The 1968 protests forced Columbia to seriously reevaluate ideas of intellectual freedom and political expression within the university setting. It was a moment at which dissent had never been heard so loudly, though both student activists and their critics accused each other of violating the tenets of free speech.
For some faculty, far from being a restoration of the principle of academic freedom, the demonstrators’ tactics were simply an attempt to impose a radical set of values upon the status quo.
Yet protestors believed that the University’s education system was rotten and corrupt. They saw the school not as a community of intellectual freedom, but rather as an autocratic institution geared towards the interests of trustees.
Interestingly, despite rallies against what some saw as stifled intellectual freedom, the University’s academic program actually instilled in many students the very ideas that later fueled their protests. According to James Kunen, CC ’70 and author of The Strawberry Statement, a Columbia education “equips you very well to be a critical thinker and probably contributed to our sense at the time of being responsible citizens in a democracy who needed to step up to do what they could to stop this evil war.”
In 1968, the activists distributed a pamphlet called “Who Rules Columbia,” which stated, “Outside interests, represented on the Board of Trustees, have organized the university as a ‘factory’ designed to produce the skilled technicians and management personnel which the U.S. industrial and defense apparatus needs.” The writing evoked Karl Marx in its portrayal of trustees as bourgeois owners of the University, administrators as managers, faculty as employees, and students as raw goods to be fashioned into finished commodities.
But opposition to the protestors’ confrontational tactics came from both liberals and conservatives. A resolution passed by the Ad Hoc Faculty Group on April 28 called upon the students “now improperly occupying various buildings to vacate ... immediately and to submit themselves to due process.” The oppositional Majority Coalition was a thousand students strong, and some faculty members—though mostly left-leaning generally—also deemed the occupations excessive.
The same day, during a closed meeting held by University President Grayson Kirk, 466 out of about 500 attending faculty members voted in favor of a resolution condemning the “violence that has occurred including the occupation of buildings and the disruption of normal University activities.”
Much of the faculty believed a peaceful resolution to the controversy was crucial to the University’s future welfare, and that the behavior of the protestors was unjustified. On the other hand, demonstrators believed the University was intimately allied with an imperialist government and could not be fixed from within.
In an editorial on March 14, 1969, the Spectator said, “We must commit ourselves to transforming the politics of the University by resorting to whatever means necessary.”
Columbia sociology professor Allan Silver and members of the Ad Hoc Faculty Group steering committee responded in a letter to the Spectator, “Some means may violate or threaten the set of understandings ... without which a university cannot live as an institution marked by some purposes and means distinguishing it from others in society.”
“A good university cannot, should not, and must not be a democracy,” Silver said.
“Academic freedom is not a First Amendment freedom. It’s a professional prerogative.”
The conflict continues today. During a conference at the Heyman Center for the Humanities this past Friday, retired professor William De Bary told Mark Rudd, President of Columbia’s Students for Democratic Society in 1968, “You were going beyond simply trying to build that [a mass anti-war movement] in a civil manner. You were preventing other people from expressing themselves.”
Rudd replied: “We participated in many excesses. ... Perhaps I’m merely stuck, but I feel that we were right.”