Oberlin students have long enjoyed a reputation for engaging in anti-war activism. During the height of the Vietnam War, peace protesters clashed with military recruiters on campus and succeeded in sending Marine officers packing. Then, as now, protest exemplified the conflict between generations.

–News Editors

February 21, 1969

Conceding a “momentary victory for a small band of students,” a stern and somber President Robert K. Carr told reporters yesterday that he has “no greater responsibility than to re-establish academic freedom and see that it is honored and observed by every member of the community.”

In answer to a question, he stated that the College’s policy on allowing military recruiters was not being changed, but that nevertheless he “would not encourage” the Marine representatives to return in the near future.

Speaking only minutes after the U.S. Marine Corps recruiters left the campus late yesterday morning, the President said that the demonstration was “nothing less than clear interference with academic freedom at one of the nation’s greatest colleges.”

Mr. Carr said that he could not “find fault: with other colleges and universities who expelled students under similar circumstances. “For the moment we’ve elected to go another way, however,” he added

Mr. Carr told the representatives of local newspapers, radio and television stations that he has always defended “the right to protest and human freedom,” but that the demonstration was a case of “moral idealism going over the line and becoming moral fanaticism. There is no place in the academic community for this sort of thing.”

Later in the afternoon when nearly 200 students jammed into the administration building shouting, “Work, study, get ahead, kill,” Mr. Carr met them at the top of the stairs shouting back:

“If you people have the gall to talk about the immorality of the war in Vietnam, than shame on you as moralists."