Overpopulation, Ecocatastrophe and Nuclear Genocide… Most college-attending youth is convinced humanity will suicide. 

 – Utonian, 1970-71 

 

The rat of politics always gnaws at the cheese of art. The trap is set. If there’s an original curse, politics has something to do with it.7  

– Robert Smithson, “Art and the Political Whirlpool, or the Politics of Disgust,” Artforum, 1970 

The University of Utah, like most college campuses around the United States, overflowed with passionate debate as the tensions of political and social issues swelled into tidal waves, with America’s involvement in the Vietnam War (1955-1975) one of students’ chief concerns. Thousands marched in protest from the University to the Federal Building in late 1969; those sentiments intensified after the U.S. entered Cambodia the following spring.  

After the May 4, 1970 murder of student protesters at Kent State University, four thousand people—mostly students—assembled just south of the University’s Union Building in protest. Within a week, an ROTC building suffered a 4 a.m. crude bomb attack, a student sit-in resulted in 81 arrests, demonstrators stormed the school’s newspaper office and halted the presses, stink bombs permeated Spencer Hall, and the Intercultural Center succumbed to arson during a rally in broad daylight.  

Campus activists also rallied for social justice and equity. The University began actively recruiting underrepresented faculty and students in 1969 and by 1973 had formalized an Ethnic Studies Program, developing curricula that introduced several areas of focus, including Black Studies, Chicano Studies, and Native American Studies. Thousands of Salt Lake City women joined others across the nation to pressure Congressional passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. The U’s Chronicle published a series of articles on gay liberation.  

The tumultuous atmosphere of those days motivated some students to seek out camaraderie through a variety of on-campus, institutionally-sponsored clubs, interest groups, courses of study, and even local politics. For others, contemporary chaos drove them deeper into the arms of the counterculture. Both found their places in Salt Lake City. Despite the concerns sending shockwaves across the University, there were moments of respite to be found in music, theater, sport, fraternities and sororities, and entertainment, from the center of campus to the snow-capped Wasatch peaks. Nevertheless, the University of Utah campus was set to vibrate with the same contemporary charge electrifying every corner of America.