Campus Activism

This Monday, Spectator Opinion looks at the different roles of student activism from 1968 to 2008.

In commemorating the 40th anniversary of the 1968 Columbia student revolt, there are three dangers. One is to use the occasion as simply an opportunity for empty nostalgia, self-reflection, or in the case of many ex-radicals, self-criticism. The second danger is to forget that the students won their demands. The third danger is to approach it as an event that belongs exclusively to the University, as if the chemicals that caused the combustion were organic to this campus alone.

The campus will hear the story this spring—how, amid the horrific Vietnam War, in the fraught aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in revolt against a high-handed University administration, the black students and SDS radicals seized buildings. And after several days of occupation, the police marched in, pushing through barricades, injuring more than 140, arresting more than 700, producing spectacular images of exuberance and panic, whereupon came strikes and wounds, boycotts and polarization, swirls of chaos, reform, and “radicalization”—in the theory of some, the jump-start of a spirit of revolution.

It’s not that we’re apathetic or ignorant. We want the war to stop. We want affordable health care. We want the campus to expand responsibly. We want a Core Curriculum that reflects the diversity and nuance of the society in which we are expected to function. All of those things are important to us, but how can our actions truly effect change?