his wife Barbara, several Amherst faculty members and several hundred Amherst students, were arrested for disturbing the peace. Ward's participation stirred both approval and outrage, as well as a large volume of media coverage and commentary, related to the appropriateness of a college president's involvement in individual acts of civil disobedience. Ward resigned after eight years of the presidency to head the Ward Commission. American studies Best known as a central figure of the Myth and Symbol School of American studies scholarship, Ward was one of the few university presidents during the Vietnam era to participate in direct activism against the escalation of conflict in Southeast Asia, and was the only university president to be arrested for doing so. His decision to protest the war was informed by his basic view of history and the role of American mythologies in American life, including and most importantly the mythology of absolute freedom and equality implied by Jeffersonian democracy. For Ward, history was made when individuals put their ideals into action, and for this reason Ward spent much of his career exploring contradictions in ideology, especially emphasizing the contradiction between the individual's freedom to act in socially responsible manner and the increasing bureaucratization of life that limited the possibility of such action. His most well known book, Andrew Jackson: Symbol for An Age treats Andrew Jackson as a symbol embodying 19th century ideology. Other figures who Ward treated as symbolic of contradictions in America's myths about itself include John F. Kennedy, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Lindbergh, and the Anarchist activist Alexander Berkman. Like many academics in the humanities during the Cold War, Ward refrained from direct opposition to American foreign policy for most of his career, although his work, much of which is included in his career retrospective Red, White, and Blue: Men, Books, and Ideas in American Culture, implies a dialectical approach to understanding culture that would influence the New Left and other expressly radical critics. As with many writers in the myth and symbol school, such as Leo Marx, who have been misunderstood by recent cultural critics writing in what has become known as the "cold war consensus" view of American academic history, Ward was attempting through the course of his career to forward a complex criticism of American culture rather than a mere celebration of American hegemony. For Ward, such criticism led inevitably to direct activism. The failure of