Faculty Activities
By intuition, one might think that the Poly faculty were in opposition to the student body, wanting classes to stay in session and minimal politcally subversive student organization on campus. But in fact, many professors and faculty members publicly oppossed the war. And this was not only the case at Poly, but at unversities across the country, such as MIT and Columbia (Schwartz).
Upon the establishment of the Vietnam War draft, both undergraduate and graduate students were exempt from the draft (Hatt). What was initially planned as a quick invasion was proven to be a slow and bloody war of attrition against North Vietnamese guerrillas. So in 1965, President Johnson decided to begin drafting college students (Hatt). Instead of drafting students by random, a student's status was instead decided by a combination of their class standing and a score on a test known as the Selective Service Qualification Test (Hatt). Students must have either had a high class rank or test score in order to have been exempted from the draft. The students who did not meet this cutoff were randomly drafted, with between one and two thousand being drafted a month (Hatt).
As early as 1967, Poly faculty took a public stance against the Vietnam War. In April of 1967, Dr. Ernst Weber, president of the Faculty Conference Committte, brought fourth a petition for Poly administration to not report students' class standings to draft boards (Schwartz). The petition was signed by 133 professors and a majority of the faculty (Schwartz). The popularity of this petition was in part due to students taking less academic risk in order to raise their class standing (Hatt). As well professors feeling morrally unable to give their students low grades that could damage their class standings and make them eligible for the draft (Hatt).
Faculty not only at Poly but at colleges across the eastern seaboard of the U.S. continued to take active measures protesting the Vietnam War into 1970. The "March 4 Movement" was the largest organized strike of university faculty to date, calling for faculty to stop all research and teaching on March 4th. The instructions don't specify specically for how long the strike is supposed to last, but I'm guessing it's indefinite until the movement organizers make a decision. The instructions also call for participants to write petitions for their universities to end Department of Defense spending. This instruction is interesting because it shows the degree to which this strike was centralized. A single petition signed by faculty at universities across the U.S. would have been far more impactful, but this instruction calling for each institution to write their own petitition shows that there might have been little coordination between different campuses.
May of 1970 proved to be one of the most prominent months of civil unrest in this country's history, after many controversial nationwide events, including the Kent State Massacre. This is expressed in Professor William R. Allen's, a Poly faculty member, letter to his peers, communicating how distraught he is with the state of civil unrest at Poly and the wider New York City area. One can infer from this letter that Allen would likely support an early dismissal for the semester, and might be trying to convince his colleagues to support it as well. I could not find any evidence of Allen's stance on the war before or after this letter, but faculty opinion, at least towards the Selective Service System, was negative; and by the tone of the letter, it seems that Allen took this civil unrest very seriously. All of these events happening to him or being observed by him in a single day seemed to have been a tipping point in his vocalization concerning the war and protests about the war.