Lettuce Boycott at McKenny Union, 1973


not true!’ It was a terribly vibrant time.” As long as dissent was nonviolent and progressive, he


encouraged questions. “I always liked when students would say, ‘I don’t agree


with that!’ I loved those discussions. I’d say, ‘I’m not here to get you to agree. That’s not my role.’” Now many students text friends during class, then pick up


their phones and make a call as soon as class ends. “I try to tell them the purpose of the university is to finish


class arguing and talking to the new people that you’ve met, not to just continue the relationships you’ve had since high school. We have a whole lot of communication, but we don’t have a whole lot of close interaction with people.’’


B


ecause of the emphasis on testing in high school, college students now come to class interested mostly in preparing for their exams, he says. They don’t have a strong sense of what’s going on in the


world, nor do they want to make waves. They’re in survival mode, focused on passing the test to get that degree. It was different 35 years ago. On the day a group of African American students locked


themselves in the Union with a list of demands—including the demand that Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers be invited to speak on campus—the Washtenaw County Sheriff ’s Department sent deputies in riot gear to shut down the campus. As an advisor to those students, Evans knew he needed to


20 Eastern | SUMMER 2011


get to McKenny, and pleaded with police to let him through. Instead, one of the officers took his night stick and


smashed Evans’ car with it. “Black students were very angry then, and I think that’s


what scared everybody,” he says. “The administration was going crazy thinking about this. At that time, everybody was terrified of black students doing anything.” In those years, African American students were a tiny


minority at EMU, and Evans recalls only one black professor. “The black students were really put upon, I thought,” says


Evans. “People would say there was no discrimination, but the black students certainly didn’t have much support.” Dennis Beagen, EMU’s head of the department of com-


munication and theatre arts for the past 30 years, was a student of Evans’ in the ’60s. “Gary was a master at listening, and a master at bring-


ing people together,” says Beagen. “His legacy in my mind is tied to those early days. He was a passionate advocate for peace and collaboration and diversity, not just ethnic, but gender and religion. And students listened to him. He had the respect of students from the early days until the day he retired.” During campus unrest following the death of Martin


Luther King, Jr., Evans was a calming voices on campus, Beagen says. Admissions Director Kathy Orscheln says that in her 32


years at EMU, she’s heard hundreds of students rave about Evans. While giving a tour of campus and bragging about the


Archive photo by Dick Schwarze


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