Over the years, U students have rallied in support of liberal causes, such as curbing financial support of South Africa during its apartheid era, U.S. meddling in Central America and the Middle East, police brutality and the power of corporations.

But nothing compared with the confrontations that came in response to the killings of anti-war protestors at Kent State when guardsmen fired into a crowd of students demonstrating against the escalation of the Vietnam War.

“The whole era was very volatile… The bombing of Cambodia, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Doug Hunter, then a high school senior who was among those arrested in the Park Building. “Getting arrested was a badge of honor. We were so against the Vietnam War.”

In the days following the Kent State tragedy, hundreds of U students converged in front of the A. Ray Olpin Student Union, demanding Nixon end the war and the university close classes in response to the bloodshed in Ohio and lift restrictions on speech.

At one point, protesters occupied the offices of The Daily Utah Chronicle, demanding the front page of the next edition of the student newspaper be given over to publishing their demands. Instead, the student editors relocated off-campus to an undisclosed location and continued reporting independently on the unrest.

On May 7, 1970, after three days of demonstrations, a memorial was held at the U for the four dead Ohio students. Afterward, hundreds walked from the Union to the Park Building where they filled the lobby and halls. For hours, speeches were made, songs were sung and administrators addressed the protestors.

Then, everyone was ordered to exit the building or face arrest. Most left, but dozens refused, vowing to remain until U President James Fletcher met their demands. The next day, the names of every adult arrested appeared in The Salt Lake Tribune. By contrast, the news media have largely avoided naming any of the students recently arrested on campus.

That year, the Tribune not only named names; it provided the ages, addresses and occupations of the 81 adults arrested, including 18-year-old Douglas Orin Hunter, whose occupation was listed as a student at East High School and whose home address on Harvard Avenue provided. Not named were Hunter’s four underage buddies—classmates at East and Judge Memorial Catholic High School—who were swept up in the arrests.

“We were sick and tired of how Salt Lake really wasn’t doing much. We went over to [the U campus to] listen to the protests,” said Hunter, now 71. He and his friends wound up in the Park Building with hundreds of other protesters.

Many of the participants, including a law professor Richard Young who was arrested, would later argue they were not breaking any laws.

“The U allowed us to come in. It wasn’t like we forced our way in,” Hunter said. “They had speakers there. There were administration people there. No one was trying to kick us out. We were there for hours.”

Once an administrator, Provost Thomas King, told the protestors to clear the building, most complied, while others waited for the police to take them away. It took nine hours for the building to clear. Police escorted arrestees out the south exit from the basement to waiting vans for the ride downtown where they were processed into jail.

Hunter recalled being held in a drunk tank with other protestors for just a few hours.

“Then they just released us. It was like 2 a.m. It was an odd time to kick us out,” he said. “We went up to a friend’s house and partied into the morning.”

The arrested U students were all suspended from school. That decision was rescinded to allow them to take final exams.

Salt Lake County prosecutors charged all the adults with trespassing. Handling the prosecution was Paul Van Dam, who would later become a prominent Democratic politician, serving as Utah attorney general from 1988 to 1992. Instead of trying the protestors individually, which would have overwhelmed the courts, they were tried as a group before Salt Lake City Justice Court Judge Maurice Jones.

According to news coverage, Van Dam acknowledged the protestors were not unruly or violent, but their continued presence in the Park Building was interfering with the university’s operations. Jones was not swayed and found Hunter and the other 79 defendants not guilty after two days of testimony.

Hunter moved to the Bay Area after high school and was drafted the next year. He earned a medical deferment, however, arising from a foot injury sustained while working as a surveyor. He eventually attended the University of California, Davis, and returned to Utah to get an MBA at Utah State and went on to work for Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, or UAMPS. He retired as the utility’s CEO last year.

In the meantime, he had forgotten about his arrest, until one day he was applying for Transportation Security Administration (TSA) clearance.

“They asked me if I had ever been arrested. I just didn’t think about it and said, ‘No,’ and he said, ‘You want to think about that again, Mr. Hunter? What about 1970?’” Hunter recalled. “‘Oh, yeah, that.’”

Although tensions ran high in the wake of the Kent State, the U protests remained peaceful, although some extracurricular activities featured arson, according to Randy Dryer, a U law professor who was then the student body president.

At the urging of hardline anti-war groups, some student protesters demanded classes be closed, firearms and the National Guard be kept off campus and restrictions on speech and activism be lifted.

As student president, Dryer insisted students should vote on whether or not to strike.

“The Chronicle published a ballot with several questions,” he said. “Students had three to five days to return the ballots, thousands were returned.”

At the end of the week, Dryer announced the results to a gathering in front of Kingsbury Hall. The question of whether to close classes failed in a vote of 5,911 to 3,432.

“After that, the steam went out of the sails of the protest,” Dryer recalled. “There was still a lot of tension. People felt strongly one way or the other about whether there should be protests on campus. No one was ever injured. There was no overt violence.”

But there was property damage, starting with a gasoline-filled, quart-sized beer bottle getting hurled into the ROTC office the day after Kent State. Because the crude firebomb failed to fully ignite, damage was minimal. But a few days later, the university’s unoccupied Intercultural Center went up in flames. It was no real loss since the building was to be razed anyway.

Then a week after the ROTC firebombing, another incendiary was thrown at a National Guard building just off campus, resulting in about $10,000 in damage. The arsons were widely condemned, but the culprits were never caught, according to Dryer.

When L. Jackson Newell arrived on campus in 1974 to start his new position as dean of students, the Cove, the space south of the Union where the anti-war protests occurred, had been recently landscaped with the sculpted mounds present today.

“They didn’t want a large area for students to congregate for protests or organize marches,” said Newell. “So they made that area very hilly.”

Later, Newell recalled one student leader wearing a T-shirt bearing a vulgar insult when he appeared for a meeting with U President David Gardner.

“I don’t recall what it had to do with, other than the general resistance to authority, which was a part of that era,” Newell said.

Before the Vietnam era, one of the earliest and perhaps most consequential examples of student activism unfolded at the 1914 Commencement Ceremony, where U valedictorian Milton Sevy used the occasion to stage a one-man protest against Utah’s “ultra-conservative” political climate and its influence on the university.

“What we need is a different point of view. The people must be convinced that their political hope lies in the breaking down of ultra-conservatism and the leadership of young, progressive men,” Sevy said in his commencement speech. “The time is ripe for this change.”

The official response was swift and severe. The first head-to-roll belonged to Charles Snow, the faculty member who reviewed Sevy’s speech and allowed it to be delivered without sufficient revisions.

No one was arrested or actually beheaded, but Utah Gov. William Spry, who attended the commencement, called for the firing of faculty responsible for permitting the denigration of Utah’s politics. U President Joseph Kingsbury obliged, firing Snow and four others suspected of criticizing the university, but without actually articulating a reason for their dismissal. Additionally, he barred faculty from outside employment and prohibited students from forming progressive clubs or hosting political speakers on campus.

Seventeen professors resigned in protest, including the dean of arts and science, leaving the university without a third of its entire faculty.

The episode sparked a national discussion about the role of academic freedom at college campuses, prompting the newly formed American Association of University Professors (AAUP) to investigate.

The AAUP investigation yielded an 82-page report that concluded that the U’s professors had been fired for no legitimate reason and the school’s respect for the rights of faculty was sorely lacking, according to an article by Newell, now an emeritus professor of educational leadership who serves as an unofficial campus historian.

As the dust settled, U faculty formed the Academic Senate and Kingsbury stepped down. Students and faculty gained greater freedom to speak their minds, but limits remained for decades.

In the 1980s, the campus saw occasional demonstrations against apartheid in South Africa and U.S. military adventures. In the mid-1980s, students erected shanties on campus, invoking the slums that most Black South Africans were forced to inhabit under that country’s strict regime of racist oppression.

But student protests have never matched the anti-war demonstrations of the Vietnam era. “What strikes me is why there has been so little student protest,” Newell said.

Dryer noted that during his years as a student, it was university administrators who appeared willing to control speech, frequently moving to block controversial activists, such as Jerry Rubin, from sharing their views on campus. Now it’s students themselves seeking to squelch speech they find offensive, he said.

A campus speaking engagement by a right-wing pundit in 2017, for example, set off a confrontation that threatened to devolve into chaos before police restored order.

A conservative student group hosted Ben Shapiro, a controversial journalist best known for a hardline stance against LGBTQ rights, arguing gay and transgender people are mentally ill.

Many students called on the administration to bar him from speaking, but the event went forward as planned.

“My students were quite exercised about that. I encouraged them to go and witness for themselves what was happening and make a record of it,” Newell said. “Tempers flared, but it was not out of hand.”

Still, the scene outside the venue wasn’t exactly tranquil. While Shapiro spoke to a capacity audience inside the Social and Behavioral Science Building auditorium, hundreds of supporters and protesters gathered outside, where tensions ramped up and insults flew, some with racist and homophobic slurs, according to coverage in the Tribune and the Chronicle. As night fell, a few fights broke out, resulting in two arrests.

Fast forward to the 2020 presidential campaign, when then-Vice President Mike Pence squared off against then-Democratic nominee Kamala Harris for a nationally televised debate in Kingsbury Hall.

That evening, anti-Trump protestors marched from Sunnyside Park toward campus and down 1300 East, where they headed toward a knot of counter-protestors, according to the Chronicle’s coverage.

U Police worked with Salt Lake City Police and other agencies to keep the opposing demonstrators separated. No altercations occurred and the debate was not disrupted, aside from the fly that famously settled into Pence’s silvery hair during the debate.