Fifty years ago, a brief letter to the editor of a student newspaper led to a national furor over academic freedom. When it broke in 1959, the Leo Koch Case dominated front pages and newscasts. It remained a story for three years. Today it is so thoroughly forgotten that not even Wikipedia, which knows everything, has heard of it.
I was on the campus the whole time and later edited the same campus paper, but I don't want to write about the case. I want to write about what was said in the letter.
It was published in the autumn of 1960. Let me take you back on a trip through time. That was a Puritan era by today's standards.
Most universities took aggressive steps to prevent sex among undergraduates. Students weren't allowed to live in their own apartments. In women's dormitories, a strict curfew was enforced, and too many "late minutes" in a semester would get you hauled up before a Disciplinary Committee. It was assumed that by locking down the women, you would prevent sex; gay sex was off the radar.
Police patrolled lovers' lanes and shone spotlights into suspicious cars. If actual sex was observed, arrests were made. University Police checked local motel parking lots for license plates registered to students. If a couple returned to a woman's dorm early, they could share a sofa in the lounge, a brightly-lighted room monitored by matrons who enforced the Three Foot Rule. This wasn't as bad as it sounds. It didn't mean boy and girl had to be separated by three feet, but it did mean that three of their four feet had to be on the floor, if you follow me.
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