Campus News, 1966-68

Fraternity reform in general and deferred  rush in particular were the most hotly debated topics on campus our junior year (much more so than the Vietnam War). It was also front-page news when the library got its first coin-operated photocopy machine … and when Piedmont instituted nonstop flights between Roanoke and New York at a fare of $33.18 including tax each way.

Wilson Pickett cancelled his Opening Concert commitment because he just had “too much work.” He was replaced by Chuck Berry. The journalism department launched its own radio station, WLUR-FM, offering four hours of programming on weeknights. Controversy immediately erupted over whether it should play “popular” music or only classical, leading to trench warfare between Steve Saunders (“The contempt with which some of WLUR’s personnel apparently view what they smugly conceive to be the peasant tastes and vulgar sensibilities of most Washington and Lee students betrays an instability and aversion to criticism…”) and Dr. Shillington (“I suggest that Steve Saunders tune each of his seven rock-filled heads to one of the following seven rock-filled stations…”).

Coeducation began to be discussed in our senior year (as it had been, periodically, ever since World War II); the Ring-tum Phi editorialized, “Of course no one is seriously contending that W&L should, like Yale, absorb girls into its student body.” W&L got a new W&L president, Robert E.R. Huntley, the young dean of the law school. (He left 15 years later, just as coeducation was about to be adopted.) The university replaced the one computer on campus with a new model. A headline said three “pot heads” had been expelled from V.M.I.

GOP politicians traipsed to Lexington for the Mock Convention: Richard Nixon first, then Barry Goldwater, a big assortment of senators, governors and attorneys general. So did celebrity journalists (Tom Wolfe, Tom Wicker, Robert Novak). Nixon took the mock nomination, defeating Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan, with each man’s W&L total uncannily foreshadowing his actual tally at the real convention three months later.

The biggest and saddest news of our upperclass years, however, was Ed Side’s announcement that he was selling the Lyric. (It's now condominiums.)