The late ‘60s and early ‘70s at the UW were packed with heated, even violent, protests. Today, stories continue to swirl about takeovers of the president’s office by subversive students, occupations of various classroom buildings and the thousands of people who marched on I-5.

At the same time that these legendary tales propagate, there seems a sense of wistfulness from some students for days gone by, believing that our generation missed out on times that were more exciting or offered a more ethereal connection to the world.

In short: Where have all the protests gone?

It’s not as if we are living in a time of bliss. News of brutal wars flash across our laptops every day, civil liberties held dear for centuries are being stripped away like cracked paint before our eyes, and the economic jubilation of the ‘90s seems like a long-ago dream. Yet when you look out your window, where is the marching? Where is the screaming? And why is the traffic on I-5 moving so goddamn smoothly?

THE PEAK OF PROTESTS

The litany of protests at the UW in the Vietnam era is staggering.

King County Councilmember Larry Gossett was here for much of the action, having been a founding member of the Black Student Union, which worked in radical ways to successfully bring a greater level of diversity to the UW.

“We had class consciousness,” Gossett said while on campus last month for an unrelated visit. “We had nothing against white students or faculty. We just wanted diversity to be respected. And we wanted our historically oppressed people to be empowered.”

With fewer than one hundred students of color attending the UW in 1968 (of a total enrollment of more than 30,000), the BSU staged several events to catch and hold the attention of the Charles Odegaard administration regarding its list of demands.

The tactics included not only protests, but also the taking over of history classes to insist on expansion of the curriculum to include black heroes, writers and thinkers.

Gossett added, “We weren’t about the business of just coming in and getting good grades so we could be white folks in black skins, as we would say.”

These actions culminated in a 50-person sit-in in Odegaard’s office on May 20, 1968.

The BSU campaigned until Odegaard and the Faculty Senate were “pushed over from no to yes,” as UW’s historian of American radicalism, professor Jim Gregory, put it.

“[Odegaard] saw the University’s all-white student body, all-white faculty and old-fashioned curriculum as a problem but felt that he couldn’t [solve it],” Gregory said. “And the Black Student Union, through their very aggressive tactics, opened the door, in Charles Odegaard’s way of saying it — put him in a position where he could make some changes.”

Gossett also acknowledged that the victory was a “50/50” result of the BSU’s actions and Odegaard’s open attitude. Gregory called this result a “productive collision.”

Other collisions of the era were not as productive.

The ‘70s were welcomed with a slew of civil disruptions, beginning in March 1970, as campus was rocked by protests against UW athletics associating with Brigham Young University.

BYU is a Mormon university, and according to Gossett, “They wouldn’t allow blacks to be ministers, because they said that’s not something blacks can do, is lead.” (He pointed out that Mormon leaders have since had “an epiphany” on this issue.)

The BSU joined with the Seattle Liberation Front, another student group, to hold massive protests. More than 1,000 participated on the first day of unrest, which included the two-and-a-half hour occupation of Thomson Hall and the damaging of some private property.

Events continued daily for nearly a week (including eight more classroom building occupations) without any response from the administration except to finally call in the Seattle Police, who then took control of campus.

The mood in the moment was chilling, as a crowd of 2,500 in the HUB (can you imagine that?) listened as the BSU’s Carl Miller warned, “Anyone who believes that those policemen out there won’t kill you is in for a very rude awakening.”

If there was anyone in that March 1970 crowd that still thought the authority’s presence on college campuses was entirely to keep the peace, there were none by May 4, when four students were gunned down by National Guardsmen at a protest at Kent State University in Ohio. This event followed the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia and was met with perhaps the biggest protests in the history of the UW.

The day after the Kent State shootings, about 7,000 UW students took to the streets in a march that led them up University Way, west on Northeast 45th Street, and, for about a thousand of them, onto the southbound lanes of I-5 via the 45th Street onramp. As they crossed the bridge over Lake Union, traffic snarled behind them, they saw a legion of Seattle Police waiting for them on the other side. They exited peacefully using the Roanoke off-ramp.

A reprise of the I-5 march was attempted the next day but was repelled from entering the freeway by a more punctual police force. However, the mayor elected to close the express lanes for a sanctioned march from the UW to downtown on May 8, in which 15,000 demonstrators participated.

Since then, there have been smatterings of unrest, but in general, the University has seen a decline in massive student civil disobedience.

JUST A SLEEPING GIANT

Gregory suggests that our image of the ‘60s — highly romanticized and vaunted — may be hindering our mindset about what is happening now.

“One of the problems of our era is that the memory of the ‘60s loom so large and everything is measured against [them],” Gregory said. “It’s probably important to put some of that aside and not let that confuse us. And when you do that, then I think you also see that there’s a lot of activism today.”

Gregory pointed out that a few groups on campus have been effective, if perhaps quietly so — namely SLAP, the Student Labor Action Project. Last year, SLAP ran an aggressive and successful campaign to persuade the UW administration to sign onto the Designated Suppliers Program, which is focused on getting American universities to phase out selling apparel made in sweatshop-like or anti-union conditions.

SLAP’s tactics may not have attracted thousands of people to protests, but they were effective enough to catch the attention of UW President Mark Emmert and elicit a commitment from the administration. That’s no small feat.

Gregory conceded that the anti-war movement on campus today is the “clearest disappointment” of the current activist culture. “[It] seems to operate at sort of a low simmer instead of the hot boil of the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era.”

However, for anyone thinking that the times are just too different to compare, Gregory cautions, “I wouldn’t proceed … with the thought that things are very different and our generation doesn’t do this very well.

“My theory of this would be that tomorrow, or next week, or this presidential election...events can change pretty quickly, and a movement which has been at a low simmer for quite some time can suddenly start to boil. I don’t think there’s anything in this moment that says that can’t happen or won’t happen.”

From this standpoint, who knows? Perhaps stories will swirl around campus in 2050 about the wild UW student rebels who changed society back in 2008.

Drivers on I-5, take heed.

[Reach reporter Matt Dundas at features@thedaily.washington.edu.]