Dissent in the Heartland: The Sixties at Indiana University by Mary Ann Wynkoop (review)

BOOK REVIEWS involved. The teams played to soldout crowds, the city leaders got a revitalized Arena District,and taxpayers carried none of the financial burden. The authors suggest that this could serve as a model for other cities seeking the revitalization and prestige of professional sports stadiums without draining public coffers. In the closing chapter,they contrast the Columbus experience with recent publiclyfunded stadium developments in Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. Curry,Schwirian,and Woldoff deftly maneuver through the complex mix of municipal politics, entrepreneurship,investment,marketing and public relations that all play a part in a massive urban redevelopment project. The reader gains a clear understanding of the power players in Columbus,as well as the tactics and motivations of their opposition . Newspaper accounts provide the bulk of the credited source material for the book, though the authors note in the appendix that they also utilized official documents and personal interviews to get the " inside story" on the Columbus arena project. This personal connection to the actors, however, proves to be both a strength and a weakness,as the narrative sometimes becomes overly detailed. Also, a more thorough treatment of the historical connection between sports and the American city would have been helpful here, and would have placed the Columbus experience in a broader historical context . Furthermore, while the authors assert that they desire to reach a broad audience,a significant portion of this work is devoted to academic theory. They interpret the events in Columbus through an ecology of games"theoretical model, which may be of interest to scholars of sociology but is largely unnecessary for the nonspecialist . Curry,Schwirian and Woldoff effectively argue for an alternative to the current trend of building stadiums at taxpayer expense, and criticize the extensive power that professional sports teams increasingly hold in cities' public dialogue. They also warn that stadium redevelopment projects, however they are funded,can seldom deliver on all that they promise. Though the Nationwide Arena and Columbus's new soccer stadium brought new development te, areas directly adjacent to them, they failed to produce the revitalization of the entire downtown that advocates had envisioned. Higb Stakes is thus both a success story and a cautionary tale. Urban planners and concerned citizens everywhere would do well to consider its arguments. Aaron Cowan University of Cincinnati Mary Ann Wynkoop. Dissent in tbe Heartland :Tbe Sixties at Indiana University. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. 232 pp. ISBN: 0253341183 (cloth), 49.95. n Dissentin tbe Heartland,Mary Ann Wynkoop argues that the protest movement of the 19605 was not solely driven by elites from campuses on the east and west coasts. Rather,she suggests that the movement evolved as a groundswell throughout the nation,including the heartland. Basing her research primarily on newspaper accounts and personal interviews with student activists and university administrators ,Wynkoop effectively supplements her work with documentation from FBI files showing the government's response to protests at Indiana University. The result is a detailed story of how IU students pushed for change on issues ranging from campus rules to wages for uiliversity maintenance workers to American policy in Vietnam. Wynkoop organizes the first four chapters chronologically to describe the events at IU through the 1960s and punctuates the book with an epilogue explaining how the sixties movement carried over into the early 1970s. The book also includes topical chapters on civil rights,women's issues,and the counterculture. Wynkoop notes that IU activism really came alive between 1965 and 1967 when 1 () 6 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY both liberal and conservative student organizations successfully rolled back in loco parentis rules on campus curfews and dress codes. Since many of these rules applied particularly to females,women's rights were at the heart of campus activism. Such dissent grew into protests regarding the Vietnam War between 1967 and 1969 as IU students confronted campus recruiters for government and corporations associated with the war. IU faculty members got into the act as well, forming an antiwar group and pressing for the addition to the curriculum of African American ethnic studies and for more female professors. One example ( of many)of IU students initiating dissentfound in the opening chapterdescribes protests regarding the Cuban missile...