Thirty-nine years ago this week, Amherst College students joined the fight for peace. The decade of the '60s was a time filled with protests and civil disobedience. Sixty students and one faculty member began a protest fast in an effort to show their disapproval of the U.S. crop bombing in Vietnam. The fast was targeted to last for eight days. "The fast seems to me to be an apt political act of symbolic significance that is a legitimate way of expressing opposition to the Vietnam War," Professor of History N.Gordon Levin, the lone faculty member who joined the fast, explained in The Amherst Student. In addition, 11 faculty members showed support for the fasters by issuing a statement in favor of the hunger strike.

While the fasters' aim was to remain on hunger strike for the full week, most planned to start eating after two or three days. Roy Chaleff '68, one of the organizers of the fast, estimated that only six to 10 people would fast for the full eight days. Originally, the fasters had discussed drinking orange juice, but this elicited comments from the student body calling the protest a "half-fast." Instead, the students on the fast would wear black arm bands and sustain themselves with a diet of water and vitamin pills.

Sympathy among students for the protestors remained mixed. Many, while agreeing with the cause, disagreed with Chaleff's assertion that a hunger strike would have more of an impact on people than another form of demonstration. Chaleff claimed that fasting would disprove the stereotype of protestors as "effeminate intellectuals." A student identified by The Student simply as "a sophomore cutie" responded, "I don't see anything more masculine about fasting than about picketing."

Faculty sympathies were also conflicted, although supporters of the fast were more vocal in their protests. A statement issued by the faculty summing up objection to the chemical destruction of Vietcong rice paddies by U.S. Air Force napalm bombing said that this action "would seem to violate all the requirements for 'just war' developed by morally concerned men over the centuries. Such destruction cannot discriminate between combatants and women and children."