The Spring of '71:
Ten Weeks that
Shook the Campus

Tuesday, March 9: After several months of unfruitful talks with the administration over liberalizing visitation rules, the Men’s Residence Council declares that all men’s dorms are open to visitation noon to curfew, seven days a week. University policy at the time restricts visitation to weekends.

Monday, March 29: The Student Government Association affirms the MRC’s decision.

Tuesday morning, March 30: The MRC’s Rob Luisana and Sue Sterling are suspended from school after she accompanies him into Tyler Residence Hall.

Tuesday afternoon, March 30: Hundreds of students gather in front of the Chancellor’s House, chanting “Visitation now!” and “We want Leo!” Rocks are thrown. The crowd marches through several residence halls and grows to an estimated 2,000 students. When they can’t disperse the crowd, campus police call for backup. City, county and state police arrive, some wearing riot gear. About 35 students are arrested for disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, failing to disperse and other charges.

Tuesday evening, March 30: The campus radio station broadcasts appeals for help raising the $200 bail for each student arrested, and all are out of jail by early next morning.

Wednesday, March 31: Chancellor Leo Jenkins announces that all students arrested will be suspended; he cancels all visitation privileges. About 3,000 students gather on the mall to organize a boycott of downtown merchants. The boycott is to begin the following Monday. Four large department stores are to be picketed.

Thursday, April 1: The Fountainhead prints many letters to the editor from students about the protests, including one written by Bill Schell that concludes: “It is my opinion that [the educational process] will not be disrupted or shattered by open dorms. It will just be a better place to live. F**k you, Leo.”

Friday, April 2: Assistant Dean of Men C.C. Rowe informs Schell and Fountainhead Editor Robert Thonen that they are being charged with using insulting and abusive language.

Monday, April 5: About 500 students march through downtown as the boycott begins. New SGA President Bob Whitley announces that he wants to remove all SGA deposits from the local branch of Wachovia Bank because Jenkins sits on the bank board. He says buses have been arranged to take students to nearby Pitt Plaza for shopping.

Wednesday, April 21: Thonen files suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina seeking a restraining order preventing the university from taking any action against him.

Monday, April 26: The Board of Trustees finds Schell guilty and gives him a suspended sentence.
Tuesday, May 11: At his hearing, Thonen criticizes trustees for violating students’ free speech and for treating them “as less than Americans.” The trustees find Thonen guilty of using “abusive language toward the president of the university,” and suspends him indefinitely.

Monday, May 24: Judge John Larkins of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina orders the university to readmit Thonen.
Source: University Archives
Newspaper articles chronicling these events are can be read at the University Archives web site.



Where are they now?

Bob Whitley ’72, who was SGA president that spring of 1971, is a senior partner in the Whitley, Rodgman & Whitley law firm in Kinston.

Rob Luisana ’74, the MRC leader who was elected SGA president the following year, is managing partner of Pilot Financial Brokerage in Greensboro. “I do remember that for a short time the campus and the students came together to change something that we thought was wrong. Being involved in that time period was an education in every way. I’m glad that I was involved and, looking back, especially happy that no one was hurt or injured during any of the demonstrations.”

Henry Gorham ’71, the SGA Attorney General who prosecuted Thonen before the University Board, is an attorney in Raleigh with the firm of Teague Campbell Dennis & Gorham.

Bill Schell, who wrote the letter to the editor that got Thonen expelled, dropped out of sight after the incident. The university has no information on his whereabouts.

Rick Atkinson ’74, who was the student public defender for Thonen and Schell during hearings before the University Board and was elected SGA vice president the next year, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former editor at the Washington Post. “Having been a newspaper man myself for more than 20 years, I can now see that Thonen was a good editor. He provided the students with a voice that was loud and clear.”




Ken Finch ’70, the Fountainhead artist who was threatened with suspension over his wickedly satiric cartoons (above), is an artist living in Olympia, Wash. “For about two years I felt energized by the ability to express myself and have people be receptive to that expression. Students were actually reading the paper, where before it was ignored. We were reflecting big changes in how students felt about lifestyle issues at a time when it just seemed something had to give. I remember circulating a petition to allow women students to wear shorts in class, if you can believe it.”

Ken Hammond ’73 ’84 ’85, the student public defender who represented Thonen and Schell, stayed at ECU after graduation and served in several roles in student affairs. He’s now pastor of Union Baptist Church in Durham. “After graduation I joined the staff at Mendenhall Student Center. MSC was one of the units under the dean of students. I had numerous encounters with Dr. Tucker and in one of those encounters he told me that the university was wrong for expelling Rob.”

Cindy Maultsby Burt ’73, who organized the boycott, is the ergonomics program coordinator at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. “I have very clear memories of this time. I remember the parade, the boycott, the ‘panty raid’ riot, being arrested in the men’s dorm. We collected nickels from students on campus. A group of students parked cars at the meters and rotated them, so no one could park downtown to shop. It was our effort to change the world (at least Greenville) through student power. We wanted local businesses to support us in our efforts to have visitation in the dorms. We thought we could get their attention by hurting their pocketbook. A nickel wouldn’t do much these days, would it? I still have the letter the dean sent to my parents saying I had applied for a permit to lead a parade that could end in violence. I had Bob publish it in the paper, which didn’t help matters for him. It was a heady time; the first time in my life I stood up for something I really believed in. In the end, I became somewhat disenfranchised, and the next year went to school in Bonn, Germany (the ECU program). Ironically, that ended up being one of the greatest times of my life. Bob was one my mentors. He took the hit for all of us. It’s funny. I can’t believe so many of these people became lawyers. I thought most of us were hippies back then.”

Robert Thonen was an unlikely figure to be at center stage during the protests over student rights that shook East Carolina 35 years ago.

He was the straight-arrow student who got himself kicked out of college for refusing to compromise on principle, the Green Beret veteran of Vietnam who defended the right of students to challenge authority. He was the darling of the American Civil Liberties Union who went on to a long career in the Defense Department.

He was the editor of the Fountainhead student newspaper expelled from school that tumultuous spring of 1971 for knowingly publishing the famous letter to the editor whose concluding sentence advised then-Chancellor Leo Jenkins, “F**k you, Leo.”

“Those were exciting times. It was exciting just to wake up in the morning,” says Thonen, who now lives in coastal Carteret County. “Looking back, it shaped my life.”

The incident also shaped constitutional law. The ACLU’s successful challenge to Thonen’s expulsion became the watershed Thonen v. Jenkins case decided by the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. It was among the first times a court had ruled that college newspapers merit nearly the same free-speech rights as the commercial press.

Student activism was at a fever pitch on campuses across the nation in the late 1960s and early ’70s. East Carolina had seen its share of mostly-peaceful protests over the Vietnam War, Kent State and other controversies. But it was visitation policy—the administration’s rules on when male and female students could visit in each other’s dorm rooms—that set passions ablaze.

At the time, visitation was restricted to noon to midnight, Friday and Saturday, and even sophomores were required to live in dorms. While those rules seem strict by today’s standards, they were similar to ones enforced at many campuses across the state.

Student groups wanted those rules loosened and the administration promised some changes. When months went by without any action, the student-led Men’s Residence Council rebelled by adopting its own rules allowing visitation seven days a week. A leader of the MRC, Rob Luisana, decided to test the new rules by inviting his girlfriend, Susan Sterling, to visit his dorm on a Monday afternoon, and both were suspended. In a confusing series of events, the incident exploded into a raucous demonstration by 2,000 students at which police in riot gear arrested 35 students. An even larger demonstration occurred the next day  at which a boycott of downtown merchants was organized.

Top: SGA President Bob Whitley speaks to about 3,000 students gathered on the mall to plan a boycott.

Middle: Chancellor Leo Jenkins addresses another crowd of protesters.

Above: Threatened with suspension over his irreverent cartoons, Ken Finch (left) was defended by Rick Atkinson and Rob Lusiana.

Students vented their anger in dozens of strident letters to the editor of the student newspaper. They all landed on Thonen’s desk.

“The funny thing was I had never intended to be the editor. I went to the paper as the business manager because that was the only paying job they had. I was going to college on scholarships, fellowships and grants, and I needed a paying job to make ends meet. But the student who was editor left school suddenly, and the Publications Board (a group of faculty and students responsible for student media) offered me the position.

“When I first met with the Publications Board about the letters we were getting, I told them how I felt about not censoring them,” recalls Thonen, who had worked as an intern the previous summer at Harper’s magazine. “I told them that personally I was opposed to four-letter words. But I said I believed that as long as someone was expressing a valid and legal viewpoint and otherwise conforms to our rules on letters to the editor, then we ought to print them. And they agreed.”

Thonen, who had volunteered for the Army out of high school and served two years in Vietnam before enrolling at ECU, added more pages to the paper to make room for all the letters. He had to increase the number of copies printed to accommodate demand. The Fountainhead, later renamed the East Carolinian, became a must-read around town.

Among the many letters to the editor included in the April 1, 1971, issue of the paper was one from a student named Bill Schell calling for liberalized visitation rules. His letter’s last sentence read: “It is my opinion that (the educational process) will not be disrupted or shattered by open dorms. It will just be a better place to live.” Schell closed his letter with a Bronx Cheer for the chancellor.

That was the last straw for the administration, which viewed the verbal assault on Jenkins, a figure of near mythic proportions, as an attack on everything the university stood for. Something had to be done. The next day, the assistant dean of men contacted Thonen and Schell and advised them they were being charged with insulting the chancellor. Both were ordered to appear before the University Board, a disciplinary body composed of faculty and a few students, which found them guilty.

“I went to the ACLU and said I have no money and they took the case,” says Thonen. “We won in U.S. District Court but the state appealed. Then the case went up to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, where we also won, but it took years.” In its May 29, 1975, ruling, the appeals court awarded Thonen and Schell $100 each in damages, plus attorney’s fees of $3,429.60.

The appeals court decision said “the mere disseminations of ideas—no matter how offensive to good taste—on a state university campus may not be shut off in the name alone of ‘conventions of decency.’ These plaintiffs rights of freedom of speech and expression are constitutionally protected.”
“The upshot was the court made the school readmit me, but I had lost all my scholarships and loans. So for the next few years I would go to school for a while and then work for a while. I didn’t graduate until 1977.”

During one of those breaks from classes, Thonen was working as a brick mason on the new Leo Jenkins Fine Arts Center. “One day I looked down and there stood the chancellor, watching the building go up. I walked up to him and introduced myself. And you know, he was very nice to me. He had no animosity, seemed apologetic.”

Thonen said Jenkins told him he in fact had a personal appreciation for free speech, having been sued a couple of years earlier by a faculty member for permitting the bookstore to sell The Essential Lenny Bruce, which some considered obscene.

Thonen tried newspaper work after college but soon accepted a job in the Defense Department. “I would go on job interviews but things usually went downhill after they asked me if I had ever been arrested. The Army didn’t have a problem with that. They saw I was a Vietnam veteran and a Green Beret, and that was good enough for them.”

He ultimately became a senior member on the staff of the Secretary of the Army and remained there for two decades until a work-related accident forced him to retire on disability a few years ago.

Thonen isn’t bitter toward anyone and has remained close to the university as a member of the Friends of Joyner Library. He has only one regret. “The one thing that still bothers me is that the whole issue had to be precipitated over a four-letter word.”

But the thrill of living through a watershed period in ECU’s history still resonates. “I think it was an incredible education and I feel very privileged. It was that way for an awful lot of people around ECU at that time. It caused you to look at issues and to decide what you thought about it. You couldn’t just walk away from it. Kids these days can just walk away from issues.”