The antiwar protest movement of the 1970s is the topic of the next Pathways to Knowledge Lecture Series

The antiwar protest movement of the 1970s is the topic of the next Pathways to Knowledge Lecture SeriesNovember 11, 2002Judy Holmesjlholmes@syr.edu

“Shut it Down: The May 1970 Student Strike and Antiwar Protests at Syracuse University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California at Berkeley” will be the topic of the next Pathways to Knowledge Lecture at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 14 in Maxwell Auditorium. The lecture is open to undergraduate students.

The announcement by then President Richard Nixon of the widening of the Vietnam War to Cambodia during the spring of 1970 sparked one of the most massive antiwar protest movements in American history. James Eichstead, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, will present his research on that tumultuous time.

The protests were focused in a large part on university and college campuses across the United States, and the Kent State killings dramatically increased the number of protests and protesters, Eichstead says. “In contrast to other large-scale Vietnam antiwar protests, these demonstrations were, for the most part, spontaneous, localized displays of rage that lacked extensive planning and coordination,” Eichstead says. “The eruptions at universities across the nation provided one of the last dramatic outpourings of dissent during the Vietnam era.”

The Pathways to Knowledge Lecture series is co-sponsored by the Department of Science Teaching in The College of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School. The lecture series was established to provide Ph.D. candidates an opportunity to share their research with undergraduate students and to provide undergraduate students with insights into graduate education and an opportunity to broaden their horizons.