One day after four students were shot and killed by the Ohio National Guard during a protest at Kent State University, the students of Syracuse University went on strike and shut down the campus. It came on May 5, 1970, as a part of a nationwide student protest of the Vietnam War.

‘To have a school like Syracuse, which had no real reputation for being a scene of great student upheaval – like Berkeley, like Wisconsin, like other places – to have what we had here was really remarkable,’ said David Bennett, a professor of history who was on campus as an associate professor at the time.

In just his 10th month as chancellor at SU, John Corbally faced the most significant act of student unrest in school history.

For nearly a week, all of the road entrances to campus were blocked off by barbed wire, broken desks, trash cans, tree limbs and other debris, said former SU students who witnessed the protests. ‘Shut it down’ and ‘strike’ were spray painted on buildings across campus.

A group of students held a sit-in at the Administration Building and installed a loudspeaker that blared from the side of the building, Bennett said. They called it ‘Radio Free Syracuse.’

Violence, it seemed, was inevitable.

‘Back then, there was great animosity between police and students,’ said Steve Tober, then a junior and president of Booth Residence Hall.

But the violence never came. Corbally, working with Syracuse city Police Chief Thomas Sardino, allowed the strike to run its course and the students to demonstrate peacefully. On May 11, he canceled the last six weeks of classes and let students leave if they wanted to, without closing the campus.

‘Syracuse basically escaped with no physical injury to people, very little physical property damage, because Corbally let it play out as opposed to try to enforce some sort of martial law or discipline,’ said Bob Tembeckjian, then a sophomore and spokesman of the student strike coalition.

John Corbally was chancellor at SU from 1969 to 1971 – only 18 months and not even four full semesters. There are no SU buildings named after him, no dormitories or dining halls bearing his name, no student centers or gymnasiums in his honor.

But Corbally navigated the school through some of its most turbulent times – from the strike in the spring of 1970 to the civil rights crisis on the football team the next fall – all before abruptly leaving to become chancellor at the University of Illinois.

The newcomer

Corbally was 44 years old when he left his post as provost at Ohio State University to become chancellor at SU in 1969. The school’s administration saw him as the young man who would lead the institution in its centennial celebration the following year, said Mary O’Brien, assistant university archivist at SU.

Corbally’s relationship with students would starkly differ from that of his predecessor William Tolley.

Tober described Corbally as a ‘breath of fresh air,’ someone who wanted to reach out to the students. He was available to talk, whereas Tolley had been inaccessible, and accommodating where Tolley had been rigid.

Corbally was a change of pace from Tolley, Bennett said.

‘He represented a very different style of leadership than we had experienced at Syracuse for a generation under Tolley,’ Bennett said. ‘He was more youthful, more flexible at that point in his career than Tolley had appeared in the last couple of years, more au courant with political and social sensibilities during the tumultuous years of the ’60s.’

What Corbally inherited from Tolley, however, was a mess.

The academic and economic infrastructure in place was no longer capable of handling the costs of Tolley’s aggressive campus expansion, O’Brien said. Corbally outlined plans for reform and was beginning to implement them before he left.

‘Remember, he was just here for 18 months,’ O’Brien said. ‘It’s kind of hard to come up with the plan, and then initiate the plan and then get the plan really started when you’re only here for 18 months.’

The level of student unrest was also extremely high.

SU students, buoyed by David Ifshin, the charismatic president of the Student Government, and other student leaders, had begun to speak out about the paternal treatment of students, known as ‘in loco parentis,’ and against the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War.

‘We had things called parietal hours where we couldn’t even have members of the opposite sex in our rooms after midnight,’ Tober said. ‘You had to always have one foot on the floor when you were sitting on the bed. You had to have the door open.’

By the time Corbally took office in the fall of 1969, the turmoil had reached a boiling point.

Tober had been Ifshin’s campaign manager during his election for president in the spring of ’69. When he returned to campus the next fall, Tober discovered Ifshin had radicalized and moved away from his more moderate election stances. Tober resigned soon after.

‘I remember Ifshin saying to me, ‘Tober, you’re the moderate, so you’re going to be the liason with Corbally,” Tober said. ‘And I realized immediately what that meant. What that meant was David wasn’t going to be working with John Corbally. If I was the moderate, that meant that David Ifshin had other ideas in mind.’

The strike

On April 30, 1970, the same night President Richard Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia to the American public, John Corbally was ceremonially inaugurated, though he had been chancellor at SU since the fall.

He was just five days away from a massive student protest.

Ifshin and Corbally had already clashed during the semester about the role of Reserve Officers’ Training Corps on campus, even engaging in a public debate on the subject. Following Nixon’s announcement, Ifshin, Tembeckjian and other campus leaders helped schedule a large-scale protest.

‘The overall purpose was to make a national statement that the student population of the country, as much as we could quantify it, was opposed to the war and wanted it to stop and was willing to interrupt business as usual in order to get the attention of public policy makers,’ Tembeckjian said.

On May 4, a crowd of 3,000 gathered in the Quad to protest – among other things – the war in Vietnam and the university’s involvement in it.

As the rally went on, however, news came in from the Midwest: shots had been fired during a similar protest at Kent State.

‘You could see the shock wave go over the crowd,’ Tembeckjian said. ‘It was visible throughout the 3,000 people standing on the Quad.’

Later that night, the students organized a strike, using the basement of Hendricks Chapel as a sort of command center, Tembeckjian said. A coalition of about 25 students was formed – of which he was the spokesman. There were newsletters and fliers passed around campus to spread the message to other students.

Soon after, the roads were barricaded. Other schools, like Columbia University, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Maryland, had experienced similar situations like this. They all ended in altercations between students and police.

‘When the police came, there were violent confrontations,’ said Bennett, regarding other schools’ protests. ‘And it was as a result of these violent confrontations that people were hurt, that there was widespread turmoil on the campus and that ultimately many CEOs or college presidents or chancellors lost their jobs. John Corbally was shrewd enough not to do that.’

Corbally and police Chief Sardino were smart in allowing the strike to run its course, Bennett said. When the group of students occupied the Administration Building and called for the university to help free jailed Black Panther Bobby Seale, Corbally simply moved his office out of the building and into the basement of Sims Hall.

The strike ended that Monday, May 11, coinciding with the cancellation of classes.

Tober remembered Corbally meeting with a group of students at Gifford Auditorium to explain the situation.

‘We could stay on the campus or we could leave,’ Tober said. ‘And he wanted us to remain peaceful and he wanted us to understand that the students who were protesting the war in Vietnam had the support or at least the understanding of the administration of Syracuse University.’

There was still activity on campus afterward, Bennett said. Student and faculty organized workshops and teach-ins were run.

‘It was a time of great intellectual excitement, where students and faculty who were serious about debating public issues, who were concerned about what America was doing and wanted to talk about it or had an opportunity to do that,’ Bennett said.

The centennial commencement would be held some weeks later, O’Brien said.

In the end, Corbally’s decision to let the strike continue peacefully was wise, Tembeckjian said. When school reconvened the next fall, the fervor had passed.

‘When everybody returned, the cohesiveness of the moment was over,’ he said.

The walkout

While one storm of unrest had been quelled, another was brewing across campus at Manley Field House.

Nine Black football players walked out of spring practice on April 17, 1970, in protest of what they felt was unfair treatment of black athletes by the SU Athletic Department and head football coach Floyd ‘Ben’ Schwartzwalder. The players demanded equal support for black players and the hiring of a black assistant coach.

In John Corbally, they found a leader willing to listen to their cause. Halfback Greg Allen, one of the players who walked out, met with Corbally previously to discuss creating a black studies program at SU and found him to be progressive and fair-minded, he said.

‘The university really wasn’t in tune with, I’ll say, what was going on outside of the campus relative to the civil rights era and what was going on,’ Allen said. ‘Now Corbally understood that and felt the need to bring Syracuse in focus with what was going on, or what should be going on or what a campus should look like.’

Though Corbally did attempt to reinstate the players, when it became clear that certain white members of the team would not welcome them back, the group chose to continue their boycott.

The nine men never played football at SU again.

Still, Corbally assembled a commission that September to investigate the issue of racism in the athletic department. In December, the 12-member commission returned with their findings.

‘Racism in the Syracuse University Athletic Department is real, chronic, largely unintentional, and sustained and complicated unwittingly by many modes of behavior common in American athletics and long-standing at Syracuse University,’ the report stated.

While Corbally was beginning to reform the athletic department, he also ensured that the striking players would be able to stay enrolled at SU – even if they did not play football.

‘I give him credit for being willing to take that risk and look at something in a way of ‘I want to be fair, there is something wrong, I want to correct it,” Allen said. ‘I give him credit for that. I also give him credit during this whole time period, he made sure that we were not expelled from school, that we could continue our education through all of this.’

The departure

Corbally would leave SU soon after. Illinois offered him a position as chancellor that winter and he accepted. He left SU in March of 1971 without finishing out the spring semester. He was replaced by Melvin Eggers, the vice chancellor and provost at the time.

Bennett said while he could not speak for Corbally’s motives for leaving, a move back to a public institution fit his background better than the private school structure of SU.

‘This was a guy who had been a provost at a Big Ten school and when offered an opportunity to become a chief executive at a Big Ten school, it made perfect sense,’ Bennett said.

Corbally’s legacy is of a man who during a brief tenure, kept a volatile situation in check, while taking steps forward to thrust the university into modern times.

‘He did not try to stand in the door of progress as the student movement and the assault on ‘in loco parentis’ was changing the student culture and university arrangements here as it was happening all over the country,’ Bennett said. ‘That was his great contribution.’

Published on March 5, 2007 at 12:00 pm