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Community Leaders, Alumni March Against Manhattanville
By Alix Pianin
PUBLISHED APRIL 28, 2008
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.
Dozens of residents, community activists, and returning and current students marched with the Coalition to Preserve the Community on Saturday afternoon in a protest route that snaked from St. Mary’s church on 126th Street to the 120th Street gates. With signs that read “Stop Hurricane Columbia” and “Stop the Police State,” activists old and new joined to speak out for a cause that, to some alumni, seemed strikingly familiar.
“This expansion is worse,” said Sherry Gorelick, who was a graduate student during the 1968 protests and occupied Fayerweather. “It’s people’s lives and homes. ... It’s completely related.”
Tom Kappner, CC ’66 and CPC member, criticized the ’68 commemorations as a “kind of class reunion” and sought to bring the legacy of the uprisings to the forefront. “The real ’68 is taking place right here,” Kappner said, adding, “For us in the community, 2008 is 1968. Not much has changed.”
“Even as things have changed so much in 40 years, they haven’t changed at all. Columbia is still in the business of taking over the community,” said Carolyn Eubanks, who was a student at the Union Theological Seminary during the 1968 riots.
The demonstration on Low Plaza interrupted the afternoon when the literary arts magazine Tablet was scheduled to have its student arts fair in the same area—the loud protesting eventually overpowered campus bands set up for the event. Protest organizers said that Columbia administrators had encouraged them to hold the demonstration on Pupin Plaza, which the CPC saw as an attempt to obscure the march.
The CPC claimed that Columbia had instructed them not to come through the 116th Street gates.
“The 120th Street gate has been opened for this march in accommodation for the student group, and if they choose not to use it, the 116th gates are open,” James McShane, director of Public Safety said prior to the protest. “Essentially the 116th Street gates are open to the public.”
While the Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification was initially affiliated with the protest, according to Julie Schneyer, SCEG opted out of officially sponsoring the demonstrations after questions of space and available entrances became an issue.
Several SCEG members still marched with the crowd, as did the campus LUCHA group.
“There was no student sponsorship,” said University spokesperson La-Verna Fountain.
She said that the administration had simply been attempting to accommodate everyone, including the student group that was already scheduled to have Low Plaza access for the day, and she called University decisions “nothing unique on our part.”
While some alumni in the crowd threw themselves whole-heartedly into the protest, others seemed mostly amused, especially when former Columbia student Mark Rudd, one of the leaders of the 1968 takeovers, stood again at the sundial where he had rallied students 40 years before. After following a fiery speaker, Rudd rose with a smile.
“I have to say that I can’t do Mark Rudd anymore,” he joked. “That last guy did a great Mark Rudd impersonation.”
Daniel Amzallag contributed to this article.
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Rudd became involved with the Weatherman (or Weather Underground), a group which was the product of an internal split within SDS in 1969. Rudd was a leader of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) faction of SDS which believed that the group was not doing enough to oppose the war in Vietnam and advocated for a more militant course of action. The 1969 SDS convention effectively splintered and ended the organization, with Rudd and other members of the RYM ultimately forming the Weatherman, a self proclaimed "organization of communist women and men" intent on overthrowing the government through violent action. The Weathermen were particularly opposed to what they saw as the criminality of the government's actions in Vietnam and its persecution of the Black Panthers.
Rudd and the rest of the Weatherman organization officially went underground in March of 1970 in the wake of the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion in which a small Weatherman cell making a bomb accidentally set it off killing three members of the group including Rudd's former classmate Ted Gold. After going underground the Weather organization was responsible for a number of bombings and other illegal actions throughout the country.
Classy.
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