My Odyssey Through the Underground Press

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction KEN WACHSBERGER M ichael “Mica” Kindman was a legend of the Vietnam era underground press, that media invention of the antiwar counterculture of the sixties and seventies that led the drive to end the U.S. disaster known as the Vietnam War. He was a founder of The Paper, the first underground paper in East Lansing, Michigan, as well as one of the first five members of the Underground Press Syndicate, which was the first nationwide network of underground papers in the country. But his story takes in way more than just the underground press. He was on other historical cutting edges as well—even when the cutting edge wasn’t necessarily a place where one would want to be. In September 1963, he began his college career as a freshman at Michigan State University, the nation’s first land-grant college. Only eight years before that, MSU had been known as Michigan State College of Agriculture and Applied Science, and previous to that as Michigan Agricultural College because it had been founded—and in the sixties and seventies still was best known—as a college to train future farmers. (It was technically known as Michigan State University of Agriculture and Applied Science until 1964.) By this time, image change was already under way, led by MSU president John Hannah. Hannah, the former secretary of the State Board of Agriculture, became president in 1941 and thus began the largest sustained growth spurt in the college’s history. Only a few years before Michael arrived on campus, MSU had replaced the University of Chicago in the Midwestern Big Ten athletic conference. The university’s building program, Michael writes, “had already doubled the size of the developed campus in recent years and would double it again in the next few years.” The student population grew from 15,000 in 1950 to well over double that size by the time Michael came to town. More significantly, MSU’s public-relations department had decided to upgrade its academic reputation. It did this by attracting nearly two hundred National Merit Scholars from all over the country with scholarships that were good only on MSU’s campus. The year Michael was a freshman, MSU laid claim to more National Merit Scholars than any campus in the country. As Michael recalls in his story, xvi | Editor’s Introduction The promotional literature did not talk about the generally sterile, almost rural atmosphere of both MSU and East Lansing, a dry (no alcohol sales), conservative place that looked like a picture-postcard college town, but offered little in terms of cultural opportunities or intellectual community and the stimulation these could bring. And, of course, the state capital was just a few miles away in Lansing; certainly the university fathers would not want to do anything or allow anything to occur that might raise the eyebrows of the legislature. All in all, it was sort of a company-town situation, but the enthusiastic series of promotional mailings we received from Gordon Sabine, vice president for special projects, and Stanley Idzerda, director of the Honors College, did not emphasize this aspect. As a result, we showed up in droves, not only from the Midwest but from all over the country. Michael found a job immediately on the copy desk of the official student newspaper, the Michigan State News, final-editing the articles and writing the headlines. Even though he found his journalism courses to be “unexciting, taught by traditionalist faculty with a heavy commitment to what we have since come to know as ‘the myth of objectivity,’” he enjoyed his experience working on the State News, reviewing local performances by folk musicians, and writing articles on developing news events. He was confident he was on the track to becoming editor in chief. The Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in 1964, and the arrests of students sitting in at the university administration building there, brought to the attention of Michael and his fellow National Merit friends our growing frustrations with the situation we were in. We all felt shortchanged to one degree or another. . . . The Honors College program that had been offered to us whiz-kid recruits had turned out to be more hype than opportunity, more the extension of Stanley Idzerda’s personality and intellectual enthusiasm than a real chance to do outstanding work ahead of the ordinary academic schedule. . . . [T]hose of us in the humanities and social sciences were becoming increasingly aware that...