“Choosing to Govern Itself”: How the Protests of 1969 Shaped UChicago’s Disciplinary System
In 1967 and 1968, student protests around the Vietnam War set the stage for escalation in 1969 by both students and administration.
Vietnam and Student Activism
As the U.S. escalated its military involvement in Vietnam throughout the 1960s, the demand for military personnel increased, leading to the implementation of a draft conducted by the Selective Service System in 1969.
Student opposition to the draft and moral opposition to the Vietnam War surged amid other social movements of the 1960s, including the Civil Rights Movement and the Free Speech Movement. In the mid-’60s, UChicago students began protesting the University’s decision to publish class rank, which risked naming students with lower GPAs and exposing them to the Selective Service draft.
Student protesters carried out minor sit-ins of University buildings throughout the 1960s, including one notably led by Bernie Sanders (A.B. ’64, I-Vt.) in 1962.
In May 1966, students took over the administration building—now known as Levi Hall—in an anti-draft protest that resulted in no disciplinary action from the University. A little more than a year later, in June 1967, the University suspended 58 students for taking over the administration building in an anti-class-rank protest that month, though many of those suspensions were not carried out.
Before the June sit-in, the University Senate had also approved a resolution that recommended the University pursue disciplinary action, not excluding suspension or expulsion, in the event of more disruptive demonstrations.
University President Edward Levi initially supported summarily expelling the 58 protesters. However, faculty members including law professor Harry Kalven Jr. convinced Levi that such a move would violate the principle of due process.
“It was decided not to permit UC to become another Berkeley,” then-Associate Dean of Undergraduate Students Mark Haller said at the time. In December of 1964, thousands of Berkeley students had occupied or surrounded Sproul Hall in what became the largest demonstration organized by the Free Speech Movement, a yearlong student protest on Berkeley’s campus.
Students Criticize the Disciplinary Process
Student sit-in participants criticized UChicago for enacting what they considered to be harsher punishments due to the sit-in’s political nature. “Would the penalties have been so stiff if the sit-in had not been a political protest?” one student, Jerry Lipsch, told the Maroon at the time.
In July 1967, Haller wrote a letter to the editor in the Maroon justifying the University’s actions toward sit-in participants.
“A university can in the short run adjust to a certain number of threats and disruptive demonstrations. But, in the long run, a university must find means to insulate itself from such tactics if it is to retain the type of intellectual freedom characteristic of a university. That, I believe, is why the University reacted as it did to the recent protest,” Haller wrote.
Throughout the fall of 1967, students and faculty advocated for more formal student roles in University policymaking and the right to due process for students in disciplinary cases. Instances of faculty and staff job dismissals highlighted community concerns that political bias was influencing administrative decisions.
Jesse Lemisch, an assistant professor in the history department, told the Maroon at the time that “he was victimized by the political bias of the university and that, in particular, his support of the 1966 Administration anti-rank sit-in cost him his job.”
Tim Naylor, one of the 58 suspended students from the 1967 sit-in, wrote a letter to the editor after losing his research job in what he believed to be a political firing.
Naylor noted that although one of the administrators he complained to about his case told him his dismissal was not related to political activity, Naylor continued to suspect that his firing was a result of “lack of due process and of political discrimination from the Right.”
The University, dismissing accusations of political bias, laid out its broad stance on activism in a 1968 statement: “The University assuredly will not endorse civil disobedience and is in fact committed to the position that civil disobedience is the last resort of a civilized and democratic society.”
Early in 1969, a two-week sit-in of the University’s administration building led to the creation of two special disciplinary committees and the expulsion of 42 students. Protests over those expulsions carried into the fall, forcing UChicago to formalize its disciplinary system for handling “disruptive conduct.”
The Case of Marlene Dixon
In January 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, the University Committee on Human Development chose not to reappoint assistant professor of sociology Marlene Dixon to UChicago’s faculty. Dixon was an outspoken opponent of the war and a proponent of the women’s liberation movement.
As the Maroon wrote on the occasion of Dixon’s denial, “she has made no secret of her new left political persuasion.”
The dismissal sparked the fiercest student-administration confrontation in the University’s history. Less than a week later, 75 students began protesting Dixon’s removal and sent a letter to the Maroon arguing that the University’s decision had been motivated by politics, sexism, and Dixon’s recent protest of Edward Levi’s appointment as University president.
Two weeks later, with little consensus between students and administration on Dixon’s situation, 85 students held a sit-in of the social sciences building on January 27. During the sit-in, administrators passed out notices informing participants that they were engaged in a “disruptive” action that was in “interference with the normal functioning of the University.” Disciplinary measures could follow, the notice said.
On January 29, students formed the Committee of 444 and voted to sanction an occupation of the administration building.
“Any student who takes part in such activities in any University building will be subject to disciplinary measures, not excluding expulsion,” Dean of Students Charles O’Connell informed undergraduates in a notice sent following the vote.
On January 30, approximately 400 students seized the administration building. The University had not locked the building, and the students’ entrance was largely unimpeded. The philosophy of the sit-in was, according to the Committee of 444, one of “nonviolent disruption.”
The Committee’s demands included the immediate rehiring of Dixon, “acceptance in principle of equal student participation in faculty hiring and firing,” and “unconditional amnesty for demonstrating students.”
The University convened a faculty committee to review the denial of Dixon’s reappointment, chaired by professor Hanna Holborn Gray, who would later serve as University president from 1978 to 1993. The Gray Committee determined that Dixon’s sex and political ideology had not played a role in the consideration of her reappointment.
However, multiple sit-in participants told the Maroon in 2025 that the protest was only partially about Dixon.
“Marlene was really just the hook,” then first-year student protester Atina Grossmann told the Maroon in 2025. “We were upset about the draft, about the [Vietnam] war, [about police brutality]. We were very upset about the strategic hamlet nature of [the University in] Hyde Park.… [The denial of tenure to] Marlene catalyzed a whole broader sense of discomfort.”
“It was about the University’s complicity in ‘urban renewal,’ which [meant] essentially Black people removal,” one sit-in participant who preferred to remain anonymous told the Maroon in 2025. “The life of the mind proved to be the life of the very white, male, Cartesian mind.”
Miles Mogulescu—then a fourth-year student, a member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and a student leader of the sit-in steering committee—told the Maroon in 2025 that the protest was also a rebuttal to UChicago’s participation in the military-industrial complex.
“UChicago was ostensibly liberal, but in effect was a bastion of corporate capitalism,” Mogulescu said.
Sit-in participants passed around a petition to mockingly rename the administration building to the “Imperial State Building.”
The University Refuses to Negotiate
In a public statement two days into the occupation, the Committee of the Council—a six-person advisory body on the University’s Faculty Senate—declared the University’s unwillingness to negotiate.
“[The Committee] insists on the distinction between free and open discussion, on the one hand and on the other, ‘bargaining,’ conducted under coercive, threatening, or disorderly circumstances,” it wrote. “The Committee will not engage in the latter kind of discourse.”
As a result, just two days after the sit-in began, the University initiated disciplinary proceedings against more than 100 of the students occupying the administration building.
Summonses were delivered verbally and through letters informing participants that their “name [was] being given to a University Disciplinary Committee.” Protesters were instructed to appear for an initial hearing within an hour and informed that failure to abide by the warning would be grounds for additional discipline.
When administrators attempted to deliver those letters to participating students, protesters burned the papers and said, “Eat them.”
According to Mogulescu, UChicago “had professors wander through the buildings and write down the names of anyone who was protesting… even the so-called liberal professors became, in our minds, collaborators with the University.”
“Students refused to cooperate with the disciplinary body and continued to refuse, even years later,” Gray told the Maroon in 2025.
The First Suspensions
After many students failed to attend their initial disciplinary hearings, the University suspended 61 protesters who had ignored summons and remained inside the administration building, pending the conclusion of disciplinary proceedings.
“Throughout the period of their suspension,” O’Connell wrote in a statement at the time, “these persons are not entitled to any of the rights and privileges of University of Chicago students.”
According to the Maroon’s coverage at the time, the sentiment of many students was “We don’t recognize the suspensions any more than we recognize the disciplinary committee.”
All suspended students who had been employed in University jobs were soon fired, though their firing was not disclosed publicly for more than two weeks. When asked why the University made the decision to fire suspended students privately, O’Connell told the Maroon at the time that the University had very little experience dealing with suspensions prior to 1969.
The University also removed all suspended students from on-campus housing. O’Connell told the Maroon at the time that “expulsion from the residence halls is common procedure in all suspension cases.”
The Oaks Committee
A nine-member University Disciplinary Committee chaired by UChicago Law professor Dallin Oaks was soon created to try students engaged in disruptive conduct.
University administrators said they had decided to suspend students “to see if the University’s own disciplinary procedures could be used to deal with this problem,” per the Maroon.
In choosing to discipline students internally rather than having them arrested, Dean of the College Wayne C. Booth believed that UChicago’s administration successfully preserved “the special character of [the] university.” The alternative, which Levi and other administrators opposed, was to rely on the Chicago Police Department and the legal system.
The Oaks Committee initially voted to close the trials to other students, faculty, and press, though four student observers were also appointed to the committee as non-voting members.
Those observers put out a statement saying they “[did] not believe that their participation in the business of the committee, as non-voting members, necessarily implies any opinion about the legitimacy of this committee one way or the other.”
A few weeks later, three of the four observers resigned from their positions in protest of the Oaks Committee’s perceived faculty-student imbalance.
Through its actions, the Oaks Committee asserted its independence from University administration by granting a motion to require the dean of students to defend his decision to declare the sit-in disruptive. O’Connell sent a statement to the Committee but declined to appear in person.
When one protester stated in an open hearing before the Oaks Committee that he did not recognize the body’s legitimacy, Oaks responded that the Committee had already ruled to consider itself legitimate.
In the days following the students’ suspensions, several of ad hoc student and faculty bodies expressed their support for pausing disciplinary proceedings until the sit-in had concluded or the proceedings had been reconstituted “in light of due process and student participation,” per the Maroon’s reporting at the time.
150 UChicago Law School faculty members signed a petition stating that the disciplinary process denied students “the right to effective counsel,” “the right to a public hearing,” and knowledge of “the range of sanctions available.”
In several of the students’ trials, the Committee granted motions for a public hearing and for a bill of particulars—a list of the charges against individual students—though they rejected motions to dismiss on the grounds of vague charges, lack of jurisdiction, and hearsay evidence.
Questions directed at students during the Oaks Committee’s hearings included, “Do you believe that you have the right to use civil disobedience against the University?” and “Couldn’t you have stayed outside the [administration] building to make your point?”
Opposition to Amnesty
In an op-ed published in the Maroon, Milton Friedman, then the Paul Snowden Russell Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and an advisor to Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan, asked that protesters not be granted amnesty.
To condone the sit-in participants’ tactics through amnesty, he wrote, would be “to cooperate willingly in the destruction of the very foundations of our great university.”
Dean of Rockefeller Chapel E. Spencer Parsons and other campus religious leaders also opposed amnesty, writing to Levi that “the demand for amnesty indicates a lack of moral seriousness about the relationship between acts and their consequences.”
Gray told the Maroon in 2025 that, although other institutions who had experienced similar unrest offered amnesty to protesters, UChicago’s administration decided to take a very different approach.
“It was the view here that amnesty was not appropriate, that civil disobedience involved taking that risk, and that people were accountable and were prepared for the consequences that might follow,” Gray said.
“Chicago differed from a great many of its peer institutions in that it followed its basic ways,” she continued. “It didn’t postpone exams [or] tell people they didn’t have to take them. It didn’t give amnesty on the grounds that this was a kind of enterprise, a kind of occasion on which a lot of people were involved with the best of intentions, but with a way of expressing those [intentions] which the [University] considered subject to disciplinary procedures.”
The disciplinary proceedings “alienated many people and were supported by many others,” Gray said.
A contemporaneous survey conducted by the Maroon and the UChicago-affiliated National Opinion Research Council found that 58.3 percent of roughly 700 undergraduate and graduate students surveyed supported total amnesty for the protesters. 33.2 percent of students opposed amnesty.
The Sit-In Ends
After more than two weeks, the sit-in ended peacefully on February 14 when an overwhelming majority of remaining protesters voted to leave the administration building.
They left behind scattered chairs and papers, shredded wires, and graffiti that read (retaining original formatting) “Student Power Grows out of the Barrel of a Gun” and “in revolution one wins or dies… win.”
The sit-in cost the University around $250,000 (roughly $2 million when adjusted for inflation) in damages, security expenses, and lost work, per a confidential University financial statement.
Mogulescu called Levi’s management of the sit-in “quite brilliant and effective.”
Just a few months earlier, protests at Columbia, Berkeley, and San Francisco State University had been put down by police and national guard involvement. At Columbia, over 1,000 cops arrested more than 700 protesters and injured more than 100 during a violent bust.
The year before, Chicago Police Department officers had beaten and pepper sprayed thousands of anti-war protesters outside the Democratic National Convention in an infamous incident that an Illinois state investigation later called a “police riot.”
“We were very much in the shadow of Columbia in ’68 and the Chicago Convention,” Grossmann told the Maroon in 2025. “Everyone was thinking maybe there would be a repeat performance, that the Chicago Police Department would come in and do something terrible.”
“Levi just let the students sit in as long as they wanted to, and he refused to negotiate,” Mogulescu said. “At the beginning, the sit-in was invigorating—to be with 400 of your fellow students who mostly shared a political and cultural view—but as it wore on and the University refused to negotiate… we got tired of eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”
At the time, not all viewed the University president quite so favorably. “Your appeasement… has been outrageous,” one angry parent wrote in a letter to Levi. “Idiots like you are what made a Hitler possible.”
Levi himself was unsure whether he’d plotted the right course forward. “I don’t know whether we have been right or wrong,” he wrote to a University trustee at the time. “But we have been trying to find a way and be true to the ideals of our University.”
Students March on Levi’s House
After the sit-in concluded, Gray said, “the real conflict on campus began”: the conflict over discipline.
The same day the sit-in ended, O’Connell issued 22 additional suspensions of protesters following a report by the Oaks Committee.
One week later, the Committee came to a final decision in the cases of 31 of the 126 student protesters who had been summoned to appear before the body. Disciplinary action was recommended in every case, though none of the students were expelled. Most students were placed on probation or suspended for up to two terms.
As the Maroon reported at the time, the Oaks Committee informed one student that he would not be allowed to withdraw from the University as part of his interim suspension. The student subsequently told the Maroon, “I was planning to withdraw from the University as a protest, but if they want to use the place for a prison, I’m happy to stay here and try to learn something.”
As February continued, a petition circulated among more than 400 protesters calling for them all to stand trial collectively rather than individually before the Oaks Committee. The belief among protesters, as reported in the Maroon, was that being subject to disciplinary action was part of the process of protest.
When 50 protesters sent a letter to the Oaks Committee demanding the opportunity to present a collective defense, they were denied; the students stated that they would make the demand once more, this time in person. If denied a second time, they would all refuse to appear before the Committee and would—in effect—be expelled.
On February 24, almost 100 students gathered outside Levi’s house to protest for collective defense, then marched on the Quadrangle Club, where “they taunted guests who were eating, took food and wine from the tables, cursed various faculty members in the room, and held mock meetings,” according to an account by historian of the University and former Dean of the College John Boyer.
O’Connell told the Maroon at the time that the February 24 protest was “the most mindless, the most senseless, and the most child-like behavior” he had ever seen on campus. A second committee for disruptive conduct was convened, chaired by associate professor of social science administration Charles Shireman.
In a letter to Levi written after the administration building sit-in concluded, Phillip Hauser, a professor in the department of sociology, wrote, “We as a University, and higher education in general, will be committing suicide if we are not prepared to meet the persistent use of force with overwhelming superior force.”
Hauser wrote that if protests continued, the University should call in a police force large enough that “bodies can literally be carted away without skulls cracked,” along with the summary expulsion of protesters.
The Kalven Report on Discipline
The 1969 disciplinary hearings played out against the release of the Kalven Committee “Report on Disciplinary Procedures,” which the Kalven Committee on Discipline had begun developing in 1967 as a general response to Vietnam War protests but which was finalized in the commotion of the 1969 administration building sit-in.
The nine-person Committee on Discipline was chaired by Kalven Jr., who also chaired the separate Committee on the Role of the University in Social and Political Action. That committee authored the “Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action.”
In its “Report on Disciplinary Procedures,” the Kalven Committee on Discipline justified the existence of an extralegal University disciplinary system for disruptive conduct as being essential “to protect the integrity of the [University’s] enterprise.”
“The tradition of civil disobedience since Socrates has always involved a willingness to accept the punishment, and its moral force as an appeal to the conscience of the community has stemmed from this fact,” the Committee wrote.
The Kalven Committee recommended that disciplinary infractions be sorted into two categories: “offenses against the mission of the University,” which included disruptive actions taken “in an effort to coerce University decisions,” and “offenses against University life,” including infractions involving sex, alcohol, and drugs.
“If we may indulge in exaggeration to emphasize the distinction we are struggling for,” the Committee wrote, “the first category of offenses might be assimilated to ‘treason,’ the second to ‘nuisance.’”
Several aspects of the Kalven Committee’s proposed system ran contrary to the guidelines on university discipline put forth by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1968. The AAUP recommended that hearing committees have voting student members and that interim suspensions not be given pending the resolution of disciplinary proceedings.
The Kalven Committee’s system, by contrast, gave the dean of students “single and final power” with regard to appeals of offense against the University’s mission. However, the dean would have no power to “enlarge or make harsher any initial disciplinary judgement.”
The University Expels 42 Students
On March 4, the University expelled 10 students to swift and strong reactions from the student body.
More than 500 protesters marched on Abbott Memorial Hall, where the Oaks Committee was meeting, to demand that the expulsions be rescinded.
Protests against the Oaks and Shireman Committees continued over the next month, becoming significantly more aggressive and sometimes escalating to rock throwing and window breaking. Committee meetings frequently proceeded only after security guards had carried protesters out of the room.
On April 1, the two disciplinary committees finally completed the task set before them. Of the 164 students who had been summoned to appear for their participation in the protests starting with the administration building sit-in, 37 were expelled and 62 were suspended. Five of the suspended students were later also expelled following review of their suspensions, bringing the total of expulsions to 42.
In thank-you letters to Oaks and Shireman Committee members, Levi wrote that the committees’ task had been “arduous, harrowing, onerous, [and] heartrending.”
“Unfortunately it is a comment on our times that those who are most committed to education and to the interests of the students must give of themselves in this way,” Levi wrote to Shireman. “There has been no task of greater importance to education.”
“Thirty-seven expulsions at the UC are more than all those at Berkeley, Columbia, and San Francisco State combined. It seems that the University overreacted just a little to a non-violent, non-successful sit-in,” a student placed on probation by the Oaks Committee told the Maroon at the time.
One expelled student told the Maroon in 2025 that her expulsion from the University came as something of a welcome shock.
“I remember feeling like a lost lamb [at UChicago],” she said. “I was just learning about the world. I was in SDS, but my father had been a Republican. This was all completely new to me. And at some point later we all just went, ‘Well, we got expelled. Whatever.’”
When it came to the disciplinary proceedings, she said, “You were either going to plead ignorant or [plead] regretful and I didn’t want to be in that position. So I think I just boycotted the [disciplinary hearings]. I thought, ‘It’s about time to leave [UChicago].’”
She said that, though she has returned to Chicago frequently in the 55 years since, she returned to campus only once because “the whole thing gives me the creeps.”
Grossmann told the Maroon in 2025 that the Oaks Committee offered her the option of “repenting” and told that, if she repented, she would only be suspended. She did not repent and was expelled.
Grossmann said she was sad to miss out on UChicago’s intellectual experience. But, she said, “It just seemed like there was something wrong with the life of the mind at UChicago. There was quite frankly a part of me that was relieved to be able to escape some of that creepiness.”
Despite his leading role in the sit-in, Mogulescu was not among the students expelled—contrary to Maroon reporting at the time. Instead, he was suspended indefinitely. He attributes the administration’s relative leniency to two factors. First, Mogulescu opposed a faction of protesters who, as sit-in participants left the administration building, argued for rifling through administrative files and destroying equipment. Second, Mogulescu needed only a few more credits to graduate.
Two and a half years after suspending him, the University allowed Mogulescu to complete his studies so long as he did not return to campus. He enrolled in two classes remotely and mailed his essays to Hyde Park. In exchange, the University mailed him a diploma.
Protests Continue
The 42 expulsions and 62 suspensions did not conclude 1969’s protest saga.
A five-day “non-militant picketing” of Cobb Hall led by members of the Committee of 444—the student organization that had led the occupation of the administration building in January—was largely successful in getting students to skip classes in the building.
The protest was not, however, successful in achieving the demand that “all disciplinary actions be rescinded.”
A brief retaking of the administration building by a dozen expelled students calling themselves the “Salvation Air Force” was similarly unsuccessful.
As the month wore on, students sought new ways to shift the University’s position. On April 15, 23 students began a quad tent-in and hunger strike for the rescindment of disciplinary actions.
“It’s surprising how long people can last on orange juice, water, and a vitamin pill a day,” remarked hunger striker Sue Loth to press at the time.
Edward Rosenheim, spokesman for the University Committee of the Council, told the Maroon at the time, “I wish to gosh they’d eat something.… This clearly does not involve persuasion or reasoning on any acceptable level of rational discussion. It does not affect the character of my deliberations.”
On April 18, the University reduced three students’ expulsions to indefinite suspensions and reduced the lengths of 28 students’ suspensions.
With the hunger strike stretching into a seventh day, 30 students planted white crosses in the grass outside the administration building in continued protest of the Oaks and Shireman Committees’ perceived illegitimacy.
“The crosses we have placed on the quadrangle,” the group said in a statement, “express the significant loss we as students feel and which the University as a whole has suffered by the expulsion of 42 students.”
Two days later, the hunger strike concluded with soup, hors d’oeuvres, sherry, and tea.
“How can we refuse to eat when apparently still half the University needs to be brought up to date on the issues that have been plaguing it for two months,” the strikers wrote in the statement suspending their protest.
The Nation Watches UChicago
The result of the spring’s events, Dean of the College Wayne C. Booth said on April 25, was “an unprecedented breakdown of trust” in the University.
The succession of protests had brought national attention to Hyde Park. Letters flooded in from parents, alumni, and faculty at other universities.
Hannah Arendt, renowned political theorist and former UChicago professor, wrote to Levi to tell him how she missed Chicago and “admired [his] handling of the student difficulties.”
Pete Seeger, the famed folk singer and social activist, wrote Levi to ask him to overturn students’ expulsions.
“I have long been a fan of your music,” Special Assistant to the President Henry Field responded.
Field was less kind in his responses to others. To one concerned alum, he wrote, “If fascism should ever come to this country, it won’t be because of carefully measured discipline by faculty discipline committees but because of people such as yourself who are incompetent to distinguish the boundary line between freedom and coercion.”
Booth, too, defended the Oaks and Shireman Committees’ decisions, which he said had the full support of the University administration. He noted, however, that he saw “no reason in principle why students shouldn’t be on all disciplinary committees, if and when they are ready to accept the responsibility.”
The Committee of 500+ Against Disciplinary Procedures (formerly the Committee of 444) wrote in a pamphlet that disciplinary proceedings had been discriminatory in their “irrational harshness” and a “political inquisition.”
In an April 8 letter reporting the decisions of the Shireman and Oaks Committees, O’Connell stated that punishments were determined in part based on “the nature of the student’s response to the summons” to appear in front of a committee.
Other factors taken into account included whether the student “sought to communicate realistically with the committee,” whether the student would admit that their behavior was “inappropriate to a University community,” and whether the student had demonstrated capacity for “positive citizenship” within the University.
Throughout the rest of the school year, students and faculty continued to stage sit-ins and protests, demanding the University reform its disciplinary system. Those efforts produced little institutional change, but did lead to disciplinary consequences for the participants and the hospitalization of professor and activist Richard Flacks.
The Assault on Flacks
Richard Flacks, an assistant professor in the department of sociology and a founder of SDS, was an outspoken critic of Levi. In response to a 1968 dinner honoring Levi’s inauguration as president of the University, Flacks wrote a letter condemning the event and its guests, which included Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley and McGeorge Bundy, President Lyndon Johnson’s national security advisor and an architect of the Vietnam War.
During the 1969 protests, Flacks and fellow professor Richard Levins accused the University of engaging in a purge of left-wing students, an action taken by one “estate” of the University against another, according to Levins. At the same rally, Mogulescu commented that “[faculty] should be glad we’re still talking and not shooting.”
Flacks’s activism at UChicago would continue for another week before an assailant posing as a journalist visited his office for an interview and proceeded to beat him nearly to death with an unknown object. Flacks suffered two skull fractures and nearly lost the use of his right hand.
Less than three hours before the attack, Flacks had attended a silent vigil protesting the University’s recent disciplinary actions.
To date, the assailant responsible for the attack is still unknown.
New information surrounding Flacks’s assault came to light in 1975, when Levi joined the administration of Nixon’s vice president and successor, President Gerald Ford, as attorney general. That year, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence learned through Levi that the FBI had sent letters to members of UChicago’s Board of Trustees in 1968 attempting to discredit Flacks and have him fired.
According to the New York Times, the FBI had credited their letter to a “concerned alumnus.”
While some former students believe that the government could have played a role, Flacks, the Senate committee, and the FBI all believed that the FBI was unlikely to have been involved in the attack.
Fallout from a Year of Protest
In November 1969, Student Government President Michael Barnett (Ph.D. ’76) resigned over a lack of responsiveness by the administration to Student Government concerns and annoyance that “political” work was taking up the vast majority of his time. In his resignation letter, Barnett called for Levi and other University administrators to also resign.
“We can not continue to tolerate decision-making in secret, closed meetings,” Barnett wrote in the Maroon. “It is wrong in any community. It is an abomination in an academic community. It can only lead to a sterile, decaying institution.”
“Last year’s discipliners were smart. They went easy on those who would (unhappily) tolerate illegitimate procedures; they expelled those who would not tolerate them,” Barnett continued. “But now that we are faced again with illegitimate discipline we must resist. Those who fail to resist violence, are violent.”
Asked why he thought the University took such a strong stance against protesters in 1969, after permitting sit-ins in previous years, Mogulescu was blunt: “There had been sit-ins three out of the four years and [the administration] just needed it all to stop.”
In a letter to a concerned alum, O’Connell stood by the administrations’ actions, writing that they were neither “vindictive nor Machiavellian.”
“I hope that you will try to understand the painful choices which confronted the University and to appreciate the difficulties of the course the University of Chicago chose,” he wrote. “It chose perhaps the most difficult [course] of all: to attempt to govern itself.”
Levi, for one, was eager for the University to move on from its troubles in 1969. In his annual State of the University address to the University Senate, Levi never mentioned protests or discipline except to say that 1969 “has been an interesting year.”
As the Vietnam War came to an end in the early 1970s, large-scale protests subsided at UChicago. The University’s new All-University Disciplinary System—established in 1970—was amended occasionally but rarely used for 40 years.
The New All-University Disciplinary System
In the wake of the Oaks and Shireman Committees and facing continued protest by large sections of the UChicago community, the University adopted a new disciplinary system in 1970 specifically targeting disruptive conduct.
The All-University Disciplinary System defined conduct “disruptive to the operations of the University” as the basis for its invocation and laid out the policies governing investigation of cases, hearings, sanctions, and review. These additions addressed some, although not all, of the concerns laid out by students and faculty during the 1969 demonstrations.
The Council of the University Senate also established a disciplinary board with the power to review the decisions of any University disciplinary committee.
Students admitted to UChicago in April of 1970 were sent a letter by O’Connell that read: “I feel that it is appropriate to draw the attention of Students admitted to the University of Chicago to the [University’s] policy concerning disruptive actions.… [A]ctions which deliberately interfere with the University’s teaching activities, research activities, or supportive administrative or operational activities, in an effort to coerce University decisions, are prohibited and subject students who engage in them to disciplinary action, not excluding expulsion.”
Student Government remained skeptical of the University’s disciplinary system and published its own “Student Government Report on Discipline.” The report called for a tripartite system, with a Grievance Board to recommend charging, a Disciplinary Committee to determine guilt, and a Review Board to hear appeals.
The Student Government report was “so unbelievably bad that it is difficult to believe that much thought went into it,” O’Connell wrote to Levi and Committee of the Council member Norman Nachtrieb. “It is a pastiche of details with no evidence of the thoughts behind them and with glaring inconsistencies and inadequacies.”
Disciplinary System Unused for 40 Years
The University’s new disciplinary system was rarely used, in large part because of its scope and “cumbersome procedures,” according to University documents. A 1986 Maroon article reported that area disciplinary committees or the Undergraduate Disciplinary Committee adjudicated most cases; though the All-University Disciplinary System was revamped in 1976, it remained unused.
The definition of disruptive conduct established by the Council in 1970 was incorporated by the Board of Trustees as University Statute 24. It now exists in largely the same form as University Statute 21.
Gray does not remember the All-University Disciplinary System having been used during her time as University president from 1978–93.
“I do not recall any large-scale activism, although there was certainly plenty of protest, as there always is and should always be on campus,” she told the Maroon in 2025.
Nevertheless, Gray said there was a rule that every year during her presidency the University appointed a disciplinary body to handle disruptive conduct cases every year, “and every year students refused to nominate members to the body because they believed it was not legitimate and that the policies were wrong.”
The boycott continued until Gray’s retirement in 1993.
This piece was produced by the Maroon’s Investigations team, whose members are Celeste Alcalay, Evgenia Anastasakos, Elena Eisenstadt, Zachary Leiter, Nathaniel Rodwell-Simon, and Anushree Vashist.
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Mark Weinstein / Mar 12, 2025 at 2:30 pm
I was a fourth year in the College during the 1968-69 academic year. I never had Ms. Dixon as a professor, however it was clear in the late fall of 1968 that her case would become a cause for students of the left. I had a few friends who were in her classes and when I asked them about her teaching they said that she was a terrible teacher and that while she claimed to be able to separate her personal politics from the subject matter of her course (unless she made it clear at the time of her class that she was giving her personal view) in fact that was not the case. In 1969 these same friends participated in the Ad building sit in and claimed that Dixon was a great teacher. I also remember the open meeting in Mandel Hall when one of the protest leaders actually said that we must “destroy the university in order to save it.”