Three decades had passed since antiwar protesters occupied Stanford's applied electronics laboratory in April 1969. When about 100 of those former students returned to campus this spring for what has become a once-a-decade reunion, some things hadn't changed. One man still wore long hair -- now mostly gray -- in a ponytail. Others donned faded blue jeans, adding tweed jackets for a touch of respectability.
Their convictions were as strong as ever. The reunion participants swapped stories about their activist roles these days and then debated the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Sixty signed a petition calling for an end to the military action. "Once again we're destroying a place to save it," the petition said. "Once again we don't know how it will end."
Most of the weekend, though, was about looking back. One panel discussed what the movement did right and wrong. Chris Katzenbach, '73, now a labor lawyer in San Francisco, said student protesters took personal responsibility for changing Stanford's role in military research. "The cynical view might be that throwing a rock at a Business School window has an uncertain effect on a war in Vietnam, but it makes a statement about our relationship to the institution," Katzenbach said. "What we did right was to take a stand."
There was more talk of the movement's successes than its failures. But Leslie Wahl Rabine, PhD '73, and Sandra Drake, '66, MA '73, PhD '77, noted that the leadership of the so-called April 3 Movement was heavily white and male, even though it happened during the civil rights and women's movements.
The audience laughed when Drake, a Stanford associate professor of English, said her students see her as a storehouse of memories. "'Tell us about the old days,'" they beg. Expect the activists to be back in another 10 years to tell it again.
