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Next day there were more rebellious speakers, including Jerry Rubin, who failed to get a crowd to join in a chant assailing Brewster. He settled for a rhythmic plea to "Free Bobby Scale." The day was uneventful, although police employed tear gas to disperse one lingering crowd on the Green. A small fire was squelched in one leftist political center. A Panther sound truck kept appealing throughout the night to "keep your heads on your shouldersthis is no time for foolish actions."
Other campuses across the U.S. suffered much greater violence during the week. In a wholly unexpected eruption at Ohio State University, a relatively small group of activists on the 45,000-student campus managed to escalate into a near riot the recent arrest of six students during a peaceful demonstration against military and industrial recruiting on campus. The fighting, with some shooting, continued sporadically for two days. When the battle was over, 640 people had been arrested, 130 protesters and officers were injured, and some 1,800 National Guardsmen had been called out. Eleven of the injured demonstrators sustained gunshot wounds. Police reported that they had fired $15,000 worth of tear gas.
At Berkeley, which has been relatively quiet recently, another ROTC protest made that campus look as chaotic as ever. For two days, groups of up to a thousand demonstrators, many of them off-campus "street people," including high school students, smashed windows and fought police.
A protest against ROTC activities at Stanford turned into two nights of clashes between demonstrators and police in which dozens of officers and 16 students were injured. The hostilities began as police tried to clear a building occupied by the demonstrators. The protesters first assaulted police with rocks, then the cops beat up some students in retaliation. The clashes grew more violent after a campus rally protesting the use of U.S. troops in Cambodia, and the two related issues were joined. Many windows were shattered by roving bands, which would be dispersed by tear gas at one point, only to regroup later. After dark, three shotgun blasts were fired by someone in a car at the home of Colonel Stanley Ramey, Stanford's ROTC commander. No one was hurt. Stanford President Kenneth Pitzer called the violence "unfortunate, senseless and tragic"while conceding that he regarded U.S. involvement in Cambodia "a mistake of the gravest kind."
