Relive Relearn Remember ’68 40 years later, UMPI honors the year of transformation

It was a year of passion, change, death and hope.

It was 1968. It was the year of the Tet Offensive and the My Lai incident; the year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. It was the year university students all over the world reacted to events around them. There was more unrest concerning civil rights and also some steps forward in fighting discrimination.

It was a year so important that two University of Maine at Presque Isle professors, who aren’t old enough to remember all that transpired in 1968, understand how those events reverberate 40 years later.

Next week, UMPI is showcasing the politics, international events, arts, music, film and science of a seminal year in American history. The six-day event, “1968 Retrospective” opens Monday, Nov. 10, and closes the next Saturday with a daylong conference.

UMPI believes it is the only college campus in New England doing a similar commemoration.

Michael Amey is an English and education professor who specializes in medieval literature. Though his focus is centered centuries before the events of 1968, Amey, who was born in 1972, said he has always had an academic interest in some of the key happenings of the year, including the student demonstrations in France and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Meanwhile, Tomasz Herzog, an associate professor of social studies education, had 1968 on his mind even though he was just a baby that year. Herzog is from Poland, one of the European countries that saw massive student protests in 1968.

Herzog approached Amey about an examination of 1968 and the two are now serving as co-organizers.

“1968 was really a transformational year in terms of American society and global politics,” Amey said. “We started to think about how that connected to events in 2008, and we saw that things resonated with this year. Everything, from having a lot of enthusiastic young people, particularly in this election, has brought out young voters, and the issues and concerns about a war in Iraq, and issues about race and politics.”

One of the challenges Amey and Herzog had in organizing the conference was how to narrow down the year into six days.

Indeed, there’s a lot left out of the conference, but how do you include it all? The Prague Spring happened that year. The Beatles released the so-called “White Album.” The musical “Hair” opened on Broadway. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act into law.

In the spirit of the year, however, Amey said he and Herzog wanted to focus on issues and events that were important to the UMPI faculty and local community. That meant the interests and scholarship of UMPI professors and community members would determine the schedule.

Faculty members will discuss the art and film, second-wave feminism, the green revolution, scientific advances and the role of the university as they relate to 1968. Several local Vietnam veterans will take part in a roundtable discussion with UMPI president Don Zillman and University of Maine chancellor Richard Pattenaude, who are both veterans. Some students are putting together art displays.

“We wanted to try to make [the conference] not simply an academic endeavor, which wouldn’t have been in the spirit of the year, but to make it about students and the community and what our community had connected with in 1968,” Amey said.

UMPI is bringing in keynote speaker Richard Dudman, a journalist who covered American politics and the Vietnam War for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and was taken prisoner in Cambodia. Dudman now lives in Ellsworth.

The movie “Bobby,” which is about the assassination of Democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, will be screened.

The timing of the conference fits nicely with events of the last few days. Tuesday’s election of Barack Obama, the first African-American to serve as president, can be seen as fulfillment of the promise of the civil rights movement that was going strong 40 years earlier.

“It does make a great connection that way,” Amey said.

For more information, call 768-9452 or go to www.umpi.edu/1968

jbloch@bangordailynews.net

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