How Columbia University’s complex history with the student protest movement echoes into today

NEW YORK — Students take up space and demand change. University administrators are under pressure to get things back under control. Police intervened to make arrests. At other schools: students notice it and sometimes take action.

Columbia University, 2024. And Columbia University, 1968.

The pro-Palestinian demonstration and subsequent arrests in Columbia, which today have sparked similar protests on campuses across the country and even internationally, are not new territory for students at the Ivy League school. They are the latest in a Columbia tradition that dates back more than five decades—a tradition that also helped provide inspiration for the anti-apartheid protest of the 1980s, the Iraq war protests, and more.

“When you go to Columbia, you know you are going to an institution that has a place of honor in the history of American protest,” said Mark Naison, professor of history and Africa. & African American Studies at Fordham University and he himself participated in the 1968 demonstrations. “Anytime there’s a movement, you know Columbia is going to be there.”

It’s part of Columbia’s lore, students participating in this month’s demonstrations insist — recognized by the school itself in its anniversary programming and taught in classes.

“Many students here are aware of what happened in 1968,” said Sofia Ongele, 23, among those who joined the encampment in response to this month’s arrests.

Also in April of that year, the end of an academic year was approaching when students took over five campus buildings. There were several reasons. Some protested the university’s connection to an institute that conducted weapons research for the Vietnam War; others opposed the elite school’s treatment of black and brown residents in the community surrounding the school, as well as the atmosphere for minority students.

After several days, Columbia’s president allowed a thousand New York Police Department officers to be deployed to clear most of the demonstrators. The arrests, 700 of them, were not gentle. Fists flew, clubs swung. Dozens of students and more than a dozen police officers were injured.

History is never forgotten. That includes now, when pro-Palestinian students called on the university to cut all economic ties with Israel over the war in Gaza, setting up a tent camp earlier this month and arresting more than 100 people. It helped spark similar demonstrations on campuses across the country and the world.

The storied past of protest is one of the reasons Ongele chose Columbia to study, moving here from her native Santa Clarita, California. “I wanted to be in an environment where people were indeed socially conscious,” she said.

When it comes to protest, “We have not only the privilege but also the responsibility to continue to walk in the shoes of those who came before us,” Ongele said. The goal, she said: to ensure “that we are able to maintain the integrity of this university as a university that is indeed socially conscious, a university that has students who care deeply about what’s happening in the world, what’s going on in the world happens’. our communities, and what is happening in the lives of the students who make up our community.”

Columbia University officials did not respond to an email asking for the school’s position on the legacy of the 1968 events. These events, like the current protest, “led to a dramatic increase in student activism across the country Mark Rudd, a leader of that protest, said in an email to The Associated Press. “Myself and others spent the year after April 1968 traveling the country spreading the spirit of Columbia on the campuses.”

But the echoes of the past are not just inspiration. Then, as now, protest had its opponents. Naison said the disruption to campus life and law and order angered many in Columbia and beyond.

“Student protesters are not popular people in the United States of America,” he said. “We weren’t popular in the 1960s. We have achieved a tremendous amount. But we also helped push the country to the right.”

That has a consequence today among those critical of the protests, who have condemned what they say is a descent into anti-Semitism. Some Jewish students have said they felt targeted because of their identity and feared being on campus, and college presidents have come under political pressure to push and use methods like police intervention.

Minouche Shafik, president of Columbia University, had just testified before a congressional panel investigating concerns about anti-Semitism at elite schools when the camp initially opened. Despite requesting police action the next day due to what she called an “intimidating and intimidating environment,” Republicans in Congress demanded her resignation.

“Freedom of expression is so important, but it does not go beyond the right to safety,” said Itai Dreifuss, 25, a third-year student who grew up in the United States and Israel. He was near the encampment this past week, standing in front of posters taped to the wall showing people taken hostage by Hamas in the Oct. 7 attack that caused the current fire.

That sense among some students that personal animosity is directed toward them is a difference between 1968 and today, Naison said. That conflict between the demonstrators and their opponents “is much deeper,” Naison claims, which he believes makes these times even more charged.

“It’s history repeating itself, but it’s also uncharted territory,” he said. “What we have here is a whole group of people who see these protests as a natural extension of the fight for justice, and a whole other group of people who see this as a deadly attack on them and their history and tradition. And that makes it very difficult for university officials to provide leadership.”