Article Browser: 1968

A week after the 40th anniversary of the 1968 protests, two alumni involved in those events contribute their thoughts on the evolution of student activism.

As the Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology, a professor of history, and the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Nicholas Dirks has a massive job description. But his post, he says, allows him to “realize as many of the aspirations that the University is invested in, because the realities are always more difficult, messy, expensive, and contested than the idea would suggest.”

Amid the plethora of events commemorating the 40th anniversary of the 1968 student demonstrations, faculty and students gathered yesterday to discuss political action and civil liberties.

After a weekend of nostalgia and remembrance, the 1968 commemoration drew to a close, as former students honored those who had since passed on by celebrating the accomplishments of both alumni and the whole of the University.

Forty years after rallying against the proposed construction of the Morningside gym, alumni of the 1968 demonstrations returned to protest something else: the Manhattanville expansion.

After spending decades in the shadow of spring 1968, when weeklong student demonstrations brought Columbia to a standstill, the University is moving into another era of its history. The passage of the protests’ fortieth anniversary should remind Columbia of the hard lessons it learned—chief among them, the need to guard against divisions strong enough to tear the campus apart. But the anniversary should bring an element of closure to a sequence of events whose legacy is fiercely contested even today.

Beginning tonight, many on campus are observing the 40th anniversary of the now-legendary week of protests against the Columbia administration. Whereas the more nuanced of the scheduled gatherings aim to provide valuable historical perspective, events commemorating the protesters might succumb to the assumption that 1968 had only positive effects on balance. Those in attendance should work to appreciate the complexity of the historical consequences of spring 1968.

This week’s commemoration of Columbia’s 1968 student protests will kick off tonight with an opening reception at 7 p.m. in Casa Italiana, during which University President Lee Bollinger and Nancy Biberman, BC ’69, will speak. Organized by several alumni, the conference will include panels and social functions examining issues including the feminist movement, the civil rights movement, and 1968’s global climate.

Forty years ago this week, Columbia made its mark on the national scene with legendary protests that shaped the University's history. Now former activists are reuniting for a look back.

It is a source of never-ending consolation that whenever I need proof of my own vast ignorance and extremely finite powers of imagination, I can think back to Columbia and 1968.

Columbia activists like myself who do not stick within the bounds of establishment politics are often accused of being nostalgic for 1968.

In the first of many 40th anniversary commemorations of the 1968 protests, Estelle Freedman, BC ’69, addressed a crowd of roughly 100 in the James Room Wednesday night about her struggle to build an identity in the midst of that politically tumultuous year.

This Monday, Spectator Opinion looks at the different roles of student activism from 1968 to 2008.

In commemorating the 40th anniversary of the 1968 Columbia student revolt, there are three dangers. One is to use the occasion as simply an opportunity for empty nostalgia, self-reflection, or in the case of many ex-radicals, self-criticism. The second danger is to forget that the students won their demands. The third danger is to approach it as an event that belongs exclusively to the University, as if the chemicals that caused the combustion were organic to this campus alone.

The campus will hear the story this spring—how, amid the horrific Vietnam War, in the fraught aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in revolt against a high-handed University administration, the black students and SDS radicals seized buildings. And after several days of occupation, the police marched in, pushing through barricades, injuring more than 140, arresting more than 700, producing spectacular images of exuberance and panic, whereupon came strikes and wounds, boycotts and polarization, swirls of chaos, reform, and “radicalization”—in the theory of some, the jump-start of a spirit of revolution.

A Student Government Association town hall meeting Thursday evening provided an arena for conversation about how activism has changed in the past 40 years as Barnard Dean Dorothy Denburg, BC ’70, and Karla Spurlock-Evans, BC ’71, reminisced on their experiences as students during the infamous 1968 protests.

There are plenty of retrospectives and opinions on 1968, but I feel that a great many are missing a big piece of the picture. Looking over Spec articles and reflecting upon opinions I have heard, I believe that black students’ participation and investment in the 1968 student rebellion is grossly ignored, as it disrupts the neat narratives that many people like to tell.

As the 40th anniversary of the April 1968 protests approaches, alumni and administrators are collaborating to organize a three-day event to commemorate and promote intergenerational dialogue on the historic episode that shook Columbia University and the nation.

Nearly 40 years after the protests of 1968, the legacy of that year continues at Columbia and inspired the theme of this year’s history department undergraduate academic symposium on Wednesday night.

On Oct. 14, 2007, the online edition of New York magazine contained an article entitled “One, Two, Three, Four, Can a Columbia Movement Rise Once More?” The photograph of a somber-looking junior named David Judd, and the caption indicating his membership in the International Socialist Organization, remind me of my friend Rudd, who was chairman of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) when he led the April 1968 occupation.