SDS Returns to CU Campus

A student activist group that spearheaded the takeover of Hamilton Hall in April 1968 has been resurrected on campus.

Revived on the national stage in January 2006, Students for a Democratic Society boasts 247 chapters nationwide but has opted to remain decentralized, without a national hierarchy or president.

Columbia's chapter held its inaugural meeting last night in Kent, attracting any with prior involvement in left-wing organizations.

SDS, which supported an actively democratic society with power in the hands of the people, sponsored the takeover of Hamilton. The protest was launched after the administration refused to end its affiliation with weapons research think tank the Institute for Defense Analyses and was partly in response to the University's plan to build a gym in Morningside Park.

After the administration failed to sever ties with the IDA and expressed its intent to go ahead with building plans for the gym that included separate entrances for members of the University and for Harlem residents, the situation devolved.

Members of the SDS joined forces with other student and local activist groups to hold a sit-in in Hamilton. As the protest garnered national media attention, activists from SDS and affiliated organizations formed human chains around four other campus buildings-including Low Library-shutting University administrators out of their offices.

After seven days of demonstrations and negotiations between protesters and the administration, University President Grayson Kirk asked the police to remove the demonstrators.

At 2:30 in the morning the following day, about 1,000 police officers responded to Kirk's request, and using what many consider excessive force, disbanded the protests, with nearly 700 arrests and 100 injuries. The subsequent fallout from the violence led to the resignation of Kirk and exacerbated an already tenuous relationship between activists and the NYPD.

After the incident, the SDS and the leader of Columbia's chapter, Mark Rudd-who was expelled from the University for his involvement-gained national notoriety.

Political infighting and leadership struggles shook the national structure of the SDS, which began to crumble in 1969 and slowly declined into obscurity. The organization disappeared completely by 1972.

According to its Web site, the new SDS is "an education and social action organization dedicated to increasing democracy in all phases of our common life. It seeks to promote the active participation of young people in the formation of a movement to build a society free from poverty, ignorance, war, exploitation, racism and sexism."

Similar ideologies were expressed during last night's meeting.

The SDS "needs intellectual and moral clarity" said Lane Sell, GS, who had expressed interest in joining the organization, but who left the meeting long before its conclusion.

Alex Cline, New School '10 and a member of that University's chapter of SDS, who played and active role in the meeting, explaining some of the group's previous activities, countered Sell's claim by saying it was "much better to get a core group of committed people" working together on specific actions.

Cline did not elaborate the specific goals of the core group.

Journalism school professor Todd Gitlin and national president of the SDS from 1963-64 said that the ideological haze currently engulfing the organization was not always present.

"When I was involved in SDS, we were rather clear. We could have given you an analysis of what was going on," he said. "The message of a student organization is whether or not it is creative. … It [the revival] seems like an odd way to start."