Bethel at War 1914 – 2014

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Having examined Bethel’s protestors, supporters, Conscientious Objectors, draft-dodgers, advocates for student power and advocates for continued parochialism, Democrats and Republicans, dissenting faculty, and the intellectual currents that undergird the war years for the entire college community — what was the significance of Bethel’s participation in the Vietnam era? The events that took place on campus, the debates that students engaged in, the passions and longings and fears of that heady decade — were these in any way exceptional? In particular, how did Bethel compare to its peers —  evangelical colleges across the country, non-sectarian private schools, and even public and elite private universities? It is time to approach Bethel’s Vietnam experience comparatively.

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When the historian William Ringenberg assessed the impact of the Vietnam War on Christian college campuses in his 1984 classic The Christian College, he concluded generally that “the schools with the tightest discipline tended to remain quiet, while those with minimal demands experienced the most trouble.”¹ Predictably, Christian colleges were typically among the most stringent in the nation in their application of the in loco parentis doctrine, and thus for Ringenberg, the Christian college experience of the war was one of comparable calm. That was not the first time the Taylor University professor has reflected on the issue of Christian quietism during the war. His 1984 book drew heavily on an earlier essay written even as the shadows of the war lingered over the country in 1972. In that earlier work, Ringenberg suggested at least five reasons why Christian students did not emulate their peers at non-sectarian schools across the nation in protesting the war.

The first reason was “obvious” to Ringenberg: “their students possessed more of God’s grace and Dad’s discipline than did those on other campuses.” While Ringenberg thought that was undoubtedly part of the explanation, he sought to explore the issue in greater depth. “The large majority” of students at Christian colleges, Ringenberg wrote, “came primarily from the socio-economic classes which are the least prone to use violence:”

The large majority of them represented families that are White, Protestant, and non-labor that reside in small towns and suburbs or on farms; and that hold conservative political views on domestic issues and anti-communist views on foreign affairs.²

The primary reason most students at Christian colleges did not participate in violent protest against the war “was that most of them did not oppose it,” Ringenberg concluded. Ringenberg also suggested that peer pressure may have played a role; “violent protest was not the “in” thing at the Christian colleges.” Those observers inclined to be uncharitable toward religious campuses might suggest that such quietism was “less a manifestation of the inner contentment of the students than a symptom of their indifference to the social evils in society.” Ringenberg basically accepted that view, lamenting that students followed largely in their parents’ social and political footsteps. Post-war evangelicalism, Ringenberg allowed, had rejected much of its earlier sense of social compassion. Nevertheless, even if students had possessed adequate concern, they would not have necessarily expressed it through violent action.³

Most critical for Ringenberg were structural factors aligning in favor of the Christian college. The vast majority were small — nearly all with fewer than two thousand students — and this fact allowed them to avoid the assembly-line sensibility that had plagued the larger universities during this time. That ethos derived from the post-war primacy of research, leading “many faculty members to see the students as pests who distracted them from their research projects, rather than their primary reason of being.” Christians schools, whose mission was more explicitly centered on personal student development, were less likely to adopt this attitude. And if research output suffered — it did — students were the better for it, developing mentoring relationships with faculty that mitigated against them seeing the school as a mere faceless bureaucracy.⁴ It was an argument that picked up on the technocratic critique of modern society so in vogue at the time and which suffused the writings of many Bethel students.

At Bethel, President Carl Lundquist agreed with Ringenberg’s conclusion that Christian colleges remained calm, offering an argument that shared the same general outline as the Taylor historian’s in his Annual Reports to the Baptist General Conference:

While no campus escaped the crosscurrents of our increasingly alienated youth population, small schools like Bethel did not experience any violent or disruptive action. To my knowledge, very few small schools were scenes of turmoil such as characterized large university centers and no evangelical Christian school experienced this at all.⁵

Of critical importance to Christian colleges’ ability to maintain peace, Lundquist argued, was the degree of importance they placed on the individual. The room for interpersonal communication schools like Bethel allowed, Lundquist suggested, enabled them to avoid “the depersonalizing efforts of modern technology” so rampant in the large, overgrown, bureaucratic state schools.⁶

Lundquist did reject Ringenberg’s assertion that evangelical students were largely apathetic to world concerns, writing that their restraint from violence did not mean

that students on the Bethel campus did not feel keenly about the issues that have embroiled American youth in controversy. If they had not, they would have been aloof from one of the most important revolutions of modern times and insensitive to the Christian implications of society’s ills. They simply found ways to express themselves constructively, visibly, and Christianly that made Bethel a stronger institution at the end of the year than at the beginning.⁷

Despite Ringenberg and Lundquist’s shared contention, I suggest that there exists ample evidence to defend two starkly different hypotheses about Bethel’s Vietnam War experience: Bethel students were significantly against the war to a degree notable among their peer institutions; Bethel was comparably placid during the war and its students were mostly supporters of the war by apathetic default. If either of those hypotheses seems puzzling in light of Lundquist’s contentions, consider what I’ve noted elsewhere: Lundquist’s Annual Reports ought to be read as the intensely political documents they are, written with very intentional goals, for a specific audience. The president’s bare assertion that the campus was peaceful or uproarious does not in itself prove that it was. And as his audience, the Baptist General Conference had its own set of assumptions and paranoias that Lundquist was tasked with navigating. Failure to do so could have significant negative implications.

At various junctures in this project, I’ve hinted at both hypotheses to some degree, occasionally concluding that Bethel’s activism was minor and at other times suggesting a fairly high level of activity. While that choice is partly reflective of my own struggle to resolve this question, it should be understood more out of the need to appropriately contextualize developments at Bethel, comparing them with either the iconic student protest movements that unfolded across the country (more on that problematic language later), or the conservatism of the Conference. For example, while examining presidential elections at Bethel I concluded that conservatives ended the period with the upper hand, complicating any narrative of success for Bethel’s anti-war students. Yet I took the opposite view after exploring the intellectual currents that animated Bethel’s discourse. In this instance, pro-war views and the generalized conservatism they stemmed from was put to flight early in the war — by the fall of 1967 at the latest. In contrast with those earlier approaches, I’ve decided to let this essay inhabit the tension between these two hypotheses and examine the evidence for each in turn.

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Historian Kenneth Heineman has argued that examinations of the anti-war movement on America’s campuses have tended to focus on a small set of elite private and public universities such as Harvard, Berkeley, Columbia, Michigan, and Wisconsin.⁸ In an effort to correct that oversight, historians Anthony Edmonds and Joel Shrock made Indiana’s Ball State University the focus of a study on anti-war protest in America’s heartland. Ball State, the authors argue, was typical of a large swath of American higher education. Founded in the late 1890s as a private teacher’s college, Ball State went through a series of boom and bust cycles that eventually transferred ownership to the Ball family, of canning jar fame. By the 1960s, the institution had been incorporated into the Indiana state system. The post-war era had been kind to Ball State as enrollments shot up from seven thousand to nearly sixteen thousand by 1969 at what remained an essentially regional institution.⁹

Edmonds and Shrock’s examination of Ball State’s reaction to three periods of Vietnam protest — the university teach-ins in the spring of 1965, the October 1967 March on Washington, and the October 1969 Moratorium — cast serious doubt on Ringenberg’s assertion that quietism and support of the war were due to uniquely Christian factors. Ball State was a thoroughly non-sectarian school, even if it’s newspaper carried the occasional Christian religious exhortation; such was more redolent of the cultural context of the school than any kind of conscious institutional identity.¹⁰ Yet Ball State’s chronology of the war revealed little or no trace of opposition — or barely awareness — of the war, suggesting that factors other than religion alone were responsible for pro-war student views. A lone 1965 editorial criticized President Johnson’s foreign policy, but only because the student felt it didn’t go far enough. Otherwise, the paper was filled with rhythms of college life — announcements for the fraternity spring easter-egg hunt, a dance, and complaints about the tennis courts.¹¹

Even by 1967, the Ball State reaction was muted. Although a new student organization was formed that year, optimistically entitled Student Liberal Action Movement (SLAM), the aim of the group was to extend library hours. Two years later, during the October 1969 Moratorium, the anti-war movement finally manifested itself openly at Ball State. The student newspaper was filled for weeks before the event with announcements, pictures, and editorials about the upcoming protest. Yet when the day of the protest came, only two hundred people attended the candlelight vigil. Furthermore, the student senate twice considered and rejected expression of support for the Moratorium, reflecting a conservative patriotism that was never disturbed by the war. In 1969, a student printed a letter from her father, a Colonel in Vietnam, who wrote, “from all the dissenting, protesting, rioting… that is going on in the U.S., I’m not sure but what I’m not safer here.”¹² Edmonds and Shrock concluded that Ball State never experienced any protest of significance; furthermore, support for the war remained high at Ball State throughout the entire war.

Interestingly, Ball State University inhabited many of the same demographics that Ringenberg identified as markers of the evangelical college. Edmonds and Shrock note that Ball State’s students were “very homogeneous:” most hailed from rural Indiana, were White, Protestant, and first generation college students. “In other words,” the authors concluded, “these were local, parochial, ambitious, Midwestern, middle-class, White kids who went to college to make mom and dad proud and find a career.”¹³ If evangelical colleges did indeed remain calm as Ringenberg suggests, the Ball State example suggests that that quietude may have been more due to non-religious demographic factors than the religious identification of the student body.

Bethel’s progression from the bucolic early part of the decade to the tumultuous late 1960s bear substantial similarity to Ball State, mirroring the Indiana university’s alternating declarations of support for Johnson’s policies and abstinence from discussing foreign affairs. Early Bethel editorials from John Sailhamer, Douglas Ring, and Dave Hartzfeld in 1966 and 1967 echoed the words of the 1965 Ball State author who thought that the bombing of North Vietnam needed to be intensified so that it would “compel Hanoi to give up the struggle in which it is engaged.”¹⁴

Yet while Ball State never really exited the pro-war rhetoric of the mid-1960s, Bethel quickly progressed toward New-Left inspired denunciations of the war as an imperialistic venture that oppressed Asian peoples.¹⁵ By the end of 1966, Bethel’s anti-war political class had firmly grasped the reigns of the Clarion and did not relinquish them for the remainder of the war. In terms of anti-war activity in the two schools’ newspapers, Bethel was clearly the more radical school.

Consider as well the levels of participation each college produced for the October 1969 Moratorium. While the total number of Bethel students who participated in the Moratorium Day activities is unknown, 144 did sign an anti-war petition during the leadup to the event.¹⁶ Ball State, in contrast, managed to turn out two hundred students during its Moratorium Day protest. Given Bethel’s student body of slightly more than one thousand and Ball State’s 15,824 students, Bethel again swamped Ball State in the amount of activity on its campus; twelve percent of Bethel’s student body protested, while only 1.2% of Ball State’s did.¹⁷ If we consider further Bethel’s turnout during the May 1970 protests against Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, the percentage of students rises considerably. The Clarion reported that over two hundred students met to plan the events.¹⁸ On that count alone, eighteen percent of the student body were involved in planning the protest. Assuming more students casually participated than planned the protest, it is possible that upwards of thirty percent of Bethel’s student body expressed opposition to the war in 1970.

This Ball State University case study raises the canard that college students were opposed to the war in greater numbers than their elders. At Ball State at least, a mid-sized state school in the heart of the Midwest, students strongly supported the war. Where had all the long-hair hippies, SDSers, and peaceniks gone? Bethel, in contrast, emerges as a starkly anti-war campus with a high degree of student support for protest activities. If I seem to be putting too much weight on the single example of Ball State as a conservative counterexample to Bethel’s radicalism, it is only because a robust analysis of Vietnam-era public polling data that Political Scientists William Lunch and James Sperlich assembled in 1979 thoroughly corroborates my point.

Lunch and Sperlich tabulated polling data from Gallup and the Michigan Survey Research Center between 1965 and 1971, each polling service providing a slightly different question. Gallup produced the most reliable measurement as its question never changed: “In view of the developments since we entered the fighting in Vietnam, do you think the U.S. made a mistake in sending troops to fight in Vietnam?”¹⁹ Also reliably, but somewhat less frequently, the Michigan survey yielded responses among the following options: “Which of the following do you think we should do now in Vietnam?

•   Pull out of Vietnam entirely
•   Keep our soldiers in Vietnam but try to end the fighting
•   Take a stronger stand even if it means invading North Vietnam”²⁰

Taken together, these two surveys allow the authors to examine changing public opinion on the war, as a whole and among various demographics.

This data becomes immensely useful when considered with a May 1968 poll at Bethel. As part of the pre-presidential election polling that year, the surveys distributed to students included several items on the war:

•   Do you favor withdrawal or reduction of our armed forces in Vietnam?
•   Do you favor permanent cessation of the bombings of Vietnam?
•   Do you favor temporary cessation of the bombings in Vietnam?²¹

Sixty-five percent of those polled responded “yes” to the first question, 27.3 percent “yes” to the second, and 29.6 percent “yes” to the third.

Lunch and Sperlich found that among the general population, the narrative of increasing dissatisfaction with the war over time held true. In August 1965, sixty-one percent of Americans believed that the war was not a mistake. After Tet in 1968, that number had dropped to forty-two percent. And by May 1971, only twenty-eight percent of Americans believed that the war had not been a mistake.²² Interestingly, responses for the withdrawal question on the Michigan survey tell a different story. Until late 1968, this was a distinctly unpopular option, never polling above twenty percent in favor. However, beginning in 1969, this number began to climb, finishing at around seventy percent of Americans in favor of withdrawal in 1972.²³

The question the 1968 Bethel poll asked was most similar to the Michigan item in Lunch and Sperlich’s review. In May 1968, the same month that Bethel students responded sixty-five percent in favour of withdrawing, only fifteen percent of all Americans affirmed withdrawal.²⁴ While comparing the number to the Michigan poll rather than the Gallup item (in April 1968, sixty percent of Americans thought the war was a “mistake”) results in a more extreme conclusion on the level of Bethel’s anti-war sentiment, such a choice is highly defensible. While Bethel’s question did not match the exact phrasing of the Michigan item, the key to comparability was that survey’s inclusion of the word “withdrawal.” The significant spread between “mistake” answers and “withdrawal” answers that Lunch and Sperlich note seems to be due entirely to that single word. While many Americans were willing to admit the war was a mistake, few were willing to move toward a policy recommendation directly at odds with President Johnson’s stated foreign policy. Thus, the inclusion the the word ‘withdrawal’ in Bethel’s poll makes it functionally equivalent to the Michigan question.

The result is striking. In early 1968, sixty-five percent of Bethel students believe American should withdraw from the war. Only fifteen percent of all Americans agreed.

The radical nature of Bethel’s opposition to the war is only underlined by comparing Bethel opinion to the appropriate demographic breakouts for age and education. Lunch and Sperlich note provocatively that in contrast to most Americans’ beliefs that college students were more anti-war than the average population, “the fact is that the reverse was true. […] Very consistently, the younger respondents (those under 35) are less supportive of withdrawal than older people (those over 35).”²⁵ Thus, while sixty percent of the general American population thought that the war was a “mistake” in April 1968, only forty-six percent of those under the age of thirty-five thought the same way. Support for withdrawal was about the same as the general population — between nine percent (1966) and twenty-one percent (December 1968).²⁶

The picture for college-educated adults is somewhat more complex. First, Lunch and Sperlich include alumni in their samples; it is not clear if or whether including only current college students would substantially alter the results for college-educated adults. Second, the authors, following earlier research, note that there appear to be two groups of college-educated: those who attended the elite institutions such as Harvard, Chicago, or Berkeley, and those who attended less prestigious schools. Those with an elite education had, by 1966, “become more resistant than the non-college population to a hard line on Vietnam.”²⁷ In contrast,

throughout the entire period from 1964 to 1968 alumni of the smaller colleges, although they came to see the war as a mistake, clung to a harder line than even the non-college population. It is this constituency from smaller colleges more than any other that has served as the backbone of popular support for the war. Since this group is numerically the largest in the college-educated population, its views explain why national survey data show people of college background giving relatively strong support to the war (emphasis mine).²⁸

Thus, not only against the general U.S. adult population but even more so within the youth and college-educated demographics, Bethel’s level of anti-war opinion was shockingly high.

Of course, this analysis is based on a single statistic from Bethel in 1968, which, upon interrogation, yields problematic concerns. The Vietnam questions were distributed on a May poll for the upcoming November presidential election. The Clarion article that reported the results noted that 31.3 percent of the student body voted in the poll. Considering the undergraduate enrollment of 1019 that year, this means that 319 students voted in the poll.²⁹ While that figure suggests a reasonable margin of error (about seven percent), it does so under the assumption of random sampling — a patently false proposition. There is every probability that politically active students self-selected for the poll, pushing the levels of war opposition far higher than otherwise warranted.

There are other good reasons to suspect the sixty-five percent figure was too high. When the actual November campus straw vote results were tabulated, Nixon won the election with seventy-seven percent of the vote. In contrast, Hubert Humphrey, the Democrat, only garnered eighteen percent of Bethel’s vote. Given the starkly different presidential results from the May poll (Nixon 39.4 percent to McCarthy’s thirty-three percent), this suggests that conservatives were highly under-polled when the sixty-five percent figure was generated.³⁰ Yet it is impossible to anchor the May poll by treating the November results as more representative of the campus. Significantly, Humphrey voters boycotted the November election. So while Nixon’s clear win in November hints that Republican sentiment prevailed strongly on campus (and by extension that the May results may have overestimated anti-war sentiment), the November results are ultimately useless for deciding just how errant the sixty-five percent figure might be. The reality is probably somewhere in the middle: fewer than sixty-five percent of students favored withdrawal (and more than eighteen percent supported Humphrey).

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The second hypothesis which I believe can be legitimately defended is that Bethel’s campus was fairly placid; most students supported the war as a default position born of apathy. If Ball State’s record of conservative support for the war late into the 1960s was one rejected by the Clarion’s editorial board, Edmonds and Shrock’s observation that the war only sporadically appeared as a topic in the Ball State newspaper held true for Bethel. In focusing on Vietnam, it would be easy to lose sight of the fact that most Clarion articles were not about the war. One count of the Clarion during the 1968-69 academic year put the number of Vietnam-related articles at twenty-six — this out of 613 articles published! To have less than five percent of the newspaper devoted to the war during what was arguably the most intense period of debate on Bethel’s campus is indeed a poor showing. Like the Ball State paper, the Clarion often focused on college ephemera unique to an evangelical school: debates over the dance-band, dress codes, dormitory visitation hours, et al.³¹ Any claim that the war was the subject of constant editorializing (at least in the official Bethel publications) is belied by these facts.

Bethel was also substantially calmer than several of its Minnesota private college peers. In Northfield, Minnesota, another Swedish immigrant-founded school ran afoul of students by refusing to heed repeated calls for the dismantling of the Reserve Officers Training Program (ROTC). Finally in April 1970, sixty St. Olaf students stormed the administration building and occupied it for twenty-four hours. No substantial physical damage was reported.³²

Further west, a third Swedish-founded school, Gustavus Adolphus College, experienced similar disruptions. In a memoir written in 2006, the president of the college during the Vietnam era, Frank Barth, reflected on the nature of his job: “a new college president is like a young boy walking on a picket fence — thrilled but in danger of being impaled.” Barth was new to the job in 1969, and quickly encountered his campus’ radicals. One evening at dinner, a group of students burst into his campus home unannounced, one of them demanding, “President Barth, what kind of shit do you think you’re pulling here?” The “shit,” evidently, was holding an administrative meeting with the parents’ committee without inviting student representatives.³³ Students were fond of holding regular “bitch-in” sessions where they complained about campus rules. At one point, students managed to upright the campus flag, flying it in distress for the local newspaper photographer to capture.³⁴ Those kinds of aggressive actions did not have a parallel at Bethel.

Bethel was possibly even less radical than its peer evangelical colleges Wheaton and Calvin. At Wheaton, students

reenacted death scenes from Vietnam, carried coffins to the city’s draft board office, mocked cadet rifle drills with displays of toy machine guns, offered bitter commentary on the college president’s support for the war, and wore nooses over their heads at demonstrations.³⁵

At Calvin, students went somewhat further, painting “END THE WAR” in whitewashed letters high on an academic building and hanging the Dean in effigy.³⁶ Of course, contrary to Ringenberg’s assertion that more parietal rules meant less unrest, Wheaton’s student actions may have been instigated by an overly harsh president. Hudson Armerding, a former World War II Navy officer, ran the school with an iron fist, implementing mandatory male ROTC and military drills on campus. Disgusted at the displays, one students asked in The Record, “you know where else they have May-Day military exhibitions?” (the answer, of course, was the Soviet Union).³⁷ The character of Calvin’s president (and Dean) are unknown, but Gustavus’ president Barth was also arguably unhinged if not honest; his memoir brims with material more redolent of an enemy’s tell-all than a hagiographic autobiography.

One thing is certain: both Lundquist and Ringenberg were correct in claiming that Bethel’s campus never saw outright violence. The incident which came closest was likely English professor Jon Fagerson’s heated confrontation with an Army recruiter or an altercation between a lone anti-war picketer and a dozen other students.³⁸ While I’m tempted to attribute Bethel’s pacifism to Midwestern reserve, the other three private Minnesota colleges that Merrill Jarchow identifies as remaining calm were all Catholic: St. Thomas, St. Catherine, and St. Benedict.³⁹ Of course, Catholics were more supportive of the war generally than Protestants, so that difference might be explained on religious grounds alone.⁴⁰ Besides, the University of Minnesota, while more diverse in its geographic pull (and certainly less Catholic), was very violent, requiring at times the Governor to activate the National Guard to control the unrest.⁴¹ Thus, it does not appear that pacifism or violence were necessarily linked with being Midwestern or Catholic.

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How are we to understand what these varied comparisons suggest about Bethel? I don’t think that these two differing hypotheses are necessarily mutually exclusive. If the May 1968 campus poll showing sixty-five percent opposition to the war were more robust, they might be. But absent that information, there may be ways to approach a synthesis of these differing pictures: I’ve shown that Bethel’s political class was far more liberal than the general study body at Bethel. That political class was fairly small, perhaps five to twelve percent of the study body, not counting some percentage of opportunistic hangers-on. This group of students was raucously against the war — penning editorials, organizing Moratoriums and teach-ins, and agitating for change. Yet that political class was small. Most Bethel students never joined its ranks. Further, a great deal of evidence suggests that Ball State was a more familiar touchpoint for the majority of Bethel students, steeped as they were in the religious and political culture of the Baptist General Conference.

So perhaps this analysis suggests that when we look at Bethel in the Vietnam era, what we see are two Bethel Colleges, one more redolent of the Ball State brand of conservatism, the other more akin to students at elite universities who had turned firmly against the war by the mid 1960s and never looked back.

In the end, I’m not sure which is a more accurate picture, and without more evidence it is difficult to press further. Given the arguments presented above, I would like to invite you, the reader, to decide. For as I conclude this sprawling, sustained examination of the Long Sixties at Bethel College, perhaps it is best to leave, at the end, some room for uncertainty.

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[This essay is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Bärbel Brodt, my tutor in Medieval English history at Oxford, who passed away unexpectedly in October 2015. A lecturer at Worcester College, Dr. Brodt was a gifted scholar, an insightful teacher, and a passionate advocate for her students. She is missed by many.]

— Fletcher Warren

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Citations
¹ William Ringenberg, The Christian College: A History of Protestant Higher Education in America 2nd Edition (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 197.
² William Ringenberg, “Why Did Christian Colleges Remain Calm?” Taylor University Magazine, Fall 1974.
³ Ibid.
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ Carl Lundquist, “Report of the Board of Education,” In 1970 Annual Report of the Baptist General Conference (Chicago: Harvest Press, 1970), 120.
⁶ Ibid.
⁷ Ibid.
⁸ Anthony O Edmonds and Joel Shrock, “Fighting the War in the Heart of the Country: Anti-War Protest at Ball State University,” In The Vietnam War on Campus: Other Voices, More Distant Drums edited by Marc Jason Gilbert (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 142.
⁹ Ibid., 143.
¹⁰ Ibid., 144.
¹¹ Ibid.
¹² Ibid., 146.
¹³ Ibid., 146-7.
¹⁴ Ibid., 144; Douglas Ring, “Vietnam Front Lacks Cohesiveness; Vietnam Differences Lead to Strife,” The Clarion 1966-05-18; John Sailhamer, “Diagnoses for Vietnamese Maladies Seek Aggressive American Policies,” The Clarion 1966-09-28; David Hartzfeld, “U.S. Stand in Vietnam Supported,” The Clarion 1965-03-17.
¹⁵ “Fellowcitizens,” The Clarion 1966-10-27.
¹⁶ “Vietnam Moratorium Statement,” The Clarion 1969-10-10; Cedric Broughton, “Reaction at Bethel College to Military Service and the Vietnam War, 1962-1972,” History senior thesis, Bethel University, GWC, 13.
¹⁷ Student body statistics from Carl Lundquist, “1971-72 Annual Report of the President,” Annual Reports to the President, Box 39, The History Center: Archives of the Baptist General Conference and Bethel University (hereafter HC); Edmonds and Shrock, “Fighting the War in the Heart of the Country,” 146;
¹⁸ Photos in The Clarion 1970-05-08.
¹⁹ William Lunch and James Sperlich, “American Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam,” The Western Political Science Quarterly 32 (1979): 24.
²⁰ Ibid.
²¹ “Bethel’s CHOICE ‘68 Vote Follows Similar Pattern to National Results,” The Clarion 1968-05-16.
²² Lunch and Sperlich, “American Public Opinion,” 25.
²³ Ibid., 26.
²⁴ Ibid.
²⁵ Ibid., 32.
²⁶ Ibid., 33.
²⁷ Ibid., 38.
²⁸ Converse and Schuman, quoted in Lunch and Sperlich, “American Public Opinion,” 39-9; Steve Marquardt, “Jesus Protectors Attempt to Preserve Bethel’s Nice, Safe, Christian Image,” The Clarion 1968-10-28.
²⁹ Virgil Olson, “Dean’s Annual Report to the President, 1968-69,” Annual Reports to the President 1968-69, Box 39, Lundquist Presidential Collection, HC.
³⁰ Steve Marquardt, “Nixon Takes 77 per cent in Campus Straw Vote,” The Clarion 1968-11-09.
³¹ Edmonds and Schrock, “Fighting the War in the Heart of the Country,” 143-4; [Untitled Clarion worksheet document], Personal Collection of G. William Carlson. 
³² Merrill E. Jarchow, Private Liberal Arts Colleges in Minnesota: Their History and Contributions (St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society, 1973), 199.
³³ Frank Barth, A Place Called Gustavus: The Protest Years (Minneapolis: Primarius Promotion, 2006), 16, 39-40.
³⁴ Ibid., 106, 82-3.
³⁵ David Swartz, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 62.
³⁶ Ibid.
³⁷ David Swartz, “You Know Where Else They Have May-Day Military Exhibitions?” The Anxious Bench, September 30, 2015; David Swartz, “Nightmare at Wheaton: Wes Craven Encounters the Fundamentalist Harvard,” The Anxious Bench, September 16, 2015.
³⁸ Jon Fagerson, “Letter to the Editor,” The Clarion 1970-10-30.
³⁹ Jarchow, Private Liberal Arts Colleges, 214, 230, 245.
⁴⁰ Lunch and Sperlich, “American Public Opinion,” 41-2.
⁴¹ Alan Bjerga, “May 1972: Antiwar Protests Become Part of University History,” MN Daily, May 12, 1997.

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