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: 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. The “bust” has a clarifying effect on many who otherwise would have paid little attention to the world of politics around them. Students who had sidestepped the protests, who never would have thought of involving themselves in disruption of any kind, are galvanized, and a fresh wave of turmoil surges across Columbia, helping to set in motion similar actions at colleges and universities – public, private, rural, urban – across the United States. The social and political issues that had energized the campus and the student protest movement for years reflected a formidable and transformative populist uprising that was engulfing whole swathes of the nation, even the globe – a rejoinder to the perceived inadequacies of mainstream institutions and politics. By 1968, in the shadow of a war that was pulling in hundreds of thousands of young American men, and only three weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Columbia University – so close to the center of the world’s media industries and even closer to the African American community of West Harlem – became one place where the academy’s plight during the Vietnam quagmire, and the culture wars of the era, were conspicuously played out. At the core of any Columbia ’68 narrative must be the students behind the inciting incident, to whom everyone else responded.