1970 unrest at OSU took decade to explode
Ohio State University has gone through significant changes since its founding in 1870.
One of the decades in which the most accelerated transformation occurred is the 1960s, which led up to a series of violent protests in the spring of 1970.
William Shkurti, who retired in 2010 as senior vice president for business and finance at the university, takes a thoughtful and comprehensive look at the years between 1960 and 1970 in "The Ohio State University in the Sixties: The Unraveling of the Old Order."
He spoke with The Dispatch ahead of his appearance Thursday at the Columbus Metropolitan Library’s Main Library.
How did you get interested in writing about this period?
I was a student there for part of the time, but I was away in West Germany in the Army when the riots broke out in 1970. I’d read about them, and when I got back to school two years later, people who were freshmen and sophomores then talked about the period in very reverential terms. I also read a book called "Berkeley at War: The 1960s." It was interesting, but I said to myself, "You know, Berkeley isn’t the only place where things happened. Nobody has told the story about the things that happened at Ohio State."
What do you think are the key things that changed at Ohio State during the ’60s?
If you take a look at what the university was like at the beginning of the ’60s, it was very prosperous, very
orderly, and everybody knew what their role was. You did your job and didn’t make waves. The generation that set up that structure was so focused on the Depression and World War II that they didn’t have the time or energy to focus on the injustices and inequities occurring in our own society. The big change of the decade was to wake the country up to living up to its ideals. The old structure gave way to a new structure that allowed people — regardless of who they were, whether they were men or women, black or white — to fulfill their dreams and become part of mainstream society. That goal was imperfectly realized, but I think we made a lot of progress in that period.
What do you think will surprise people most about Ohio State in the ’ 60s?
I assumed, as I think a lot of people did, that the riots here were about Cambodia and Kent State. In fact, the big confrontation occurred the afternoon of Wednesday, April 29, before anybody knew about the invasion of Cambodia, and four days before the Kent State riots. . . . Fundamentally, this was a revolt against the university. There was discontent from the students during a period when the university had to manage enormous growth. They managed the physical side of that, in terms of getting buildings up and classes taught, fairly well, but they didn’t manage the human side very well. The university worked very hard to keep the lid on in terms of student protests. During most of the ’60s, OSU was relatively quiet. But the problem was, they kept the lid on through the use of force. So when the lid blew, it really blew.
Of the challenges the university faces, which ones are the same as in the ’60s and which are different?
The upheaval that happened in the spring of 1970 was the result of a confluence of events that had never happened in the hundred years before and, fortunately, hasn’t happened in the 50 years since. But the university needs to be careful that it doesn’t get so caught up in itself that it becomes subject to institutional hubris, where it doesn’t listen to the legitimate criticism of critics and outsiders.
In what ways do you think Ohio State was representative of other large state universities at the time, and in what ways was it different?
All of the large state schools in the Midwest were facing large growth as a result of the baby boomers coming of college age. They also all faced protests in one form or another during the ’ 60s.
I think what made OSU different was that in the early part of the ’ 60s, the protests were a lot smaller, more self- contained and less contentious than they were in other places, like Wisconsin and Michigan. But then what flipped is that in the protests in the spring of 1970, in terms of the number of people involved, law officers involved, damage, number of arrests — Ohio State was worse than other schools. I think it was because the lid had been clamped down so severely for so long.