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: This was a contest of ideas, a confluence of mismatched concerns making for an extraordinarily stimulating learning curve that no one had ever before experienced. Whether aware of it or not, everyone active in the protests was showing one another, once the textbooks were put away and the classroom doors were sealed, how living through a historical moment could be an educational windfall, a potent form of vivification. The tumult had been brewing for years. Study Columbia’s student newspaper Spectator from 1965 onward and read about a centralized administration offering paper-thin promises and desperate to prevent dissent from upsetting its fund-raising efforts, alongside a marked acceleration of student protest and voice-raising, a drive toward transgression and extreme measures, the jettisoning of complacency, and the censuring of conformity: an expanding number of single-issue political groups operating on campus; provocative antiwar gatherings around New York involving Columbia students; the steady, sometimes reluctant abandonment of conventional, moderate tactics as seen through increasingly contentious campus rallies, including protests against the Reserve Officer Training Corps and recruitment by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Marines Corps; students involving themselves in community outreach in Harlem; civil rights activism and furor over the draft, and the prospect of conscription and the brutality of the Vietnam body count; demonstrations at the site of Columbia’s proposed gymnasium;