This exhibit tells a complex story that involves not just the student body but the faculty, staff, administration, and local community as well. The motivations for protesting and resisting the protests were complicated. Northern had some serious problems in the late 1960s that deserved protesting. However, did the students protest for the right reasons? While some students cared passionately about the issues, there are many who became involved in order to have a reason to skip class or who simply jumped on the bandwagon without understanding the problems underlying the protests. It is perhaps tempting to view the administration as the villain in this narrative. However, they sometimes did have valid concerns. The protests did sometimes overwhelm the university to the detriment of the students’ education.
As John Vandezande, a professor at NMU at the time, said about this period in Northern’s history:
“NMU was coming into awarenesses of all kinds… It was a late coming-of-age for Northern. It had to shed some of its provincialism and become a part of the world and this did it. It was a very active time, not the best of times. Much of it was just rhetoric conducted at high volume, a lot of the worst kind of rhetoric that precludes dialogue, with arguments ad hominem and logical fallacies lying all over the place. One side would refer to the other side as Commie hippie faggots and the other side would refer to them as fascist pigs and at that point the reasonable person leaves the room. I mean, there will be no dialogue. There was a lot of hate…"
Interviewer: There wasn’t much open-mindedness at Northern then?
“No, open mouths. Just an unwillingness of one side to listen to the other…dialogue involves listening, and no one was too willing to do that. It was the first time, I’m sure, on Northern’s campus that they had such an amalgam of different points of view and openly expressed."
Click play to listen to John Vandezande's 'Race Relations' interview.
The stories of these protests are told on this website through the perspectives of students, faculty, administration, and community members. Each section contains a brief narrative about the event. If you wish to delve deeper into the protests, each section also contains a link to a page of oral history interviews, audio from the protests themselves, newspaper articles, correspondence, and other types of sources which deal with each event.
If you are looking for a general list of source material on student protests at Northern, a page of sources can be located here.
Interested in researching other events in Northern’s history? Try searching the collections of the Central Upper Peninsula and Northern Michigan University Archives.