Memo from President Etherington, "Urgent decision on military recruiting"

This collection is divided into five folders. The first and second folders are general correspondence between Wesleyan and the various branches of the military, during the years 1968-1971, and 1972-1975, respectively. This correspondence is mostly generic in nature: military requests to visit campus, University responses to these requests, University inquiries about military programs, and military mailings and brochures detailing their career options for students.

The third folder is the Policy folder, and it contains the documents pertaining to the creation of the University's policy towards military presence on campus. Because of student and faculty protests about the military actively coming on campus and conducting interviews with students, the University created a new policy whereby there was an Advisor on Military Programs for students who scheduled meetings with the military based solely on student request. There was some controversy, as the Marines accused Wesleyan of barring the military from the campus, and due to a Public Law in the NASA Act (enclosed in the collection), the university could have been penalized by the Secretary of Defense by having funds denied to it. The information pertaining to this conflict is all enclosed in the third file.

The fourth file is the Philip Rockwell file. It includes several articles from the Argus and the Middletown Press from 1968 and 1969 about military protests by students, and the University's decision to create a new position for an "Advisor on Military Programs." It is at this time that the University created a new policy toward the military on campus. This file contains information about the creation of this office, a handwritten essay by Rockwell entitled "My Stand on Position of Advisor on Military Programs," correspondence, and his annual report of activities from 1969 to 1972.

The last file in the collection is the Paul Reynolds file. Paul Reynolds was a professor at Wesleyan who vocally protested the Vietnam War and military presence on campus, for various reasons. This file mostly contains his writings, his letters to the administration, the Argus, and detailed written explanations about his beliefs and actions toward military and espionage recruiters on the Wesleyan campus as well as the administration's response to this accusations and inquiries.