Headmaster Fred Torrey titled his July 1970 Loomis Bulletin column, “Ventilating the Ivory Tower.” National and world events during that school year had made evident deep social, economic, and racial divides in the United States alongside growing distrust in the American government. Torrey wrote, “[t]here was much with us in our ivory tower. My Lai, the Chicago trial, October 15^th, Earth Day, Cambodia, Kent State, and Jackson were part of the Loomis year because they happened. Their messages of hate, war, distrust, violence, racism, pollution, and waste were real and demanded attention.”

Articles in The Loomis-Chaffee Log debated underlying questions of this tumultuous year: How might Loomis and Chaffee disrupt, what one Log writer called, “the image of the irresponsible student radical”? How would student activism, undertaken in the school environment, be made meaningful?

The Log reported on student engagement throughout the year: two faculty-led student trips to Washington, D.C., and a meeting with Secretary of Labor, George Shultz ’38; The National Day of Moratorium on October 15, 1969 during which over a 13-hour period, faculty and students read aloud in the Quad approximately 40,000 names of Americans killed in the Vietnam War and distributed anti-war information throughout Windsor; a symposium held on the first-ever Earth Day in April 1970, attended by students from 21 schools, featuring speakers, discussions, and hands-on work about pressing environmental issues; and Chaffee’s Black Awareness Week of student-led Chapel Talks and guest speakers fighting racial biases in Hartford’s public schools. Though few students attended off-campus protests, a handful of first-person accounts were published in The Log. Feature articles by Ken Washington ’70 and Gordon Turner ’70 gave frank perspectives on the experiences of Blacks in America and at Loomis. Opinion pieces addressed police brutality, conscientious objector status, and the US invasion of Cambodia, among many topics.

The “dissent movement” at Loomis gathered its strongest momentum during May in response to the announcement of the US invasion of Cambodia and deaths of student protesters at Kent State, Jackson State, and Augusta, Georgia. Just two days after the Kent State shootings, faculty and students gave presentations related to the war and the peace movement. The next afternoon, the faculty voted for an optional class day “for…students who…signed a petition expressing their interest in participating in the Loomis Action and Self-Education Program.” Two hundred fifty-six students signed the petition and attended workshops on the following day with “speakers on the [Black] Panthers, the state guard, local politics, civil rights, the courts, and several views on the war in Indochina.” That afternoon, “[a]bout 50 students” collected “several hundred signatures…for the immediate end of the US involvement in Southeast Asia” from Windsor residents. The Nee Room became a letter-writing space; “315 letters [in support of the peace movement] were written to ‘swing’ U.S. senators, national magazines and newspapers, and influential Loomis alumni.” Later that month, students held a strike in honor of the eight lives lost at Jackson State and Augusta; these had received far less attention in the national press. A Letter to The Log Editor written after the strike called for a school-wide “memorial day” sponsored by the Afro-American Society to honor those eight students who died at Jackson State. The Loomis administration had limited participation in the strike to Black students, and the letter writer convincingly argued that all students should have been included, because there were many “who were ignorant of the events, but…interested in finding out.”

In her letter published in the final Log of the year, faculty member Margot Torrey, endorsed students’ reactions “to the events of May…[and their] new commitment to learning and action within the democratic system.” She continued, “[t]here has been much concern on the part of adults here and elsewhere about student apathy…Now…many students are showing the desire to inform themselves and a willingness to work hard through legitimate channels to change the world that will be theirs… If the country is to find a route between anarchy and reaction we’ll all need to work together.”

That spring and into the next fall, debate continued on the role of political action and self-education at Loomis and Chaffee. One proposal, offering students working on November election political campaigns time off from athletics or classes, generated the most discussion. The Log editors echoed Mr. and Mrs. Torrey and the lived experiences of the previous year in their October 17, 1970 issue: “Politics is part of the world around us, and perhaps the subject most vitally in need of study. We can not afford to shut ourselves off.”