After the Kent State Shootings: Bowling Green State University's Reaction

70_06_10_Gross

Kent State Shootings at Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green State University 70_06_10_Gross

TEI Letters

2017 Mathew Sweet Created the initial version of the article
2017 Mathew Sweet Converted to TEI
John J. Grosse Ohio June 10, 1970 William T. Jerome
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June 10, 1970

Mr. Lamont McLoughlin
Director of News
WTOL-TV, Channel 11
Toledo, Ohio

Dear Sir:

Your editorializing reporter, Mr. Don Edwards,
in a recent telecast stated disparaginlydisparagingly that a campus
faculty group at Bowling GreenBowling Green State University, the American Association of
University Professors
, had commended President William Travers
Jerome
for "rare moral courage" in keeping open the university
when every pressure was being exerted by disruptive forces to
close it.

As president of that faculty organization, I regret
that so little understanding has been shown by television stations
in Toledo of the unique and unprecedented problems faced by
universities in Ohio and throughout the nation. Newsweek, for
example, in its current June 15 issue, has questioned whether
universities, as we have conceived them in the past, can con-
tinue to exist. Editorially, the Wall Street Journal, Harpers,
the Saturday Review, and numerous other concerned and responsible
publications, among them certainly the Toledo Blade with one of
the best editorial names in the nation, have faced up to the
need for understanding causes, rather than reporting symptoms,
of student unrest and a universal malaise.

What the editorialists of the air have failed to
understand is that educational leaders like Kingman Brewster
of Yale or locally our own President Jerome of Bowling GreenBowling Green State University
properly recognize the need to keep open channels of communica-
tion between all segments of the university complex if it is
indeed to be a real community. That end cannot be achieved by
closing the universities of the nation, or by imposing repressive
measures upon the dissent of youth and driving the vast majority
of moderate and liberal students into the camp of a tiny minority
of anarchistic and violent radicals who have abandoned any hope of
reforming our institutions from inside the system.

Acceptance by the administration and faculty of the
"so-called new University," which has been so badly misunderstood,
here and elsewhere, did not represent a "surrender to revolutionaries."
On the contrary, it has provided serious and thoughtful students
an opportunity to investigate the possibility of formulating more
"relevant" courses without threatening the university’s academic
integrity.

We kept the university open and recognized the student’s
right to be heard, no small achievement in these troubled times for
the president and his administration. As a former national leader
once pointed out, "better to jaw, jaw, jaw than to war, war, war."

Very truly yours,

John J. Gross, president
AAUPAmerican Association of University Professors, Bowling Green
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June 26, 1970

Dr. John J. Gross
Department of English
Bowling Green State University

Dear John:

Thank you for sending me a copy of your letter of
June 10 addressed to Channel 11. The media certainly
has had some fun at our expense. Letters such as yours
help to some degree.

Jean and I also enjoyed very much your party last
week. If we don’t see you before leaving, I hope you
know that the Grosses will always have a very warm spot
in our hearts.

Cordially,

Wm. Travers Jerome III
President
WTJ:da