The Slate Reports: Student Culture at Shippensburg State College, 1960-1969

Bob Dylan's words defined a generation. Violence, politics, and societal changes characterized the turbulent 1960s in the United States. American culture evolved drastically during this decade, and these changes appeared most dramatically on college campuses throughout the nation. Today, when anyone mentions students and the 1960s, they tend to think of student protests against the Vietnam War. However, the majority of schools and students did not participate whole-heartedly in the anti-war movement despite the impression given by the popular media. There were other issues of concern to students besides this divisive conflict. Advocating for less restrictive rules governing female students was one of the topics being debated at Shippensburg State College (SSC). This paper is not proposing that these more prominent national issues that garnered attention at other campuses, such as Berkeley or Pennsylvania State University, did not occur at Shippensburg, but there was not the consistent protesting and clashes with the school's administration. However, Shippensburg students reflected the changes occurring in student culture at campuses nationwide in their desire for student's rights and their discussion of national issues like race and the Vietnam War.

This paper offers a new view of student culture at American schools in the 1960s, because it looks at a small state school in Pennsylvania rather than the larger and better-known schools such as Penn State or elite schools such as Harvard. Regional institutions similar to Shippensburg dot Pennsylvania and the rest of the country, but do not enjoy the status among scholars that schools such as Berkeley or Columbia do. Institutions such as SSC enrolled a relatively small student body and were usually located in areas far from urban centers. However, they may well be more representative of the country and student culture at the time. Further investigation into other schools like Shippensburg could produce evidence to support this hypothesis, but the scope of this paper is limited to a discussion of student culture at SSC rather than a more representative view of national student culture.  

To present this new look at American schools, a variety of sources will be utilized to analyze student culture at SSC. The school newspaper, The Slate, will provide the bulk of this paper's information for various reasons. The stories, articles, and editorials comment on the weekly and daily happenings on SSC's campus as a whole. The Slate's material was written by its student staff, as well as by other Shippensburg students, and thus these stories illustrated the important issues affecting the student body as a group and on an individual basis.

Despite The Slate's usefulness, it poses a number of interpretive problems as a source. First, there was no background information given on the writers who authored the articles and other pieces in the paper; thus, political, socioeconomic, and educational sympathies were not known. This limited the interpretation of the feelings and motives of the writers. It would be impractical to try to trace the personal information of The Slate's writers so many years later. Secondly, the newspaper gives no explanation as to why some campus issues were reported in the paper while others were not. Editors never gave explanations for including a column or an editorial. They also failed to indicate how many editorials were submitted to the newspaper's staff. Finally, The Slate at the time emphasized the coverage of on-campus events, with very little attention paid to national news. By the end of the decade, The Slate devoted more space to the discussion of national news.

The scholarship of Troy Zimmer, professor of Sociology at California State University, Fullerton, offers important interpretive insights into utilizing student newspapers as primary sources. Though he conducted his study in 1973, Zimmer's findings correlate effectively to those revealed in The Slate of the 1960s. College newspapers helped connect the faculty, students, and administration by reporting on the college's events. The majority of college newspaper editors were male students. These editors felt compelled to cover all topics revolving around students' opinions, students' rights, and student government. Zimmer also noted that editors who were politically conservative reported less on politics and world events compared to politically liberal editors. This political characterization is evident in the reporting of The Slate during the 1960s. These editors also "assigned higher priority for campus newspapers to be watchdogs of students' rights." Since administrators supported the role that campus newspapers played in promoting a sense of satisfaction within the student body, they acquiesced to the editors' choices of articles and stories and did not interfere with the newspaper. 

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