Interview with David Orr, 1998

Interview with David Orr, 1998

Transcription: "It was, for me, a very exciting time. I came full-time in the fall of ’69. And that’s when there was the—in terms of the Vietnam War—that many campuses were really getting active. One of the things that was so wonderful at Mundelein, both for students as well as for faculty like me, is that we had all our fights, but it was a learning community. So when I refer to that first year particularly, because the strike took place, I believe, in the Spring of 1970…The value of that war, many people in academics—and I think that I like—they believe in the value of discourse, the value of intellectual debate. Yet in many places in our society, in our politics, and in many cases our universities, there is a paucity of real debate. People are as cowardly there as they are in other places. So to have this full-fledged debate student and faculty—‘Should we do this? Should we have a strike? Wait a second, if we have a strike that’s not fair to the ones who are going to graduate. Or that’s not fair to this. Well, but on the other hand, at a time like this when people are dying and they shouldn’t be, we’ve got to change the rules.'"

Mundelein College Oral History Collection