"A number of commentators have observed that 1968 was really the year that the 1960s kind of exploded," said Walter Crowley.

Crowley would know — he was a prominent youth activist in Seattle at the time, and now runs Historylink.org, an online encyclopedia of the history of Washington. He marched in Seattle's first anti-war protest in 1965, and wrote his own memoir of the city during the '60s: Rites of Passage.

"If you're talking about student activism," Crowley said, "the UW was late getting started. But it made up for lost time."

Between 1960 and 1970, the student population doubled, and the U-District began its transformation into a gathering place for local activists. College campuses nationwide were alive with youths organizing to raise awareness of Civil Rights issues, free speech rights and to protest the escalating Vietnam War. Incidences of violence on the Berkeley, Stanford and Columbia campuses were indicative of an emerging violent undercurrent within student movements.

By Sept. 1968, the major national youth organization, Students for a Democratic Society, had splintered. Some leaders within the party left to form new groups such as The Weathermen. These organizations pursued more aggressive means of garnering attention for their cause: bombings, jailbreaks and riots.

National events in 1968 played a major role in heightening tensions among the student population: President Lyndon Johnson's approval rating plummeted to 35 percent as he presided over the draft, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in April and Democratic Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was killed in June. Richard Nixon was sweeping the nation with a campaign based on "law and order."

"Everything prior was prologue, and everything after was kind of a slow, painful decline," Crowley said. "But there was no disagreement about when the apex was: 1968, the year all hell broke loose."

On the night of Sept. 18, 1968, Clark Hall, then primarily housing the Navy ROTC, was the victim of an arson attack. A pane in a north-end window was broken, and an incendiary device ignited the wooden stairwell into flames. The fire spread up through three stories, and superheated gases in the attic caused an explosion through the roof.

The attack took place during the week that students were moving into dorms, but no one was hurt. Nearly the entire north end of Clark Hall was destroyed, causing about $85,000 in damages. Some claimed they heard a group of young people chanting: "This is number one, the fun has just begun, burn it down, burn it down!" However, authorities could not confirm it and no one was ever charged.

The ROTC had become a favorite target for student groups protesting the Vietnam War and the draft. The week before the attack on Clark Hall, the Navy ROTC building on Berkeley's campus had been attacked for the third time. The previous January, Stanford's ROTC building had been completely destroyed.

"The ROTC was a legitimate target in that it was the officer training corps for the Army," Crowley explained, "and if you were against that, here was an accessible target on your campus."

For the UW, this incident was a foreshadowing of events to come. In March 1969 approximately 9,000 students marched in protest of ROTC. The following June, two boxes of dynamite exploded at the entrance to the Administration building (now Gerberding Hall), shattering windows as far away as Parrington. In January 1970 two Weathermen were arrested in an attempt to firebomb the Air Force ROTC building.

"The Weathermen would be my first candidate for Clark," Crowley said, "but I don't know who did it; I've never even heard a concrete theory."

The drastic, violent actions taken by the Weathermen and other similarly paramilitary activist groups were very controversial within the anti-war movement at the time.

"Those of us who had not given up on a mass movement and a democratic response to get out of the war were very disturbed by these things," said Crowley. "It led to a schism in the anti-war left between an increasingly violent and militant far-left contingent and the more traditional left. Incidents like Clark, I would argue, were destructive beyond the act of arson. They were politically destructive because they undermined public support for the anti-war movement."

In 1970, Seattle was given the dubious distinction of highest per capita bombings, ranking beneath only New York and Chicago in number of actual bombings. Protests and demonstrations on campus and in the U-District continued into the early "70s.

"The Vietnam War was by far the biggest concern on students' minds," said UW President Mark Emmert, wjp was a freshman in 1971. "There was an enormous awareness of political events and a deep sense that social change was underway. The Civil Rights movement, Vietnam and Watergate all came crashing together."

The UW Faculty Senate met in December 1969 to debate whether or not the school should retain Army, Navy and Air Force officer training corps on campus. They eventually voted to keep the programs, but with stricter limits on purely military courses.

Emmert recalls witnessing ROTC members being heckled on campus, and remembers the program coming up in students' political conversations.

"It's important to remember that the draft was still very alive and virtually all students had friends and relatives in the war," he said. "All young men were worried that they would be called up."

That sense of dreadful urgency fueled students to fight vehemently for their cause. The UW is still a place that cultivates passion for youth issues, Emmert insists, but the imminent possibility of being drafted made the war more tangible for students at that time.

The attic of Clark Hall, decades later, is still too damaged to be used.

"The only visible damage is if you go up in the attic you can see some burned rafters," said Navy Cmdr. David Neely, associate professor of Naval Sciences. "You can see the front brick portion is actually separating from the rest of the building. Those reasons, along with a lot of other construction improvements, are why they are doing the renovations."

In September, all three divisions of UW ROTC will relocate temporarily to Condon Hall as Clark, the fourth-oldest building on campus, undergoes an extensive restoration. The project's estimated completion date is March 2009.

"The idea is to make this building usable for the next 50 to 100 years," Neely said.

Reach reporter Sarah Anderson at features@thedaily.washington.edu.