Cold War University: Madison and the New Left in the Sixties by Matthew Levin (review)

At approximately 3:45 A.M. on August 24, 1970, a Ford van packed with explosives and parked behind the University of Wisconsin’s Sterling Hall exploded, illuminating the night sky and reverberating through much of Madison. Sterling Hall was destroyed, and the immediate area was littered with debris. Three of the individuals responsible for the bombing, Karl Armstrong, Leo Armstrong, and David Fine, initially escaped capture but were eventually caught, tried, and imprisoned. The fourth member of the New Year’s Gang as they came to be known, Leo Burt, has eluded capture to this day and is still wanted by the FBI.

The apparent target of their efforts was the Army Mathematics Research Center (AMRC), a cooperative institute of the university and the U.S. Army that had been established in 1956 and that was housed in the building named after the university’s first faculty member, mathematics professor John Sterling (pp. 174–175).

For several years, the Madison campus housed some of the most volatile protests of the 1960s and early 1970s. If those efforts formally began in 1967 with attempts to prohibit recruiters from the Dow Chemical Company to visit the campus, one could argue that they ended early on that August morning in 1970. One thread of irony is the AMRC facilities were among the few unaffected by the blast while the physics department, home to some of the most vocal opponents to the Vietnam War, was completely destroyed. On a tragic note, Robert Fassnacht, a postdoctoral student in physics, husband, and father of three, lost his life that morning while quietly working on his research.

Seeking to make some sense of these events, Matthew Levin offers Cold war University: Madison and the New Left in the Sixties. A recent doctoral student in history at Madison and a current high school social studies teacher in McFarland, Wisconsin, Levin unveils how “the Cold War pointed to a new role for the nation’s colleges and universities” (p. 10). With Madison as his case study, Levin details that higher education became “increasingly vital to America’s technological, economic, and even military strength, all crucial fronts in the struggle with the Soviet Union” (p. 10). The question that emerges in his work, however, along with a growing number of comparable efforts, is whether Levin’s well-crafted case study is sufficient in terms of posing a thesis transcending the Madison campus.

Shortly after the student protest movement subsided on campuses such as Harvard, Columbia, and the University of California at Berkeley, a wave of histories surfaced detailing those particular efforts. After a relative lull in interest, the last 10 to 15 years have witnessed a growing wave of comparable histories such as Rusty L. Monhollon’s “This Is America?”: The Sixties in Lawrence, Kansas (New York: Palgrave, 2002), Richard W. Lyman’s Stanford in Turmoil: Campus Unrest 1966–1972 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), Donald Alexander Downs’s Cornell ‘69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), and Mary Ann Wynkoop’s Dissent in the Heartland: The Sixties at Indiana University (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2002).

While Levin’s work is one of the first full-length histories of the student protests that took place at Madison, at least two other resources focus on the turmoil that besieged the campus. In particular, David Maraniss’s They Marched into Sunlight: war and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003) focused on the efforts to interrupt the Dow interviews along with a failed U.S. military offensive that took place at basically the same time a world away. In Two Days in October, Mark Samels and his colleagues then drew on Maraniss’s work as the basis for the first installment in what would become PBS’ American Experience (2005...