Kent State and Berkeley: Revolt and Re-appropriation of the Multiversity in the Spring of 1970

During the sixties and seventies, the American university underwent a radical transformation, forever altering the relationship between the students and the administration. This paper seeks to examine the relationship between students and the university at two large state universities, Berkeley and Kent State, and to examine how students at both institutions sought to reaffirm their power and re-appropriate the university in an increasingly depersonalized educational setting. The paper, which focuses on the spring of 1970 and the nation-wide student uprisings, looks at how student activists had both schools, utilized protests, writings, and other means to try and wrest power from the administration and to return the university to the ideal of old. By attempting this, students were consciously subverting the dominant norms and standards set by the faceless multiversity of the time. In this work, which focuses almost exclusively on student produced literature from the period, the author examines the extent to which the students succeeded, and the ways in which they ultimately failed in attempting to permanently alter the university