Keylor Contributes Chapter to A Time to Stir
William Keylor, Professor of International Relations and History at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, contributed a chapter to the recently published book, A Time to Stir (Columbia University Press), on the 1968 student protests at Columbia University on a planned gymnasium in a nearby Harlem park, links between the university and the Vietnam War, and what students saw as the university’s unresponsive attitude toward their concerns.
Keylor was a graduate student at Columbia at the time and participated in the events. His chapter is entitled “The Special Case of the Fayerweather Occupation.“
From the text of the chapter:
As a second-year graduate student in Columbia University’s History Department during the spring of 1968, I heard the daily speeches reverberating from the sundial by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) militants with a mixture of approval and dismay: approval of the ardent denunciations of the war in Vietnam and the demand that the university sever its connections to a think tank that conducted weapons research for the Pentagon; dismay at the inflammatory revolutionary verbiage that accompanied what I considered that eminently reasonable demand.
The occupation of Low Memorial Library in the early hours of April 24 by SDS students—after they had been gently evicted by the Students’ Afro-American Society (SAS) from their joint occupation of Hamilton Hall—filled me with the same feelings of ambivalence. On the one hand, my deeply felt opposition to America’s war in Southeast Asia prompted me to support the Low occupation as an appropriate gesture of condemnation directed at our university’s complicity, however indirect, in the conduct of that war. On the other hand, I was disconcerted by the stream of diatribes emanating from Low Memorial Library that revealed the SDS regarded opposition to this particular war as merely a pretext for a fullscale ideological indictment of “Amerika.” I was an enthusiastic supporter of the antiwar campaign of Sen. Eugene McCarthy, whose strong showing in the New Hampshire Democratic primary a few months earlier had
Keylor served four consecutive terms as Chairman of the Department of History at Boston University (1988-2000) and has been Director of the International History Institute since 1999. At Boston University, he has received the Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Methodist Scholar-Teacher Award.