It’s April at Columbia. The trees are blooming, the air is warming, and the steps of Low are once again covered with students. But instead of smoking the University president’s cigars, today’s occupiers carry laptops and bubble teas.
Forty years after 1968, students are again faced with a controversial University expansion project and a war that the majority of them claim to oppose. Where, many bewildered ’ 68 veterans ask, are the riots?
“There was a mass anti-war movement on hundreds of American campuses in 1968,” Graduate School of Journalism professor Todd Gitlin said, comparing eras. “Look around you. Even just speaking of the Iraq War, I’ve never seen much movement, or even very many posters around.”
On some fronts, the shift toward more crafted actions, like this week’s litany of the Iraq War dead on Low Plaza may mark a conscious change in tactics.
“Activism today is more pragmatic,” said Jenna Hovel, CC ’10 and one of the Columbia College Democrats’ four lead activists. “Times have changed where people don’t expect that a huge rally will have a huge effect. I think in the ’60s, when that was kind of more new, it was something that seemed to the American people a little more effective.”
Hovel has heard critiques similar to Gitlin’s from her own parents, but she disputed the idea that hers is a less engaged generation.
“I don’t think it’s apathy,” she said. “There are certainly apathetic students, but I don’t think our generation is apathetic. ... There definitely are still protests and strikes, but one thing people have said about our generation is that we’re more results-oriented. So one of the things we do is work within the system in ways that are going to bring results. ... A strike or a protest is used as more of a last-resort method.”
But protest still has a place at Columbia, as November’s 10-day student hunger strike demonstrated. At Columbia, the years since 1968 have been marked with acts many have characterized as radical, including a 1985 takeover of Hamilton Hall that succeeded in pushing the University to divest from apartheid South Africa, and a 1996 hunger strike that escalated into another building takeover. Johanna Ocaña, CC ’10 and chair of the campus activist group Lucha, cited the much-publicized 2006 incident in which students rushed the stage during a speech by Jim Gilchrist, founder of the anti-immigration Minuteman Project. Although she said she thinks today’s students are “less likely to take a radical, dramatic action” than those of 1968, she suggested that the change is conditional.
“I don’t think people are less willing to do it,” she said, “if they know they’re going to have the support they need.”
Many ’68 veterans attribute the dearth of radical student activism to the fact that, unlike in the ’60s, there is currently no draft.
“It tends to blunt the effect of this increasingly militarized imperial apparatus that has only a direct effect on certain people, certain families,” Hilton Obenzinger, CC ’69, said of the current all-volunteer military. “If everyone else can go ahead with their lives, well I may be for it, I may be against it, but it’s not that big of a deal. But if you’re asked to die, then you have to say, ‘Well, what’s going on?’”
Many members of the older generation also point to economic pressures as dampers on activism—pressures that seem to be so natural to most current activists that they don’t even come up in conversation.
“We didn’t have anything like the debt that people develop now,” said Mark Rudd, who was expelled from Columbia College for his leading role in the 1968 protests. “Even the poorest people on scholarships didn’t come away with their entire futures mortgaged, and that’s a big thing.”
“That’s a different world than the world of Columbia students in 1968,” Gitlin said of the current economy. He said of the atmosphere 40 years ago, “You feel freer in such circumstances. ‘Sure, let’s do the revolution, let’s smoke a lot of dope, let’s go be community organizers, let’s go bum around the world and live in a cave in Crete, and when I come back, having dropped out, I’ll be able to drop back in.’ That world’s gone. The horizons are more limited today.”
But some say they’re also more open.
“Today, one of the main focuses in youth participation is voting,” Hovel said. “Every week, you’re seeing more on the news about how the youth vote is making a difference in ways that it never has before.”
Such agency in the hands of youth marks another change from the dramatically charged political atmosphere of the ’60s.
“While there was a lot of exuberance on the part of the students who occupied the building in ’68, there was also sort of a subliminal awareness of desperation,” Gitlin said. “This horrendous war was on. The country was getting uglier. The political violence was spreading. Race feeling was becoming more intractable. I think there was a double feeling on the part of the movement at that point that it was time to bust out and sort of remake institutions by fiat, and at the same time, we were all sort of skidding toward hell.”
At the moment, the situation may be the opposite.
“There are a lot of people who are very hopeful that with the election, with a new president, there will be some change,” Ocaña said.
But despite the changes, commonalities remain.
“I think the same spirit of questioning what America is doing is there,” Hovel said of both 1968 and her own time. “I think there’s a sense that with all the ways America’s role in the world has changed, and all the ways America’s political system has changed, activism has to change a little too.”