Title: Columbia 1968 | The Sticking Place
Headings: Columbia 1968
Columbia 1968
The Role and Responsibility of Democratic Citizenship
The Role of the University in American Society
Racial Justice in Sixties America
Participatory Democracy
1968: End of an Era
from Sticking Place Films

Content: In their stories, we learn about the disillusionment of male undergraduates at Columbia College, the pent-up frustrations, the persistent and earnest activism, and the spontaneous occupation of five buildings by what student leader Mark Rudd described as a “motley mob.” Here was a ragtag collection of disaffected constituencies, a crowd – passionate, polemical, and reliant on instinct—with diverse political commitments but commonality of purpose, brought together by circumstance and a series of improvisational encounters, with a more or less group-centered leadership. Each occupied building quickly developed its own personality, drawing in a particular kind of activist. Low, Avery, Mathematics, and Fayerweather became dynamic enclaves packed with hundreds of undergraduates and graduate students, holed up side-by-side with a host of sympathetic outsiders who suspected that Columbia would prove fertile recruiting ground for action on the streets beyond campus. Of vital importance, too often forgotten today, or more likely simply unknown, was the fact that Hamilton Hall was held by a group of contemplative, disciplined black Columbia students who proved to be the strategic and moral centrifuge of the protests. For these men and women, pledged to the ideal of self-determination, some enthralled by the rise of Black Power, the act of closing ranks was made easier by the fact that most already knew each other. Initially suspect of the level of commitment of white students, and with practical support offered by Harlem locals, these black students were, from the start, on a different trajectory than the other protesters. Every individual on the Columbia campus in 1968 – no matter whose company they sought or kept, which organization or ideology they aligned themselves with, how committed they were to allegiances, or how fiercely they vowed to remain unaffiliated – was motivated by different reasons. With the enduring absence of a monolithic student bloc, with pulses beating ever faster and a stunning lack of stability to the situation, with rival factions proliferating by the day, consensus and conciliation would never be easy to reach. There wasn’t a groupuscule that was not, at one time or other, at odds with every other groupuscule.