Michael Birkner

• The warmth of the faculty and its interest in the likes of me.
  People like Ted Baskerville and Ken Mott were terrific mentors. Others, like Norm Forness, Don Tannenbaum, Bruce Boenau, and Jim Pickering and others were consistently interested in me as a person and cared what I had to say.
• The good times in my fraternity, Rho Beta. 
  I belonged to an unorthodox fraternity. It was the only local and it did not subscribe to hazing, hell week, or other nonsense. We were a collection of individualists (you could say nerds and misfits in some cases, notably mine). I lived in the fraternity house for three years, and while I was not involved in many of the late night card games and hi jinks because I spent most of my time at the Gettysburgian office, I did forge close and lifelong friendships with a number of my brothers there.

Photo by Michael Birkner

• The energy of the place during the height of student activism. If there was a period when student activism became common at Gettysburg, it was 1968-1971. I was there for all of this, starting the first week of school when there was a Peace march to the Peace Light (above).
  
  I saw the making of Symposium '70, attended the amazing faculty meeting of May 1970 after Kent State, and had many, many informal debates with friends and faculty members about the war, Nixon, etc. 
  
  I tell my students in my 20th century US class that as crazy as this seems, I once spent hours debating a fraternity brother whether Richard Nixon was "the devil incarnate" or not!  (I took the position that he was bad news, but not the devil!)