George Washington University - Cherry Tree Yearbook (Washington, DC)

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I fU ‘The Movement’ was a tag that dominated much of American thinking both on and off campus this year. Move- ment suggests momentum and action. Yet the threads of the action were not all political and revolutionary as one might suppose from the year’s engaging title. Difficult to portray, difficult to conceptualize, difficult to verbalize, the various movements drew all the threads and all the people into a changing mass. Ranging from Vietnam to the election, and from basketball to Greek Week, most students at GW ‘gave a damn’, if only for a diversion. Two occurences will probably stick out when one remembers 1968-69 at GW: November 5 brought the Nixon victory and the riots on ‘G’ Street; December 16 brought The Hatchet which told us to go home and get over the flu. Nationally, Vietnam dominated our thoughts. The draft calls were going down, then up. The peace talks would begin only to bog down in the diplomatic haggling over the shape of a table. Two political conventions, utterly polar in atmosphere, suggested the right-wing reaction that would prove itself at the time of the election. And for Christmas, we went to the moon, hopefully overshadowing some of the less pleasant bits of history made in 1968. On campus, construction burgeoned as the new Student Center and a classroom building moved rapidly to completion. The Colonials began with a winning streak; we hoped for a chance at the Southern Conference champion- ship. The discrimination issue moved to its solution and was replaced in Hatchet headlines by Flash, the controversy over the bookstore, the Day of Dialogue, and Jim Knicelv’s resignation from the presidency of the Student Council. Amidst all this, some of us kept on studying, talking, or just walking and thinking. We learned from the past; we participated in the present. And we contemplated the future.