We read with interest, “A look back at Lafayette protests,” (May 2, 2025).
As class of 1969 history honors graduates, we were involved in two memorable anti-Vietnam War protests. First, in 1966, we and several dozen other students engaged in a silent demonstration carrying signs outside Marquis Hall protesting the appearance of the South Vietnamese Ambassador to the U.S. This was the very first anti-Vietnam protest ever at the college. For our troubles, we were met with attacks by students who dumped trash cans full of water on us and threatened worse.
That same night, we reported this dangerous situation directly to Dean Charles Cole. We told him that Lafayette’s dean of students, Armand Shaner, who was also outside Marquis Hall during the protest, had not only refused to stop the attacks, but told us, “You’re provoking them (the attackers).” No charges were ever brought against our attackers. Shocking but true.
Then, in the spring of 1969, we and more than a dozen of our classmates staged an anti-war protest at the ROTC graduation ceremony. Dean Herman Kissiah promptly filed charges against us. He prosecuted the case himself and prohibited us from appearing before or having representation at the hearing conducted by the faculty conduct board. Needless to say, we were found guilty. So much for due process.
We took these experiences to heart in becoming lawyers fighting for human rights over our long careers.
All the best,
Rob McGarrah ’69 & Ted Ruthizer ’69
William Neil • Oct 2, 2025 at 1:58 pm
I have the hopes that for the current classes of undergrads at Lafayette, the Trump administration will become, in its attacks on American democracy – Ralph Nader and Chris Hedges said the current number of Impeachable actions has risen to 23 in an interview/article this week – what the Vietnam war and the Johnson/Nixon administrations became for the 1960’s students: a clear moral issue to prevent a national disaster and to save a million lives in a brutal and unwinnable war. This time it’s to save the very basis of our republic, no exaggeration in stating it that way.
I entered Lafayette as a freshman in the fall of 1968 and participated in the strike against the Cambodian incursion (worse was going on in Laos, unknown at the time) which looked to be spreading and intensifying the war, not winding it down. That was in May of 1970.
The Lafayette Strike Committee was well run, publishing many flyers and briefing papers, and making use of the Chaplain’s Office, Rev. Pete Sabey’s at the time. Sabey was “let go” before I graduated in May of 1972 and the feeling on campus was that his dismissal was the cost of his anti-war views and accommodation to the printing press needs of the strike committee.
That May of 1970 there were rallies and speakers on the commons, outreach to the other Lehigh Valley Schools, and marches downtown to the square. And yes, someone burned down, or tried to, the ROTC building.
I will say this, never having stopped being political and still writing at Substack (and thinking of the protests last year over Gaza): sad is the nation whose students are not idealists, who don’t get angry over important political and economic injustices, domestic or foreign. The young should be passionate and will make mistakes, grave ones in judgements – and they will be thoroughly rebuked by elders, wise or not.
It has to be this way, and all in all, the Lafayette Strike should be a proud memory for both policy and free speech. And I hope someone has saved at least a few of the reams of policy/position papers produced. And maybe share them with the current students.
And if students care to look now, I just read a WSJ piece today outlining Trump’s continued cultural war on liberal colleges, quite true to the tyrant we now have in the White House.
William R. Neil
Class of 1972