History Repeats Itself at Columbia
By David Swanson
Last night, as a group of activists took over Hamilton Hall just hours after Columbia University administrators had begun suspending students and clearing an anti-war encampment, there was a sense that history was repeating itself. Since the sixties, Hamilton Hall has been a flashpoint for protest on the Columbia campus. It was famously taken over by Civil Rights activists and anti-war protestors in April, 1968, and was subsequently seized by students in 1972, 1985, and 1992. It’s an appropriate spot for revolution, named for Alexander Hamilton, the university’s original student activist. Columbia’s current leadership appears to disagree: the school has responded to this latest development by cancelling classes, and closing off the campus.
This is surely not how the university’s administrators anticipated things playing out, but any student of history could have predicted it. In 1968, the Columbia student body helped ignite a wave of protests across the world. The pro-Palestinian demonstrations have now spread to college campuses around the country, and despite a widespread crackdown and accusations of anti-Semitism, there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight.
The current state of affairs, at Columbia and beyond, is so similar to the events of 1968 that I was compelled to go back to the contemporaneous media coverage to see if my sense of deja vu was misplaced. There are, of course, plenty of differences—America is not the same place that it was 56 years ago. But the parallels are so striking you’d think everyone involved was just re-running the 1968 playbook. Having chased this notion down the digital rabbit hole, I’ve returned with a selection of articles from then and now to illustrate both the similarities and the differences.
Mark Rudd, who helped spearhead the 1968 protests as leader of the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), sees both. “They’re pretty much the same as we were. The basic impetus of the students, I think it’s not that complicated. It’s that they see a moral tragedy and moral crime going on, and they want to try to do something to stop it,” he told the Daily Beast. “They don't have the violent rhetoric we had, like calling the cops pigs and ‘Up against the wall, motherfucker,’ that kind of craziness. I think they’re a lot more careful. I think they’re smarter.”
THE STATE OF STUDENT ACTIVISM
In January, on the heels of a Fall academic semester in which campus protests stirred to life at colleges around the country, the New York Times Magazine weighs in with a long-form think-piece on the state of American higher education.
Rebels Without a Program
By George F. Kennan
New York Times Magazine, January 21, 1968
I would submit that if you find a system inadequate, it is not enough simply to demonstrate indignation and anger over individual workings of it, such as the persistence of the Vietnam war, or individual situations it tolerates or fails to correct, such as the condition of the Negroes in our great cities. If one finds these conditions intolerable, and if one considers that they reflect no adequate expression either of the will of the majority or of that respect for the rights of minorities which is no less essential to the success of any democratic system, then one places upon one's self, it seems to me, the obligation of saying in what way this political system should be modified, or what should be established in the place of it, to assure that its workings would bear a better relationship to people's needs and people's feelings.
College Is All About Curiosity. And That Requires Free Speech.
By Stephen L. Carter
New York Times Magazine, January 24, 2024
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the “free speech” movement that began among students at the University of California, Berkeley, and spread swiftly across the country. The anniversary is a reminder of a sort that students, too, are entitled to academic freedom—and I don’t just mean the freedom to protest, cherished as that right may be. What’s far more important is the freedom of students to grow into distinct thinking individuals. The student must be, in the phrasing of the German philosopher Friedrich Paulsen, “free to devote himself wholly to his task of forming himself into an independent personality.”
PROTESTS AND CRACKDOWNS
In late April, with graduation on the horizon and students at Columbia becoming increasing vocal in their activism, the school’s administrators cuts off the campus, and called in the police.
Seal Columbia Campus As Sit-Ins Continue
By Edwar Benes and Arthur Mulligan
Daily News, April 25, 1968
Officials at Columbia University virtually sealed off the troubled campus last night, canceling evening classes and closing all entrances except for two on 116th St.
The action came amid reports that Harlem Negroes planned to join student sit-ins that were continuing in two campus buildings.
The tension continued despite the release of Henry Coleman, acting dean of Columbia College, and two associates. They had been held in Coleman's office in Hamilton Hall since Tuesday afternoon, Students released them at 3:30 p.m. yesterday. last night about 150 faculty and administration members voted to ask that all work be stopped on a gymnasium in Morningside Park pending further discussions with community leaders on the controversial gym.
NYPD Arrests Pro-Palestinian Protesters at Columbia University: How It Happened
New York, April 18, 2024
Columbia University struck hard against pro-Palestinian protesters on Thursday, suspending student demonstrators and authorizing the NYPD to break up an encampment at the heart of campus. Police made more than 100 arrests as part of a promised crackdown by the university’s president, Nemat Shafik. Below is what we know about what happened.
Police shut down some entrances to campus, which was placed on lock down. One remained open at West 115th Street and Broadway, where a line of students formed to enter. A block away on 116th Street, about a hundred protesters were surrounded by police in riot gear who looked on at demonstrators wearing keffiyehs and waving Palestinian flags.
THE STUDENTS’ TAKE
First-person accounts by Columbia students give readers an up-close view of the unrest on campus.
The Diary of a Revolutionist
By Simon James
New York, May 27, 1968
At 4:00 a.m. the cops come in. The eight of us sit down on the stairs (which we've made slippery with green soap and water) and lock arms. The big cop says don't make it hard for us or you're gonna get hurt. We do not move. We want to make it clear that the police had to step over more chairs to get our people out. They pull us apart and carry us out, stacking us like cord wood under a tree. The press is here so we are not beaten. As I sit under the tree I can see kids looking down at us from every window in the building. We exchange the "V" sign. The police will have to ax every door to get them out of those offices. They do. Tom Hayden is out now. He yells "Keep the radio on! Peking will instruct you!" When they have 60 of us out they take us to the paddy wagons at mid-campus. I want to make them carry us, but the consensus is that it's a long, dark walk and we'll be killed if we don't co-operate, so I walk. At the paddy wagons there are at least a thousand people cheering us and chanting Strike! Strike! Strike! We are loaded in a wagon and the doors shut. John tells a story about how a cop grabbed the cop that grabbed him and then said “excuse me." We all laugh raucously to show an indomitable spirit and freak out the cops outside.
Shafik authorizes NYPD to sweep ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment,’ officers in riot gear arrest over 100
By Maya Stahl, Sarah Huddleston, and Shea Vance
Columbia Daily Spectator, April 18, 2024
The encampment began in the early hours on Wednesday, shortly before Shafik began her testimony in front of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce regarding antisemitism on campus. Shafik faced dozens of questions grilling her on the University’s response to pro-Palestinian protests on campus since Oct. 7, 2023.
At around 1:20 p.m., NYPD informed protesters that they would now be placed under arrest for trespassing after protesters did not disperse, pursuant to a previous message relayed by the officers. Officers from the NYPD Strategic Response Group then began arresting students roughly seven minutes later. Officers carried batons and had zip ties on their persons.
Arrested students were forcibly removed from campus and loaded onto correctional facilities buses, as hundreds of students looked on from outside the lawn. By around 2:10 p.m., one correctional bus had filled up with detained protesters.
THE PROFESSORS’ TAKE
Faculty at Columbia are split over support for the student protesters, with some protesting the protesters, some offering sympathy to the protesters, and others offering cluelessness.
The Uprising at Columbia
By F.W. Dupee
New York Review of Books, September 26, 1968
The Sundial was occupied by a speaker and three or four associates, including (briefly) a couple of what I guessed were Barnard girls. The boys tended to be quite tall with hair wild, eyes haunted, lower jaws protruded, shoulders hunched: the SDS look; while the girls were short, dark, stern-faced, and had their hair pulled tight into knots at the back. The group didn’t look as scary to me as they were reputed to be, perhaps because a couple of them were students of mine—the family quarrel aspect of the coming crisis was already present. In the bright Spring sunlight, squinting watchfully across the expanses of the campus, the SDSers made a familiar, disarming, storybook or TV Western impression—that of an embattled cluster of frontiersmen and their women in Indian country. This image fitted in—too conveniently, I was to find—with what I knew of their ideology (or anti-ideology) which, despite its debts to Marcuse, Sorel, Camus, Mao, etc., seemed to me in essence radically American and populist, with Cuba as the latest frontier and the great Guevara as the tragic hero.
I’m a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice.
By John McWhorter
New York Times, April 23, 2024
Last Thursday, in the music humanities class I teach at Columbia University, two students were giving an in-class presentation on the composer John Cage. His most famous piece is “4'33",” which directs us to listen in silence to surrounding noise for exactly that amount of time.
I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building. Lately that noise has been almost continuous during the day and into the evening, including lusty chanting of “From the river to the sea.” Two students in my class are Israeli; three others, to my knowledge, are American Jews. I couldn’t see making them sit and listen to this as if it were background music.
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BEYOND NEW YORK
Inspired by the events at Columbia, students from other schools, as well as activists from outside organizations, begin to coalesce into a nationwide movement.
Will Tom Hayden Overcome?
By Steven V. Roberts
Esquire, December 1968
Hayden and the rest of the New Left cannot be explained away as the dupes of some foreign ideology. It is very difficult for an older generation to understand this. Everyone extrapolates from his own experience, and when the men who are now middle-aged went to college or started their careers, most radicals were, in fact, Communists or some other brand of ideological leftist. Ipso facto, the New Leftists are Communists. Some of the most intelligent men I know insisted during the Columbia rebellion that the students were Communists, or worse, and called anyone who doubted it “naïve.”
But the older generation would like the New Left to be ideologues—or at least immature adolescents—for a deeper reason. That way they would not have to listen to the New Left; the kids’ rejection of the values and priorities of the older generation could be discounted. But the elders can’t get away with it. The New Left might be a lot of things, not all of them pleasant or tolerant. But it is neither the tool of a conspiracy nor a group of ungrateful wretches who haven’t grown up. It is the best of a generation—and it has been bred by nothing more than the world it was given.
Secret meetings, social chatter: How Columbia students sparked a nationwide revolt
By Tim Craig, Hannah Natanson and Richard Morgan
Washington Post, April 26, 2024
For students attending college today, life has been defined by waves of upheaval.
Columbia’s student body president, Teji Vijayakumar, notes that graduating seniors like herself were entering elementary school during the Occupy Wall Street protests, middle school during student walkouts over gun control and former president Donald Trump’s executive order barring travel from some Muslim-majority countries, and were in high school when the Black Lives Matter demonstrations erupted.
Vijayakumar recalls being 13 years old and writing her emergency contacts on her arm when she attended a women’s march in Washington.
“I think a difference with older generations is that for them college was a coming of age, whereas my class started elementary school in the financial crisis, started high school in the Trump presidency, and started college in the pandemic,” Vijayakumar said. “We’ve never lived in normal times.”
THE BACKLASH BEGINS
With conservative criticism around the country escalating, the Times editorial page takes a reactionary stance.
Hoodlumism at Columbia
New York Times, April 25, 1968
Massive student participation in the Presidential campaign has given a persuasive demonstration that young people can apply their political power in meaningful ways through legitimate and legal forms of expression. That demonstration merely underscores the intolerably undemocratic nature of dictatorial student minorities, at Columbia and elsewhere, who undermine academic freedom and the free society itself by resorting to such junta methods as wrecking the university president's office and holding administrators and trustees as hostages.
By inviting outside groups to join in such revolutionary tactics, they clearly challenge the university to call for the intercession of the police and thus deliberately provoke a basic threat to academic independence. Only concerted and determined efforts by the majority of students and faculty to resist the disruptive nihilists and to isolate them from legitimate and essential reform movements can prevent the irresponsibility of a few from doing irreparable harm to the universities and to the whole democratic process.
Colleges Have Gone off the Deep End. There Is a Way Out.
By David French
New York Times, April 28, 2024
What we’re seeing on a number of campuses isn’t free expression, nor is it civil disobedience. It’s outright lawlessness. No matter the frustration of campus activists or their desire to be heard, true civil disobedience shouldn’t violate the rights of others. Indefinitely occupying a quad violates the rights of other speakers to use the same space. Relentless, loud protest violates the rights of students to sleep or study in peace. And when protests become truly threatening or intimidating, they can violate the civil rights of other students, especially if those students are targeted on the basis of their race, sex, color or national origin.
The result of lawlessness is chaos and injustice. Other students can’t speak. Other students can’t learn. Teachers and administrators can’t do their jobs.
POLITICAL LEADERS REACT
Facing a national election in November, political leaders from both parties are quick to condemn the campus unrest.
Setting Matters Straight at Columbia
By Jack Newfield
New York, November 25, 1968
Last spring, at the zenith of the student insurrection at Columbia, respectable liberal opinion was against the student rebels. Vice President Humphrey confessed that Mark Rudd made him "sick to his stomach." The New Republic published a curious article supporting the conspiracy theory that the movement at Columbia had been carefully planned months in advance, at an NSA conference in Maryland. And the New York Times, in an emotional editorial entitled "Hood-lumism at Columbia," condemned “the intolerably undemocratic nature of dictatorial student minorities, at Columbia and elsewhere, who undermine academic freedom and the free society itself by resorting to such junta methods as wrecking the university's president's office…”
Republican Senators Demand Biden Use National Guard to Suppress Columbia Protests
By Nikki McCann Ramirez
Rolling Stone, April 22, 2024
Self-avowed pro-first amendment, anti-government repression Senators Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) are demanding President Joe Biden unleash the full force of the state’s National Guard to suppress pro-Palestinian student protests at Columbia University.
“If [New York City Mayor] Eric Adams won’t send the NYPD and [New York Governor] Kathy Hochul won’t send the National Guard, Joe Biden has a duty to take charge and break up these mobs,” Cotton wrote Monday on X, formerly Twitter, describing the protests as “nascent pogroms” against Jews — invoking the term used to describe historic massacres against Jewish communities. There have been no reports of targeted antisemitic violence stemming from the Columbia solidarity protest, although there have been some reports of harassment by protesters unaffiliated with the core group of students.
“Eisenhower sent the 101st to Little Rock. It’s time for Biden to call out the National Guard at our universities to protect Jewish Americans,” Hawley wrote in his own post on X.
STUDENT MATTERS
A writer at the Atlantic takes stock of the motivations of the students involved, and examines the roots of the generational divide.
On Misunderstanding Student Rebels
By Martin Duberman
The Atlantic, November 1968
The Young, it is becoming clear, are regarded with considerable hatred in our country. Resentment against them cannot be explained simply as a reaction to the style of a particular generation, for in recent years the young have been attacked on such divergent grounds that the grounds themselves take on the appearance of pretext. In the 1950s we denounced students for their inertia, their indifference to public questions, their absorption in the rituals of fraternities and football, their dutiful pursuit of “achievement.” In the 1960s we condemn them for the opposite qualities: for their passion, their absorption in public questions, their disgust with the trivia of college parties and athletics, their refusal to settle for mechanical processes of education.
Since the past two college generations have been denounced with equal vehemence for opposite inclinations, it seems plausible to conclude that it is not those inclinations but the very fact of their youth that makes them the target for so much murderous abuse. This conclusion may seem to contradict the fact that American society, above all others, is known for its adoration of youth. But that itself, paradoxically, is one cause of adult hostility: our youth-obsessed elders resent the eighteen-year-old’s easy possession of the good looks and high spirits they so desperately simulate
The Campus-Left Occupation That Broke Higher Education
By George Packer
The Atlantic, April 25, 2024
The long, intricate, but essentially unbroken line connects that rejection of the liberal university in 1968 to the orthodoxy on elite campuses today. The students of the ’68 revolt became professors—the German activist Rudi Dutschke called this strategy the “long march through the institutions”—bringing their revisionist thinking back to the universities they’d tried to upend. One leader of the Columbia takeover returned to chair the School of the Arts film program. “The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next,” D. H. Lawrence wrote. Ideas born in the ’60s, subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies, and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There’s nothing to debate.
ON TO CHICAGO AND BEYOND
With the protest having captured the imagination of young Americans beyond Columbia’s campus, student activists turn their sights to the coming Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
SDS Against the World
By Jonathan Rubinstein
New York, October 14, 1968
The number of radicalized students has increased. The assassination of two major political figures, the spectacle of the Chicago convention and the malaise being spread by, the most conservative Presidential campaign in memory has contributed to further weakening the patience of many with existing conditions. These factors are also increasing student determination to directly participate in the running of their school.
In New York these pressures are especially critical because the open conflict which is tearing the public school system. The Negro demand for local control over the public schools arouses deep sympathy among a large number of students. One reason police were initially called in last spring was to prevent the appearance on campus of large numbers of high school students who had walked out of classes in sympathy with the Columbia strikers. If a similar situation were to recur this fall there would exist the potential for a major student revolt in New York which could parallel in scope and intensity the student rebellion in Paris.
The Ghost of the 1968 Antiwar Movement Has Returned
By Charles M. Blow
New York Times, April 25, 2024
As in 1968, the semester will soon end, and those students will leave for the summer, allowing more time and energy for their efforts to be focused on the convention in Chicago in August.
Antiwar groups are already planning large protests at the convention. Hatem Abudayyeh of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network recently told The Chicago Tribune: “We’ll be marching with or without permits. This D.N.C. is the most important one since 1968, also in Chicago, when Vietnam War protesters and the Black liberation movement organized mass demonstrations that were violently repressed.”
