Robben Fleming News Today

The new language that was initially proposed a few days ago would alter long-standing commitments on fundamental questions of free expression at the University, and place significantly greater restrictions on free speech and dissent. 

On April 15, 1970, at a large demonstration held in Kennedy Square in downtown Detroit to protest the war in Vietnam, Jim Toy became perhaps the first

Madison, the last week of July, 1962 Close Close The sad saga of the disgraced former Madison police chief Bruce Weatherly comes to a tragic end on Wednesday July 25 when his wife, Inez, shoots him in the stomach with his own .38 caliber revolver at their home in his native San Antonio, Texas. “I just shot your daddy,” Mrs. Weatherly tells her daughter as she comes downstairs to call police before driving across town to her mother’s house, where she was arrested. Weatherly, 49, dies abo...

Madison – May, 1967. The Bus Lane Protest By the spring of 1967. many campuses were having demonstrations against the war, the draft, and the CIA. But only Madison had a disruptive protest over a bus lane. In 1960 the city announced a ten-year plan to improve University Avenue from Bassett Street to Old Middleton Road, the first phase focused on the campus area — four lanes heading west and one lane heading east, reserved for buses. Nobody objected. But when the new road finally opens in No...

As the war in Viet Nam escalated, so too did the monthly draft. When it hit 40,000 in December, 1965, Selective Service director General Lewis B. Hershey warned that “marginal” students — about 10 percent of university freshmen and sophomores — could soon lose their 2-S student deferment and be drafted. To define “marginal,” he brought  back the policy from the Korean War, using class rank and a standardized test.  The American Council of Educators, and UW Dean of Students Joseph ...