Due out this summer from Palgrave Macmillan, Radicals, Rhetoric and the War: The University of Nevada in the Wake of Kent State by Brad Lucas, English assistant professor, is already generating positive buzz. Though the book details an event that occurred at the University of Nevada, Reno more than 35 years ago, it seemed especially timely this spring as students locally and nationally took to the streets in protest of immigration law changes.

Radicals, Rhetoric and the War spotlights a “little-known” campus anti-war protest at UNR following the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and campus protests at Kent State University where National Guardsmen killed four people and wounded nine others.

“Comparatively, the protest was tiny but nearly violent, and the consequent firing of a tenured English professor makes it a case study about academic freedom and the Vietnam era,” said Lucas, who began working on the project in 1998 while he was a doctoral student at UNR.

Though UNR’s only significant war protest, its repercussions reverberated for years.

How do the events at UNR 36 years ago apply now?
Students and faculty back then were frustrated by institutions that turned a deaf ear to human concerns, and those frustrations turned to action when our leaders became arrogant and more cavalier in their agendas. I think there’s a growing sense of frustration today with the current state of our political institutions — our low voter turnout is a testament to this. And you don’t have to look far back in history to see that the rhetoric of immigration reform, the attempt to hermetically seal borders, is a big step in any government’s ideological shift.

What can it apply to the vital issues of culture and diversity on today’s campus?
One of the biggest myths about the 1960s era was the predominance of the anti-war movement. Granted, the war in Vietnam was of huge concern, but most of the actual campus protests were focused on racial discrimination and student rights. In several cases, the anti-war demonstrations didn’t catch fire until an anti-racism protest had sparked attention. So these issues have not gone away, and that’s important to remember, especially when folks say that everything was fixed in the 1960s, or that it was only hippies and Black Panthers making all the fuss.

How can university administrators be more proactive?
Dialogue, dialogue and dialogue. The UNR president was trained in rhetoric, and not in the sense of the ‘mere’ or ‘empty’ sense of the term. He was trained in group communication, in rapport and audience. Immediately after the anti-war protest, he called all of his deans and faculty together and told them to get out of their offices and talk to students. He pushed them all to raise good questions, get students talking and listen to them. After all, you can’t put out the fires that fuel a social movement — the best you can do is redirect the energy into productive directions.

What is the role of rhetoric in the way we shape and remember events?
Most people think of rhetoric in terms of political double-talk or ‘spin,’ but rhetoric is one of the oldest areas of study and practice because it attends to the power of language and persuasion. Without language we have no memories, and any historian will tell you that history is constantly being negotiated, argued and refined. The rhetorical strategies of our leaders and our media machines shape not only how we think about the present, but how we recall the past, so I’d argue that rhetoric is the way we shape and remember events.