From Vietnam to Palestine: The past and present of student protest 

Editor’s Note: This is a follow up piece to an edition of the Life column “This Week in History,” which covered archival materials on UConn and Vietnam Protests.

To pick up from the end of my collaborator’s dive into the history of activism on campus against the Vietnam War, it’s time to go further and answer the next question: What should we make of this? 

Especially now, as the University of Connecticut has once again become embroiled in another anti-war movement, this time in defense of Palestine, the importance of understanding this university’s history becomes all the more important. When looking back at the entirety of the antiwar action taken at UConn, there is one key theme which sticks out across time. 

As Evan Hill’s article lays out, the targets of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1969 were on-campus recruiters such as Northrop Grumman, DOW Chemical, Olin Mathieson Manufacturing and more. The reason these targets were chosen specifically was for their involvement in atrocities committed in the Vietnam War. Olin Mathieson made the bullets and shells which were shot in the war (in addition to defrauding the federal government by taking kickbacks from illegal drug sales they were doing in Vietnam with foreign aid money). Northrop Grumman was a key supplier of military aircraft and bombs which carried out attacks on the Vietnamese. Finally, DOW Chemicals was the source of napalm and Agent Orange for the American military, the key chemical weapons which were dropped indiscriminately on the Vietnamese during the war. Napalm was responsible for burning forests and villages down to ash, sticking to human skin until it burnt through to bone. Meanwhile, Agent Orange bled into the Earth and caused environmental hazards which have led to 400,000 deaths by cancer and 500,000 serious childhood birth defects up to this day. 

In summary, they were all responsible in various ways for the death in the war, and the SDS believed that it was immoral for its university to be allowing those people to come on campus and directly recruit students to join them. It was their way of contributing to the antiwar effort by focusing on the concrete local relations their community had to the war. While it’s unrealistic to attempt to make concrete change on federal war policy by acting on a local level, it is much more realistic to change the ways our local institutions interact with these large-scale international events. When many of these local changes are made, that is then when they have the power to change the course of international events. 

In the decades since Vietnam, the university has only grown more entrenched with these war profiteers, with Raytheon Technologies, Lockheed Martin, Electric Boat and more being the new corporations in focus. They pay for the research done in our engineering labs, as students and professors work directly to make their weapons systems deadlier and more effective. Their names sit on our buildings and students are constantly pushed to work for them. Their representatives sit on our board of trustees, the highest source of power at UConn; two of the 21 members of the board are current employees of Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Their names are Bryan K. Pollard and Kevin J. O’Connor.  

Students, undergraduate and graduate combined, have two representatives on the board as well. It’s curious that the interests of the entire student body are given equal weight to that of two private corporations, but I digress.  

This new status quo has come into conflict as students began taking action to change UConn’s involvement in the genocide of the Palestinians. While it would be immensely difficult for students working here at UConn to directly influence Israeli policy, or even American support for Israel’s actions, it is possible to at least stop our community and our university from materially supporting it. From there, a larger movement can be built. The theory of change here is the same as it was back in 1969. 

This is the primary misunderstanding that many, such as Evan Hill, have of the antiwar movement, whether it be from then or now. Critics of the movement claim that protestors and activists are deluded by fantasies of being able to singlehandedly end the war by doing little protests at home, or that their idealism blinds them from reality. But none of these attempts at change are overly idealistic. They are deeply based in the material conditions of the university and the connections that it has as part of a broader economic system which profits off war.  

As we go forward, we must recognize the connections between the local and the international. While it is easy to think of these things as being separate, they are not; they reflect each other, and working to change one can influence the other. We are not hopeless or helpless to be able to make change on a broad scale, so long as we focus on where we have power: our communities, our local governments and our universities.