Forty Years Later, Emotions Toward 1968 Fragment a Generation

There is no simple way to recall the past, and to recall Columbia during the spring of 1968 is a task as controversial as the period itself.

The events of that year are both a scar and a hallmark for Columbia, evoking emotions that span from shame to nostalgia. Four decades later, alumni, locals, administrators, and current students continue to feel the influence of that historic moment for the University and the world at large. Now, they are gathering to consider its importance—or whether it has any—for the University’s future.

“The ’60s, and the meaning of the ’60s, and what happened—it’s so intricate, it’s so—not only large in its implications, but tangled. ... The Columbia event was a station in that cross, if you will,” said Graduate School of Journalism professor Todd Gitlin, who was active in his own school’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society at the time.

The campus activists reflected the issues of their time and sought change as the feminist, anti-war, and civil-rights movements were gaining momentum. Across the nation, they became the faces of youth rejection of authority—particularly government officials that were sending them off to war.

But the events of that spring influenced later chapters of University history. A generation made up of those who protested and those who were ashamed of the protests felt alienated from Columbia, and the fallout made an imprint on the University’s reputation for decades.

“It’s a ghost,” explained sociology professor Allan Silver, who was on campus at the time. He added later, “I have no interest in nurturing its memory, but it haunts the place.”

Today, the University is still sorting out its identity as a place of free discourse. Over the years, the voice of Columbia’s primarily liberal student body has resonated through demonstrations against South African Apartheid, the Iraq War, and sexual abuse and assault, among other issues.

“It’s something in the history and the culture of the place,” said University President Lee Bollinger, who came to Columbia Law School in August 1968. “You just feel the currents of the time much more powerfully here than elsewhere—the kinds of things that are written, the kinds of things that are taught, the kinds of things that are done, and the issues that are raised are all affected by that.”

Alumni groups, made up of mostly former activists, will likely reminisce over the course of the week about what many consider the glory days of political activism. But perhaps the absence of dissenting alumni, and some noted disapproval of any 1968 acknowledgement, speak to the deep fragmentation of a generation.

Instead of playing an official role in the 40-year anniversary, the administration chose to provide free space but not to sponsor the alumni’s events. Bollinger will speak at the opening reception and a Journalism school panel.

“I do know that there are some alums who feel very strongly that this is an important set of events to think through, even to the point of trying to achieve some reconciliation after all these years,” Bollinger said, adding later, “I do know that for some other alums, there is a feeling that we’ve done this before, there is no point in doing it again. Or I am sure there are some people who feel ‘I don’t want anything that celebrates it’ or ‘If there is going to be something, I only want something that celebrates it.’... But my involvement has been that there is some kind of University—even if modest—marking of this in an academic, intellectual way.”

melissa.repko@columbiaspectator.com