The murder spree was effective, to say the least: It delayed W&M’s reopening for several decades, and destroyed a large part of the town of Williamsburg.
The present-day W&M student protest has little in common with the first; today, most of the student body here is composed of children of the comfortable Fairfax, Virginia suburbs and the affluent neighborhoods surrounding Washington, D.C. W&M has a proudly successful business school, an elite pre-med major, respected English, history, and religion departments, and a popular international-relations program. The students here are quiet, focused, mostly traditionalist, and politically apathetic.
They are also in uproar. Earlier this month was fraught with demonstrations and waving banners, propaganda and megaphones, painted faces and burnt American flags.
Nixon's Hit Man
It all started on Saturday, when W&M celebrated Charter Day – the annual ceremony marking the date King William III and Queen Mary II signed the royal commission for the college, as a place of “learning and spiritual instruction,” in 1693. Charter Day is also the date when a new chancellor is installed at the college — it’s a figurehead position for the most part, but still an important one. George Washington was the school’s first American chancellor. After GW were John Tyler, Henry Compton, Warren Burger, and, most recently, Lady Margaret Thatcher.
When word came last semester that Dr. Henry Kissinger had graciously accepted the chancellorship, the powers that be could not have been more delighted. Kissinger is everything the school could want in a figurehead — someone with celebrity appeal, an international focus, and — most important of all — a ready network of political and business connections. W&M is currently $1.1 million in the hole (a combination of Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore’s increasingly demanding car-tax plan and unexpected sky-high heating costs), and needs all the help it can get in that department.
But on Saturday, the campus got a glimpse of the other side of Kissinger as chancellor. In the middle of the Charter Day ceremony, after Kissinger helped present honorary awards to several visitors, including an honorary degree for former U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, a group of about 50 students rose in the front of the auditorium, yelling and screaming into megaphones, “Not my chancellor! Not my chancellor!” The group nearest the front of the stage, all seniors dressed in caps and gowns, held up a white sheet on posts painted with the message, “Kissinger Kills” in crimson paint. Others stood up from their positions around the auditorium, brandishing signs reading “Ban Pinochet,” “Fraud,” and “Nixon’s Hit Man.”
Tense Atmosphere
President Timothy Sullivan, who had just finished introducing Kissinger, leapt to the microphone and tried to seize control the situation, to no avail. The audience, made up of nearly 5,000 alumni and students, began to loudly boo the protesters; some tossed verbal arguments back and forth, and a scuffle broke out in some of the lower seats.
Finally, Sullivan bellowed into the mic, “There are a lot more people here who would like to hear what this man has to say, and respect this occasion.” The audience rose to its feet, drowning out the protestors with sustained applause. Sullivan, encouraged, said “That’s right. They’re not William and Mary. You are.”
The protesters slowly filed out, except for a few that had to be carried out by security officers. They took up positions outside William & Mary Hall, where they chanted, painted slogans on an American flag, and waved signs for the duration of the ceremony, before making a walking circuit of the campus, castigating any unfortunate alumni or faculty members they spotted. They posted leaflets and posters with a rather twisted Kissinger caricature and slogans that read “War Criminal” and “Chancellor = Murderer.” Some even threw rocks at the president’s private residence.
For his part, Kissinger was unruffled. “Thank you for your warm welcome,” Kissinger told the remaining audience in his lumbering accent. “I have heard that you do this for all of your chancellors.”
Since Charter Day’s passing, the protests have died down, but the tense atmosphere remains. Students on opposite sides of the issue have started fights in the computer labs, and filled the normally calm college paper op-ed pages with rhetoric and fire-and-brimstone talk.
The anti-Kissinger forces are still alive and well, though, mostly because the entire demonstration was an outgrowth of a previously existing group – one of the environmentalist organizations on campus, headed up by a current candidate for Student Body President, one Peter Maybarduk. It’s the same group of ardent leftists that blanketed the campus with oversize Nader-Laduke signs last November. They’ve got the tactics of student protest down pat; Maybarduk learned more than a few tricks at the national conventions last year.
Chic Radicalism
Before Kissinger had even arrived, the group had grabbed up press and campus attention by inviting journalist Christopher Hitchens to campus – he of the recent Harper’s Magazine hatchet job that labeled Kissinger a “war criminal” and accused the Nobel Peace Prize winner undermined peace talks in Vietnam. They’ve organized marches and 60s reminiscent “teach-ins” with sympathetic faculty, initiated an enormous influx of literature and glossy bulletins, and even passed out a plethora of bright red “Kissinger Kills” buttons. Students arrive to their classes with their faces painted like corpses and wearing white t-shirts with “Kissinger Victim #34,256” penned on the front.
This quiet southern public ivy seems more like Berkeley every day.
However, it is unlikely that the dissidents can sustain their cause for much longer, for several reasons. First, the protesters have been unable to convince any significant number of college alumni or faculty to join their cause, mostly because their abrasive tactics do not mesh well with a love of alma mater. Secondly, the vast majority of students support Kissinger as chancellor, and were extremely embarrassed by the Charter Day demonstrations and subsequent protests which dominated local press coverage. The bellicosity of the protestors turned many undecided students into the anti-anti-Kissinger camp, including the editorial staff of the student newspaper, which had previously given frequent voice to Maybarduk’s leftist opinions.
Finally, and most importantly, Maybarduk’s followers seem completely ignorant of the fact that the W&M administration has no ability to rescind Kissinger’s chancellorship – that power lies solely with the College Board of Visitors, a group of businessmen and bureaucrats who reside in Richmond, not Williamsburg. In other words, protesting in front of the President’s house accomplishes nothing of substance. Nothing, that is, except building up support for Maybarduk’s presidential candidacy. The student elections, after all, are just days away.
Despite the fact that these latest protests have a healthy group of 60s-era Nixonian bogeymen as their targets, it’s doubtful that the “Kissinger Kills” buttons will be around for much longer. Most of the students who raised signs and yelled into megaphones on Charter Day were theater majors, not international-relations buffs. Most hadn’t even heard of Kissinger, Chile, or Pinochet prior to Maybarduk's fliers and Hitchens's soliloquy. Maybarduk may have learned some tactics in Los Angeles last summer, but he missed the biggest lesson of them all: that protest for the sake of protest is nothing more than self-flagellation, demonstration without heart, falling prey to the cheap lure of chic radicalism. The students who rose on Charter Day have vocally likened themselves to 60s radicals – but like it or not, when they go home to Fairfax for Spring Break, they’ll still be driving SUVs.
(This article can also be found on National Review Online.)
