The backlash was instantaneous.
In Ann Arbor, Harlan Hatcher, president of the University, said: “There is a time and place for making protests, but canceling classes is certainly not an acceptable one.”
The influential U-M regent Frederick C. Matthaei said: “They get their living from the taxpayer. They have no license to abrogate their duties. They are robbing the payroll!”
On the floor of the Michigan Senate, which called on Hatcher to discipline the organizers, Senator Terry L. Troutt, a Democrat from Romulus, declared: “They should be given a one-way ticket to the University of Hanoi in Vietnam.”
Governor George Romney, a likely candidate for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, said: “This is about the worst type of example professors could give to their students.”
Bill Gamson stood his ground. “We respect the governor’s feelings and the state legislature’s,” he said. “But in the end, we have to answer to our consciences and meet our responsibilities to students, University, and country.”
Still, the heat was intense. There was opposition on the faculty, too. Even professors who shared the planners’ outrage about Vietnam were uneasy about a strike. Some asked: Why strike against the University when the target was the Johnson administration? Why deprive students of their education because of professors’ private political views?
The planners were especially dismayed when Kenneth Boulding, a revered senior economist and lifelong pacifist, refused to sign the strike pledge. “I am in complete sympathy with their objectives,” he told The Michigan Daily, “but I have great reservations about the means.” He said everyone would be talking about whether it was right for professors to strike, and no one would be talking about U.S. bombs falling on the North Vietnamese.
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