I hope that for the current classes of undergrads at Lafayette College, the Trump administration will become, because of its myriad and shameful attacks on American democracy, what the Johnson/Nixon administrations became for the 1960s students: a clear moral issue, crystallized by the Vietnam War.
The moral issue was then, in May of 1970, to block a national disaster (televised live in 1975) and to save another million lives from an unwinnable war. Today, in 2025, the purpose is to save the very basis of our republic. Political activist Ralph Nader is keeping count on a new list of impeachable offenses — 23 and growing. And once again, the National Guard is being mobilized against citizen protests, illegally. With echoes beyond Kent State.
I entered Lafayette as a first-year in 1968 and participated in the strike against the Cambodian incursion, which looked to be spreading the war, not winding it down. Worse was to follow there, and in Laos, unknown at the time.
The Lafayette strike committee was well run, briefing papers galore, to be spread on and off campus and making use of the chaplain’s office, the Rev. Pete Sabey’s. He was “let go” before I graduated in 1972, and the feeling on campus was that his dismissal was the price of his anti-war views and accommodation to the printing needs of the strike committee. Lafayette College denied that.
The spring of 1970 saw rallies and guest speakers on the commons, outreach to the other Lehigh Valley schools, and marches downtown to the Centre Square. And yes, someone burned down, or tried to, the ROTC building. But there was no “Hard Hat Riot” as in New York City, despite Bethlehem Steel and Ingersoll-Rand being close by. The strike committee was serious and sober, the antithesis of the public antics of the famous two Yippies.
Bridging more than a half century, my thoughts now are: sad is the nation whose students have abandoned idealism for “Mammon and the Cash Nexus,” and watch newly minted coins broached for sitting presidents — students who can’t get angry over important injustices. The young should be passionate when high crimes are afoot in high places, and they will make mistakes, even grave ones, in their young judgments — and yet if all the wheels of history are not to be economic, their hearts and consciences must go public, full force and against all odds.
It has to be this way, and all in all, the Lafayette strike should be a proud memory, anticipating correctly the concluding truths about the horrors of the Vietnam War and the character of the man who set the forces loose on Cambodia, finally revealed in Watergate.
And according to several Wall Street Journal articles from the first week in October, Donald Trump is making new demands of colleges, touching on culture and politics. A continuation of his unrelenting “Blitzkrieg” against all the republic’s key checks and balances to prevent a “monster of ambition” from seizing power, backed by a range of ideological forces on the right side of the political spectrum, some scarier than the commander-in-chief himself, if that’s possible. And it is.
William Neil • Oct 14, 2025 at 7:15 pm
I had forgotten, when I mentioned William E. Simon and economics and donations, that the late Treasury Secretary under Ford and the author of a “Time for Truth” also funded a Chair in political economy. Here is the official description of the holder of the current chair, and a brief resume.
“Mark Crain is the William E. Simon Professor of Political Economy at Lafayette College and Chair of the Policy Studies program. Dr. Crain has published over 125 articles and 10 books in the fields of economics, business, political science, and law.
Crain came to Lafayette College in 2004 from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia where he had been a faculty member for many years, and Director of the Center for Study of Public Choice. His prior academic positions were at UCLA and Virginia Tech. He served under President Reagan in the US Office of Management and Budget, and on numerous civic commissions at the federal, state, and local levels.
Crain received his doctorate in economics from Texas A & M University and a Bachelor of Science from the University of Houston.”
Am I being unfair to say that this is a fairly conservative background in economics? Despite my intensive reading in economics, I’ve never been referred to one of books, nor come across his name. There is of course, sorting along the lines of the political spectrum, but I’m surprised I don’t know about him.
Jeff Ruthizer '62 • Oct 12, 2025 at 4:51 pm
Thank you William Neil ’72 for this thoughtful piece, with which I entirely agree. What you have said is very important. But isn’t it just incredible, and probably so frustrating to the editors of the “oldest student newspaper in Pennsylvania,” that no one, mostly ever, comments on opinions, letters, editorials or news items. What is wrong with the larger, regular Lafayette community of students, faculty, administrators who I assume read these pages weekly in print or on the website, and the few alums who also do, that no-one usually has a concurring or dissenting view or just wants to add some flavor or a comment of his or her own? Is everyone so disinterested in what is printed in these pages about our College and its affairs, or in Op-eds, that people usually have nothing to say about things written or reported? This topic has been on my mind for some time as I have witnessed these past few years the paucity of comments submitted on a great deal of very important written subjects. And this is one of those…the very future of American higher education.
William Neil • Oct 13, 2025 at 7:22 pm
Thanks for this Jeff. I agree with your observations, that the lack of responses overall seems to be the inverse of white hot reactions – often instant – in the far reaches of the online universe.
Perhaps it is the school itself which sets this quiet tone, in the Alumni magazine itself, which I think steers away from any controversy about the issues of the day, although I do remember black students finally launching a protest and issuing a philosophical correction to the inscription over the doorway of the Kirby Hall of Civil Rights …”is it not lawful for me to do what I will with my own” – which bothered me a great deal way back in 1968-1969.
On the other hand, I lived at Kirby house my last three years on campus, and still remember a former soldier who lost part of his foot to a land mine in Vietnam – Jules Manger, and Al Sylvia head of the YAF chapter, and Al DeMarco also an outspoken member, and we had some intense disagreements but somehow always managed to stay civil and even friendly, which is a credit I think to the basic decency of those who attend the school. But yes, overall, too withdrawn on the state of our republic. So if they read this, best to you…
Jeff Ruthizer • Oct 14, 2025 at 2:03 pm
Your latest comment is probably right, William, or is it Bill, since it seems we are having an open interesting dialogue. I think it is the College itself that sets the “quiet”tone, and always has, and yes indeed the Lafayette alumni magazine does stay away from talking about issues of the day, even those affecting the college first-hand, except the obvious feel-good things…even today’s serious Trumpian threat to higher education in general. But one would think that particularly the students have a view, pro or con, on what happens, nationally or on campus, and what gets reported in the pages of their student press about what’s going on right in front of them. The editors do a great job in gathering news and reporting, but no one comments. I can understand why faculty or staff would tend to shy away from weighing in on things, especially controversial issues, but students? And alums? Who reads these pages things anyway? The “no comment” trajectory is even true across the board for stories on the College’s own website, so why even have the space to comment when practically no one ever does?
William Neil • Oct 14, 2025 at 6:43 pm
Bill is fine Jeff. Despite my brief take on the strike which began the conversation, when I was looking for some visuals and Googling names I thought I’d remembered, I saw a comment which said that the student body was divided in thirds, which is the way I’ve always seen the original American Revolution . Waiting for Ken Burn’s take. Trump’s support has been steady for almost a decade at 43-49%, plus the election results, lower on issues and performance. And more than any president in history, and the basis for my stance today, is that he has said and done things which have crossed lines which I would hope, naively it seems now, every serious liberal arts teacher would view with horror and state it bluntly: he’s crossed the line into being a despot, not waiting for the Supreme Court to ratify him. It’s hard to ignore the intimidation, costly to so many, very public and wielded as the suppression of speech and thought that it has become. At Lafayette, students are concerned about grades and professional schools, med, law, MBA’s and that was a consideration in campus protests disappearing in the fall of 1970 after the spring strikes and shootings. And I worried about how I allocated my time in 1970 too. My editorial therefore I hope was taken as a call for the protests at time of exceptional national danger, not a yearly occurrence – Trump conduct now excepted.
One would hope liberal arts department heads could bring before gathered students, and invite the local public and press, to hear the debates from inside their own departments…but I don’t sense that happening…perhaps the Palestinian-Gaza-Israeli conflict has signaled it can’t happen. But if faculty can’t disagree passionately, and still civilly, and air the deep chasms for the public, there isn’t much hope that the great electronic “sorting” tools of our time can in themselves solve the problem. Made it worse it seems. Professor Timothy Snyder and his wife Marci Shore left Yale in fear this spring, she being a Weimar-Holocaust-Eastern Europe specialist, she said they weren’t waiting for 1933. Today, Chris Hedges aired the same worries. And thus I can’t be too hard on students…harder on faculty and college leaders who perhaps have some financial cushion…and for me, mere “vermin,” as a social democrat, it was that part of Trump’s Veterans Day speech in NH in 2023 crystallized my own conclusions from my work on the history of the Weimar Republic.
And for me, as much as the ideas of William E. Simon set the tone of the reaction of business to Earth Day (also 1970) and the rise of Nader’s Raiders, it was his style and intensity that was worrisome. I knew Chris Daggett who strangely went to work for him in the 1990’s…former EPA Chief, Region 4, and NJ DEP Commissioner…a moderate Eagle Scout type R…moving Right. And I don’t expect Lafayette to take much interest in my own economic work, the Trump warning in 2016-2017, being a mere donor in the lifetime 50-100 dollar range. Total. And the nerve to write about economics…
Rick Beltram • Oct 12, 2025 at 12:58 pm
Obviously, you do not understand the need for Made in USA.
William Neil • Oct 13, 2025 at 7:36 pm
Hi Rick. Oh but I do. I write about economic and ecology, and one of my mentors was the late William Greider, author of three of the best books on the US and world economy. Bill, way back in 1997 wrote in “One World Ready or Not” about the stresses globalization had already placed on democratic politics in the West, and cautioned, as did Kevin Phillips, that the history of economic powers that stopped “making things” and turned to finance (esp. the Dutch and English before us) eventually lost their dominance. Greider died in 2019, and since then I have turned to other serious analysts of economic history, like Mark Blyth of Brown, and Rena Foorohar of the Financial Times who don’t think it’s possible to turn the clock back as Trump wants to, except for limited items crucial for national security/electronic dominance…and I tend to agree with them. That doesn’t mean that American workers don’t have, didn’t have real grievances over a world turned upside down – amazingly my views, in published forms, come close now to Martin Wolf of the Financial Times in his “Crisis of Democratic Capitalism” that our elites were tone deaf to the disruptions of the lives of industrial workers, and the psychological pains of being marginalized in the service economy. Blyth makes the point the starting block for trouble is economic pain, and that gets translated into other grievances: race, gender, borders…no matter quick summary of where this has led: Quinn Slobodian’s title: “Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right.” And back to the McKinley era of no unions, high tariffs and no regulatory “greens.” A lot of missing fingers from the “slate belt” workers just north of the campus in that era…And finally, I’d buy the $150 steel frying pan some of our grads manufacture – if I could afford it.