determined whether a student was eligible for deferment from the military draft for the war. Later that year the many students wanted to participate in the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam on October 15. The killing of four students at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, led to Concordia students holding a vigil for the Kent State victims on May 6. Four crosses were erected in the seminary quadrangle, the bells were tolled, and barbed wire was strung. During the 1969–70 school year and thereafter, the student newspaper, the Spectrum, urged students to take action to boycott California table grapes, work for social justice, and fight discrimination. The student response to the events leading to the establishment of Seminex borrowed from the previous activism. For example, the crosses erected for the walkout and the tolling of the bells replicated the response to the Kent State killings. Early tensions Concordia Seminary Under the presidency of Alfred Fuerbringer from 1953 to 1969, Concordia Seminary had developed a reputation as a more liberal institution within the LCMS due to its teaching of historical-critical methods of biblical interpretation. Though the charges were reformulated in several different reports, they generally held that the faculty (and, particularly, members of the exegetical theology department) were using historical-critical methods for biblical interpretation, and that these professors improperly stressed the importance of the doctrine or teaching of the Gospel (forgiveness of sins in Christ) over the importance of the whole of the Christian Bible. The September 1, 1972, Report of the Synodical President states: Sensing that the LCMS was changing its theological position, two other conservative Lutheran church bodies, the Evangelical Lutheran Synod and the Wisconsin Synod, who had been in altar and pulpit fellowship with the LCMS for a century, suspended that fellowship with the LCMS in 1955 and 1961, respectively, and withdrew from the Evangelical Lutheran Synodical Conference in 1963, a body the synods had co-founded in 1872. Beginning in 1959 and continuing through 1973, the laity in the LCMS reacted to the growing modernism at Concordia Seminary by passing a series of seventeen resolutions either affirming full biblical inerrancy or condemning the spread of "antiscriptural teaching" in the synod. Fuerbringer ignored these resolutions as well as the growing discontent in the synod. Many conservatives in the LCMS asked whether the seminary was serving the denomination or the denomination was serving the seminary. Ascension