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Indiana Alumni Magazine

Conflict & Conciliation

A few years in Bloomington, when youthful activism became a habit and shaped lives

By Douglas Wissing

The morning of May 6, 1970, dawned cool and clear on the IU Bloomington campus, perfumed with the scent of flowering trees. All across the university, people were up early, getting ready for a momentous, quite possibly terrible, day. Police helicopters whickered over Dunn Meadow, troopers checked out their riot gear. In dorms and town apartments, students began the recommended preparation for the massive anti-war rally: taking off their earrings and braiding up their hair; putting on long pants and good running shoes; remembering to bring their Vaseline for Mace and vinegar-soaked cloths for tear gas. By noon clots and rivulets of students were making their way across campus toward Dunn Meadow, where the rally was scheduled for 1 p.m. In spite of the gamboling dogs, Frisbees, and rock ’n’ roll, there was an air of foreboding.

IUB student body president and Black Panther Keith Parker had warned student demonstrators a few days earlier, “All who turn out must be fully aware that there is a very real possibility of violence.” Already the red Viet Cong flags of the hardcore student radicals were fluttering in the light breeze. Across the street, an elderly Hoosier lady in a winter coat watched the gathering crowd with her hand over her mouth. “The Communists are here,” she whispered. “The Communists are here.”

“I was lean and mean back then,” says Parker, ’71, of his term as a confrontational student leader. Afro-haired with a moustache and fulsome muttonchops, Parker served during the turbulent 1970–71 school year.

When President Richard Nixon announced the American invasion of Cambodia and Laos on April 30, 1970, a thousand IU students boiled out onto Kirkwood Avenue, with broken windows and edgy police in their wake.

Four days later, Ohio National Guardsmen gunned down four Kent State students during an anti-war demonstration. Parker spoke the following afternoon at a large protest rally in Dunn Meadow and then led a march on Bryan Hall to present a list of five demands to university administrators. Parker had earlier written, “Education must be taken out of the hands of the pig administrators and put back in the hands of the people.” While Parker and IU Vice President David Derge challenged one another, 40 police officers in riot gear nervously guarded the halls, and the university chimes played “We Shall Overcome.”

Plans for a moratorium on classes and other “revolutionary actions” were to climax at the mass May 6 Dunn Meadow rally. The very future of the university seemed to be at stake as students filled the meadow to overflowing, and zealots shouted rebellion through their bullhorns.

But at a moment when tensions were at their height, both the activists and the university administration pulled back from the brink. A hybrid of both the Black Power movement and the Methodism of his minister father, Parker decried any calls for violence by protestors as “rampant mad dog adventurism.” Ignoring the calls for the National Guard by some of the more reactionary state officials, the university administrators opted for a strategy of accommodation and conciliation.

Rather than the rampage and reaction that scarred other universities, 10,000 Indiana University students marched 15 abreast across the campus to peacefully protest against the war.

“We are disciplined people who are not fools,” Parker told the crowd as they dispersed. The university canceled the next day’s classes in memorial to the Kent State students. As teach-ins about the war in Southeast Asia abounded across campus, many students continued to boycott classes. The semester entropied to a close with the faculty council voting liberal grading options so student boycotters were not penalized. The next spring, as U.S. bombs continued to drop, Parker traveled to Hanoi to witness the devastation of the American war on North Vietnam.

Time and Tides

With today’s students more focused on résumés than revolution, many activists of the ’60s and ’70s still ponder those spring days of rage, when the ideas of alternative lifestyles, participatory democracy, anti-imperialism, and racial, gender, sexual orientation, and class equality blossomed. What does a generation of IU activists have to tell us about the importance and legacy of that era? How have those ideals informed their own lives and careers?

In his current position as UCLA’s assistant vice chancellor of government and community relations, Keith Parker now sits on the other side of the desk listening to student demands.

“Sometimes I do have to laugh at myself — sometimes I hear myself saying the same things I heard 30 years ago,” he says. Revising his original trajectory of becoming a medical doctor, Parker taught African-American studies in Minnesota before joining the UCLA administration in 1981 in the Affirmative Action office.

Parker says, “I believed in empowerment of people who were not empowered,” proudly noting that his IU student administration spearheaded student legal aid and day care. He credits his era of student activism with the growth of ethnic and women studies and the “engaged university” of today.

His activism continues as UCLA’s assistant vice chancellor, laboring to keep college education available for the broadest range of the society. “I’m not as lean,” he says. “I’ve got a beard now. I’m 56 years old. I’m older, wiser, have more maturity. But I still have the same spark of idealism and passion. I’m still anti-war, still believe in empowerment. Education is still critically important to me — access, affordability, diversity — all those things are still important to me.”

In Loco Parentis and the SDS

Guy Loftman recounts, “I never imagined that people would be calling me up about this 40 years later. I just thought it was a wild and crazy thing I did.”

Now a Bloomington, Ind., attorney, Loftman was a radical Students for Democratic Society firebrand, who won the 1967–68 IUB student body presidency on a platform of student rights. In the process, he began a tradition of student government activism that continues to resonate today.

For many decades, the university regulated students with in loco parentis policies, without any substantive student input. Among the rules that seem almost incomprehensible today, the university dictated dress codes at dorm dinners (no blue jeans), where students lived, and when they could have cars. But the most hated regulations related to women’s hours, a Byzantine set of rules that mandated women return to their dorm or sorority by 11 p.m. on weeknights and 1 a.m. on weekends. Male students were free to roam, the administrators assuming if they sequestered the fairer sex, the men would meander on home.

Students wanted change, and the time was right. The fight for civil rights had engendered activists with a fervent belief in grassroots democracy and the training to organize mass movements. The immense baby-boom generation began hitting the nation’s campuses in the mid-1960s, creating a seismic cultural shift.

As the youth culture began to flex its power, the small military advisory mission in Southeast Asia escalated into the juggernaut of the American war in Vietnam. Fed by the relentless Selective Service military draft, 537,000 soldiers were in Vietnam in 1968. By the end of the year, 24,486 young Americans had died in the war — a thousand deaths a month in 1968. More than 58,000 American soldiers eventually lost their lives in Vietnam.

Using tactics from the Civil Rights movement, radical student groups such as the SDS called for anti-war actions, as well as participatory democracy on campuses. The activists included Loftman, BA’67, JD’74, who helped organize an IU chapter of the SDS. In Loftman’s first campaign in 1964, he argued for the abolishment of the mandatory ROTC training requirement, commingling anti-war activism with a very real grassroots student issue.

Loftman had arrived at IU in 1963 as a conservative fraternity boy, but the tenor of the day moved him rapidly to the left. With the help of his wife, Connie Keisling Loftman, ’79, who acted as his campaign manager, Loftman won the 1967 election for student body president on a platform of student rights. His party, the Progressive Reform Party, announced it would engage in “open confrontation” with the administration over such issues as women’s hours, sprawling survey courses that were often devoid of faculty involvement, free bus service, 24-hour library access, and student control over nonacademic policies. With the political pressure of the Loftman-led student government and other engaged groups that included the Association of Women Students, the university rescinded many of the onerous parietal regulations over the next few years.

“Connie still tells me where to go, and I still figure out what to say,” Loftman says with a laugh in his sunny Walnut Street law office, where he has a sole general practice in a restored Victorian house. As she has for 20 years, his wife and former campaign manager acts as Loftman’s office manager.

After his term as student body president, Loftman had to deal with the Selective Service and a culture in crisis. He spent two years serving as a conscientious objector in the Bloomington Hospital before joining the legendary Needmore Commune in Brown County. He and his wife then worked as juvenile prison guards for more than two years. In 1972 Guy Loftman entered the School of Law–Bloomington, graduating in 1974.

Loftman has remained an activist. He’s one of those stalwart folks protesting the war in Iraq each Wednesday on the Monroe County Courthouse steps. He counsels young people about military recruiters and the potential for a draft.

“I remain highly committed to ending this awful, awful war,” he says. Loftman’s long been involved politically in the local Democratic Party. He’s also a perennial member of community boards and a soft touch for needy nonprofits seeking pro bono work. He’s been part of the ongoing fight for racial equality since his college days, serving on the local NAACP executive committee and as a leader of an intensive six-year study of race and criminal justice in Monroe County, which the American Bar Association recognized as a national model of community relations.

“The fact is,” Loftman says, “the values I formed then are still my values. Patterns of activism are still my patterns.”

Student Strikers and the Counterculture

The tempo of conflict increased in the late ’60s. With student deferments increasingly curtailed, the Selective Service scoured the campuses for fresh soldiers. Equally determined anti-war activists fought the military machine with mass demonstrations and threats of armed resistance. With Vietnam casualties soaring, protests expanded exponentially. Facing almost certain electoral defeat, incumbent Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the presidential race in February 1968. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. in April and Robert Kennedy in June of that year convinced many that nonviolent protests were futile, and the Chicago police riots against student demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention in August further illustrated that young protestors were now fair game. There was continuing violent upheaval at Berkeley and Columbia, and in Mai ’68, Paris student riots toppled the French government.

In the spring of 1969, Indiana University was a bubbling cauldron of discontent. A host of activist groups were on campus, including the SDS, the W.E.B. Dubois Club, the Young Socialist Alliance, and the Committee to End the War. Emboldened by their fellow activists’ success, IU radicals pressed for further student rights and for the university to sever itself from the American war enterprise.

The youth culture was increasingly codified with long hair, anti-authoritarian music, and more than a modicum of drugs, which promised, if not consciousness-raising, at least a very good time. It was the year students arrived as khaki- and kilt-clad prepsters, morphing by Thanksgiving break into bellbottomed bohemians. Shaven-headed Hare Krishna devotees dressed in orange panhandled the campus verge. Gaily painted VW buses with large dogs named “Moon” and “Toke” parked on the side streets. Shops emblematic of the nascent counterculture, such as The Other Side and the Black Market, marked Kirkwood Avenue with the scent of Patchouli oil and the throb of aggressive rock ’n’ roll.

Inside, students could buy essentials like incense, Jimi Hendrix posters, bongs of various sizes and complexities, and Indian water-buffalo sandals that were sure to stain suburban feet, all the while conspiring to overthrow the state with other new hipsters.

On the Friday before spring break began, March 28, 1969, the Indiana University trustees voted, without any warning or student input, to raise tuition 68 percent. With the broad array of financial assistance available today, the increase seems laughable: the tuition for in-state undergraduates students went from $195 per semester to $325 per semester. But for the less prosperous students of the late ’60s, it was another seemingly insurmountable barrier to higher education.

The students returned from spring break abuzz with angry talk — as much against the increase as the high-handed manner with which it was handed down. Over the next few weeks thousands of students protested, including an April 28 rally in the new field house, where 8,000 students and faculty demanded the administration rescind the fee increase, establish a student budget committee with real power, and reduce tuition to zero within three years. They insisted on a response within two days.

A few days later, Bloomington’s underground paper, The Spectator, published a “Special Pre-Barricades Issue.” In a series of rallies, IU students voted to boycott classes.

“All strike; shut it down,” was the cry as thousands participated in the student strike. On Sunday, May 4, as an enormous throng of students debated tactics in Dunn Meadow, smoke from the burning Graduate Library in Franklin Hall billowed into the warm spring sky. Though a disgruntled library employee was later charged with the arson, anarchy seemed to be in the air.

A young dissident, Michael Shoemaker, ’70, was among those in the meadow that day. A former fraternity member, business major, and editor of the right-wing alternative newspaper, Shoemaker had drifted steadily left. In 1968 he’d been elected to the Student Senate, and joined other activists demonstrating against the university administration’s decisions.

“I was an action-oriented person, pushing us to strike,” he remembered from his Portland, Ore., ashram, the Nityananda Institute.

Shoemaker took a different route out of the ’60s. “People mostly call me Swamiji,” he says. He is now Swami Chetanananda, leader of a spiritual group with centers in New York City; Boston; Santa Monica, Calif.; Oslo, Norway; and Kathmandu, Nepal.

He tells of a fellow IU student government officer, Kerry Kaplan, BS’70, MS’72, “dragging me to a yoga class and introducing me to yoga.” In the chaotic summer of 1970, Shoemaker and other IU students founded a commune in a bankrupt fraternity house, where 28 people eventually lived and practiced various Eastern spiritual disciplines.

“It was so stressful and intense,” Shoemaker says of the times, “we turned to spiritualism as a way to anchor ourselves.”

The group eventually became the Rudrananda Ashram, which was instrumental in a number of successful Bloomington ventures, including the Tao restaurant, the Vienna Dog House, and Graphic Glass.

Today Swami Chetanananda is a recognized religious teacher in both Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist practices. Speaking of his status as a recognized reincarnate teacher, he says, “I’m probably the only person in the world who has received linage transit in the Hindu Shaivist and Tibetan Buddhist traditions.”

Since 1996 his spiritual practice has included Chöd, the esoteric Tibetan Buddhist tantric technique that involves midnight meditations in charnel grounds. He spends six months a year at his center in Kathmandu, where he focuses on the Chöd practice. “As you can imagine, I spend a lot of time in some pretty weird places,” he says.

“IU was a beacon of hope for young people in Indiana,” Swami Chetanananda says of Bloomington activism in the ’60s and ’70s. “It was exciting to be there, and I look back on that time with some gratitude and some regrets. On the one hand, there was a sense of new possibilities. But the question remains, there were thousands of us there. Where are they now?”

Though he says, “IU taught me a lot about what I didn’t want to be,” Swami Chetanananda counts himself among those who live out their youthful ideals.

“I’m at the center of a community of a few hundred people. We’re living our political values every day. Our community exists in contrast to the greed of the entire culture.”

Time for a Woman

A Young Democrat from the small town of Zionsville, Ind., was also in Dunn Meadow during the student strike.

“I came from a sheltered high school,” Mary Scifres Grabianowski remembers. “There were 80 kids in my class. I tried to take part in everything at IU — speakers, music, organizations, everything. It was just so neat to be part of all of this.”

Grabianowski, BA’79, MS’92, says she was a do-gooder in high school, thanks to a “political gene” inherited from her family’s long political involvement.

“I got involved with Young Democrats from the giddy-up,” she says. She recalls the huge changes as she and her classmates spun off into new, uncharted orbits in the ’60s; singing church hymns with Black Panthers one winter day at a radical camp on Lake Webster; Yippie Jerry Rubin vainly attempting to foment revolution at IU; Woodstock poster-boy Louie Zantashi eternally whirling in Dunn Meadow in his signature loincloth and black cape.

Grabianowski’s political gene stood her in good stead at IU, where she was a political-science major and a stalwart Young Democrat. After the tuition strike in the spring of 1969, she marched on Washington, D.C., in the Vietnam Moratorium demonstration, as well as the campus protests after Cambodia and Kent State. She became a student lobbyist at the Indiana Legislature, arguing for more dollars for higher education, for the 18-year-old vote, as well as for an 18-year-old drinking law that she now is happy to have seen fail.

In the spring of 1971, Mary Scifres ran for IUB student body president.

“Clarine Nardi (Riddle, BA’71, JD’74), who was the president of the YWCA, said, ‘You ought to run. It’s time we had a woman. You’d be good.’” Scifres defeated a slate of 13 male candidates, and then immediately faced a funding crisis: In the aftermath of Keith Parker’s trip to Hanoi, the university trustees revoked all funding for student government. But the trustees soon relaxed when they realized they now had a moderate, if highly mobilized, leader at the helm. With the war winding down in the spring of 1972, Dunn Meadow was quiet for the first time in many years.

And then — “after I finally put a bra back on” — she began working on larger campaigns. After the voting age was lowered to 18, she helped register 12,000 IU students to vote, and then campaigned to elect a young law graduate, Frank McCloskey, BA’68, JD’71, as Bloomington mayor. For many years, she worked for U.S. Sen. Birch Bayh, JD’60, LLD’95, and Common Cause.

In 1987, Grabianowski returned to Zionsville High School as a teacher, a highly involved, highly motivated one. Her many awards are testimony to her dedication, including one in 2003 for outstanding teaching from the IU Center on Congress, headed by Lee Hamilton, JD’56, LLD’91, and the 2005 Olin Davis Economics Award for outstanding teaching of economics.

“My years in Bloomington as a student activist and an observer helped me to be open to change, to other people, to other ideas,” Grabianowski says. “It was such a crossroads of politics, the arts. I encourage my kids to be active. That’s what makes good citizens.”

Magical Bloomington

Jeff Richardson, BA’73, JD’77, MPA’81, was there, too, when the edifice of monolithic university education cracked, and a whole generation of students poured into the gap. He arrived at Indiana University in 1968, staying until the early 1980s.

“My family says I zipped through school in 12 years,” he says. “I fell in love with Bloomington. It was just magical. Robert Kennedy spoke. Eugene McCarthy. I swam in the quarry. Walked Kirkwood and the campus. I thought I was on a movie set.”

The tuition increase of 1969 politicized the previously moderate and uninvolved Richardson. “I saw people — myself — transforming themselves and how they saw ‘the establishment,’ to use a term from back then.”

In Richardson’s case, he transformed himself into an activist, marching against the war, campaigning for anti-war Indiana Senator Vance Hartke, JD’48, serving as IUB student vice president in 1971–72, and president in 1973–74. He served on Bloomington’s Common Council from 1976–80, with a focus on protecting student rights though legislation such as the landlord-tenant laws.

Under Gov. Evan Bayh, BS’78, LLD’96, Richardson headed two state agencies, including the 13,000-person Indiana Family and Social Services Administration. After serving as the executive director of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), America’s largest AIDS service, education, and advocacy group, Richardson became the executive director of Step Forward, an international relief organization dedicated to the growing number of children impacted by AIDS. Both the School of Law–Bloomington and SPEA have honored Richardson with distinguished alumni awards.

“I can’t imagine being in college in a more interesting, more dynamic, more energizing school,” he says. “I am so grateful to have been there in that period of time. It’s not just the energy and the activists. It’s the unlimited possibility. Bloomington represents the good things that can happen when you get good people together.”

Dada Activism

While IU’s political storms abated after the early ’70s, Bloomington continued to swirl with creative energy. A number of former activists settled in the town to start small businesses and families. And yet another group of engaged and engaging characters arrived on campus to continue the high jinks. Leon Varjian was one.

Varjian, MAT’75, arrived as a graduate student in 1972 from New Jersey’s Montclair State. A math whiz with a puckish sense of humor, Varjian sported a luxuriant Groucho Marx moustache and Veronica Lake hair, dressing in ensembles of plaids and patterns that can only be described as inspired.

“Coming to Bloomington was like ‘anything goes,’” Varjian says. “The administration had their hands full with students burning the ROTC building. We did kind of a hit-and-run, artistic thing — nonviolent, somewhat ethereal, ephemeral. It was there; it’s gone. And we always cleaned everything up.”

So after years of doctrinarian seriousness, Bloomington soon came to savor the surreal antics of too-bright Leon: rubber band assaults on Bryan Hall; free campus transportation (via grocery carts); and his annual Banana Olympics, where entrants competed in events such as banana tosses, belly-to-belly banana races, and banana-peel slipping contests. Varjian’s frenetic ringing of an old school bell outside of Ballantine Hall often heralded his madcap announcements, such as President Nixon resignation because of an ingrown toenail, or IU’s reorganization as an amusement park, “IU-Land.” There was the hard-fought “Name that Tuna” contest for the Monroe County Courthouse weathervane, and the proposal that the Courthouse square be turned into a giant Monopoly board.

“It would have fit perfectly,” Varjian insists. He would know: Varjian chalked up the sidewalk with game squares as business owners warily watched.

Politics naturally called. Varjian ran for IUB student body vice president as part of the Birthday Party slate, each campaign event beginning with the party’s anthem, “Happy Birthday.”

“Everybody knew the words,” Varjian says.

Emboldened by his lack of electoral success, Varjian ran for Bloomington mayor in 1975, finishing third in the Democratic primary with 776 votes.

It was a sad day when Varjian left town. Armed with his master’s degree, he headed to Washington for an unlikely job in the bowels of the Bureau of Labor Statistics — “I was a bureaucrat!” he insists. But after a year, academia again whistled, and Varjian headed north to Madison, Wis., for what he calls “post-graduate-level prankdom.”

He is still fondly remembered in Madison for delivering on a promise made during his successful campaign for vice president of the student body. Varjian pledged to airlift the Statue of Liberty to Madison’s centerpiece, Lake Mendota.

One frigid winter morning, Madison was stunned to see the Statue of Liberty indeed out in the lake, surrounded by ice. Well, they actually couldn’t see the entire Miss Liberty, only her head from the nose up and the tip of her torch. According to Varjian, when the helicopter dropped her off the night before, the statue broke through the ice and plunged to the bottom of the lake. Madisonians still talk about trudging across the ice to inspect Varjian’s plywood and papier-mâché ruse.

“I always thought I was doing a public service,” Varjian says of his college-days tomfoolery. But 20 years ago, he did another unlikely thing: he became a New Jersey high-school math teacher — and not surprisingly, a superlative one. In 1996 he was honored with the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science and Mathematics Teaching, the most prestigious award a math teacher can receive.

“I think my pranks prepared me for going into the classroom,” Varjian says. “I’ve called on every element of those pranks in the classroom. You get their attention, you do your spiel, you get out. It’s the same. But you try to reach beyond that and get to the mathematician within.”

Make a Difference

Black Panther university chancellor, SDS community attorney, fraternity-hippie Swami, feminist civics teacher, student activist AIDS executive, campus-clown math teacher.

Stories and paths that became interwoven in a few tumultuous years on a leafy campus in Indiana — a few years when youthful activism became a habit and shaped lifetimes.

As Jeff Richardson says, “If you get that spark when you are in school that hopefulness can change the world, it will stay with you your whole life. The great revelation I got in Bloomington is that one person can make a difference.

Douglas Wissing, BA’71, is an independent journalist for publications that include The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, National Geographic Traveler, Saveur, and Salon.com. His latest book is Pioneer in Tibet: The Life and Perils of Dr. Albert Shelton. Wissing recently found his button from the 1969 Moratorium march on Washington, D.C.

 

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