Columbia and the World from ’68 to ’08

College is, for the vast majority of us who experience these four years of “higher education,” the last womblike vessel that we will inhabit before being sent out into the world to sink or swim on our own. It is the place where the veil between fantasy and reality is the thinnest, where we can see the world up close and actually try to touch it, where we can get the texture, the feel of it.

There is nothing purer than the beliefs of a college student. We are given four years to actually study the world, and that we surely do. One of the core realities of that study is, hopefully, the realization that “I am the same as everyone else in the world.” We all bleed, we all love and want to be loved, we are all shaped by whatever circumstances we receive by chance or design. Humanness remains at the center of it all, and is, I believe, what student activists in particular are keenly and often painfully aware of.

I stopped Thursday night as I crossed campus to hear the reading of the names and the incidents of the dead in Iraq. I used to feel that the whole world should stop at every moment that there was an untimely death. We do stop everything, of course, for our most beloved leaders, but I felt deeply that every single one of us deserved the same love, at the same moment, impractical though the idea may have been.

The urgent desire to communicate a feeling, a thought, a realization, is what gives rise to the reality of art. That is what I saw in the reading of those names. Student activism is an art form that signals an urgent, heartfelt need to communicate the empathy felt about an issue at hand. That is what I believe I took part in back in 1968, and it is what I see in the student activists today.

I was fortunate enough to see an interview with a young hunger striker at Columbia a few months back. He was in a tent on campus, I believe. I deeply admired the student’s ability to clearly articulate his viewpoint, and felt that his level of maturity was greater than mine was at his age. I would almost say that the student activists of today may be more spiritual in the realization of their work than we were back in 1968, although I do not expect that they perceive themselves to be so.

Making a memorable, clear statement is the challenge in any art form. If life has meaning, then the most urgent task is to communicate that significance.

I didn’t know what I was going to do on that day in April ’68. But I knew there was an urgent need to communicate a reality. I’m a native New Yorker—a Brooklynite—but most of my family, including my father, comes from the South. So I cannot adequately describe how I felt when I heard that “the community” was going to have to enter the back door to use the gym in Morningside Park. It made my eyes tear and my chest get tight, and I could only look down and shake my head. I had turned 20 just three months earlier. I was no longer a teenager, but I didn’t think I was going to have to feel so old so soon in this life.

I followed my heart. I woke up that morning to see students milling about the campus from a window on the 10th floor of Furnald. Someone was saying, “Students have taken over Hamilton Hall.” I was riveted, and someone from WKCR (where I was a jazz jock) called me—I think we had floor phones back then—and said, “You’ve got to get over there as a reporter!”

We did some live work from inside the lobby, and it was chaotic and upbeat. We were reporters at the center of a serious moment and all of the “guys” were very up and very focused. Then it turned more serious for me, as the black student leaders said that everyone would have to get out. That was the moment I joined the strike. This was my impulsive yet deliberate response to the realization that the great academic leaders of my world-renowned University were no more educated than “those crackers,” as my father would say, down South.

There is no question in my mind that “the way of things” is not “things as they should be,” now as in ages past and those to come. The student activist will continue to be an important part of anything recognizable as civilization on our tiny planet, practicing the art of meaningful, urgent, and essentially peaceful communication. Anyone have a better definition of love?

The author is a member of the Columbia College class of 1969.