governor Rhodes had made things worse by an irresponsibly pugnacious speech in northern Ohio. Up to now at Ohio State, people who’d actually spoken to guardsmen had found them unhappy to be here and eager to get 4 back to their civilian jobs. They’d been much easier to deal with than the inflexible Highway Patrol. Now the guardsmen were much more anxious, and everyone else was anxious about them.

Tuesday May 5

In class I discussed the situation with my students. Some, of course, wanted to cancel classes. Most, especially the few seniors, wanted to continue, as did I. I told the students that I would look into possibilities of holding class off-campus, if necessary. For now, the early meeting times of the classes meant that students would probably not encounter interference nor have to cross picket lines.

Back at my apartment, about noon, I received a call from Rick Brown, a graduate student in History with whom I occasionally played tennis. He’d somehow gotten and was passing on a White House phone number which had been released to certain Ohio Republicans, presumably to round up expressions of support for the Nixon Administration. I called, identified myself only as a resident of Ohio, and said of the Cambodian escalation “this has to stop.” At the other end a conciliatory male voice responded “I understand, sir,” in a tone which gave me the impression that the relative lengths of the columns he was checking off were not what he’d considered satisfactory.

Among the broad variety of reasonable and unreasonable demands (some of which exposed embarrassments such as the University Development Fund’s ownership of racially segregated properties off-campus), the one having the most immediate symbolic urgency was that concerning the ROTC Spring Review. ROTC had a strong hold at Ohio State. (The Marching Band, which had originated as an ROTC unit, still wears traditional uniforms of dark blue rather than the university’s own colors, scarlet and gray.) The Spring Review had for some time been held at the center of the campus on the Oval, where a large castle-like building called the Armory had once stood at the end opposite the library. This month to hold it there would have certainly provoked a major confrontation. Anti-war protesters demanded that it be canceled. Others, I think including the Green Ribbon leadership, suggested it be moved this year to athletic practice fields on the periphery of the campus. So far, however, the administration had remained unmoved--whether insistent on keeping it on the Oval or merely indecisive in the face of resistance to changing it by the state government and influential alumni I never learned. The situation on the campus was plainly deteriorating.

Wednesday May 6

I don’t recall what I did after class. In mid-afternoon, though, I met Rick Brown at Denney Hall, and we crossed 17th Street to the Administration Building, which was the focus of protests which had begun to seem more volatile than before. A group of protesters in a larger arc marching around the building veered off and headed across the Oval and through the Hollow toward the President’s House. Rick and I followed along with one or two more Green Ribbon members who did not stay.

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The president, Novice Fawcett, would be the last to live on campus. I found out later that this excursion may have caused more than usual consternation at what was now a full-scale operations center north of the stadium where military vehicles, including a few tanks, were parked in long lines in front of St. John Arena. I doubt the president was home at that hour, but in the house toward which we were walking was his sick mother or mother-in-law. Fawcett, a builder in the mode of many 1960’s presidents of large state universities, in some ways typified the provinciality of OSU at the time. For one thing, his previous position had been Superintendent of Schools in Columbus and his only doctorate was honorary. At that time power over the university was lodged in a Board of Trustees with a strong local representation. For example, on the evenings of meetings the Board would dine at the segregated Scioto Country Club in Upper Arlington where it would make its decisions on the evening’s agenda and then motor over to campus for the formality of a public board meeting. A few years later a Democratic governor, John Gilligan, responded by appointing Jack Gibbs, a black Columbus school principal, to the Board. In 1969, among the vice presidents, only the university’s provost, John Corbally, had not been a native Ohioan. At the year’s end he had left for a better position and been replaced by a former President of the University of North Dakota, Edward Moulton, who Green Ribbon sources found reliably constructive during the protests. But some other high administrators were obstructive or simply ineffective. Two consecutive deans of students, John Bonner and John Mount, were soon to be shunted off into new vice-presidential positions for telecommunications and regional campuses which were then discontinued upon their retirement. After the riots more serious national searches began to be conducted; they appeared to reflect a greater concern for the professionalization of the Ohio State administration.

We arrived at the President’s House with the protesters. Stationed on the front lawn were a handful of guardsmen, like us outnumbered by the students. We identified ourselves to the guardsmen and positioned ourselves on the sidewalk in front of the house between them and the protesters. When Bill, one of the protest leaders whom we both knew from the Eugene McCarthy campaign two years before, arrived on the scene, we asked him, at a guardsman’s request, to keep the protesters on or across Twelfth Street. He talked to them and, though they shouted things at the house, they didn’t try to push past us. They were boisterous but seemed in fairly good humor.

Eventually the protesters became bored and started back toward the Oval. As Rick and I began to follow them we were approached by a National Guard Captain who was shaking a bit as he reached out his hand to us. He thanked us, excessively we thought, since there had seemed no real danger in this sideshow. But gradually it became clear that he had understood his directions from the command post to be to order his outnumbered men to fire if the protesters had entered the grounds. Having been between his men and the demonstrators, we were shaking a little ourselves as we walked away.

Back at the Administration Building things had gotten much worse. A large crowd of angry protesters confronted a contingent of the Highway Patrol blocking the Oval entrance to the building. Between them, as usual, was a line, one-deep, of Green Ribbon members whom Rick and I joined. Near the front of the crowd was Michael White, completely out of control, shouting at the police to shoot him. He had had a hard week I was told later, having been arrested two or 6 three times as the police, in a dubious and dangerous strategy, had targeted protest leaders and, according to my source, having been gassed while in jail. I stayed in line while Rick found a few of White’s friends and urged them to get him away from there, which they had the sense to do. Not much later someone deep in the crowd threw a brick which, falling short, hit a boy five or six yards in front of me in the back of the head. As he was carried off to the hospital, I wondered what would have happened had it reached the Highway Patrol for whom it was intended. The revolutionary who threw the brick would, of course, have escaped had patrolmen fired in reaction and may well have intended to provoke a fatal incident at the expense of the innocents up front. This crowd was far the most heated of the protests, and at six o’clock an announcement was made that the university was closing. Everyone was to evacuate the next day.

That night Rick and I went to Michael White’s dorm to give him our names as potential witnesses to certain incidents of his responsible conduct should they be of use at a subsequent trial. He’d calmed down, seemed grateful, and shook our hands as we left. Though little enough, it was something positive he could take home with him the following day. We were never contacted later.

Thereafter

Ohio State University closed Thursday May 7th. It reopened Tuesday May 19th. The state and university authorities found it perhaps more difficult than they’d expected to close a university of its size. Sweeping denials of access had provoked numerous faculty complaints, especially from members in disciplines shuttered off from the protests who felt they should be exempt from such an inconvenience. They were not heeded. Other complaints were more compelling. Especially in the biological sciences, there were research projects which needed continuous tending or the results of months, in some instances years, of work would be wasted. It was decided that a limited number of faculty members would get passes which, when presented to the guards, would admit them to their labs. When classes resumed, all faculty members were issued passes; a few people I knew were infuriated at having to show them to enter the campus. Most of these had kept themselves at some distance from the protests, and their assumptions about their roles in the university were being denied a little belatedly and in a framework somewhat more abstract than others of us had already encountered.

Except in self-esteem, they suffered little, but at least one faculty member’s career was ruined by his participation in the protests. David Kettler, in Political Science, a specialist in 18th century Scottish political thought, had addressed protesters several times, supporting them but counseling moderation. He had already accepted a position at Purdue for the following year, but sources at Ohio State apparently sent damaging characterizations of him to Purdue, where his appointment was withdrawn. When later I saw an article by him in a scholarly journal, he was teaching at an obscure college in northern New England.

The anti-war protests at Ohio State accomplished little. Black students probably made some gains. The situation of women would distinctly improve but not immediately and not because of the 1970 protests. No one was killed, thank God. The last account of those hospitalized I heard placed their number in the mid-thirties. 7

On the Ohio State Campus the university’s police force was about to be considerably expanded. Numerous architectural and street details were altered, one conjectured, in the interests of crowd control. (High Street, however, would suffer greater damage not much later in the decade from two riots after Michigan football games than it had from the protests.) Fawcett’s successor as president once more came from within Ohio. But what, it was said, impressed the search committee about Dr. Harold Enarson was that he had moved his desk outdoors in response to protests at Cleveland State where he had previously been president. At a distance, I thought well of him. He never got on especially well with the crowd at the Columbus Athletic Club, though, and ultimately would be remembered for firing Woody Hayes after the coach had run on the field and punched a Clemson football player who had just intercepted an Ohio State pass in the 1978 Gator Bowl. Enarson’s contract was thereafter not renewed. One can hardly say that provincialism disappeared from Ohio State as a result of the riots, but in certain sectors it likely was reduced.

Students were allowed, if they wanted, to take Spring Quarter’s courses pass-fail, which about half of mine did. I heard of no students who failed, but, since that was before grade inflation had set in, maybe a few did. I should record here, to forestall inferences a reader might draw based on other associations with the sixties, that this quarter’s students, especially the juniors and seniors, were at the end of a line of socially responsible and generally conscientious students I’d had through the late sixties. Not knowing that I would never encounter as good a generation again, I may have undervalued them. Things would be different as soon as the following academic year.

Note: This “diary” was assembled in 1970 after the end of the academic year from factual notes I’d taken during the events it records. As some notations had become cryptic, further explanatory language was subsequently—though lightly—added when I entered this document into my computer close to three decades later. And, as is obvious, I have added comments to the “Thereafter” section from a later perspective. However, such additions to the day-by-day account (for example, that on Michael White’s future) are rare. JF