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: It was time for every man to stir. Thomas Paine
Columbia’s problem is the problem of America in miniature. Tom Hayden
April 1968. Hundreds of emboldened Columbia University students, many allied to two groups – Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Students’ Afro-American Society (SAS) – take direct action against what they regard as their university’s racist and militaristic policies by barricading themselves inside five buildings on campus. All of them together, behind locked doors, with a unified vision, issuing demands: Columbia must end construction of a gymnasium in nearby Morningside Park (public parkland situated within a primarily black neighborhood – “Gym Crow Must Go!”) and disaffiliate with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), which is conducting weapons research for the Department of Defense and so connects Columbia to war in Vietnam. Immediately are opened up, and made crystal clear, the schisms that have long existed on campus. As Columbia’s unresponsive administration – controlled by businessmen-trustees and overseen by a dithering president – attempts to defuse the situation, as faculty meet and discuss the issues, as undergraduates opposed to the occupiers mobilize a raging reaction to their classmates’ rebellion, hundreds of New York police officers are assembling. After six days, with neither side leaning toward compromise, with no hope of reconciliation, law enforcement remove the protesters – more than seven hundred, of whom nearly two hundred are not Columbia students – from their makeshift, self-governing communes, one of which is held exclusively by black students.