By the mid-1960s, the United States had begun dramatically increasing its troop presence in Vietnam. Between 1964 and 1973, the federal government drafted 2.2 million men into military service; many of them were just out of high school. The draft prompted large protests on many college campuses against the Vietnam War, which many college students saw as a Vietnamese civil war in which the U.S. had no business interfering.
“The student movement really spread via the media,” Isserman says. “Student protests were colorful, and they showed up on the evening news. And then students at other campuses took their cues from that media attention.”
The high-water mark of U.S. campus protests came in 1970, after the U.S. expanded the war effort into Cambodia. Students were also incensed by fatal shootings of students by authorities during protests at Jackson State University, in Mississippi, and Kent State University, in Ohio, where the Ohio National Guard killed four students and injured nine. (The Kent State shootings came after some protesters threw rocks at the troops and had set fire to a military training building two days earlier.)
At that time, students at nearly 900 schools took part in a coordinated strike, according to an analysis by the University of Washington. They boycotted classes, occupied campus buildings, and led protest marches.
The televised scenes of chaos at American schools, and the growing radicalization of some elements of the anti-war movement, created a significant backlash. A Gallup poll done just after the Kent State shootings found that 58 percent of respondents blamed the students for the incident.
Even so, historians say that the large-scale protests on and off campus pressured President Richard Nixon’s administration to speed up U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. The last American combat troops left the country in March 1973.
“The student anti-war movement got its message across that the Vietnam War was immoral and unwinnable,” Isserman says.
The protests had a domestic impact too. In 1971, states ratified the 26th Amendment to the Constitution, lowering the voting age to 18 from 21.
“Lowering the voting age would never have happened without the student protest movement of the 1960s,” says Cohen.