Northwestern protests, encampments bring back dizzying memories

Rick Telander/Sun-Times

Déjà vu is a heck of a thing. The disassociation from reality can almost drop you to your knees.

I felt that dizziness when I looked at the scene before me: Northwestern University’s Deering Meadow taken over by protesters, tents, posters, foreign flags flying.

Abruptly, I was carried back to the spring of 1970. The same spot. I was a junior football player, and the Vietnam War raged. Deering Meadow — make that all of campus, up and down Sheridan Road, from the Chicago Avenue intersection on the south to Lincoln Avenue on the north — had been taken over by student anti-war demonstrators.

The wrought-iron fence in front of the meadow had been ripped out to help build a barricade across Sheridan that prevented all traffic from entering. Protesters had declared Northwestern a “free state.”

Was I part of it? Was I for or against the war? Was I on strike with the student leaders? Was I passive? Or was I just an athlete, a dummy, a meathead?

Athletes don’t get involved in campus issues. That has always been the way. You’re there to perform, to entertain. “Shut up and dribble” is the message. Tackle, pitch, swim, run. Stay quiet. Follow the rules. Obey your coach.

But this was no easy time on campuses throughout America. Student protesters had just been killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State. Four of them, shot dead on a lawn much like this. For protesting the Vietnam War.

My pal and teammate Mike Adamle was from Kent, Ohio. Later, he’d tell me he knew one of those Guardsmen who fired live rounds. The Guardsman told Mike he fired into the air.

Who knows?

In a few days, police would fire at students outside a dormitory at Jackson State, killing two and injuring 12. This was beyond serious.

And here are the tents now, and the signs everywhere, and the soaked sleeping bags drying on a clothesline hung between trees next to the Marjorie Weinberg Garden. It rained the previous night, and bad weather can snuff out demonstrations.

But not here. There are still maybe 200 people here — students, most of them, it appears — and there are perhaps 50 tents still standing. The signs tell the protest cause: “Free Palestine,” “From the River to the Sea,” “How Many Dead Kids Till You Care?”, “Disclose, Divest, We Will Not Rest,” “We Pray Cease Fire,” “Stop the U.S. War Machine.”

The leaders begin speaking. One young man chants, with the crowd answering: “Northwestern, take a stand!” (“We are taking back our land!”) “Michael Schill, take a stand!” (“We are taking back our land!”)

Schill is Northwestern’s president, and like the presidents at colleges across the country, he is stuck in a bind between free speech, activism and the freedom of other students to learn in peace. So far, he has played it low-key, and nothing terrible has happened.

I talk with a school police officer, standing next to the Kellogg business building, watching the crowd, and he says the day before was bad: “There were anti-protesters, and the two groups got close to each other.”

Fortunately, he adds, there was no real violence.

When I was in the midst of that protest so long ago, I didn’t know what to think. There was a military draft back then, and the second you lost your student deferment — flunked out or graduated — boom, you were prime meat for Vietnam. Vietnam was a mystery to us, so far away. Was it a Communist domino or was it a place we shouldn’t be?

Back then, chancellor J. Roscoe Miller — “Rocky” to us — had asked students to “show their concern in a manner consistent with the traditions of the academic community.” Some students had gone with torches, ostensibly to burn down the ROTC building on campus. Student president Eva Jefferson, a protest leader herself, apparently talked them out of it. Dyche Stadium, where we would play our spring game, had been a site for demonstrators.

Our coach, Alex Agase, a World War  II Marine who had been engaged in hand-to-hand combat in the Pacific, was as lost as all of us. What was going on? How do you play by the rules of a game and yet defy other rules?

The huge Palestinian flag flying on campus right now where a huge American flag should be, is, I’ll admit, disturbing.

But the war in Gaza is also disturbing.

I don’t like my flashback at all.