The Vietnam War on Campus

Book excerpt: Previous analyses of the student antiwar movement during the Vietnam War have focussed almost exclusively on a few radical student leaders and upon events that occurred at a few elite East Coast universities. This volume breaks new ground in the treatment it affords critiques of the war offered by conservative students, in its assessment of antiwar sentiment among Midwestern and Southern college students, and in its invesitgation of antiwar protests in American high schools. It also provides fresh insight through a discussion of the ways in which American films depicted the student movements and an examination of the role of women and religion in the campus wars of the Sixties and Seventies. The campus dimensions of the antiwar movement were more broad-based and more diverse in membership, roots, and strategy than is often assumed. Each essay in this collection strives not only to present a fair-minded picture of the impact of the Vietnam War on campus, but also to offer balanced reflections on its significance for today's body politic. Contributing authors conclude leading scholars on the war's impact on American society and two artists closely associated with that conflict, Vietnam veteran, writer, and poet W.D. Ehrhart and Country Joe McDonald, author of the antiwar era anthem, I Feel Like I'm Fixing to Die Rag.