HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. (CN) — Overshadowed by student protest at the University of California and Kent State, Hofstra University had its fair share of Vietnam War-era iconic moments as well.
In one apocryphal tale — a fitting tribute to the alma mater of "Born on the Fourth of July" writer Ron Kovic — student revolutionaries pointed broomstick handles like mock rifles at Richard Nixon's helicopters traveling to a campaign event at the Nassau Coliseum.
Hofstra has calmed down considerably since the heady days of hosting the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at one commencement, but its manicured lawns will transform Monday night as the suburban Long Island campus hosts this year's premiere 2016 Presidential Debate.
This election season's slate of candidates might have sent students from Hofstra's halcyon days of protest storming the barricades of the approximately 1,000-seat Debate Hall.
Polls of young people — or as the media calls them, millennials — consistently show that dissatisfaction with Democrat Hillary Clinton is rivaled only by their greater contempt for Republican Donald Trump.
For many on campus, Hillary Clinton offers four more years of the most powerful political dynasty in the United States since the Kennedys. While the Kennedys are remembered for the rhetoric of peace, progress and public service, however, the campus-left here associates the Clintons with militarism, incrementalism and triangulation.
The problem has gotten so bad that even the leader of Hofstra's Campus Feminist Collective said she does not know if she will cast her ballot for the woman who would bust the presidential glass ceiling.
"I feel like at this point in 2016, a first female president is so overdue," Natasha Rappazzo, 20, said in an interview. "It's about damn time."
In addition to her double-major in history and political science, Rappazzo serves as program director for the Long Island Alliance for Peaceful Alternatives.
Along with many activists in her circle, she finds Clinton's record as a "hawk" troubling. Rappazzo voted for Clinton's insurgent challenger, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, in the Democratic primary, and she is now giving a closer look to the Green Party's Jill Stein, who has been shut out of the debate.
"It's a whole political system that doesn't represent what we want," Rappazzo said.
Through her anti-war group, Rappazzo and her professors have prepared daylong events, including protests, teach-ins, art displays, and of course, a debate-watch. She said these offerings would give students a reprieve from what she called the "war room" of the Debate Hall.
The head of Hofstra's Black Student Union, on the other hand, has high enthusiasm for Hillary.
Clinton "understands economic and racial equality and wants to implement laws to fix the problem," said Jasmine Spaulding, a 21-year-old business major. "She supports other women in the climb for equality. She understands the criminal-justice system is broken and wants to give those [affected by it] a fair chance."
That system, Spaulding says, has been on the minds of many black students who have been watching a cascade of videos showing police officers shooting and killing unarmed people like them across the nation, the most recent of which have brought hundreds into the streets of Charlotte, North Carolina, for nearly a week.