Ford Speaks on Campus: An Opportunity Lost? President Gerald Ford’s Major Speeches at College Campuses, 1974–76

Ford Speaks on Campus: An Opportunity Lost? President Gerald Ford's Major Speeches at College Campuses, 1974–76 William Purdy (bio) President Gerald Ford loved the University of Michigan dearly, often calling his time there the best four years of his life. Ford loved college life but, more importantly, he loved the purpose of college. He learned lessons in Ann Arbor that cemented his high ethical approach to leadership. Ford fought for affirmative action in 1999—sixty-four years after he had graduated from college—because his close friend and football teammate Willis Ward, who roomed with him when the team was on the road, was asked to be held off the roster when Georgia Tech University came to play Michigan, and though Ford and his teammates protested, under terrible pressure from Michigan Athletic Director Fielding Yost, Ward held himself out of the game.1 During the game, with Ward having to listen to the broadcast on the radio at his fraternity house, one of the Georgia Tech players taunted the Michigan side with racial slurs about Ward. Ford and another Michigan player, Bill Borgmann, sandwiched the taunting Georgia Tech player, and he left the field on a stretcher; Ford told Ward after the game "that one was for you."2 Ford was still furious decades later, writing that Ward's sacrifice "led me to question how educational administrators could capitulate to raw prejudice. A university, after all, is both a preserver and a hotbed of innovation. So long as books are kept open, we tell ourselves, minds can never be closed."3 When Ford became President on August 9, 1974, he replaced Richard Nixon, who had spent his tenure battling student activists. Riven with war protests, [End Page 1] most colleges did not welcome presidential visits.4 President Ford, however, visited Ohio State University within three weeks of taking office, and kept visiting major universities and small colleges throughout his term, reaching out to estranged academic audiences. When, years after he left office, a historian asked Ford how he would like to be remembered, he said, "I was a healer and a builder. And if I am remembered that way I would be most grateful." For President Ford, healing and building at home began on the troubled college campuses of the country.5 While he was building bridges to campuses, this former Joe College did not offer much in the way of substantive higher education policies in his speeches at colleges and universities. President Ford stuck to a handful of themes, which varied according to his specific venue but changed little during his two and half years in office. Mainly, he used campus backdrops to display the contrast between the peaceful environment at home and campus riots from Nixon's administration; to point out he had brought peace and an end to the military draft; to offer support for tax subsidies for charitable giving to private colleges and universities; and to celebrate the nation's Bicentennial and tie the idealism of the American Revolution to his own administration, working hard to drum up enthusiasm among young Americans in the 1970s. College Campuses in the Mid-1970s Arthur Levine and Keith Wilson identified three periods of "relatively widespread student dissent" in the twentieth century: the years directly preceding World War I, the Great Depression in the 1930s, and the student protest movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, which waged great campaigns—from the Free Speech Movement arising in Berkeley, California, and civil rights protests throughout the South, to the long struggle to end the Vietnam War.6 Yet Philip Altbach and Roger Cohen termed what followed the protest era as an "anticlimax," with "the two decades after the sixties being, in contrast to the decade of turbulence, characterized by quiet."7 Student protest movements, according to Levine and Wilson, became "issue oriented rather than ideological."8 While protest activities did not look exactly as they did in [End Page 2] the 1960s—lacking extensive campus shutdowns, mass rallies, and violence—in fact, student activism did not vanish but merely evolved to meet the needs of a changed culture. Altbach and Cohen second this view, arguing that the mid-1970s...