Campus Climate in The Swinging Sixties
In 1966, students established an Upward Bound program, funded by the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, to help prepare students from lower-income and poverty areas for college. The Arts Castle, the Early Childhood Center, the Big Pal/Little Pal Program, the Andrews House, the Office of Community Service, and the International Ambassador High School Program are among the many programs founded since the 1970s to provide services to the larger community in Delaware.
Elden Smith, Wesleyan's 11th president, appointed a commission in 1968 to study student life and to refine and further edit Wesleyan's previously too-broad Statement of Aims. The commission's report recommended four criteria that OWU's educators should foster: perception, critical judgement, enjoyment, and active responsibility for the problems of society. On "active responsibility for the problems of society", the report stated, "A socially concerned individual who had no capacity for enjoyment, who exercised glib and trite rather than critical judgement, and who had no perception of reality, would be a public menace. Perhaps this is the meaning of 'do-gooder'. On the other hand, the absence of active responsibility for social problems might degenerate into obsession with self, and that perception might become dilettantism."
In 1969, the Commission on Student Life drafted a new form of student life. It formed the Wesleyan Council of Student Affairs (WCSA) with the right to decide basic policies on matters related to student life. The group was controversial from the start: more than two hundred students held a sit-in at the student union to gain faculty approval for issues-oriented representation. WCSA became involved in the first major controversy on the Wesleyan campus in the 1960s: its representatives called for the elimination of academic credit and existence for ROTC and demanded access to the University's budget and general financial statements.
Read more about this topic: Activism At Ohio Wesleyan University
Famous quotes containing the words swinging sixties, climate, swinging and/or sixties:
“All that Swinging Sixties nonsense, we all thought it was passé at the time.”
—David Bailey (b. 1938)
“There is much to be said against the climate on the coast of British Columbia and Alaska; yet, I believe that the scenery of one good day will compensate the tourists who will go there in increasing numbers.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (18821945)
“I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.”
—Elizabeth Bishop (19111979)
“I want a revamped feminism. Putting the vamp back means the lady must be a tramp. My generation of the Sixties rebels wanted to smash the bourgeois codes that had become authoritarian totems of the Fifties.... Thirty years later, were still stuck with the [nice girl].”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)