From '63 to '73 was just a remarkable decade of change. There's certainly change in every decade, but this one seemed to be explosive in so many fields •.. I was hired to get students involved, but I didn't get them involved-the world got them involved. They used the outside issues and began to try to bring about change within the university. And I thought maybe it was my job to help show them how to take charge of those things I felt were appropriate. o I felt very responsible for seeing that student body presidents .lRd their cabinets were exposed to some kind of leadership training ... One young man, Brad Skinner, got interested in what was happening in developing nations. He raised the money and brought about an international conference for student leaders talking about what young people could really effect in a "united nations" way . Joe Uris seemed synonymous with that decade as far as students were concerned. Joe was certainly a leader of the students here and he could control those students better than any administrator. o The kinds of activities I found on the campus when I got here were Winter Carnival, homecoming and activities that really weren't teaching students very much... I felt that all the issues of the day were grist for the mill for students and faculty and the univerSity was a platform for valid ideas ... It wasn't ever the aim to bring controversy to the campus, but the aim was to bring literature and art of the times and to bring the expressions of the people who were voicing what those times were like . o On an impluse, which I now have very mixed feelings about, I ran for student body president. I ran with Mae Ochida and we essentially knocked out two of the old-fashioned college p:>litical machines. II was a fluke, I think. The facl was that we were articulate, we were funny. We brought a lot of issues to the fore and presented what we saw as a growing, new movement with student concerns ... By the time I was done I had some perspective on how to run an organization. Thai'S something Portland Siale gave me, whether it meant to or not. At the same time, I met a 101 of really good academics and got involved with the world of ideas. One of the first things I did when J became student body president is I helped put together the freshman orientation program, a major effort being done by Katherine Corbett. She was a great lady. Sometimes I shocked her but she always came through. I tried to introduce the freshmen to the idea thai the city and the college had a relationship that couldn't be separated-they were intertwined I got a chance 10 address the Faculty Senate and I think maybe I had some role in persuading them to put students on faculty committees. o I think I just expressed the zeitgeist of that time ... It was a time when people were very concerned with trying to build a better world and had real hope that they could do so. It ranged in belief from people who actually thought there was going to be a revolution, which I didn't ever really believe, to people who thought we could really reform things and make them more humane. There was a countercuhural movement going on which was very vigorous. You had the drug Katherine Corbett Then: Coordinator of Educational Activities Now: Retired thing on top of which was the civil rights movement and the outrage over the Vietnam War. And then you add to that the pill and the boom in rock 'n' roll . o In the fall of '68 I came back to go to graduate school and found myself drawn into the anti-war movement. By this time I was pretty disillusioned with hardcore, left-wing politics, though you'd never know that to look at the newspaper stories of the late '60s. A lot of people slill are frightened by (my) reputation. Even then I wasn't as dangerous a figure as was being created . Maybe it wou Id have been better to keep challenging the recruiters without driving them off campus. There was a tendency to be intolerant, but remember, that war was seen as a terrible, terrible thing by most people. The polilicization of campus was something that a lot of people objected to, but my attitude has always been that the least political person is the most political because they're allOWing whatever goes on to go on. o The one event that might have typified that age was when we invited Timothy leary to come and speak on campus. I'm not sure what my motives were, but I charged a 25¢ admission or nothing if you didn't want to pay. That created enormous moral chaos . .. The air was redolent with incense and these kids were probably ealing these marijuana brownies they'd brought in, unbeknownst to me. And by the time leary came out in his white pajamas---and he was obviously stoned out of his mind-it was quite an interesting crowd, many of whom were jocks who'd come to jeer and stayed, I think, to cheer. Because he was a very effective public speaker, very hypnotic. There was no trouble getting audiences for the kinds of things we produced during those years. (Timothy leary) was one I got a great deal of criticism for. I did it deliberately. What it did was it gave our students an opportunity to see what a man who had taken LSD long enough would end up being. After that, I got a great many students who were using drugs corne to me and ask where they could get help. o I really liked the students of that lime. II seemed natural to be a listener and counselor for students who were trying to find a new lifestyle and not able to talk to their parents . . I remember staying up most of the night with some of the students when they were talking about breaking all the windows in Smith Center. I was able to stop them ... because basically, given an opportunity to talk out things, Ihose students could be reasonable. o One Memorial Day, the students wanted to make some kind of large gesture. We finally came up with the idea that why didn't we go out to Willamette Cemetery and put flowers on all the graves of the young men and women who had died in the service. Here was this eerie fog out there and we had about 100-150 students show up. And there were dozens of cop cars out there because they were going to be sure that nothing went wrong. My respectable presence did nothing to assure them. o U's hard to shock me. I guess I've been open to change all my life ... If only we were educated to embrace change, we would be so much happier and, in my estimation, more creative as we go about our own lives. Joe Uris ('67, '71 MA, '81 Ph.D.) Then: Student Body President Now: Instructor, Clackamas Community College PSU Perspective, Summer 1986 / page 11
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