The student protests of 1968 remain the most famous historical incident on Columbia campus. Columbia’s reputation as a centre of 1960s student radicalism – the origin of the Weather Underground lies in Columbia student protests – still precedes it. The flip side of this radicalism is the university administration’s ongoing role as one of New York City’s most powerful landlords.
Low Library became the launching point for the largest student protest on Columbia campus, which began on April 23rd, 1968: nearly 42 years ago this month. It lasted for six days and involved the simultaneous occupation of Low, Avery, Fairweather and Mathematics buildings by students. It ended in a violent confrontation when 1000 members of the NYPD forcibly seized the buildings back, arresting 712 students and injuring 148 in the process.
The build-up to this action began in 1967, when students began sit-ins on buildings across campus to protest both the expansion of the Columbia campus into Harlem, the university’s nearest northern neighborhood, and to protest the recruitment of students on campus by both the US Defence forces, the CIA, and private defence companies as the Vietnam War ground on.
Particularly contentious was the proposal for a student gymnasium, to be built in a section of Morningside Park slightly north of the campus, at the boundary of Harlem and Morningside Heights. Although the university administration emphasised the fact that Harlem residents would have access to the gymnasium at certain times, it was quickly discovered that this “access” would take the form of a separate, basement entrance for Harlem residents, while students would enter the gym at a higher level of the building. With Harlem a historically African-American neighborhood itself in the throes of radical organising and resistance throughout the 1960s, particularly through the Black Panther Party and the Civil Rights movement, the Columbia gymnasium and its separate entrances appeared as a nasty throwback to segregation. The project quickly acquired the name “Gym Crow”.
Student sit-ins at Low Library during March 1968, protesting the recruitment of students by the Institute for Defence Analysis – a weapons research think-tank providing “technical expertise” to the US Defence forces – attracted the ire of the university administration, particularly President Grayson Kirk, who had issued an order banning “indoor” protests in September 1967. The ban had been very little enforced, but the March sit-ins at Low, where SDS (Students for a Democratic Society, the dominant student activist group in North America at the time) played a large role, led to six students being placed on probation for their defiance of the ban. This disciplinary action, of course, only sparked more protests.
On April 4th, Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, a murder which sparked riots in African-American communities across the United States, including Harlem.
On April 23rd, 1968 a student rally which began at the sun-dial – a campus landmark situated on the Low plaza – failed to gain access to Low Library. The rally moved to the proposed gymnasium site at Morningside Park, and then back to campus, where the Society of African-American Students (SAS) moved to occupy Hamilton Hall. The SAS voted for an autonomous occupation by black students only; other students began an occupation of Low Library the next morning, April 24th. By April 25th several major buildings on campus were occupied, and remained so until the police seizure on April 30th.
In the wake of these huge protests, in which thousands of students and local residents participated, Columbia spent the rest of the spring semester until May as, effectively, an autonomous university. Official classes ended, and students and sympathetic faculty (of which there were many) ran their own lessons, often held outdoors, which anyone could attend. These classes were for the most part a mixture of revolutionary theory, history, and day-to-day discussions on activism as it unfolded, on campus, in the local community, and throughout the world during 1968.
At the 1968 commencement ceremony a majority of graduating students walked out in protest, along with faculty, to celebrate their own counter-commencement on Low plaza, followed by a picnic in Morningside Park.
The legacy of the 1968 student protests at Columbia is both enduring and complicated. In the immediate aftermath, Grayson Kirk resigned from his position as university President, and an independent report was sharply critical of the university administration for its aggressive and hostile attitude towards student protestors. The university Senate, intended to curb any anti-democratic tendencies of the administration and to ensure greater faculty and student representation in university affairs, was established as a response. Columbia severed its ties with the IDA and other defence industry think-tanks, and a ban on Defence force recruitment of students on campus remains in force to this day.
The university, however, still has a strained relationship with the local Harlem community. Current plans for a second campus to be constructed in West Harlem from 125th to 134th streets – which if approved would mean the demolition of many current buildings and the forced eviction of thousands of Harlem residents – are fiercely opposed by much of the community and by many current Columbia students.
Student activism on campus is a far cry from 1968. Columbia’s radical reputation lies in the past. Can it be resurrected, not as an exercise in nostalgia, but as a living presence for the present?
In returning to Low Library with a body of students and non-students, we cannot avoid invoking the ghosts of these 1968 protests, nor would we wish to. A library is a place in which the details and the lessons of the past may be rediscovered, as we listen to the voices on the page. We have much to learn.
(An archive maintained by former participants in the 1968 Columbia protests is here. The university’s own archive of the protests, housed in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library on the top floor of Butler, can be searched online here.)
