Columbia, 1968
On April 23, 1968, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Student Afro-American Society (SAS) at Columbia University agreed to speak at the same demonstration. SDS’s main grievance was about the treatment of six students who were disciplined for protest against Columbia’s affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a weapons research think tank tied to the Pentagon. The SAS, on the other hand, was protesting a “community” gym Columbia was building in Morningside Park, which the University had promised would be mixed-use, but was much more lopsided and featured a design that would have students enter from above and community members below (the construction was on a slope).
After the demonstration, the group of several hundred students meandered between three different sit-in sites, finally settling on Hamilton Hall. But in the night, the SAS students requested that the SDS group move elsewhere to keep the protests separate, as the SDS’ freewheeling style disturbed the SAS. The occupations, which covered administration and library buildings, came to a violent end after a week, with NYPD violently arresting protesters and counter-protesters alike. But Columbia did disassociate from IDA and scrapped the new gym. (Clara Bingham, “‘The Whole World Is Watching’: An Oral History of the 1968 Columbia Uprising,” Vanity Fair, Apr. 2018.)
Back to the Future
At the University of Missouri in 2015, in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting and the rise and attention of Black Lives Matter, African American students responded to incidents of racism with activism, protesting on campus and in front of the president’s car during the homecoming parade. Protesters demanded acknowledgment and action from the administration, who waited 16 days to meet with students and performed poorly in such meetings. In the meantime, protests escalated to include camping on the quad, a grad student’s hunger strike, and the football team’s refusal to play. The only violence was Melissa Click’s grabbing of a student videographer’s camera during her viral moment.
And yet, if you are reading this, you probably have clicked on a piece in the last few years such as the one published by Voice of America on April 26, 2017. The headline? “American College Campuses Increasingly Hostile to Free Speech.” In response to a public perception of college kids unable to handle points of view students don’t like, Republican state lawmakers have passed or contemplated bills going so far as to force universities to punish students who were deemed to have interfered with the free expression of others. (Neal H. Hutchens, “New legislation may make free speech on campus less free,” (June 27, 2017).
In fairness, there have been violent incidents, including an injury to a professor who merely facilitated a talk at Vermont’s Middlebury College. Few universities, such as Cal Berkeley, have responded to student protests against invited speakers with cancelations, however, and, as Evan Gerstmann notes in his article “Protests, Free Expression, and College Campuses,” speakers such as Milo Yiannopoulos, who has tactically outed a transgender student in the past, may deserve to have invitations rescinded. (Social Education 82(1), 6–9.)
But instead of an intolerant campus run amok, as has been claimed for at least the last century of university protests (see quotes of Reagan and Pataki above), modern protest movements seem more like their forebears, trying to move the campus forward. The tactics are unlikely to be clean or even necessarily legal (though hopefully nonviolent), but they can bring attention to historic and systemic wrongs that deserve our attention.
