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 October 1965, David Truman, dean of Columbia College, spoke to an interviewer about student civil disobedience, declaring that “the circumstances under which such protest would be acceptable are extremely rare.” As with Berkeley in 1964, the battleground became one of free speech. On the first day of the fall 1967 semester, in an attempt to stave off disruption, a ban on protest inside campus buildings was instituted. Columbia students were part of a cohort of headstrong youngsters immersed in a set of subcultures that by 1968 had permeated deeply and were helping to cultivate in millions of people a sense of personal responsibility for institutional behavior. Many of them, for the first time in their lives, saw the necessity for direct action. This may have been a coterie of ludic, hedonistic