Looking Back: A history of SOcial COncerns, Political Life at UW Oshkosh
By Joshua Ranger
Student political activity at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh has been influenced greatly by the role of the school over the years. When the campus was dedicated solely to teacher training, it may not have attracted the most politically engaged students, who perhaps looked toward the more cosmopolitan UW-Madison. |
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Yet, the campus has drawn its share of high-profile figures with visits from Booker T. Washington in 1911 and famous Oshkosh suffragist Jessie Jack Hooper in 1924 as well as a string of politicians in the 1960s, including John F. Kennedy, Barry Goldwater, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, George Wallace and political provocateur Dick Gregory.
With the advent of liberal arts degrees in the 1950s and university status in 1963, the UW Oshkosh student population slowly grew more diverse in hometown, class and political perspective. The campus itself became more complex, as did its role in higher education in Wisconsin.
In the University’s earliest years, Oshkosh Normal students organized themselves into only a handful of clubs and organizations, few with any political agenda or activities. Literary societies, precursors of fraternities and sororities on campus, engaged in the friendly discussion of books and other scholarly pastimes.
In time, these groups — with such classical names as Philakean, Alethean, Phoenix and Lyceum — began to stage debate and other oratorical contests, sometimes with political themes. The “golden age of debate” thrived in Oshkosh well into the 1930s.
Some of these groups organized the first systematic civic engagement projects emanating from the Oshkosh campus. In 1912, Alethean, an all-women’s group, organized a Christmas party for poor Oshkosh children that continued for several years.
The Phoenix Society picked up the trend with children at the Sunnyview sanatorium through the 1920s and 1930s. Such contributions to the community would forever remain a part of student political life at Oshkosh.
The first official organizations attached to political parties seemed to appear in the early 1950s. The Young Democrats and Republicans organized students into their respective camps, despite a voting age of 21.
As the student body grew throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the campus increasingly became a stop along campaign trails. Student involvement with national, state and even local elections would wax and wane over the years, seeing an intense and record-shattering revival in registered voters in recent years.
The radicalization of college students worldwide in the 1960s may have been slow to come to Oshkosh, but it did not pass the campus by. Although largely still a conservative group, many UW Oshkosh students were sympathetic to the New Left causes. Several leftist “alternative press” publications appeared as these students sought to voice their concerns and opinions.
In 1967, some of the first anti-Vietnam protests occurred, and Students for a Democratic Society was formed. The SDS and others in student government called for a greater voice for students in administrative and tenure issues and effectively abolished the existing student government system in favor of one they thought would offer better representation.
This event in 1968 was followed by one of the biggest protests to hit UW Oshkosh, an event known as Black Thursday. Many of the campus’ black students entered University President Roger Guiles’ office with a list of demands to make the campus more hospitable to students of color.
Riot police returned in May 1970, when in the wake of the Kent State shootings, students barricaded and tore up Algoma Boulevard, protesting the oddly paired issues of the bombing of Cambodia and pedestrian traffic hazards on the main artery through campus.
As the intense debates of the late 1960s and early 1970s cooled, student political activity did as well, although there have been some exceptions.
In 1985, a major controversy erupted when Oshkosh hosted the International Tug-of-War championships. When the South African team was to be housed in campus dormitories, students and citizens protested their inclusion in the competition, joining an international push to isolate the Apartheid regime.
That same year, a visit by President Ronald Reagan drew many hostile students, including several topless women with signs reading “Naked Not Nuked!”
Other guests visiting campus were met with less controversy. In the 1970s, Oshkosh hosted feminists Gloria Steinem and Florence Kennedy, civil rights leader Julian Bond, consumer advocate Ralph Nader and presidential candidate George McGovern. In the 1980s, Jimmy Carter and Justice Antonin Scalia spoke to students, as did Yippie leader Jerry Rubin and the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
In more recent years, UW Oshkosh has hosted the Earth Charter Summit, an annual event showcasing issues and technologies related to an environmentally friendly future. In 2006, attention turned to student voting, with registration drives resulting in unprecedented student voter turnout.
As the campus grew in scope, complexity and enrollment, so too did the students’ political activities. Although they may not have been the vanguard of any campus movement, UW Oshkosh students were certainly in the mix as they took part in many protests, elections and civic engagement activities.