A Time to Stir

Columbia '68

Paul Cronin

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231544337
• Subtopic: Higher Education
• Index: History

For seven days in April 1968, students occupied five buildings on the campus of Columbia University to protest a planned gymnasium in a nearby Harlem park, links between the university and the Vietnam War, and what they saw as the university's unresponsive attitude toward their concerns. Exhilarating to some and deeply troubling to others, the student protests paralyzed the university, grabbed the world's attention, and inspired other uprisings. Fifty years after the events, A Time to Stir captures the reflections of those who participated in and witnessed the Columbia rebellion.

With more than sixty essays from members of the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, the Students' Afro-American Society, faculty, undergraduates who opposed the protests, "outside agitators," and members of the New York Police Department, A Time to Stir sheds light on the politics, passions, and ideals of the 1960s. Moving beyond accounts from the student movement's white leadership, this book presents the perspectives of black students, who were grappling with their uneasy integration into a supposedly liberal campus, as well as the views of women, who began to question their second-class status within the protest movement and society at large. A Time to Stir also speaks to the complicated legacy of the uprising. For many, the events at Columbia inspired a lifelong dedication to social causes, while for others they signaled the beginning of the chaos that would soon engulf the left. Taken together, these reflections present a nuanced and moving portrait that reflects the sense of possibility and excess that characterized the 1960s.

INDEX

Page numbers refer to the print edition but are hyperlinked to the appropriate location in the e-book.

academic freedom: Coleman, H., on, 211; Committee A on, 271; doctrine of, xli, 210–12; as shield for Vietnam War research, 278; of student protesters, 272

Action Committee for Immediate Defense (ACID), 375

Action Faction: base building and, 294, 296–98; error of, 125, 298; formation of, 296; in SDS, 50, 53–58, 125, 130, 134, 296–98, 396

Action political organization, 47–48

Ad Hoc Faculty Group (AHFG): at Avery Hall, 313; chronology of events, lxiv, lxvi–lxviii; cordon, 109, 212–13, 352; graduate students in, 310; lack of diversity on, 122; membership, 310; in Philosophy Hall, lxii, lxiv, lxviii, 102–4, 108, 121, 124, 281, 285, 290; role of, 212, 281–82, 309–14; Truman and, 122

administration, Columbia: communication with, xxxv; discipline by, 57; domination by, 145–46; incompetence of, xxxi, xxxv–xxxvii, lxiv, 65–66, 105–6, 177, 210, 213–14, 264; insensitivity of, to black students, 18–19; media colluding with, 15–16; NYPD’s duty to, 266; Philosophy Hall and, 285; security guards and, 351; sympathy for, 182; against Vietnam War, xli; white privilege of, 37–38

administration, LSE, 328

Advisory Committee of the Faculties, liv

Advisory Committee on Student Life, lvi

affirmative action, 96

Afrikan World, 318

AFSC. See American Friends Service Committee

AHFG. See Ad Hoc Faculty Group

Akst, Paul, lix–lx, 56, 130–31

Alabama (Coltrane), 149

ALFONECO. See Alumni for a New Columbia

Alfred Lerner Hall, 70

Ali, Muhammad, 72, 150

alienation: of black students, 10, 301; faculty and, 103; of outsi...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents 
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chronology of Events
• Children of the New Age: (Barnard undergraduate/Strike Coordinating Committee)
• Inside Alienation, Outside Agitator: (Columbia College undergraduate/Students’ Afro-American Society/Hamilton Hall occupier)
• Race and the Specter of Strategic Blindness: (Columbia College undergraduate/Students’ Afro-American Society/Hamilton Hall occupier)
• Liberation News Service and the Columbia Student Revolt: (Liberation News Service)
• A Working Class Veteran’s Perspective: (Student, School of General Studies)
• Constructions of Power: (Columbia College undergraduate/Strike Coordinating Committee)
• You Gave Us Hope: (Graduate student, History/Fayerweather Hall occupier)
• A People’s Prehistory of Columbia, 1968: (Columbia College undergraduate/Students for a Democratic Society/Fayerweather Hall occupier)
• “Possibilistes” vs. “Maximalistes”: How It Went Down in Fayerweather: (Graduate student, Department of Public Law and Government/Fayerweather Hall occupier)
• Attempting to “Hold the Center” at Columbia, 1968: (Graduate student, Columbia Law and Business Schools)
• The Man Who Shook My Hand: (Columbia College undergraduate/Students for a Democratic Society)
• In the Spirit of Reconciliation: (Manhattan District Attorney’s Office)
• How I Become a National News Source: Columbia’s Office of Public Information: (Columbia College undergraduate/Office of Public Information)
• The Jolt of Radicalization: (Graduate student, Architecture/Avery Hall occupier)
• Daddy’s Girl: (Barnard undergraduate/Students’ Afro-American Society/Hamilton Hall occupier)
• The Columbia Stir-Fry: (Faculty, Department of French/Ad Hoc Faculty Group)
• The Great Morningside Rising: (Faculty, Department of English and Comparative Literature/Ad Hoc Faculty Group)
• From Columbia 1968 to Fort Leavenworth: (Graduate student, History Department and the Russian Institute)
• The Essence of Spirit Is Freedom: (Columbia College alumnus/teaching assistant/Ad Hoc Faculty Group)
• The Smartest Kids I’d Ever Met: Memories of a Columbia Rebel: (Columbia College undergraduate/Mathematics Hall occupier)
• Who Be the Dominator?: (“Outside agitator”)
• The Moral Obligation to Act: (Barnard undergraduate/Strike Coordinating Committee)
• Columbia in the Community: (Columbia College alumnus/Morningside Heights resident)
• Mutiny in the Air: (Columbia College undergraduate/Students for a Democratic Society)
• Liberated Fayerweather: Agony and Ecstasy While Awaiting the NYPD: (Graduate student, Anthropology/Fayerweather Hall occupier)
• The Special Case of the Fayerweather Occupation: (Graduate student, History/Fayerweather Hall occupier)
• A Time for Revolt: (Graduate student, Art History and Archeology/Fayerweather Hall occupier)
• Getting Back to “Life as Normal”: (Office of the New York City Mayor)
• The Power of Power Structure Research: (North American Congress on Latin America)
• Days of Whine and Ruses: (Columbia College alumnus/Alumni for a New Columbia)
• A Time to Stir … Up Trouble: (Columbia College undergraduate/Majority Coalition)
• The Primary Shades of Opposition to the Columbia Occupation: (Columbia College undergraduate/Majority Coalition)
• No More Antiwar! The Rise of the Therapeutic Left: (Columbia College undergraduate/Students for a Democratic Society)
• Already Dead: Inside Low Library Commune: (Columbia College undergraduate/Low Library occupier)
• A Night to Remember: (Columbia College undergraduate/WKCR)
• Silence Is Compliance: (Graduate student, Union Theological Seminary/Columbia University Student Council)
• On the Air: A View from WKCR: (Columbia College undergraduate/WKCR)
• Columbia and the Draft: (Columbia College undergraduate/Student Draft Information Center)
• Impressions of a Rookie Cop: (New York City Police Department, Tactical Patrol Force)
• The Sound of Breaking Glass: (Columbia College undergraduate)
• Hats and Bats: (New York City Police Department, Tactical Patrol Force)
• Stopping the Machine: (Barnard undergraduate/Avery Hall occupier)
• Life on the Ledge: (Faculty, Department of English and Comparative Literature/Ad Hoc Faculty Group)
• How I Learned I Was a Menshevik: (Columbia College undergraduate/Fayerweather Hall occupier)
• What It Takes to Build a Movement: (Columbia College undergraduate/Students for a Democratic Society/Strike Coordinating Committee)
• Self-Determination and Self-Respect: Hamilton Hall, Fifty Years Later: (Graduate student, Political Science/Students’ Afro-American Society/Hamilton Hall occupier)
• Long Ago and Not at All Far Away: (Graduate student, English/Preceptor, Columbia College/Ad Hoc Faculty Group)
• Columbia 1968: My Course Correction: (Columbia College undergraduate/Students’ Afro-American Society/Hamilton Hall occupier)
• Uniters: (Columbia College undergraduate)
• A Sense of Rightness: (Barnard undergraduate/Fayerweather Hall occupier)
• Avery Hall to Urban Deadline: (Graduate student, Architecture/Avery Hall occupier)
• Forming Community, Forging Commitment: A Hamilton Hall Story: (Barnard undergraduate/ Students’ Afro-American Society/Hamilton Hall occupier)
• From College Walk to the Stonewall Inn: (Columbia undergraduate/Low Library occupier)
• Five Red Flags: (Graduate student, Law School)
• Never Again?: (Graduate student, English and Comparative Literature/Mathematics Hall occupier)
• Covering—and Covering Up—Spring ’68: (Columbia College undergraduate/Spectator newspaper)
• Hundreds of Pairs of Wings: (“Outside agitator”/Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers)
• Political Education and the Birth of Students for a Restructured University: (Graduate student, English/Students for a Restructured University)
• It’s Better to Build Up: Post-’68 Governance at Columbia: (Graduate student, History)
• A Foot Soldier’s Story of the Sit-Ins: (Barnard undergraduate/Mathematics Hall occupier)
• From Community Service to Political Action: The Evolution of the Citizenship Council: (Columbia College undergraduate/Citizenship Council)
• Afterword
• Index