’71 editorial director remembers campus upheaval, paper’s split from SU

Syracuse University and the nation were in constant turmoil 40 years ago. Protesting students shut down colleges across the country after Ohio National Guardsmen killed four anti-war students at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. At SU, a self-created student-strike committee camped out in the basement of Hendricks Chapel — the student center had not yet been built — and directed alternatives to business-as-usual, such as teach-ins, anti-war seminars, public policy debates and door-to-door community organizing. There were mass informational meetings on the Quad nearly every day.

Social conventions were challenged, and rules constraining SU’s campus life eliminated: the 11 p.m. curfew for women, sharp time limits on opposite-sex dorm visitors and the one-foot-on-the-floor policy in the opposite sex’s room, which had made us all romantic acrobats. Students vigorously advocated for innovations that today are taken for granted, such as voting representation in the University Senate and internships for credit.

In 1971, Chancellor John Corbally, whose calm, empathetic response to the 1970 student protest helped keep the campus peaceful, left after falling out of favor with the Board of Trustees over his support of a report finding racial discrimination in the vaunted SU football program. Despite the eventual accomplishments of his successor, Melvin Eggers, many students regarded Corbally’s departure as a sign that Syracuse was not ready for progressive change in 1971.

The D.O. seemed to adopt the era’s student mantra: If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Many readers regarded The D.O. as slanted toward student protesters. A new masthead logo appeared: a fist breaking a rifle.

In 1970 and 1971, The D.O. undoubtedly gave university administrators heartburn. Mutual trust and respect were in short supply. Although The D.O. was a university publication, the administration tried to avoid responsibility for a libel suit against the paper. In spring 1971, Paula Fabian took over for Sam Hemingway as editor-in-chief and was subjected to enormous criticism for continuing along a path some considered countercultural. The university created a new publication, The Record, in part to disseminate ‘official’ information The D.O. would not print. Smaller, vibrant student publications (The Dialog and The Promethean) competed with The D.O. A debate raged over what defined a campus newspaper. Could a university tolerate freedom of expression when that expression acerbically turned against it? Could a student newspaper published under the university’s imprimatur really be independent?

Then, in October 1971, the three student newspapers audaciously banded together, renounced SU control and named Bob Heisler and Barbara Beck the consensus choices for editor-in-chief and managing editor of a now independent D.O. Heisler and Beck, joined by News Editor Jayson Stark, Features Editor Bruce Apar, Sports Editor Bob Herzog and myself as Editorial Director. We were too giddy and naïve to worry or appreciate the enormity of what had happened. Less than 1 percent of all college papers were independent.

Money? It’ll come, just cover the stories. Another campus sit-in, denial of tenure to a talented teacher, a mess-up at health services, the war, civil rights. Heisler had us cover city politics because of their effect on the university. We started calling women ‘Ms.’ instead of ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs.’

Somehow it worked. We rode a dilapidated red station wagon from East Adams Street to Manlius Publishing every night, where new ‘cold type’ machines sometimes froze and the old linotype cranked out ‘slugs.’ Business Manager Rich Turner routinely warned us that we were in the red, and we’d say cut more ad space for editorial.

The paper would not have survived without Heisler’s deft management and Student Association support. For 20 years, SA underwrote a significant part of the operating budget, but that was not without its perils. Student leaders could be as prickly as university administrators when the focus of unflattering press attention turned on them.

In 1991, another exhilarating chapter of D.O. independence was written when Editor-in-Chief Jodi Lamagna and the D.O. Board of Trustees disavowed SA support, declaring that a free press could not accept subsidies from a government it covered. In the nearly 20 years since, The D.O. has hewed to that policy, making us 40-year ‘ancients’ exceedingly proud.

Bob Tembeckjian was The Daily Orange’s Editorial Director from ’71-72.  Before joining the editorial staff, he wrote D.O. opinion pieces and served as class president and the spokesman for the student strike committee during the 1970 protests. He is now the administrator for the N.Y. Commission on Judicial Conduct.