From Vietnam to Gaza: 56 Years On, What Has Columbia Learned?
(Photo: The Morningside Post/Victoire Mandonnaud)
April 30 is a day cemented in infamy for Columbia University.
At 8:21 PM, students received an automated email ordering them to shelter in place with a warning that non-compliance may result in disciplinary action. By 11:50 PM, the order had been lifted.
In those intervening three hours, dozens of militarized NYPD officers used a ladder atop a tactical truck to gain entry to the second floor of Hamilton Hall (renamed Hind’s Hall by the demonstrators barricaded inside) while a similarly sized force with riot shields awaited orders to storm the front doors. Students attempting to return home were kept waiting on Amsterdam Avenue during the operation, and student journalists were barred from documenting the event. Flashbangs were deployed against the protestors––a rarity for operations involving unarmed students––and a gun was accidentally fired by an officer. Video evidence surfaced on social media of officers throwing wooden chairs, metal trash cans, and large pieces of furniture down the steps of Hamilton Hall. In the tumult of the operation, at least one student fell down the concrete steps; it has since been reported that at least two people were hospitalized with minor injuries. Over 100 people were arrested, including those occupying Hamilton Hall and those who remained in the encampment. Many were Columbia students.
President Minouche Shafik later praised the NYPD “for their incredible professionalism and support.”
Exactly 56 years prior, on April 30, 1968, the President of Columbia, Grayson Kirk, called the NYPD on student demonstrators. The results of that operation ultimately cost Kirk his job.
The spring of 1968 was a tumultuous time for the University. Demonstrators aligned with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Afro-American Society were protesting Columbia’s ties to the Vietnam War and the construction of an allegedly segregated gymnasium in Morningside Park. On April 23, more than 300 students stormed the gymnasium construction site, tearing down sections of the twelve-foot high fence and sparring with police.
Inspired by the protests at the gymnasium, more than 400 additional demonstrators moved into Hamilton Hall the same day and occupied every floor. Papering the walls with pictures of Lenin, Che Guevara, and Mao Zedong, they refused to leave until their demands were met. At one point during the occupation, the dean of Columbia College entered his office in the Hall and was subsequently unable to leave.
Amidst the chaos, which Columbia’s Vice President David B. Truman called a “matter of life and death for the University,” students moved to occupy Low Library and three other campus buildings. Several barricaded themselves inside Kirk’s office and found documents that contained clear excisions regarding Columbia’s relationship with the community and its research contracts with the Department of Defense.
(Photo: Adler, Gerald S., “April 23, 1968 Crowd Sundial Rally,” Columbia University Libraries Online Exhibitions, accessed May 8, 2024, https://exhibitions.library.columbia.edu/exhibits/show/1968/item/5622 )
By April 26, construction of the gymnasium had been indefinitely halted. But that didn’t quell the protests.
At 2 AM on April 30, hundreds of NYPD officers moved onto campus and cleared the five occupied buildings. The NYPD assured Kirk that minimal force would be used. At least four faculty members suffered severe head wounds, and more than 100 students were injured by officers’ nightsticks, brass knuckles, and rough handling (which included being dragged down concrete steps and stomped on the ground). Over 700 were arrested.
The next day, Columbia’s Board of Trustees praised the NYPD operation and claimed to have heard nothing about associated injuries.
The occupation and barricading of Columbia buildings is a staple of University protests: in 1972, antiwar protestors occupied Hamilton Hall and barricaded classrooms and offices with furniture; in 1985, nearly a thousand students padlocked Hamilton Hall from the outside for three weeks, demanding divestment from apartheid South Africa; in 1992, students protesting the proposed transformation of the Audubon Ballroom (Malcolm X’s assassination site) into a biomedical lab barricaded Hamilton Hall for a day; and in 1996, around one hundred protesters demanding the creation of an ethnic studies department occupied Hamilton Hall for four days.
The occupation of Hamilton Hall last week was nothing new. And, in many ways, Columbia’s response was nothing new.
What is most striking about the administration’s response, though, is its ignorance of the University’s history. The passing decades have been quite favorable to the images of occupied Hamilton Hall. But they have not been as kind to images of NYPD on campus and students being cuffed and shoved into police vans.
President Shafik’s decision, then, to call the NYPD twice on students protesting with comparatively minor tactics to their predecessors is mystifying. Further deploying a militarized force on the very anniversary of Columbia’s most infamous night demonstrates either a complete lack of understanding regarding the history of Columbia’s protests or a callous disregard for that history. Both prospects are equally alarming.
Like all universities, Columbia takes as its foundational tenet the free and unencumbered pursuit of inquiry. Part of inquiry entails questioning the very assumptions we all take for granted. And sometimes, when those assumptions are upended, inquiry can manifest as visible unrest. As in 1968, those involved with Columbia University Apartheid Divest and the Gaza solidarity movement no longer took for granted the participation of their University in what they deemed to be unconscionable.
But Columbia has severely curtailed this form of inquiry in the name of student safety and antisemitic rhetoric. They also curtailed access to the Morningside campus for over a week in the name of student safety.
There have certainly been instances of antisemitic and Islamophobic rhetoric from both sides. Jewish students’ concerns about their safety on campus should also be taken seriously. However, the University’s characterization of the largely inclusive student protests as encouraging, or even representative of, these isolated instances of hate speech and racism casts their own students in the role of the ‘other.’ This is a role in which it is forbidden to question the grounds upon which authority stands. This is a role in which the pursuit of inquiry is hemmed within narrow, preapproved bounds. It is a role anathema to what the University professes to stand for.
The deployment of hundreds of NYPD officers on April 30 was never about a few broken windows or access to a building. It was the logical next step in making the pursuit of inquiry ‘safe’.
Students will disagree about Israel and Gaza, about historical injustices and land claims, and that is just as well, for disagreement is at the heart of academic freedom. Protesters and counterprotesters abound in the annals of 1968 and beyond. The University is meant to provide a haven for these conversations and demonstrations. But those who were mercilessly beaten with nightsticks on the night of April 30, 1968, are among those now in 2024 who well know what it feels like to see their University turn its back on them.
Protesting is always inherently about the right to speak your message as much as it is about the message itself. Columbia’s handling of the Gaza protests is just one more entry in an already stained record. In the end, to silence the voices of one side with such finality over a few broken windows represents a rejection of the University’s ideals. And it is a rejection of the message for which the demonstrators stand––that, just as it was unconscionable 56 years ago to support a war in which young Americans were being sent to die, so too is it ethically indefensible to support the silencing of 34,000 dead.
Greg Porter (MPA-ESP ‘24) is the Campus News Editor at The Morningside Post.