Thousands of protesters marched on campus on a daily basis, including alumnus Danny Glover (far right, in trenchcoat), who remembers "the incredible discourse and dialogue that happened between Asian American students and Latino students and black students, and progressive white students."
"When we were in strike mode, it was pretty horrendous," recalls alumnus Don Scoble, assistant to President Robert Smith at the time of the strike and now president of the SF State University Foundation. "People were throwing office equipment out of windows ? a command post was set up in the president's office and order turned over to the SFPD."
President S.I. Hayakawa, Smith's successor, made headlines for his hard-line strategy of keeping police on the campus during the strike at what was then SF State College. "The revolutionaries said they would destroy the College," he explained in testimony before a Senate subcommittee. "I said they would not."
When protesters refused to turn off their loudspeakers, President Hayakawa climbed atop their truck to do it himself. Alumnus Ernest Brill, who was inside the vehicle, remembers a "man in a Tam o' Shanter tried to reach through the window and pull out the microphone on which I was speaking ? the sun seem to glint off thousands of pieces of metal which I later realized were TV cameras ? a group of SF Tactical Squad Police ordered us to get out of the truck and then arrested us without reading us our rights."
