What It All Meant : Members of UCI’s First 4-Year Class Review ‘60s With 20 Years of Hindsight

Maybe it’s his naturally casual, open manner--the touch of the optimist--that makes him by conventional standards something of an eccentric.

Maybe it’s his Sprout Acres compound, the private experimental ecosystems station he operates in the Laguna Beach hills, his little Shangri-La of organic crops, recycled wastes and energy innovations.

Or maybe it’s the evangelistic zeal he gives to his cause: the preservation and harnessing of natural resources, the educating of the uninitiated about the beauty--and urgency--of it all.

Much about Bill Roley, UC Irvine class of 1969, still evokes the fervent advocacy, maverick life style and pure exuberance of the 1960s student generation.

Yet Roley was never a “blazing activist” while a student at UCI 20 years ago, in the era synonymous with anti-war marches and anti-Establishment sit-ins on hundreds of U.S. campuses.

That does not really matter, he says, because the protest activism of the ‘60s “didn’t raise the social consciousness of only a few but of people throughout our society. It was the conscience of America.”

Standing outside his solar-powered A-frame office, gazing across a back yard thriving with organically grown fruit trees and vegetables, he pauses.

“I like to think of these ideals as the roots of my generation,” he says, his voice rising, “that these are still with us, still at work in our lives.”

UCI’s class of ‘69--its first full, four-year graduating class--is having its first reunion.

About 75 members of that 450-member class will gather Aug. 18-20 at their alma mater for traditional welcome-back events: tour, barbecue, dinner-dance and plenty of speeches.

Overall, the reunion participants are solidly mainstream, professionally successful and middle-class respectable. Almost none of the returning graduates were considered protest militants in their student days, UCI Alumni Assn. organizers say.

The turbulence and soaring idealism of the ‘60s cannot be far from their minds, however. Such memories are hardly avoidable these days. Media critiques and commemorations by the scores have dissected that era’s defiance, tragedy and exaltation--the Chicagoes, Kent States and Woodstocks.

And UCI officials who were there in the ‘60s are sure to remind the ’69 returnees of the historical niche of their generation.

UCI’s activists then were “at times confrontational and abrasive about social change, and they did not always show how the corrections could be achieved,” recalls Daniel G. Aldrich Jr., UCI’s founding chancellor.

But Aldrich, who retired in 1984 after 22 years as Irvine chancellor, says the ‘60s generation “had the courage to speak out, to focus on the inequities of our society and to challenge the traditional organizations.”

In contrast, student generations since “have shown neither the same energy nor the same social concerns,” he says. “They have not stepped forward in the same way. They have not led the charge.”

For this class of ‘69, then, the reunion becomes not only a memory game of “whatever happened to . . .” but also a recounting of “what were you doing in the ‘60s?”

Consider three classmates who still live in the county, maintain ties with the campus and plan to attend the reunion:

* Dennis Ettlin, 42, an economist for a Los Angeles aerospace company. He and his wife, Mary, live in Dana Point.

* Diana Janas, 41, of Corona del Mar, who operates her own Irvine-based communications consulting firm. She is also a media teacher at Orange Coast College.

* Roley, 42, an environmentalist, ecosystems consultant and Saddleback College instructor. He and his wife, Susanne, and their 3-year-old daughter live in Laguna Beach.

Their most obvious common denominator is this: They were typical of many students of their generation during one of most rancorous and far-reaching of U.S. protest movements. These students were believers, yes, but militants? No.

When they entered UCI as freshmen in September, 1965, they thought of themselves as a generation of local pioneers.

The school was built on sprawling, once-rural spaces, with buildings designed with boldly modernist strokes. The campus had just opened; the site had been dedicated a year earlier by no less than President Lyndon Johnson.

With such a beginning, it naturally seemed to the class of ’69 to be an idyllic time for trust and harmony.

“The mood then was exhilarating--that’s the only way to describe it,” recalls Janas, who was a comparative literature major. She had attended Corona del Mar High School and, before that, a Catholic high school in Swarthmore, Pa.

How could it be otherwise? “We were there at the start, building a university from scratch, so to speak,” says Janas, who was also an associate editor on the New University campus newspaper. “We felt we were in the right place at the right time.”

But widespread dissent had already surfaced at older, more volatile U.S. campuses.

Protesters called for sweeping, rapid social change on and beyond the campuses. They condemned what they said was a crushing, monolithic political and corporate system. They wanted true “participatory democracy” brought down to the grass roots and vast new efforts to rid America of poverty and racial and sexual discrimination.

And in the issue that was to thunder past all others, they sought an immediate end to U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia.

Such echoes of dissent were heard at UCI. Peace vigils opposing the Vietnam War were held on the newly opened campus, followed by a growing number of rallies and other anti-war protests.

Attacks on university policies became frequent, including a class boycott in 1967 over the firing of UC President Clark Kerr and sit-ins in 1969 over dismissals of two popular professors.

But unlike other campuses, the Irvine protests were peaceful, marked by neither violence nor mass confrontations with police.

Roley, who was a biology major, a varsity basketball player and a member of the Student Senate, said: “Granted, our campus wasn’t a Berkeley or a Columbia when it came to big protests. But you’re talking Orange County in the ‘60s--students from some pretty conservative families.”

Dissent at UCI “was a great deal tamer and safer,” says Roley, who had attended high school in Maryland before his family moved back to Laguna Beach.

Nevertheless, “there was something contagious about the energy (of the dissent), a kind of electricity,” says Roley, who especially remembers the off-the-cuff discussions conducted by professors on campus lawns during the class boycotts. “There was a lot of intellectual ferment and diversity, a real audacity.”

However, UCI students such as Roley, Janas and Ettlin remained casual about open dissent. They drifted in and out of campus forums about the war and educational reforms. They observed but did not take part in sit-ins or similar demonstrations.

And they kept their distance from key protest strategists, the circle of 50 or so hard-core activists, most of them members of the local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society.

“SDS was one of the true lightning-rod groups in the movement,” says Ettlin, who was an urban planning and economics major and a varsity crew member. “I was certainly sympathetic to their overall goals.

“But SDS wasn’t my style. It was too far out and strident and confrontational,” adds Ettlin, who was raised in Tustin and attended Servite and Mater Dei high schools in Orange County. “The more violent elements associated with SDS--like those in other areas of the country--really scared me.”

Still, the issues raised by the protest activists had shaken their confidence in U.S. society.

On the eve of their 1969 graduation, Roley, Janas and Ettlin found that they too were angered and dismayed about the state of their nation. To them, the ‘60s decade, which once appeared so promising, had turned ugly and somehow treacherous.

Janas, a precinct worker for Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 California primary campaign, recalls it this way: “It was the war, the political expediencies, the Chicago (Democratic Convention) crackdowns. It was the horror and devastation of seeing Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy blown away, the way John Kennedy had been.”

“America seemed invincible to us,” Ettlin says. “But we came to realize that terrible things can happen; that American society had to be profoundly changed--from the ground up.”

They still did not become avid, open protesters. But although their levels of involvement varied widely after graduation, their goals for society were much the same.

Janas’ explanation is typical: “I knew I wasn’t the banner-waving type and that whatever I might do would not be at the front lines. But you have to find your own way of helping change attitudes and raise awareness, even if it’s not spectacular, not on the cutting edge.”

While pursuing a master’s degree in journalism at Northwestern University in 1970, Janas briefly joined anti-war demonstrations, including one that mourned the slayings of four Kent State University students by Ohio National Guardsmen.

But later, when she returned to Southern California, she resumed her low profile. She worked on children’s educational TV, counseled Catholic youth groups and wrote magazine and newspaper articles on human behavior, education and social issues.

Meanwhile, Roley, who remained at UCI to earn a master’s degree in anthropology and a doctorate in social psychology, took part in anti-draft rallies, including some in Los Angeles.

Already an outspoken environmentalist, he took a more direct advocacy path: He turned to teaching about natural resources, recycling and other ecosystems. His classes included field-study treks in Central and South America and one of Chapman College’s World Campus Afloat voyages.

Ettlin remembers marching in “one or two” 1970 anti-war protests in Gary, Ind. But elsewhere in Gary, his social involvement was more direct: He spent four years in the black community, helping conduct federally backed grass-roots projects.

At first Ettlin was a VISTA volunteer organizing a food cooperative, then a coordinator of a day-care center and a field researcher in an income-assistance experiment.

It was community action in the War on Poverty and Great Society style of the ‘60s, Ettlin says: “We were helping people to get on their feet, to get the community itself to run their own lives. For me, a white kid from California suburbia, the experience was the biggest eye-opener of my life.”

When Ettlin left Gary’s black neighborhoods in the mid-’70s, the protest movement had long since peaked. A key reason for the swift decline was all too obvious: the shutting down of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. By 1973, a cease-fire was reached and the final U.S. troop withdrawals were under way.

But Ettlin’s dropping out underscored some of the other reasons--highly personal ones--for the trailing off of ‘60s-style dissent.

“The (Gary) project was exciting, a feeling you were doing something, but it was exhausting physically and emotionally,” says Ettlin, who left Gary to earn his master’s degree at Tufts University in Boston. “I saw a lot of burnout in Gary (among other volunteers). The day-to-day intensity can be overwhelming to most people.”

Besides, he says: “I had always thought of it (community action) as a temporary thing. I never thought of myself as a 100% activist, but that it would be something I would hope to continue part time. When you’re younger, you’re much freer to do such projects, I think.”

Ettlin returned to California to be a consulting economist for private industry. “As you grow older, no matter what your ideals,” he says, “we have to take on other responsibilities, like a family, like meeting certain financial demands.”

Personal economic survival became pivotal in changing student attitudes toward dissent in the late ‘70s. In the ‘60s, when the economy was booming, students took prosperity for granted. But in the ‘70s, the country was battered by recessions. To protest-era alumni like Roley, the subsequent collapse of dissent on campuses and the emergence of the so-called Me Generation are understandable.

“By then, you had students living with hard times and new fears,” Roley says. “It became a question of economic pressures--getting the good grades, putting the nose to the grindstone, then, if you’re lucky, finding the good job and a home you can own.”

As for student dissent in the late ‘80s, there remain “isolated examples of real social awareness and questioning,” Roley says, adding that students in general remain “too self-absorbed and inward.”

“They have forgotten about community responsibility and the rest of society,” he says. “They have forgotten what the ‘60s taught us.”

The three UCI alumni have not forgotten: The ‘60s still sets the standard for them.

Both Janas and Ettlin have drifted from social causes. But they intend to become more involved, especially in environmental issues and grass-roots Democratic politics.

Roley is as much the environmentalist advocate as ever--still teaching on the college circuit in Orange and Los Angeles counties, participating in field research in the United States and Mexico, operating his Sprout Acres station.

All three say social change, if it is to be effective, needs to be small in scale and gained by providing examples, rather than by mass dissent.

Nevertheless, they argue that the impacts of the ‘60s protests--despite the setbacks, the overreaching and the rhetoric--have been immensely profound.

“Maybe it was youthful naivete, a lot of wishful thinking, to believe that change could be achieved on such a sweeping scale and within such a short period,” Ettlin says of that era.

And in that light, he says, “some may think there weren’t very many reforms gained--not with all the institutional resistance and inertia and the social injustices and poverty that still exist.”

But, Ettlin says: “I am still convinced that society can be changed, and because of the ‘60s (dissent), much has been changed, even if these efforts did not meet all the high expectations.”

Janas notes that the ‘60s raised “the whole level of all social-change efforts. Many of the movements today--women’s rights, gay rights, the environment, anti-nuclear--were launched or nurtured in the ‘60s.”

The era “brought about fundamental changes in our attitudes,” she says. “Maybe this didn’t happen in all aspects, but it did in many vital ways, touching the lives of all of us with its compassion, questioning and social commitment.

“It changed my life, I know, even though most of us did not march then, do not march now. It was a very special, maybe unique era.”