The Dartmouth Review: The Occupation of Parkhurst Hall

"Kent State could have just as easily happened here," Thaddeus Seymour '49 told Professor Jere Daniell in a 1977 interview. He was referring, of course, to the 1970 deaths of four student protestors following the US invasion of Cambodia. Thankfully, four students did not die here, as they did in Ohio. Instead, students protesting the presence of ROTC on campus occupied Parkhurst for 12 hours: from the afternoon of May 6, 1969 until the following morning when they were arrested with force but not violence.

Courtesy Dartmouth College Library

—A 1970 student strike looks much less impressive from above.—

The most controversial issue of 1968-1969, however, was the presence of the military's Reserve Officer Training Corps—long a campus fixture—and its recruiters at the College. On January 31, 1969, the faculty voted to weaken ROTC's institutional stature by recommending that course credits be eliminated and military membership in the faculty be reduced in upcoming years.

Students for a Democratic Society, however, were not satisfied with this gradualist approach and organized a sit-in for April 22. A few days later, 35 percent of students voiced their desire to eliminate ROTC after its current members graduated, while an additional quarter were in favor of immediate discontinuation.

At a May 2 teach-in, protestors set a May 12 deadline for this latter option. The faculty reconsidered its position on ROTC with a vote three days later, choosing to recommend that the program be phased out. This constituted a harder line than its earlier position but was not enough to satisfy a splinter group of protestors who decided to take action the following day.

At 3:15 pm, some 75 students rushed into Parkhurst Hall and began clearing the building. "You are in violation of the College Policy on Freedom of Expression and Dissent," Dean Seymour intoned, to which ringleader David Green '71 responded with "F*** you!" In his interview with Daniell in his more loquacious days, Seymour recalled the incident (see photo opposite):

Dean of Freshmen Albert Dickerson refused to leave and was summarily carried out of the office. "Don't you have any manners?" inquired Director of Senior Fellowships Arthur Jensen rhetorically as he was rudely ushered from the building.

Apparently, they did. Indeed, as violent take-overs go, the seizure of Parkhurst was exceptionally well-mannered. Before storming the building, the protestors took a vote on their action. Once inside, they left Waldo "Spike" Chamberlain undisturbed; it was rumored he had a heart condition, and so, wary of giving him a fright, students let him keep working in the basement and leave at 4 o'clock as scheduled.

Green '71 took to the megaphone only after calling his lacrosse coach to let him know he wouldn't be at practice that afternoon. Later on, three occupiers left, only to return after taking an exam for Daniell's history class. It seems they were participating in the workings of the very institution they were protesting against, but the test was on the American Revolution. The papers reported that students were kind enough to deposit their cigarette butts in ashtrays, and an inventory from the following morning shows postage stamps, eight concert tickets, and ten dollars' worth of silverware from the ladies' lounge were among the few items that had gone missing.

The Parkhurst take-over was a relatively docile affair. While some students gathered on the building's steps, while a sign reading "Abolish ROTC and Military Recruiting" hung from the second-floor window. Others, however, went on with business as usual, playing softball and practicing Hums (a capella songs) on the Green.

That the long-dreaded event occurred without any initial violence, was something of a relief for College President John Sloan Dickey, who was anxious not to spoil his reputation during his final year on the job, one which also marked Dartmouth's bicentennial.

To this end, administrators had long since formed a response in the event of such a take-over. Within a half-hour of Dean Seymour's forcible ejection (simply leaving his office wouldn't have gotten the law involved), College lawyers were on their way to file an injunction against occupation by "John and Jane Doe," in which "the College prays: For an order temporarily and permanently enjoining and restraining the Defendants . . . from . . . [o]bstructiong the entrance or exit of any person to or from Parkhurst hall."

Filing an injunction rather than a criminal complaint was a masterstroke on two levels. First, it made the occupation of Parkhurst an issue between the Court and the students, preventing the College from having any further role in events it could not control. Moreover, it allowed Dickey, who opposed not only the seizure but also, as he revealed the following fall, the war in Vietnam, to have students held in contempt of court without subjecting them to New Hampshire's draconian anti-trespassing laws, relics of anti-labor legislation that subjected violators to up to a year in jail.

Moreover, the process of filing the injunction gave the students plenty of time to leave voluntarily, their point having been made. Sheriff Herbert Ash gave the protestors until 9 pm to leave, but it was not until 3:15 am, exactly 12 hours after the occupation began, that a convoy of New Hampshire state troopers rolled onto campus.

Their last chance to avoid a confrontation slowly disappearing, the remaining students threw flowers out the window to symbolize their continued resistance. New Hampshire Governor Eugene Peterson '47, who had taken personal control of the potpourri of forces, urged restraint, and law enforcement officials, accompanied by future Senator Warren Rudman and a Catholic priest, pulled the protestors from the building one at a time. The students remained limp but did not resist violently, and 56 were carted off by bus to local jails. Dean Seymour described the surreal scene as:

Eventually, 45 students were held in contempt of court and sentenced to 30 days in jail, of which they served 26. There was talk of a general strike on campus, but interest quickly dissipated in the inebriation of a Green Key weekend.

Controversy later erupted over the question of whether subjecting students to college discipline constituted double jeopardy (in the end, most of the 'show trials' resulted in the imposition of college discipline, although one student and two faculty were separated), but immediate public and alumni response to the administrators' action was overwhelmingly laudatory. Even the parents of some of the incarcerated applauded the College's tactics; "we believe his conduct was a result of immaturity and misguided idealism rather than of malicious or criminal intent," wrote one.

Life seemed to proceed with suprising normality, even for those students who were jailed. The college allowed them to complete their coursework and even assigned a faculty member or administrator to oversee the inmates at each jail.

In the words of Bill Pacht '67, who met his now-wife when she came to visit a classmate, the fervor of May 6 died quickly:

Despite its seeming transience, the Parkhurst occupation left an indelible mark on the lives of its protagonists. One might even say they became caricatures of the roles they played that day. Bill Lind '69, who marched around Parkhurst with the flag of the Kaiser's Germany in a unique form of counter-protest, now directs the Center for Cultural Conservatism at Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation. Paul Gambaccini '70, the WDCR personality who breathlessly covered events from inside Parkhurst, is a famed radio presenter in London. Several protestors, upon being released from jail and graduating, formed a commune called the Wooden Shoe on the property of Jake Guest '66, who now farms organically in Norwich. And Ed Levin '69, who nailed shut the Parkhurst door during the occupation, became—you guessed it—a carpenter.

If there is a succint lesson to all this, it was best expressed by Dean Seymour's statement of May 10. "There is a clear message in the judge's action: the days of indulgence are over. Contempt of college has been accepted by patient academic communities in the spirit of free expression, but contempt for civil authorities with not be tolerated by the courts." If only the former were still true.

The author wishes to acknowledge the research of Cory Wishengrad '96, whose senior history thesis and the quotations it contained were invaluable in compiling this article.