Protests

After a weekend of nostalgia and remembrance, the 1968 commemoration drew to a close, as former students honored those who had since passed on by celebrating the accomplishments of both alumni and the whole of the University.

Forty years ago this week, Columbia made its mark on the national scene with legendary protests that shaped the University's history. Now former activists are reuniting for a look back.

There was no national protest on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. The event that essentially took the place of a big march, The Winter Soldier organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War—a gathering of more than 200 veterans giving heart-wrenching testimony on the roots of civilian deaths and detainee abuse in official policy—was nearly ignored by the mass media. However, there are signs of a renewal.

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.

As the 40th anniversary of the April 1968 protests approaches, alumni and administrators are collaborating to organize a three-day event to commemorate and promote intergenerational dialogue on the historic episode that shook Columbia University and the nation.

On Oct. 14, 2007, the online edition of New York magazine contained an article entitled “One, Two, Three, Four, Can a Columbia Movement Rise Once More?” The photograph of a somber-looking junior named David Judd, and the caption indicating his membership in the International Socialist Organization, remind me of my friend Rudd, who was chairman of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) when he led the April 1968 occupation.

As student leaders have planned a series of walkouts recently, some have raised questions about the efficacy of the decades-old form of protest.

Despite initial complaints from student leaders that they were not given enough time to plan a response to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech at Columbia, the campus quickly mobilized, and many students have united for a large speak-out today.

Jim Gilchrist, the controversial founder of the Minuteman Project whose visit to Columbia in fall 2006 ended in a brawl, confirmed yesterday that he was invited to return to campus for a second speaking engagement, but a withdrawal of support for the event by the Columbia Political Union made it unclear whether such an appearance would occur.