ABSTRACT
Ann Arbor, Michigan is often seen as a sister city to Berkeley, California: the mid-West's sibling of that unruly bastion of free speech, anti-war politics and student radicalism on the Left Coast. There is some truth to this. Certainly by the time Gunnar Olsson arrived on the campus in 1966 several years after the founding of Students for a Democratic Society(SDS) and the drafting of the Port Huron Statement and in the immediate wake of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and President John's massive troop build-up in Vietnam Ann Arbor had established its credentials as a centre of dissent: a forcing-house in a widening network of opposition to what was then called, as President Eisenhower put it in his 1961 speech, the American military-industrial-congressional complex and its imperial ambitions. The departure from Ann Arbor was bittersweet. No regret over Geography perhaps, but the University had been a crucible of his creativity.
