This article depicts the university declaring a state of emergency in May 1970 due to violent anti-Vietnam war protests — just a semester before The Diamondback announced its independence from the university.
As Wilson Elkins addressed the university’s graduating class of 1967, he did not impart sage wisdom or fond remembrances.
As he looked out onto the neat rows of students robed in black, Elkins, the university president at the time, did not leave the class of 1967 with advice for the real world ahead. He left them with a declaration of war.
His targets ranged from hippies to Communists to radicals, all facets of an emerging student sect he described as “the New Left.” Not to be left out from Elkins’ barrage was The Diamondback.
“We have seen the only student newspaper, which is supported by all the students maintain an editorial policy obviously in support of the New Left,” Elkins said in his address.
Diamondback editors bristled at this characterization.
“It is embarrassingly apparent that Elkins has been laboring under some sort of misconception,” an editor told The Diamondback at the time.
Student publications had indeed shifted left as the anti-war movement swept college campuses everywhere in the 1960s. The university magazine, Argus, ran covers featuring burning flags, nudity and pigs emblazoned with the names of university administrators.
Another university publication, Course Guide, took a more subtle approach. Its cover featured an abstract geometric pattern indiscernible at first glance. But when turned on its side, the pattern’s message was clear: It spelled out “F— Elkins.”
These outrageous covers eventually led to all student publications severing ties with the university in the spring of 1971. But as the tumultuous ’60s raged on, The Diamondback took a path of its own.
Looking back on the era, former Diamondback staffers remember covering the anti-war movement from a balanced perspective that sought out both sides. While the staffers acknowledge some opinion columns slanted left, the paper ultimately endorsed Richard Nixon for president in 1968.
The staffers say it was curious that Elkins would have singled out The Diamondback. Here is how they remembered the paper:
David Lightman (former managing editor):
“There’s this impression that people have of that era that we were all just out there as agents of the anti-war movement. And it just wasn’t true … I can remember trying to cover some of the demonstrations and the riots and trying to be the down-the-middle reporter. It wasn’t easy. But you had to do it. That’s what journalism was.”
Ira Allen (former managing editor and columnist):
“Here’s the thing. Maryland was a large commuter school outside of Washington. In the 1960s, it was very much like it was still [the] ’50s. … It was a very conservative place, and I didn’t realize that. I wrote what I thought was kind of [a] mainstream, liberal [column] and people thought I was a Communist.”
Michael Fribush (former advertising manager, who now heads The Diamondback’s parent company Maryland Media Inc.):
“There was certainly more investigative work, more questioning of things that happened on campus. … It wasn’t just accepted that, ‘OK, this is what the administration says, and that’s the way it is.'”
Jerry Ceppos (former editor in chief):
“There was one curious episode. … The [university] administration wanted to know who was running this anti-Nationalist Chinese advertisement, and I refused to tell them. And it became a big issue, that even the Board of Regents became involved in. But it said to me, boy, if a pretty innocent political ad about world history can cause a dispute, … there’s really a problem here. That was the first time I said to myself that this idea of university publication probably wasn’t going to work long term.”
Allen:
“I graduated in January 1970, immediately went to work for United International in Baltimore, back when it was a real wire service. Naturally, when stuff started happening in 1970 against the war, I was assigned to cover what was going on down in College Park. When I arrived on campus as a fully credentialed reporter for a major international news service, I found out I was barred from campus. I was named on an injunction the university had gotten. … Now, I was never an activist because I was a journalist.”
Fribush:
“The university and the state didn’t want to have anything to do with these publications. They were getting too much heat from taxpayers … and the students on campus, meaning the editorial staffs of the publications, were just as eager to say, ‘We don’t want to have anything to do with you.”’
Ceppos:
“If you have alumni calling saying, ‘Why did you let them do X, Y and Z?’ I’ll bet there was some administrator who said ‘I’d rather tell them we have no control over The Diamondback.'”
Fribush:
“So the Board of Regents formed a commission, saying that these publications should be separated, and they had several hearings on it. … They said, ‘OK fine, we’re going to separate these publications from the university. They’re always going to be the official publications of the University of Maryland, and we’re going to provide a space, but they’re on their own.'”
slivnick at umdbk dot com
