Columbia University is locked down. Only students and faculty can enter. Pro-Palestinian student protesters have set up an encampment on the lawns in front of the dorms. The entire perimeter of the campus is being protected by security guards.
Last night, at a rally in the middle of the Quad, three Jewish students passed by the speaker on their way back to their dorms. When he saw them, the speaker called on the crowd to form a human chain with him, to keep the women away from what he called, “our community.”
This isn’t the first time that student protests have engulfed the Columbia campus. In 1968, students rallying against the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War took over five buildings and even took the dean hostage for a short while.
The year before that, in 1967, a Columbia student activist found evidence in the International Law Library that tied the university to a weapons research think tank called the Institute for Defense Analyses or the IDA. The university had not made that connection public. The IDA discussed ways to provide a link between scientists and the demands of national security. During the Vietnam War, that was an extremely unpopular idea.
At the same time as that discovery was made, Columbia was planning on building what appeared to be a segregated gymnasium in nearby Morningside Park. The upper floor of the building would be a gym facility used by the students with an entrance on one side. The lower floor would be a community center used by the Harlem community with its entrance on the opposite side. Student activists complained that the building’s design violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Because Harlem residents would only get partial access to the new upstairs fitness center, which was going up on public land, people started calling it “Gym Crow.”
A group of students calling themselves Students for a Democratic Society first started protesting both things in March of 1968. To give you an idea of the tenor of the country at that moment, that was just eight days before the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Tensions were high.
The demonstrations exploded on April 23, when police officers attempted to stop students from entering the construction site in Morningside Park. When that happened, the students left the site and took over an administrative building on campus called Hamilton Hall.
As the occupation went on, the Black students in the group tried to distance themselves from the White students. The Black students wanted to focus on the gym rather than the war. The White students wanted to focus on the war. To complicate matters even further, more and more people from outside universities and, indeed, other people with no connection to the school at all began to join the fray.
Several hundred other students who called themselves the “Majority Coalition” were opposed to the protests. They formed a blockade around Low Library. They would let anyone out of the building but would not let any people or supplies in. They felt that the University was not doing enough to quell the violence, so they decided to take care of it themselves.
Finally, at the crack of dawn on April 30, The New York Police Department entered with tear gas and evicted the protestors. The Black protesters cleared their building peacefully while the White protestors resisted and were forcibly removed from the rest. Seven hundred demonstrators were arrested. Over a hundred people sustained injuries including a police officer whose back was broken when a student jumped on top of him from a second-story window.
As a result of the students’ actions, Columbia University withdrew from the Institute for Defense Analyses and construction on the gymnasium was halted and plans for its completion were scrapped.
Columbia College at the University has a requirement that each student be able to swim three, I think it was, laps in the pool. I am a perfectly capable swimmer, but I put off doing it while I was there in the 1980s until almost the last possible minute before graduation. The pool where I swam was built after the plans for the other one were tossed out. It’s located underground at the northwest end of the campus. That was probably the only time I ever ventured in there.
The 1968 protests showed just how effective student demonstrations could be. The entire University ground to a halt for several days and its business dealings were paralyzed. Along with similar protests at UC Berkeley and Kent State, those students helped change the course of US history.
Andrea Boroff and Richard Egan were married inside one of the occupied buildings during the Columbia protests. Their daughter Daisy would go on to win a Tony Award for playing the lead role of Mary Lennox in the Broadway musical, The Secret Garden. That useless tidbit of information has been rattling around in my brain for decades.
The fight for individual rights was a hallmark of the 1960s. Civil Rights victories led, in turn, to the struggle to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. Even though the ERA was never ratified by the states into the Constitution, it nonetheless marked a momentous step forward for women in this country. That fight, and the riots at Stonewall, then, in turn, led to the eventual passing of gay marriage among other pro-LGBTQ-themed legislation. We’ve had forty years of fighting political battles that we’ve largely won.
There were factions in America then, as there are now, who wanted to suppress the rights of all but the White elite. The me-generation, as students and young graduates, rose up to oppose everything that was being done to exploit and repress us as a people. “Make love, not war,” was a popular slogan. Jimi Hendrix said, “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.” John Lennon said, “All we are saying, is give peace a chance.”
In 2024, I find myself wondering, what has happened?
The Republican party has become a haven for White Supremacists. When our 45th President responded to a Nazi rally by saying, “There are good people on both sides,” something in America broke.
When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, something else in America broke.
As preachers, ministers, and our elected politicians continue to speak out publicly against gay, queer, and trans people, all I can hear is the sound of cracking as America breaks a little bit more.
Where are the student rallies being held to fight against all that? Why, instead of fixating on the very real issues threatening to crush our fragile democracy, are the students of America concentrated on a war in the Middle East? Why have they chosen to support a people, who are certainly suffering a great deal, without knowing very much about them?
Is it purely a manifestation of anti-Semitism? It can’t be just that one country is fighting against another in a way that is being perceived as illegal and immoral. Our country’s students don’t seem to be at all interested in Russia’s brutal attacks on Ukraine. That war seems to have been completely shoved aside.
That nobody has taken to streets considering the recent Supreme Court rulings is astonishing to me. Do they not all realize what will happen when their freedoms are taken away? I honestly don’t think they do. They’ve never existed without them.
I grew up as these fights were going on. I saw them unfold. It never once crossed my mind that I would be able to marry a man in my lifetime and, yet here we are. The kids demonstrating at Columbia don’t seem to have the slightest idea how hard-fought these struggles were. They’ve never known a world without the freedoms they all enjoy. Do they realize that they are losing them?
When that speaker at the rally at Columbia singled out the three Jewish students and called on the crowd to barricade themselves against them, something else in America broke. It wasn’t just a finger or a toe, it was a whole leg.
There is plenty about the Israeli / Palestinian conflict to be up in arms about. What’s happening there is awful. And complicated. It has nuances and levels. It isn’t as easy as picking one side and throwing yourself wholeheartedly behind it. Both sides have blood on their hands. Blame for all of it stretches back countless years across multiple borders.
If we allow Jewish students to be victimized simply for being Jewish, then America is already past the point of repair. You can’t use hate speech to fight for something you believe is morally right. The second you do that, you become the problem, not the solution.
The Jewish people are not their government any more than the Palestinian people are theirs or we are ours.
The University of Southern California just canceled its graduation ceremonies. There have been arrests at NYU. Protest encampments have popped up at Princeton, UCLA, Brown, Northwestern, Harvard, Emerson, Emory, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, UC Berkeley, and Yale. There are actions at Ohio State and countless others.
I don’t know how you try to stem a flood once the dam has broken, but some objective thinking would be helpful right about now. Somewhere along the line, the teaching of critical thinking seems to have been abandoned. I couldn’t be happier to see young people take to the streets, but I do question their choice of causes.
There is so much going on that needs this energy and attention. I hope that eventually the younger generation can see that and react accordingly. They’re proving every day that they can affect change how to we get them to fight for themselves?
As much as I hate this when Michael says it to me, I’m going to say it anyway.
To all you young folk out there, if you need something to do, something to rail against, something to fight for, I’ve got a whole list of things that need fixing. I am more than happy to share it with you.
Don’t lose track of what you are fighting for. Above everything else, we must be kind to each other.
“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”
- Jimi Hendrix -
Powerful post!
RIGHT ON!! I have been wondering the same things! Thank you for putting my thoughts into words, as only you seem to be able to do. I did not know that about the 3 Jewish students and I am appalled…and stunned… The current state of affairs is incomprehensible to me.
My college years began in 1968, at Goddard College in Vermont. You may have heard of it.
Yes, the war in Vietnam was the rallying point but our generation brought about a LOT of good change to the status quo of the time.
Now we are seeing it break down - brick by brick and leg by leg, as you put it - and it’s crushing me. 💔