Vietnam War and Wenzlau Controversy
The escalation of the Vietnam War in the early 1960s had a significant impact on Ohio Wesleyan students. A small minority had been concerned with the war for several years, but the bombing of North Vietnam and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August 1964 raised campus-wide awareness almost overnight. The Vietnam War, so distant, became a huge presence on campus, affected ideas of community, student power, and free speech, and influenced daily decisions like class choices and social interactions. The first stirrings of protest against the war occurred in late 1964. In December, the Wesleyan Council of Student Affairs voted to send a letter to President Lyndon B. Johnson opposing the expansion of the war and advocating withdrawal. Opposing expansion was a fairly moderate position, but calling for withdrawal was much more radical.
Wesleyan was the first college campus in the country to demonstrate against President Richard Nixon's decision to invade Cambodia on April 30, 1970. Following the demonstration, two hundred students occupied the Air Force ROTC building on campus to protest both the war and the awarding of academic credit for ROTC participation. The ROTC was seen as an extension of the "Pentagon's war machine."
President Wenzlau, then the president of OWU, attempted to disperse the protesters but was shouted down. The students demanded that the school hold a campus referendum on the issue of ROTC campus disbandment and that the vote be binding on university policy.
Wenzlau called for an emergency faculty meeting on May 1, 1970. The faculty body, surrounded by more than 300 students, decided to hold a faculty meeting later in the month when the entire faculty body would be present. The faculty meeting authorized sending a telegram to Nixon demanding an immediate unilateral cease-fire for all US troops in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.
The student referendum was held on May 22, 1970. The student body was split on the issue of ROTC, while 67 percent voted to censure the Vietnam War.
Read more about this topic: Activism At Ohio Wesleyan University
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“No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.”
—Richard M. Nixon (b. 1913)
“I was proud of the youths who opposed the war in Vietnam because they were my babies.”
—Benjamin Spock (b. 1903)
“Christians would show sense if they dispatched these argumentative Scotists and pigheaded Ockhamists and undefeated Albertists along with the whole regiment of Sophists to fight the Turks and Saracens instead of sending those armies of dull-witted soldiers with whom they’ve long been carrying on war with no result.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)