This guide serves as an electronic addition to the MSU Libraries exhibit A Campus and a War: Michigan State University and Vietnam.
Over a generation (1945-1975), a civil war in Vietnam evolved into an enormously destructive Cold War conflict that profoundly marked the world in the twentieth century, and whose legacies remain profound and contested fifty years after its end. Michigan State University’s connection to and involvement in the Vietnam War deeply impacted the institution as it transformed from a small agricultural college into a globally engaged research university. During the 1950s and early 1960s, MSU administered federally funded technical assistance and training programs that were part of a broader American effort to shape the political and economic direction of the decolonizing world after World War II. As a subsequent American military intervention in Vietnam in the later 1960s became destructive and politically divisive, MSU’s relationship to the US-backed South Vietnamese government intensified anti-war activism on campus, leading to one of the most tumultuous periods in the university’s history. Using archival and print materials from the MSU Libraries University Archives and Stephen O. Murray & Keelung Hong Special Collections, “A Campus and a War: Michigan State University and Vietnam” shares the deeply complex history of our campus’s involvement in a conflict of global importance. Through print, photographs, and voice, the exhibition reflects the varying experiences and perspectives of members of the MSU and greater Lansing community whose lives intersected with the war, from the servicemen who parachuted into northern Vietnam in 1945 to the war refugees who made Lansing their home during the 1980s. Fifty years after the war, the exhibition attempts to explore how our campus and community was marked by a war that changed the world.
Liberators of Vietnam cartoon, undated. MSS 431-99
The MSU Vietnam Group Archive includes roughly 80,000 pages of digitized documents, maps, and images. Most of these materials date from 1955-1962, when Michigan State University led a range of US-funded technical assistance programs in South Vietnam for the purpose of producing a stable non-Communist ally in Southeast Asia.
On the Banks of the Red Cedar provides online access to documents and audio visual materials related to the history of Michigan State University and in the broader context, the state of Michigan and the United States.
Activism and Radicalism. MSU Special Collections
Forging a Fateful Alliance: Michigan State University and the Vietnam War by John Ernst
A University Turns to the World: A Personal History of the Michigan State University International Story by Ralph H. Smuckler
Michigan State College: John Hannah and the Creation of a World University, 1926-1969 by David A. Thomas