The campus and a nation in crisis

This book demonstrates how colleges and universities have played a vital role during times of great crisis in American history, responding actively and helpfully to all the major challenges confronting their country. The colleges of the land became politicized repeatedly by such momentous developments as the American Revolution, the Civil War between the North and the South, the two vast global conflicts of the twentieth century, and America's controversial involvement in Southeast Asia. Campus life became intensely fractious during these difficult and turbulent periods. Violence sometimes accompanied the campus activism. While there were significant differences in the response of groups on the campuses - students and professors reacted differently, for example - to the crises of earlier times as compared to those in more recent years, there is an element of continuity. That thread of continuity from the Revolutionary era to Vietnam was the fact that time after time, the members of the academic communities sought to resolve the nation's crises constructively. They rallied to the cause of colonial rights and, ultimately, political independence. They supported the aims of their embattled sections, North and South. They sought to influence their nation's responses to the global crises of the twentieth century. And they campaigned to extricate the nation from an increasingly costly military entanglement in Southeast Asia. In all five of these tests of national purpose, the colleges and universities, while not the ultimate decision makers, helped shape the eventual patterns of America's response in an important way.