Shared Words, Divided Worlds: Moral Language and the Struggle for Meaning at the Claremont Colleges During the Vietnam War, 1965-1969

<p>This thesis examines the Vietnam War-era campus conflicts at the Claremont Colleges as a profound struggle over the meaning and ownership of moral and political language. Rather than interpreting antiwar and prowar activism as expressions of fundamentally opposed value systems, this study argues that students and administrators alike engaged in an ongoing contest to define ideals such as democracy, responsibility, and conscience. Through a micro-historical lens, the project analyzes how these contested vocabularies were invoked, reinterpreted, and performed in protests, counter-protests, and administrative policies. Drawing from a wide array of archival sources—including student newspapers, protest ephemera, administrative records, and visual materials—this thesis adopts a contextual approach rooted in intellectual and cultural history. It traces how antiwar activists expanded concepts of responsibility and conscience to critique American violence and demand global moral obligation, while prowar students reimagined those same ideals as imperatives of loyalty, discipline, and national unity. The administration, in turn, translated moral contestation into procedural neutrality, prioritizing institutional stability and the regulation of dissent. By foregrounding the interpretive struggles at Claremont, this study reveals that the most consequential divisions were not over values themselves but over the different meanings attached to shared ideals. The Claremont case thus illuminates how American democracy has been—and continues to be—shaped by ongoing debates over the language and concepts that define collective life, showing how common ideals can unite and divide, and how their meanings remain open to continual negotiation.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Religion, MA

Level thesis:degree_level

Open Access Master's Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

School of Arts and Humanities

Year dc:date.available

2026

Author dc:creator

• Freeth, Haley

Contributors dc:contributor

• Daniel Ramírez

• Political Science
• Religion
• United States History

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/1099

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarship.claremont.edu:cgu_etd-2121