The 1968 Student Encampment at Columbia University: Students’ Protests against the Gym, Building, Campus, Library, and Athletic Facility
The Society of Afro-American Students was upset that Columbia University was moving ahead with plans to build a gym in a Harlem park that critics said would only provide limited and second-class access.
Eleanor Stein, a law professor at the State University of New Paltz, told NPR that the building was done in a green space in Harlem. “And we felt that it couldn’t be business as usual, that the university itself was engaging in an indefensible takeover of Harlem land and an indefensible participation and complicity with the Vietnam War effort.”
The White and Black students coordinated a protest against the gym and then hundreds of students went on strike, seizing office and classroom buildings.
Pro-Palestinian students set up tents to hold a demonstration on campus on the same day that Columbia University President Minouche Shafik testified in Congress about reports of antisemitism on Columbia’s campus — a session that school newspaper the Columbia Spectator followed with live coverage.
The debate about free speech on campus lingered as she testified. The school’s response to antisemitism is the subject of an investigation by the House Education Committee.
Students for a Democratic Society objected to Columbia’s links to the Institute for Defense Analyses, which was researching and analyzing weapons and strategies to use in Vietnam. They also wanted the CIA and military services barred from on-campus recruiting.
For many Columbia students in 1968, their protest was motivated by anger over the Vietnam War — and changes to the military draft that were chipping away at students’ deferments, particularly in graduate schools.
There are parallels between the two high-profile events, most starkly the proliferation of similar protests around the country, as students call for an end to the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
The University’s ability to function was in danger due to the protests and the New York Police Department was asked to remove the protesters one day after.
“All University students participating in the encampment have been informed they are suspended. The people who are in the camp are not authorized to be on the University’s property.
When the police were called onto campus in 1968, officers were blamed for violently arresting hundreds of students, using nightsticks and horses in a chaotic scene.
The removal of demonstrators from Columbia’s campus was peaceful, and no injuries were reported, as was claimed by police and city officials last week.
What the Arab Student Union and the White House Embedded in a White Classroom told the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia that Tinker v. Des Moines
Reporters for Columbia’s college radio station WKCR (including longtime NPR host Robert Siegel), were present when Henry Coleman, acting dean of Columbia College, sought to confirm his status as he stood among a crowd of students in the lobby of Hamilton Hall.
“SAS leaders later explained that the spontaneous, participatory, and less-defined politics of SDS-led white students interfered” with the Black students’ goals that centered on racial justice and equity, according to an online history exhibit assembled by the Columbia’s library system.
In Hamilton Hall, there were quiet and calm conditions compared to other areas, the exhibit states. University leaders viewed the Black held hall as a powder keg, worried that a violent reaction would befall students there if police were called in.
Some students were angry at one another because of their differences, for example, black protesters told white counterparts to leave a building. And women who were part of both groups cited their disillusionment with being left out of positions of power, spurring their embrace of the feminist movement.
Students at a Washington, D.C., public school are suing their principal and the school district over the administration’s censorship of the Arab Student Union’s pro-Palestinian speech, according to the federal lawsuit filed by the the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia.
The students said that they tried to hold their Palestinian Culture Night in January but the event was removed from the official school calendar. The event was rejected multiple times because it was not approved to be held at a later date.
In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case of Tinker v. Des Moines that “made clear that high school students had a right to peacefully express their views about the war,” said Spitzer.
In 1965, a group of students in Des Moines decided to wear black arm bands to show support for a truce in the Vietnam war. Any student who wasn’t allowed to remove the armband was going to be suspended. Two students were sent home from school in December of 1965, one of which wore her shirt to school. The Supreme Court held that students didn’t lose their freedom of speech when they stepped onto school property.
The students were eventually able to host it this Thursday, but Spitzer told NPR, “It was still not exactly the program they would have wanted. They say that they had to provide information for advanced clearance, which included what books they would display on the table and what symbols they would display.
The students are looking for a federal judge to tackle this case quickly, so they can still host the documentary screening before school ends for seniors on June 7.
