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Columbia marks anniversary of '68 riots

By David Freedlander | dfreedlander@am-ny.com

April 28, 2008

Buttons, documents, archival photos and other archival memorabilia from the 1968 Student Uprising at Columbia University is on exhibit at Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Library on the 6th floor of Butler Library, Chang Room through June 6. (Dave Sanders / April 27, 2008)

A nation waging an unpopular war. A divisive presidential campaign. And a university moving into an adjacent neighborhood.

It is as much a description of the realities of life in Morningside Heights in 2008 as it was the scene in 1968, when Columbia University exploded in riots.

The question for many of the campus radicals who gathered at the university this past weekend to mark the 40th anniversary of the riots is why today, with another unpopular war raging, and with Columbia's planned expansion into West Harlem, have students not broken out in the kinds of protests seen then?

"People today don't have a model of how to build a movement," said Mark Rudd, who lead the revolt, at a reception at Columbia Friday. "We had the civil rights movement, and of course the anti-war movement had been active for several years. Students these days are too fragmented. There is no 'youth culture' for them all to tap into."

He added, "It was a moment where we really believed that we could be active forces in history. We had an idea that we could actually do something about the war and about racism. That's the memory of it."

The 1968 protests lasted from April 23 to April 30. They began in the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, and were spurred on by the university's involvement in weapons research for the Vietnam War and its plans to build a gym in nearby Morningside Park. The gym was slated to have a smaller, back entrance for non-students, a design many felt to be discriminatory. Then university president, Grayson Kirk, called in the police to clear the protesters of the buildings, but it instead escalated the unrest.

For years, Columbia thought of the riots as a black mark in the history of the university. This year, though, the school hosted a three-day remembrance of the riots, with panel discussions and film screenings and culminated yesterday with a ceremonial tree planting where the disputed gym was supposed to have been constructed.

Many said that the shadow of 1968 had a cast a pall on current students.

"It's unfair to burden people, to tell them they weren't as cool as 1968," said Robert Friedman, who was editor of the campus newspaper in 1968. "That was just a unique set of circumstances that won't come around again."