U-Mass Boston 1970 – 1995
In January 1970 I enrolled at U-Mass Boston. My main reason for becoming a student was to join the student anti war movement. I saw it as the best way to vent my anger at how my country and its political leaders had misled and misused me. Ten months earlier I had completed a one year tour of duty in Viet Nam, serving with the First Cavalry Division, part of my one year nine months and twenty days as a draftee in the Army, and three and a half years after dropping out of Stonehill College in Easton Mass. In the time following my discharge I wandered. At first I traveled aimlessly from Venice Italy, to Paris France, and London England, then back to Boston, only to set out again across the United States with stops in Albuquerque, Los Angles, and finally San Francisco. While I wandered I tried to come to grips with my experience in Viet Nam. Almost from the minute I landed at Fort Lewis in Washington I knew I wasn’t the same person I had been a year before. My father was proud of my service and wanted me to speak to the local Rotary Club, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. All I knew was that my view of the war and my father’s were very different. More and more I began to question the justification for all the killing and pain being wrought in the name of defending my country. I rode my motorcycle past anti war demonstrators on the Harvard Common and couldn’t find any words to justify a war I had recently left. I gradually came to an understanding of my country’s involvement that made me feel betrayed, used, and angry.
I came to U-Mass to join the most visible force I could find that was fighting to end the war, the anti-war student movement. I chose U-Mass for two reasons; first of all there was an active chapter of Students for a Democratic Society chapter on campus. I thought SDS was leading the movement on campuses across the country. Secondly, U-Mass was located in the heart of the city I had grown to love since my earliest days when I would go to work with my father, ride the Swan boats, go to Red Sox games, or simply bask in the vibrancy of one of the great cities in the world.
I received much more from my decision to go to U-Mass than I had ever hoped for. Not only was I able to participate in one of the great social movements of the late twentieth century in America and play a part in ending the war in Viet Nam along the way, I met and fell in love with the woman who was to become my wife of 41 years. Susan Whitcomb and I met at my first SDS meeting, which was held in a classroom on the second floor of the Old Gas Building. She was the only woman there in a miniskirt and Courrege boots. In addition to the future Mrs. Winbourne I met and formed friendships with other students that have endured over the decades. I found I wasn’t the only veteran that needed to speak out against our country’s involvement in Viet Nam. After becoming disenchanted with SDS, more on that later, together with other anti-war vets, among them were the Clifford brothers, Doug and John, and John Hopkins, I helped take over the existing veterans’ organization on campus. We held educational forums on the war where a number of us were able to voice our opposition and call for other students to join in the movement to end the war. The U-Mass Vets were at the center of every important issue facing the student body.
The U-Mass I attended in 1970 was alive with the feelings of the time. From the beginning of the Spring semester the student body was in active revolt. Not only was the great overriding issue of the Viet Nam war front and center but the life of U-Mass as a downtown campus was at stake. To my surprise the issue of moving the campus out of downtown to Dorchester proved to be a catalyst for action for everyone on campus. It led to direct action against the University trustees. When the trustees held a meeting at the Park Plaza Hotel adjacent to campus to discuss moving the University to Dorchester the student body responded en masse. The Park Plaza is situated in the midst of the collection of office buildings that made up the University. The student body rallied in the Sawyer Building lounge and then marched down Huntington Ave and flooded into the Hotel. Initially the Trustees tried to carry on with their meeting but that was not to be. I’ll never forget John Clifford, a Marine veteran of Viet Nam, rising up from where he was seated on the carpeted floor directly in front of the Trustees and challenging the entire Board to be more transparent on their intentions for our school. The Board promptly adjourned, but the battle was on and it was to continue up to the time the main body of students was forced to report to Columbia Point. The fact the architecture of the buildings designed for the new campus could best be described as penal, in the best traditions of the eighteenth century prisons, is another issue.
I got a lesson in the internal politics of the student movement in April of 1970 when the Student Mobilization Committee organized an anti war protest on Boston Common. SDS was not what I had read about in my days before U-Mass. Instead of an open student organization it had been taken over by Progressive Labor Party. That takeover forces many long term members to leave SDS and find other avenues of protest. The PLP leadership was not involved in the organization of the April rally. Instead they set out to disrupt it organizing the existing SDS chapters on Boston and Cambridge campuses to disrupt the rally. I took part in that ill fated effort as a member of the U-Mass Boston SDS chapter. We met up with other chapters in Park Square and then marched into the rally and forced our way up to the stage. I will never forget watching Abby Hoffman point to the John Hancock building towering behind him and compare it to a hypodermic needle. Despite their attempt at disruption the rally went on, and PLP’s effort to get a speaker came to naught.
Fighting to end the war was not without setbacks. One person to suffer for her principals was Professor Freda Saltzman, a physics professor, who was denied tenure despite recommendations from by her department and the faculty tenure committee based on her outstanding work in the field of physics. Chancellor Broderick based his denial of tenure on a nepotism rule then in effect for university Departments that could have been overruled based on an exception to the rule for extraordinary circumstances. Professor Saltzman’s work justified such an exception. In reality the nepotism issue was a pretext. It was her social activism against the war, for woman’s rights, and for social justice that was the real reason. A movement grew up around Professor Saltzman to win her tenure and I was proud to be a part of that. Eventually she was reappointed to the faculty but not without the battle taking a toll on her.
When the United States invaded Cambodia in the Spring of 1970 U-Mass Boston, like hundreds of other campuses across the country erupted. I will never forget the takeover of Chancellor Broderick’s office. After a mass meeting in the Sawyer building hundreds of students marched down Huntington Ave. and burst into the administrative offices on the top floor of the Gas Building. As we burst into the Chancellor’s office he ran out a back door. Over the next month we held meeting after meeting, discussing everything from what to do next to why we are in Viet Nam. All classes were cancelled with a pass/fail option for those that wanted it and a letter grade for those who could work it out with the professor.
All these events were made more intense by the school’s campus being located in the heart of the city. My time at U-Mass was an experience that I will always recall with melancholy for the good old days, clouded by time, and my mind cherry picking the high points. Luckily I share those memories with my wife, the former Susan Whitcomb. We both look back and realize how fortunate we were to have been at U-Mass Boston in those heady days.
— Ed Winbourne