Higher Learning, Social ChurningMidwestern Universities in the 1960s

Higher education is in trouble. A recent cover of Newsweekproclaims an ongoing "war on college." Conservatives and libertarians denounce the elitism and moral superiority they discern in liberal students and faculty, while liberals complain about the misplaced priorities of college sports and out-of-control fraternities. Controversial speakers face harassment and intimidation on campuses that are supposed bastions of free speech. Jeremiads like William Deresiewicz's Excellent Sheep, and Richard Arum and Jospia Roska's Academically Adrift, condemn the intellectual hollowness of the modern curriculum. And everybodystands aghast at the ballooning tuition price tag (even as most voters acquiesce while our state legislatures continue to defund public education).

As with much else in our culturally fraught and politically polarized moment, the roots of contemporary campus wars grow from the intellectually fecund soil of the 1960s. In the popular imagination, student insurgencies of the 1960s were predominately coastal affairs: Mario Savio orating for the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, or Mark Rudd leading the student occupation at Columbia. ¹However, as a spate of recent studies on midwestern universities convincingly demonstrate, campus unrest was a national phenomenon—and midwestern schools were every bit as combustible as the usual coastal suspects. A moment's reflection confirms how unsurprising this conclusion should be; after all, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the most important agent of the "New Left," wrote its famous 1962 manifesto in Michigan (conversely, Young Americans for Freedom, the conservative counterweight to SDS, was founded at Yale by William F. Buckley). Regionalism, in fact, probably plays a minor role in the story of student activism; as Beth Bailey observes in her study of the sexual revolution at the University of Kansas (KU), most college youth "understood their actions within a national framework" (6).

If anything, midwesterners earned a reputation as the wild kids of the movement. Sarah Eppler Janda, author of a new study of the student counterculture in Oklahoma, points out that SDS leader Carl Davidson coined "prairie power" to "distinguish between the more straight-laced East Coast activists and those in middle America who embraced many forms of experimentation." Jeff Shero Nightbyrd, another SDS member, added, "Midwestern culture experimented with acid, pot, and stuff, and looked in part to the tradition of not only the IWW and the Populists, but to the American Indian who had ideas about the land and the interconnection of all living things" (7). When SDS leaders in Norman were arrested in 1966 as part of a major marijuana bust, embarrassed leaders on the coast wanted the Oklahoma chapter expelled; fellow prairie-power campuses like Texas, Kansas, and Missouri defended Norman and its more freewheeling culture (29–31). No wonder: Lawrence, home of KU, was "one of the most drug-oriented towns in the United States," Bailey tells us (166–67).

Still, a less breathless understanding of midwestern campus upheaval in the 1960s reminds us that student activists were minorities—albeit highly articulate and influential ones—within institutions, towns, and regions deeply marked by traditionalism and suspicious of troublemakers. College towns were always somewhat incongruous places, simultaneously implicated in the provincialism of local cultures and the cosmopolitanism of intellectual cultures. This was the paradox that Paul Engle, founding director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, balanced while he tirelessly pitched...