Students ✦ Campus Police
In the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, the most relevant interactions between HWS students and police, both Campus and Ontario County, occurred around events associated with an undercover cop posing as an organizer for the SDS known as Tommy the Traveler. Students clashed heavily with law enforcement groups on campus at this time, particularly when incidents involving Tommy the Traveler occurred.
Here is an example from the current HWS archives of a 1970 police report on the ROTC building bombing incident that as instigated by Tommy the Traveler and carried out by Hobart freshmen.
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Between the 1960’s and 1970’s college students around the county protested the Vietnam War. The Hobart and William Smith campus along with a few others thought there needed to be someone who helped end this student unrest. As chronicled in one of the official documents from campus safety, Tommy or “Tommy the Traveler” as he was known to the media came to the HWS campus under the guise of being a student to provoke change. The administration brought in Tommy to stop what was going on and to catch the people who were starting these riots Against the Vietnam war and AROTC. The students were not happy with the organization being on campus. Tommy the Traveler came to campus to push kids in the wrong direction to show who was causing the issues. They thought it would “fix” the campus.
Tommy the Traveler created a public outcry after he was figured out. He would say outlandish things about the Vietnam War and would go off about how awful the police were. Dr. Jeffrey S. Victor says, “He tried to meet with the two students on campus in my wife’s language lab, but when she heard the nonsense he was preaching, she told him to leave. Months later, during June 1970, I saw a picture of this guy on a national television news report about a student riot at nearby Hobart College. He had provoked the anger of students, after they found out that he was an undercover agent, who had urged them to make bombs and destroy buildings. Someone fire-bombed the ROTC building.” He was there to create problems to see who would actually do the things crime’s he wanted them to do. He would aggravate the problems and ended up causing loss of trust on campus with students and administration. Paul Van Hemel a Hobart alumni reflects on his views of what Tommy the traveler did to their campus by saying, “We must all work hard to avoid the mistrust which fosters and feeds on incidents such as that which recently threatened the peace of our community. . . . I have heard, from residents of the Geneva area, suspicions that the trouble at Hobart was stirred up by “Communist-inspired outside influence.” The fact that the outsider, who was indeed stirring up trouble, turned out to be employed by the Police is evidence of shocking irresponsibility in community leadership.” He caused an effect on the Hobart campus as well as campuses across the country, by coming in and trying to pave paths of destruction during a very trying time.