Once upon a time

While today's Duck fans waited for hours to get a football game ticket, students in the 1970s were enthusiastic with political debates and anti-Vietnam war protests.

By Zhiyong Zhou

If Jim Sullivan, who graduated from the University of Oregon in 1976, had visited the EMU on Nov. 19, he might have been surprised by the long line at the ticket office.

Hundreds of students skipped class, waiting for hours to pick up a ticket to the Civil War football game on Dec. 1. Dozens of diehard fans had camped in the line outside EMU several days before.

Going back to the early 1970s, the years when Jim Sullivan was on campus, football was no big deal. If students were absent from the classroom, they were likely attending anti-Vietnam War protests or teach-ins.

In the Oregon Daily Emerald, the front-page headline on May 12, 1972, was, "Near 3,000 stage long peaceful march." According to the story, marchers, most of them students, collected at the EMU terrace early in the evening.

Jim Sullivan might also be surprised by the low voter turnout rate, should he pass by a voting table near the ticket office a few days before. Students were encouraged to vote an ASUO special election to decide how incidental fee should be used. A volunteer asked students who were walking by: "Want to vote?" "Nope" was the most likely answer.

Back in the 1970s, the campus voter turnout rate was much higher.

The most significant event on campus Sullivan remembered was the faculty vote on whether move the ROTC program off campus.

"I think there were a series of votes over the years I attended. What was the outcome? I don't remember," he said.

By the time Jim started school, campus anti-war protest marches, the sit-ins and bombings had been going on for several years but had begun to dwindle.

"I heard about the sit-ins in 1971. Many students were arrested. The students took over Johnson Hall. They took over the president's office, the dean's office. They demanded change to certain campus research with military purposes," he said.

He also remembered hearing about the bombing of basement of Prince Lucien Campbell in 1971. "That's the building where my program was. My office was in PLC when I was a graduate student in Sociology Department," he said. "In fact, my office was in the basement," he said,

Sullivan said that students those days seemed more concerned with social justice and were more actively involved in politics than now. One example would be support for the migrant farm workers movement. The workers, most from Mexico, were badly paid, discriminated against, and lived extremely poor lives. The students staged protests and helped improve their situation.

Many people thought that America might be changed into a socialist country. "I was one of them," said Sullivan, who now works for a rural postal service company and lives in Eugene with his wife.

He remembers being impressed by the internal conflicts in the Sociology Department. "The field was in an academic uproar. Two factions, the conservative and the radical views of society, were in constant conflict," he said.

Marxism was academically in fashion those days. In the Sociology Department, there was a year-long theory course with one term being Marxist social theory.

In the year before Sullivan came to UO, during the annual American Sociological Association conference, two professors, one pro-capitalism, the other advocating Marxism, fought with each other to try to get the microphone.

"I believe they both were in my Department," he said, laughing, when he recalled this episode.

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