Columbia in Turmoil-our Articles A Student View
JACOBS, MARK
A Student View The tactical police encountered resistance when they tried to enter the room in Mathematics Hall held by student protesters. "Remove the barricades," they ordered. There was some...
...a majority wanted classes to continue...
...Although their relations with the 600 white students who supported them by seizing other buildings were somewhat strained, both groups considered the gymnasium issue to be of primary importance...
...In other rooms the whites sang folksongs about revolution and freedom...
...Columbia had created the "hidden tension" through its history of community abuse...
...Kenneth Clark, for one, has attested to the wanton destruction of classroom furniture by policemen...
...The university claims that $500,000 worth of property damage was done in the five student-occupied buildings...
...Had they displayed a willingness to compromise they could have won endorsement for their protest from the powerful Ad Hoc Faculty Group...
...As early as 1964, during his freshman year, he tried to unionize the workers in Columbia's food services, in the face of university resistance...
...The student leaders who formed the Strike Coordinating Committee could not maintain sufficient discipline among their followers...
...They flaunted school authorities by flying a red flag from the top of Fayerweather Hall...
...The whites debated the issue and split into several factions...
...Still, they showed a lack of political wisdom in their failure to adopt the Fayerweather proposal...
...Most students, I think, sympathized with the ends of the demonstrators...
...This failure bespeaks a serious insensitivity to racial tension...
...The body of protesters included disparate elements?fringe groups" such as hardened revolutionary anarchists and naive rebellious yippies...
...several students and community people, including at least one Harlem minister, were arrested at the sit-ins...
...Even the strong intervention of such elected Harlem representatives as State Senator Basil Patterson and State Assemblyman Charles Rangel failed to move Columbia...
...Another pause, then the response: "Hold it—we're taking a vote...
...The "separate and unequal" nature of the planned recreational facilities characterized Columbia's insensitivity to community feeling: the few facilities open to Harlem were to occupy the bottom floor of the gymnasium, and were to be accessible only by a back door...
...The vote turned out 8-7 with two abstentions...
...Under conditions of stress, the students lacked trust in even sympathetic faculty members...
...and for the past three years he has worked for the prominent Metropolitan Council on Housing...
...In the summer of 1965, he went to Mississippi on a Head Start project...
...After several hundred demonstrators at Columbia had occupied Hamilton Hall and imprisoned acting Dean Henry Coleman for 12 hours, the black students in the group held a secret caucus...
...The blacks clearly represented a significant body of opinion in...
...The occupation of campus buildings can be seen, then, as a justified act of civil disobedience for the participants...
...Black students maintained absolute cleanliness in Hamilton Hall by mopping the floors at least twice daily...
...I do not think so...
...It was rumored that the university, whose traditional policy toward the black community had been one of "containment," had recently acquired large tracts of land in Harlem...
...the gym would have been an oppressive symbol of white power...
...But I sympathized with them, for most acted out of genuine commitment to just and urgent causes...
...The chairman of the Columbia College Citizenship Council, a program which comprises many student-run activities in the ghetto, presented an anti-gym petition signed by numerous community leaders to Columbia Vice President David Truman, but Truman ignored the petition and reiterated Columbia's intention of erecting the gym...
...an alliance with the faculty would have strengthened the students' position and prevented the administration from ordering the "bust...
...They broke into the secret files of Columbia President Grayson Kirk, and they defaced the walls of Mathematics Hall with revolutionary slogans...
...In a time of growing frustration and militancy among blacks, the Columbia community had largely ignored the issue...
...But they acted in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr., who wrote in his "Letter from Birmingham City Jail" (See NL, April 22, p. 7), "we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension...
...Although plans for the gym had evoked community protest since 1958, when they were first conceived, reaction became especially intense after groundbreaking early this year...
...significantly, they didn't do so in front of the other buildings because, as the leader of the Majority Coalition himself explained, "there wasn't enough manpower to go around...
...The students were unreasonable in demanding complete amnesty for their actions, since their foolish excesses deserved some punishment...
...True, the students' actions disrupted the academic process and caused tension...
...many...
...In view of the urgency of the issue, I think the proven futility of less extreme forms of protest justified the basic tactics employed by the students...
...It is not difficult, though, to imagine why the gym had aroused deep resentment in Harlem...
...Again, "remove the barricades...
...But the blacks—who started perhaps a majority—also supported their means...
...Many faculty members were basically sympathetic to the students...
...in February of this year, he sat-in at the construction site of Columbia's new gymnasium located in Harlem's Morning-side Park...
...As it happened, the protesters gained wide faculty and student sympathy—at least temporarily?because the bust turned into a police riot...
...White students committed some acts whose illegality was not justified, however...
...Community groups and concerned students circulated petitions, held rallies at Columbia, and sat-in at the construction site...
...To suggest that the students were not concerned with reform is—to say the least—inaccurate...
...Because of Columbia's autocratic governmental structure—full executive, legislative, and judicial power are vested by the trustees in the President—it was impossible for faculty and students, much less community people, to effectively influence the university's decisions...
...in fact, there is strong proof that city policemen caused almost all of the damage during and after the "bust" ordered by the university...
...at a meeting of the College faculty less than a month before the student demonstration, a professor of city planning could not even obtain a second to his motion asking an end to the gym's construction...
...As one Harlem woman further explained, the gymnasium structure in its overwhelming physical brilliance would have constituted an unbearable foil to the nearby squalid slums...
...I am a moderate, in that I hope necessary social change will be accomplished through the least violent means...
...I think that in certain respects those students handled themselves foolishly...
...Primarily at issue in the student protest was the university's right to construct a gymnasium in Morning-side Park, a sloping natural barrier between Harlem and the complex of imposing institutions on Morningside Heights, including of course Columbia...
...Harlem...
...During their occupation of Avery Hall, architecture students worked on various plans for Columbia's expansion...
...As early as 1964, too, he did education organizing in East Harlem and housing organizing in West Harlem...
...The feeling of Harlem is so strong that if Columbia builds the gym, community people may well tear it down...
...they were continually meeting to discuss them...
...on April 24, the party was interrupted when an emissary from the black caucus told the whites the building would have to barricaded until all demands were met...
...These senseless acts, representing the work of a few, in a way reflected the loose democratic organization of the white students...
...To suggest that the students were primarily concerned with destruction is—once more, to say the least—also inaccurate...
...There was some whispering inside, followed by a pause...
...At about 5 a.m...
...While these groups were a source of embarrassment to the protesters, they exercised no serious influence on the students' decisions...
...Contrary to what the press and many older people seem to believe, they demonstrated a basic faith in democratic values, and in a significant way contributed to the preservation of a viable democratic society in America...
...One protester, for example, related to me the following personal record of civil rights involvement...
...What emerged most frighteningly from the first week of protest at Columbia was the failure of the press to acknowledge either its true nature or the full gravity of the issues involved...
...The main protagonists in the original protest were 80 black students?a majority of the blacks on campus —who with 30 community people seized Hamilton Hall...
...If democratic society in America is to remain at all viable, it must heed fully protests such as the one at Columbia...
...A proposal passed by the students in occupied Fayerweather Hall asked the Strike Committee to drop its demand for amnesty as a pre-condition for negotiations with the administration...
...Opponents of the demonstrators joined the so-called Majority Coalition and locked arms in front of one occupied building...
...they feared that construction of the gym would lead to large-scale Columbia expansion into the community...
...I do not consider myself a "radical," nor was I one of the 700 students who "liberated" five buildings at Columbia for seven days...
...By Mark Jacobs That incident occurred at 4:30 in the morning of April 30...
...Yet in spite of their errors, I was grateful to the demonstrators...
...In that spirit I am thankful to the student protesters for having taken the dramatic steps necessary to expose a dangerously unjust situation...
...But if the administration had succeeded in restraining police brutality during the bust, the students would probably have lost support...
...Over a five-month period he picketed, petitioned, slept-in, and staged hunger strikes on behalf of the workers, most of whom were black or Spanish...
...accordingly, the students moved the desks and let themselves be dragged away...
...Some people, including the editors of the New York Times, claimed that a majority of Columbia students actively opposed the protest...
...Many of the protesters apparently realized this...
...Representatives from the four white-occupied buildings controlled eight of the 11 votes on the Strike Committee, which reached no important decisions without first securing the approval of the students in the buildings...
...All students in the buildings had a voice in formulating the goals and strategies of the protest...
...we merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive...
...The students were concerned with gaining recognition for the morality of their protest, not with escaping punishment...
...they acted on the naive faith that in any event they would win their case, a faith founded only in their belief that they were in the right...
...the proposal suggested instead that students submit to the disciplinary decisions of a bi-partite (student-faculty) board that would agree to issue only punishments less severe than suspension...
Vol. 51 • May 1968 • No. 11
