Estimates counted that between 5,000 and 10,000 people showed up for the teach-out in Tech. Photo by Nickerson.
By Elena Hubert ’25
From dusk to dawn, 10,000 people crowded the halls, classrooms and auditoriums of the Technological Institute with the world on their minds. On Jan. 23 and 24, 1970, student group Northwestern Students for a Better Environment organized the first informational “teach-out” on climate action: “Project Survival.”
A new Libraries digital exhibit, “Up All Night with a Sick Environment: Project Survival and its Legacy,” looks at press clippings, internal communications, video footage and more to highlight what compelled so many students & community members to take to the seats.
Ben Taylor, a first-year graduate student in the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Library and Information Science program, curated the exhibit for his recent practicum at Northwestern. Working in University Archives from February through March, Taylor was tasked with re-developing an existing, outdated site about student life.
Taylor said he was not familiar with Project Survival before his arrival but was drawn to it due to the momentum students created with the event, which received national media attention.
“It’s not something I’d ever heard of, but it was a big student-organized project that really made a splash and was a complex event with a lot of moving parts,” Taylor said.
For his practicum, Taylor worked with Charla Wilson, the Libraries’ Archivist for the Black Experience, who helped him build a timeline for research, storyboarding and website development. Wilson emphasized the utility of a practicum as an exploration of professional opportunities.
“The purpose of the practicum was to provide a student with exposure to this as a potential career,” Wilson said. “A project like this gives you that insight while also creating something at the end like a digital exhibit that will be great for a portfolio.”
Taylor’s final product looks into the origin, events and legacy of Project Survival, which is considered a lead-up event to the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. For a month, Taylor combed photos, articles, other documents and over five hours of video footage to build his perspective on the event.
Members of the Native American Committee of Chicago approached the stage during the teach-out and were offered a microphone. Video of their demands is available on the exhibit page.
Northwestern Students for a Better Environment had previously donated their archives to the Libraries, allowing Taylor to look at meeting notes, letters and internal communications from the group. He said reading documents like NSBE’s newsletter allows for “a lot of personality to come out.”
“That’s not really stuff that you could see elsewhere,” Taylor said. “I felt like I got a really good glimpse of an archival researcher’s experience.”
After finishing his research in February, Taylor spent the rest of his practicum storyboarding exhibit layouts and developing the website. Wilson said Taylor went “above and beyond” with the digital exhibit, which follows the lifespan of the event and its impact.
“I think he just surpassed what I expected him to even come up with,” Wilson said. “We were just thinking, ‘Oh well, just create a few pages. It’d be a very minimal amount of work.’ But I think he went above and beyond to create something that is truly stunning and just informative and educational.”
Although he said he’s still “feeling out” what kind of library work he wants to do, Taylor said his main interest is in the “public accessibility of these collections.” With Project Survival’s story now just one click away, he said he hopes people discover how similar activism 50 years ago is to today.
“In a lot of ways they didn’t have the vocabulary yet for things like ‘climate change’ but were talking about the same issues,” Taylor said. “Although sometimes these things get forgotten about as history, people have been working on the same things.”
Elena Hubert is a Medill School of Journalism sophomore