The Bust > "Dear President Kirk..." (continued)
Letter from "A Concerned Student" to President Grayson Kirk, May 2, 1968.
A General Studies student criticizes Kirk's use of police force on campus and demands his resignation.
Letter from Jane Cullen Chrzanowski to President Grayson Kirk, May 1, 1968.
Ms. Chrzanowski’s daughter Francesca attended Barnard College.
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"My daughter has apparently escaped with a minor physical injury, a sprained ankle, which should soon heal. Her outbursts of hysterical crying at the memory of what happened will become less frequent. Her shock, outrage, and grief will subside. But some effects of the experience will remain throughout her life….Linking arms and singing is in the category of nonviolent resistance.It should be no warrant for the police to set about as though to kill our children. Nor was there any warrant for the college, to whom we have partially entrusted our children, to turn them over to the police for disciplining in the first place."
Letter from Mrs. Julian J. Klein of Newton Centre, MA to President Grayson Kirk, April 30, 1968.
Klein criticizes Kirk's use of police force on campus, comparing his actions to those taken in Nazi Germany.
Letter from John S. Casler, L70, to President Grayson Kirk, April 30, 1968.
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"First they ‘cleared’ the area of your faculty members and your students who were there, as was I, to request non-violence.They waded in with fists and black-jacks. They enjoyed it. One man was bounced viciously onto the concrete in front of me. Others surrounded individual students and faculty members, threw them to the ground, and beat them….I am afraid that those men, and yourself primarily, were more interested in getting up to Low Library as fast as they could to see how much of their silverware was missing than they were in preventing the destruction of what to me is the only important part of a university, it’s [sic] spirit."