David Shapiro, unwitting protest icon, dies at 77

David Shapiro, a poet and art historian who was widely admired for his erudition and indelibly remembered — to his chagrin — as the defiant, cigar-wielding student in a photo that was taken during the 1968 uprising at Columbia University and came to represent the era’s revolutionary zeal, died May 4 at a hospital in the Bronx. He was 77.

The cause was Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Lindsay Stamm Shapiro.

After Dr. Shapiro died, writer Joyce Carol Oates posted in a tribute on X that “no one who knew David could quite envision him as the swaggering young hippie protester” made both famous and infamous by a photo that was published in Life magazine and circulated around the world in the spring of 1968.

The picture, taken by fellow student Gerald Upham, depicts Dr. Shapiro as a 21-year-old undergraduate seated behind the desk of Columbia President Grayson Kirk, whose office student demonstrators had occupied in a protest against the Vietnam War. Dr. Shapiro’s gaze is obscured by cool sunglasses. With his right hand, he raises a cigar pilfered from the president’s desk drawers.

To Americans who sympathized with antiwar demonstrators at Columbia and on campuses across the country, Dr. Shapiro became a symbol of their dauntless spirit. To those who regarded the student occupiers as vandals, he embodied a descent into disorder. Dr. Shapiro recognized himself in neither version.

Dr. Shapiro taught English at Columbia in the 1970s before moving in 1981 to William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J., where he was a professor of art history until his retirement seven years ago. His first book of poetry, titled “January,” was published the year he turned 18; his final poetry collection, “In Memory of an Angel,” appeared in 2017.

David Lehman, the founder of the “Best American Poetry” series and the editor of “The Oxfowrd Book of American Poetry,” included Dr. Shapiro’s work in both anthologies. Embracing the abstract and experimental, the surreal and Dadaistic, Dr. Shapiro had developed a language all his own, Lehman said in an interview, one that “gives rise to an epiphany almost carelessly thrown off as a kind of side effect of the experience of generating new words out of old.”

Among Dr. Shapiro’s most noted poems was “The Funeral of Jan Palach,” about the Czech student who died after publicly setting himself on fire in Prague in early 1969 to protest the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. The final lines read: “And my own mother was brave enough she looked / And it was alright I was dead.”

The poem, which Dr. Shapiro wrote in the years immediately following Palach’s death and the uprising at Columbia, helped inspire a monument to Palach in Prague. But the poem also represented what Dr. Shapiro called “the funeral of America.”