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Universities and War
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Kent State. Berkeley.
In times of war, the stateside dialogue is often centered in a university setting. As places designed to provoke intellectual inquiry, universities naturally assume a role of fostering this dialogue, whether it’s for or against the war.
Emporia State University, too, has played its part, adding to the rich history of Emporia as the founding location of Veteran’s Day. Considering the present, there couldn’t be a more timely topic.
Looking back
Viewed as a whole, the perceptions of America at war have undergone various iterations. Take, for instance, the attitude at Kansas State Normal School in 1898 during the Spanish-American War – the “necessity for imperialism” was commonly accepted, said Dr. Chris Lovett, a professor of history at ESU. “It was the way to go, the thing to do,” Lovett said. In the two World Wars, the United States rose to challenge totalitarianism and won. By the time of the Vietnam War, disenchantment led to a massive backlash. Today, the war-time emotions of old are resurfacing, channeled through Iraq and Afghanistan.
Few students of KSTC in the post-WWII era will forget Vet City. A history pulled together by the ESU Archives tells the story: By January 1946, 288 veterans were enrolled on the GI Bill, including three women, according to an article in the Bulletin. The university, finding itself with a sizeable population of married students who needed family housing, secured 40 2-family trailers for temporary housing, placing them west of the football field. Later, ranch-style apartments were built west of Morse Hall.
The trailers were a bit on the primitive side. The late Dr. George Goebel (BSE 1947, MS 1949) wrote to the Alumni Association in 1994, in response to a 1993 Spotlight article on Vet City. He and his wife Maudene (Messmer) Goebel (BSE 1943) lived there from January 1946 to August 1947. “We were among the first returning couples who moved into the trailers with no sidewalks, no steps to enter, and no bathrooms,” Dr. Goebel wrote. “Our trailer had been used as a paint shack – so you can imagine the rather primitive conditions. Lighting the stoves in the trailers was quite an ordeal. One had to attach a match to a wire, try to maintain a flame as you reached for the fuel some two feet at the bottom of the stove. Capricious winds exhausted one’s patience in lighting the stove.”
A Bulletin article from 1955 reported that there were 35 children, none above seven years old, among the 30 families in Vet City. That summer, the play areas were enclosed with wire fencing. “Mother, who previously spent most of her time chasing the little ones, now spends just half of her time at this chore,” reads the article. But it wasn’t all fun and games. Many wives worked or attended school, as a 1953 Bulletin article notes: “Many of the wives in Vet City could easily qualify for a Pf.T. (Putting Father Through) degree by reason of three or four years of constant struggle.”
Fast forward to the Vietnam War, when divisions arose. Lovett, the history professor, graduated from the College of Emporia in 1970 and entered graduate school at KSTC; he recalls protests on both campuses. “People were engaged,” Lovett said. “It was very difficult for anyone not to be engaged because there was a draft. In Vietnam, you had to take a stand. You couldn’t be neutral.”
As the Vietnam War was scaled back, the university had an influx of veterans, just like after WWII. Marilyn Buchele has tracked student-veteran statistics for ESU’s Office of Student Affairs for more than 30 years; her office is the on-campus agency that serves as a conduit for GI Bill benefits. In the fall of 1970, 575 veterans were students. By March 1973, there were 624. In recent times, the numbers are far less. Buchele recalls just five or six students who were called to active duty in the Persian Gulf War, and in the spring of 2007, 78 ESU students were receiving GI Bill benefits.
Apathy? Not exactly
As unpopular as the Iraq War appears to be in American perceptions today, there doesn’t seem to be an undercurrent of dissent that would lead to another Kent State. While labeling the young as apathetic doesn’t exactly fit, the declining percentage of servicemen may offer at least a partial explanation.
“What makes it so different today is there’s no draft,” said Lovett, who was drafted while in graduate school at KSTC, served in Vietnam, and retired from the National Guard in 2005 as a warrant officer. “They’re not apathetic. They don’t have a dog in the fight. There’s no draft.
“The burden of Iraq is falling to fewer and fewer people,” Lovett said. “(A draft) would create a citizen army. I think it’s the only way an American public will be made aware of (the consequences of) an assertive foreign policy. I know our students would be concerned if they had to worry about their draft numbers.”
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In the fall of 2004, the “Iraq in Memory” art exhibit came to ESU. Strips of cloth held pictures and short biographies of each fallen American soldier to date. The display was developed by Chicago artist Jean Perkins (above), who said the installation is a response to the distance she feels from the war. |
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Dr. Gregory Schneider, an associate professor of history, also sees the draft as the animist behind the anti-war movement on campuses in the 1960s. It grew out of an understanding of protesting from the civil rights struggle, and came to “ignite a predisposed culture of protest on campus,” Schneider said, and “it spread outside of that into the nation as a whole.” The debate became polarized in the Vietnam era, and it remains that way today. Vietnam shattered the post-WWII consensus in America that the nation should tend to the world’s ills. “We haven’t put that together again, if we ever will,” Schneider said.
Polarizing debates certainly make such a consensus difficult to achieve, particularly when the labels continue to change. Schneider writes on the history of conservatism, and notes the Bush administration’s divergence from traditional conservatism in its push to spread democracy. Problems arise when governments try to “change people against their will,” Schneider said. Which also calls into question the “fixing” of apathy. “That’s a humanitarian goal, to try to change people. Conservatives tend to be dismissive toward changing people against their will, against their nature.”
The dialogue may not be as loud today, but it is there. A draft today would cause “outrage,” said Rachel Reeves, a senior from Olathe and president of the ESU Young Democrats. However, she adds, “You hope people would be more active but you hope it doesn’t take something like a draft to make it happen. We need to be proactive rather than reactive.” As for the label of apathy, Reeves disagrees. “That’s a stereotype our generation has been given,” she said. “What are we called? ‘Generation Quiet.’ I don’t think we should be written off as the quiet generation. I think a lot of us do want to be involved in the policy and changes that are going on.”
Reeves and others organized an anti-war protest in the fall. Reeves said it was a chance for students to exercise First Amendment rights, whether they agree with the war or not. “In the end, it is our generation that is out there dying, and it is our generation that is going to have to deal with it if something isn’t done now,” she said. Reeves said she opposed the war because it places soldiers in “unnecessary danger,” because of the “terrible intelligence that led us into the war,” the poor execution of the war, and more. “You see polls that say 60 percent of Americans oppose the war, but there’s not enough push there to change,” Reeves said. “There’s not enough push on our political leaders.”
One study suggests young people aren’t sure how to affect societal change. A study of college student political engagement, as reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education, found today’s students turned off by polarized national debates, but eager to engage on the local level. “Students were passionately concerned about the genocide taking place in the Darfur region of Sudan or the war in
Iraq, but they didn’t know what steps they could take to change what is happening,” the study says. “Instead, they considered volunteering in their community as more important.” The study called for “higher education to pay attention to its role in providing opportunities for students to become more civically engaged.”
Lovett said he and other faculty members held “teach-ins” during the run-up to the Iraq War, drawing together more than 100 people to debate the issues. At ESU, he says, “everyone talks about the war. The academic community talks about it. The activist students talk about it. It’s the students on the borderline that we have to be concerned about, the students who want to punch their tickets for a high-paying job” without stopping to considering other aspects of education such as social awareness and civic engagement, Lovett said.
One such opportunity is the American Democracy Project, a national project coordinated on campus by Rob Catlett, director of ESU’s Center for Economic Education. A project the group is working toward now is called “deliberative polling” – gauging a person’s view on a topic before and after hearing from an expert. Catlett, who started college in the Vietnam era, learned very quickly to pay attention. Students today have a similar opportunity to show initiative and pay attention. “The idea is that our democracy gets reinvented every generation,” Catlett said. “Our society evolves. Our democracy evolves. As a faculty I think we are committed to (teaching) them critical and analytical thinking skills.”
Said Catlett, “I don’t think they’re apathetic. I think they’re extraordinarily busy.” Still, Catlett quotes an old adage of Henry Ford’s: “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”
A personal education
For some, awareness is borne of an intensely personal experience with war. Just as Phil and Suzie (Kronoshek) Stadler what Iraq did to the homefront of their marriage and their perceptions.
Phil, a captain in the Air Force Reserves and a 1999 graduate of the Newman Division of Nursing, has returned home from a three-month deployment last fall in Balad, Iraq, where he was assigned to the emergency and critical care unit as a registered nurse. At the Level 1 trauma center, he saw the “worst of the worst,” treating American and Iraqi soldiers, civilians and insurgents. Suzie (BSN 2002), meanwhile, was in Olathe, caring for their two sons, ages 3 and 1.
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| Phil and Suzie Stadler with their boys |
The deployment taught the Stadlers a great deal about family and society. Suzie said they weren’t “political” people, until the deployment raised the stakes: “I was naïve before Phil went, and that educated me. It improved my relationship with my family, it improved my spiritual relationship.” And Phil came to understand why a soldier fights, learning “that my wife and children are the heart and soul for why I do what I do,” he wrote in an e-mail. “This deployment further solidified my marriage and made me realize, even more, just how supportive and loving they really are.”
Thanks to fairly consistent phone calls and e-mail – along with her degree in nursing – Suzie had a partial feel for Phil’s routine. “He would call: ‘The red alarms went off today and I was lying on the floor when I should’ve been sleeping,’” she said. Phil also brought back pictures, surprising his wife, who works as a nurse part-time. “I was completely disgusted and mortified. Not your normal level 1 trauma center.” The comment that stuck with her the most was Phil’s amazement at the American and Iraqi soldiers: “They wanted to be patched and put back together so they could get back out there.”
Suzie got by with the support of her family, friends, and faith – well, she more than got by. “The support was overwhelming, a little uncomfortable actually,” she said. Meals were provided for the first month, and Phil’s employer, Cerner Corp., provided a lawn service. Meanwhile, her frustration came out when reacting to those who disagreed with the war. She was hearing directly from Phil about the reality of what he saw versus what the media portrayed, such as the “overwhelming gratitude” of Iraqis. “It softened him and his words were, ‘We should be nowhere else but there,’” Suzie said. “Everyone’s entitled to free speech – I wouldn’t jump on my high horse – [but] I felt isolated and defensive… when people would start to bash the war. ‘Wait a second, my husband’s over there and he believes in this.’”
Henry, the Stadlers’ three-year-old boy, surprised them before Phil left, when he saw his dad in uniform and promptly saluted. Suzie was grateful for the deployment and its reminder about civic engagement, particularly as a mother, and with a presidential election right around the corner. Fifteen or 20 years from now, her two boys as college students may well experience the next generation’s surge of national dialogue about war – for universities have been and always will be vehicles for the freedom of inquiry.
- Story by Jesse Tuel
- Art by J.R. Garvey
Reaching out
As the university reaches out to veterans, alumni are also assisting. Dr. David Corbett (BA 1973) and his wife, Karen, served in the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps, respectively, and established the Corbett Family Military Veterans Scholarship to recognize the unique needs and contributions of student-veterans. “We’re both veterans ourselves, and we know that the veterans returning from war today have a big challenge ahead of them,” said Karen, noting that educational benefits for veterans aren’t what they once were. “And frankly, they deserve it – they’ve done so much for their country.”
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Online extras
A postcard from Sgt. Nowicki (click)
In Phil Sadler's own words
Q: Suzie said she learned quite a bit from your deployment - about the need for education, political awareness, and the support of family and faith. What did you learn from the deployment?
A: That the need for political education and media awareness is completely skewed. Clearly, we (U.S.) will likely never be able to completely withdraw from Iraq. The message on the ground is clear, the locals wants us there (for protection and piece of mind) the insurgents simply do not. To this point, the insurgents are many and varied throughout that country and it is virtually impossible to tell the good guys from the bad. That, in it's purest sense, is the reason why this battle is so damn difficult and why it continues to rage on. But...what did I learn? That the Iraqi soliders are surviving on pride alone. That the Navy Explosive Ordinance Disposal (E.O.D.) troops are the bravest of all. And that, during wartime, the human body and soul can survive on God, a strong family and cold water. Especially, when its 140F outside and the "Incoming" sirens are alerting you that a mortar is heading your way.
Q: What did you learn about the U.S. while you were overseas?
A: That it's the best damn country in the world and that many more Iraqi nationals would be dead if it weren't for the soldiers on the ground. Some would argue that many have died because of our involvement with this "Holy War" or "Jihad". But the truth of the matter is, we are there, we are saving lives and we are giving the Iraqi children a chance for a better life. This "War in Iraq" was raging well before our involvement. And it will continue to rage on until the people of that country decide that enough is enough. And that's where our involvement comes into play. The Iraqi nationals are witnessing a "stand." A stand against the insurgents and a stand for what is right. Regardless if this war is over oil, or religion or the territory for which some claim is theirs. This war is about taking a stand for the greater good.
Q: I wonder if there's a perception in young people today that they can't make a difference. Some call it apathy, some call it being too busy, and this is one angle I'm addressing in this story on universities and war. What would you say to ESU students who are on campus today about this subject?
A: Before you begin to pass judgement on this campaign, before you begin judging our Commander-in-Chief, and before you turn on the T.V. tonight to get your daily lesson on how the media portrays this war...I say, take a stand. Take a stand to stop every solider on the street and ask him/her about how they percieve this war. Take a stand and go visit the Armory down the street (just across from the campus tennis courts) and thank those solidiers for the sacrifice they have made. While you're at it, don't hesitate to ask them what it means to "Serve" their country and be willing to pay the ultimate price for standing up for what they believe in. And last but not least, go home tonight, thank God that you are living in the land of the free and that the brave are watching over you tonight.
Q: What did you learn about marriage and family as a result of the deployment?
A: That my wife and children are the heart and soul for why I do what I do. They reminded me on a daily basis (or almost daily, since I didn’t have the luxury of talking to them on the phone each day) why I love this country and why I choose to fight for what is right. This deployment further solidified my marriage and made me realize, even more, just how supportive and loving they really are.
Vietnam-era photos from the ESU Bulletin
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Last Updated April 17, 2008