In 68 we occupied Columbia. Today's students can again spearhead change
Aremarkable time in America: young people mowed down in the prime of life, erratic foreign policy eroding the country’s stability, endless military engagement abroad, growing civil discord at home, as a crude and insensitive president calls for law and order amid questions about his ability to lead. Enraged and terrified by the mayhem that’s killing their peers, students mobilize to address a crisis that their elders have utterly failed to deal with. It was 1968.
The thirtieth of April marks the 50th anniversary of the violent end of the student uprising at Columbia University, events I helped to report (and foment) as an undergraduate editor of the student paper, the Columbia Daily Spectator. That day, at 2.30am hundreds of New York City police took over the campus to eject the students who were occupying five university buildings.
The protest had dealt with an intense mix of issues: the university’s plans to build its gym in a nearby African American neighborhood, which we saw as our own hyper-local manifestation of racism; Columbia’s collaboration with a thinktank assisting the Vietnam war effort; and its punishment of students who had spoken out about these and other issues. This first takeover of its kind at an elite American university had begun a week earlier when student demonstrators occupied the college’s main classroom building, Hamilton Hall, semi-inadvertently imprisoning one of our deans. When the black students in the movement insisted that Hamilton become their own base, hundreds of white students fanned out across the campus to occupy four other university buildings. The movement’s demands included stopping construction of the gym, ending university participation in defense research, and amnesty for the protesters.
The occupations lasted for a week; in what became a classic model of grownups’ mishandling of such matters, the university showed striking inflexibility and called in the police to clear the buildings in one of the largest such actions ever seen in the city; scores of non-violent student protesters were beaten in the process. More than 700 students were arrested, and many were suspended by the university, whose officials then notified their draft boards that they were no longer enrolled and therefore subject to be sent to Vietnam. A general student strike took hold for the rest of the semester; on Columbia’s scanty lawns, we held unofficial “counter-classes” on progressive topics that replaced conventional academic work. Our team of editors and reporters at the Spectator became alarmed that many local and national news reports seemed to misunderstand what was going on, attributing the movement to “outside agitators” or feckless hippies seeking disruption for its own sake. Some media falsely reported that violent black activists were streaming in from Harlem with guns, in preparation for a race war. So that summer several of us got together to write a book, Up Against the Ivy Wall, that became the standard history of what really happened.
The years passed, and Columbia 1968 left its imprint on many of us. After graduation I attended Harvard Medical School where I’ve remained since, now serving as a professor of medicine. I built a research unit that studies drugs (prescription ones, not the recreational ones of our youth) – their cost-effectiveness and risks. My program also develops strategies to make medicines more affordable and to curb corporate influence on physicians and regulators. I’m 70 now, but a big part of the 60s lives on in that work, as it does in that of many of my ageing contemporaries.
Today’s #NeverAgain student movement, sparked as ours was by rage and fear over the prospect of our own violent deaths, could perhaps transform into broader activism on multiple fronts. Gun policy just might be the trigger that drives large numbers of today’s students to take on this issue and all the others that have continued to smolder over the last five decades: inequality, racism, militarism, xenophobia, sexism.
Two generations later, I hope today’s students might yet organize more durably than we did, and rekindle the hope that fundamental non-violent change is still possible in America.
Jerry Avorn is the author of Up Against the Ivy Wall; a History of the Columbia Crisis
Some media falsely reported that violent black activists were streaming in from Harlem with guns