The 1968 Student Encampment at Columbia University: Students’ Controversy and the University’s Response to Antisemitism
But others, especially the Society of Afro-American Students (SAS), were also upset that Columbia University was moving ahead with plans to take over part of a public park in Harlem, to build a gym that critics said would give only limited and second-class access to the local community.
Eleanor Stein, a law professor at the State University of New York, told NPR that it was built in one of the few green spaces 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 protest against the gym was coordinated by White and Black students who then took over classroom buildings and the office.
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.
Her testimony followed months of debate and argument over free speech on campus. The school’s response to antisemitism is the subject of an investigation by the House Education Committee.
The Institute for Defense Analyses was linked to Columbia by Students for a Democratic Society, who opposed the research on Vietnam’s weapons and strategies. They also wanted the CIA and military services barred from on-campus recruiting.
Changes to the military draft and students’ anger over the Vietnam War were factors in the protest by Columbia students in 1968.
There are parallels between the two huge events, such as the proliferation of similar protests around the country as students call for an end to the war in Gaza.
The University’s functioning was put at risk by protesters who were forced to request the New York police to remove them one day after.
“All University students participating in the encampment have been informed they are suspended. The participants in the camp are not allowed to be on University property at this time.
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 police and city officials said last week that the removal of the demonstrators from the campus was peaceful, and no injuries were reported.
The Occupation of the American Mind: A lawsuit against high school students in Washington, DC, claiming that the university’s Hamilton Hall student protester protested the 1967 Vietnam war
Henry Coleman, the acting dean of Columbia College, tried to confirm his status as he stood among a crowd of students in the lobby of Hamilton Hall, and reporters for Columbia’s college radio station WKCR were there.
“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 fact, when the police entered barricaded Hamilton Hall in the early hours of April 30, the occupying students avoided struggles with the police, calmly marched out the main entrance of the building to the police vans waiting on College Walk,” according to the library’s online exhibit.
But some divisions emerged among the students: Black protesters asked their white counterparts to leave a building due to their different approach and focus, for instance. 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.
This lawsuit filed by the students in Washington, D.C., claims that school administration prevented the club from showing a documentary film during lunch called The Occupation of the American Mind that’s critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
The lawsuit alleges that the club was prevented from holding its Palestinian Culture Night in the way the students wanted, that they were barred from distributing a one-page “zine” that explained various Palestinian symbols and were not allowed to offer face paint “tattoos” or to distribute pro-Palestine stickers.
The United States Supreme Court made it clear in 1968 that high school students had a right to peacefully express their views about the war.
In 1965, a group of students in Des Moines decided to make a public showing of their support for a truce in the Vietnam war by wearing black arm bands. School administrators created a policy stating any student refusing to remove the armband would be suspended. Two students were sent home in 1965, when they wore their armbands to school. Students did not lose their freedom of speech when they stepped onto school property according to the Supreme Court.
The students were able to host it this Thursday, but that program was not what they would have wanted. They tell me that the school required them to submit for clearance symbols and books that they were going to display on a table.
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.