1960s: Siege on Morningside Heights TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1960s Highlights
Time Magazine May 3, 1965 STUDENTS Siege on Morningside Heights

Not since the battle of Berkeley has there been anything that could quite match last week's disorders at Manhattan's Columbia University. Demonstrators stormed the office of the university's president, held three officials hostage for 26 hours, took over five university buildings, eventually forced the 17,000-student university to suspend all classes.

Situated in Morningside Heights at the edge of Harlem, Columbia is an academic enclave surrounded by poverty and decay. Its students, a large number of them subway commuters, are both liberal and well integrated. But the school itself, while earnestly trying to deal with the urban ills in its neighborhood, has fallen far short of the expectations of either its students or its neighbors.

Long Challenge. Much of the blame falls on President Grayson Kirk, whose aloof, often bumbling administration has proved unresponsive to grievances that have long been festering on campus. Last month, when a group led by Students for a Democratic Society marched into Low Library to protest a university ban on indoor demonstrations, Kirk began disciplinary proceedings against six of the leaders. Feeling thus challenged, and long provoked, the SDS last week organized a defiant demonstration. The students demanded that the charges against the six be dropped, and also seized the occasion to protest the construction of a new off-campus gymnasium.

The gymnasium controversy has been simmering ever since the university in 1959 leased part of nearby Morningside Park as a site for the facility. A few Harlem leaders objected on the grounds that the project would deprive them of park land--though the area involved occupies barely two acres of the 30-acre park. A later objection arose over the architectural plans: while Columbia intended to make part of the gym exclusively available to Harlem youngsters, it blundered by providing for a rather grand entrance opening on to the campus and a separate less conspicuous one, facing Harlem. Negroes seized upon the gym as a symbol of back-door paternalism.

Sudden Power. Last week's demonstration began quietly enough, with some 400 students gathering on the campus plaza. University officials promptly offered to meet with them to consider their demands that the gym be abandoned, as well as student objections to the university's ties with the Institute for Defense Analysis, a Washington "think-tank" that conducts military-related research for the Federal Government. But the students, carried away by their own heady sense of sudden power, shouted down the university's offer and marched to Morningside Park, where they tore down a fence at the gymnasium excavation site.

Returning to campus, the demonstrators next stormed ivy-covered Hamilton Hall, headquarters for undergraduate Columbia College. Inside they stationed themselves in front of the office of Acting Dean Henry S. Coleman. After telling his visitors that he had "no intention of meeting any demands under a situation such as this," Coleman went into his office with two other school officials. Blocking Coleman's door, the demonstrators pasted up photos of Lenin and Che Guevara, and chanted "Racist gym must go." As night came, the demonstrators were still there--and Coleman and his friends casually played cards.

But student power soon came up against black power. Arguing that the white SDS insurgents in front of Coleman's office were not sufficiently militant, a group of 60-odd black students concluded that the whites should leave--and at 6 o'clock the next morning they did. Left in control of the building, the Negroes eventually released their three hostages--26 hours after they were first taken captive. A number of the whites had meanwhile moved on President Kirk's office--he was not there at the time--in nearby Low Library. One group broke down a side door and brushed aside campus police to get into the office; others clambered through a window. They hurled Kirk's papers onto the floor, smoked his cigars, pasted on the office window a sign reading LIBERATED AREA. BE FREE TO JOIN US.

"Get 'Em Out." Over the next 48 hours, other students accepted the invitation and seized three more campus buildings. By this time, the sit-ins had taken on an air of well-oiled organization. From inside the barricaded buildings, the insurgents sent out emissaries to bring back food, blankets and Vaseline--to smear on their faces on the theory that it deadened the effects of the chemical Mace. Suddenly image- conscious, they began tidying up their own disorder, even emptying wastebaskets. A coordinated command post was set up, mimeograph machines churned out bulletins and manifestos. The Negro group in Hamilton Hall issued a formal statement: "We are prepared to remain here indefinitely. Morale is high."

Other students, including many sympathetic to the demonstrators' demands, began to complain about their disruptive tactics. Outside Low Library, some 200 counterdemonstrators cried: "Get 'em out! Get 'em out!" Some threw eggs. A group of Columbia athletes volunteered to remove the protestors, but were restrained by school officials. "If this is a barbarian society," growled a burly wrestler, "then it's survival of the fittest--and we're the fittest."

With such an accessible stage, radical Negro leaders moved briskly into the act. Charles 37X Kenyatta, head of Harlem's Mau Mau sect, led a group of his followers on a sympathy march across the campus. Black Power Apostles Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown showed up to counsel the Negro students occupying Hamilton Hall. Some 200 Negro youngsters, many of them no older than 13, snaked onto the campus chanting "Black Power."

Victory Claim. Obviously chary of capitulating to the demonstrators, Columbia officials seemed equally reluctant to regain control of their university. The students refused to quit their posts without a promise of general amnesty for all demonstrators--a condition that President Kirk rejected. Failure to take disciplinary action, Kirk insisted, would "destroy the whole fabric of the university community." But the school yielded on at least one important point. At the urging of New York City Mayor John Lindsay, it announced that it would temporarily suspend construction of the disputed gymnasium. Still the students refused to budge.

Into the vacuum created by this impasse moved a number of faculty members--mainly younger ones sympathetic to the students' cause. When the administration called in police to eject the demonstrators inside Low Library, 30 professors blocked their way. In the face of the growing faculty pressure, the administration backed down.

The insurgents meanwhile were already claiming a peculiar victory. They had shown, as a leaflet put it, that students "can exert their collective energies, their power, to bring about change in their local community." Yet the immediate changes they sought to bring about--abandonment of the gym, for example--hardly seemed to merit the storm-trooper tactics employed. As for the broader goal of improving Columbia's relations with its neighbors, the demonstration had probably aggravated existing racial tensions. Besides inflaming hatemongers of both races, the dissidents themselves had divided along racial lines, with blacks and whites generally holding separate pieces of campus property.

But they were in total agreement, at least, in their demands for amnesty. At week's end, Columbia trustees emerged from a special meeting to back President Kirk and "affirmatively direct him to maintain the ultimate disciplinary power over the conduct of students." There both sides rested--eyeball to eyeball, heavy breathing and mutually defiant. Locked in their test of strength, they seemed to have forgotten that their ultimate, and presumably mutual, objective is better education.

WHY THOSE STUDENTS ARE PROTESTING

One great educator became so infuriated with what he called the licentious, outrageous and disgraceful behavior of students at his college that he quit in disgust. The college was at Carthage, the year was A.D. 383, and the dismayed teacher, as he relates in Confessions, was St. Augustine. Sometimes students can try the patience of a saint.

One of those times is now. Seldom before have so many groups of students organized so militantly or seemed to try so hard to reorder their colleges, their countries or the world at large. It is the biggest year for students since 1848--a year of student-led revolution in Europe.

The rise of this obstreperous generation is a genuine phenomenon. It was unforeseen by educators, who scarcely a decade ago were overstating the case in criticizing what came to be called "the silent generation." Now the cry for student power is worldwide. It keeps growing and getting a lot of attention and quite a few results. For the first time in many years, students are marching and fighting and sitting-in not only in developing or unstable countries but also in the rich industrial democracies. In the U.S., the movement has spread from the traditionally active, alert and demonstrative student bodies of the elite schools to many usually quiescent campuses.

The protesting activists, still a very small minority, overlook the accomplishments of society but criticize its shortcomings. Possibly idealistic but skeptical of ideologies, they contend that governments have not performed up to their original promises. The student leftists disdain Soviet-style Communism as spiritually corrupt. The democrats fault the inequalities of wealth and race.

The activists demand change and want to determine its course. The university should not be the conserver of society, they argue, but the fountain of reform. They believe that students should be not merely preparing to enter the active world but a force within it. Many of them have a fashionable disaffection for organized religion, but they express the Judaeo-Christian belief that one man should act where he is, and that if he does so, he can help to change the world.

Demonstrations and Issues. During the past three months, students have demonstrated for change in 20 countries. They have taken to the streets in such usual centers of student unrest as Brazil, Japan and The Netherlands and in such normally placid places at Denmark, Switzerland and West Germany. Student protests have led to the temporary closing of at least three dozen universities in the U.S., Italy, Spain, Tunisia, Mexico, Ethiopia and other countries. Belgian student demonstrations, fanning the old Flemish-v.-Walloon controversy, brought the government down. Egyptian students, marching in spontaneous protest against government inefficiency, obliged Gamal Abdel Nasser to rearrange his Cabinet, Communist Poland put down street demonstrations, but only after suspending more than 1,000 rebellious students. More successful were Czechoslovakia's students: their protests were a significant factor in pushing out the old Stalinists and shifting the direction of government toward greater liberty.

In the U.S., a significant facet of the phenomenon is that more students are moving away from alienation and toward highly political activism. While the hippie movement is waning, student power has shifted from passive protest to specific action aimed at accomplishing practical goals. Some youngsters who had despaired of the whole political system, and doubted that they could ever accomplish real change by working inside it, were given a new sense of hope and power by the crusade for Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire. Following a romantic cause to a remote state, a few thousand students used old-fashioned ward politics to help bring out the vote. The result brought Robert Kennedy into the presidential race. And that--plus student protests against the Administration's Vietnam policies--had something to do with Lyndon Johnson dropping out.

The latest worldwide wave of student activism started in the U.S. several years ago, partly as a demand for more freedom and power of decision on campuses. It was stimulated by two larger emotional issues. The first was civil rights. In their demonstrations in the early 1960s, U.S. students discovered that they had the power to move legislators to action. And while they would be horrified at the thought, the students--says Harvard Professor Seymour Lipset--learned their tactics from the white Southerners who used civil disobedience to protest the 1954 Supreme Court decision for desegregation of schools. Out of this developed the pattern of sit-ins, lie-ins, marches and some violence. After civil rights, the second issue was Vietnam. This was not merely a question of sticking up for somebody else; the draft made it a highly personal issue for many students. They did not like the prospect of getting shot at in a war that many of them considered to be unjust and immoral.

Privilege & Permissiveness. The U.S. protests have clearly had an international impact. In Berlin, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo, student activists study the sit-in and seizure tactics that U.S. students used to protest the war, to desegregate Southern lunch counters and to immobilize the University of California in 1964. When television carries pictures of students demonstrating in London or Manhattan, students in Amsterdam and Prague start marching.

For all their differences of nationality, mood or cause, student activists around the world have many common traits and habits. They tend to read the same authors, particularly the U.S.'s C. Wright Mills, Norman Mailer and Paul Goodman. Their favorite is California Professor Herbert Marcuse, 69, who argues that individuals are dominated and manipulated by big institutions of government and business, tend to have the same heroes; among them are such disparate Americans as Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and Robert Kennedy, who is now much more popular with students abroad than at home. The far-out radicals idolize not the old leaders of Eastern Europe but such revolutionaries as Ho Chi Minh, Regis Debray and, above all, Che Guevara, around whom grows the martyr's myth.

One reason that students are getting more attention is that there are so many of them--and larger student bodies make larger demonstrations. Since the mid-1950s, university enrollments have doubled and more: from 380,000 to 880,000 in Latin America, from 739,000 to 1,700,000 in Western Europe, from 2,600,000 to 7,000,000 in the U.S. Among these, the vast majority are not militant and are often repelled by and sometimes moved to protest against the extravagances of the extremists. The majority are not apathetic but are more concerned with courses than causes. By the best estimate of educators at home and abroad, 1% to 2% of the students in a university are highly committed leaders and agitators tending to extremism. Beyond them, roughly 5% to 10% are activists who take part in demonstrations, though the number can go much higher when a sensitive issue is raised.

The Young Democrats claim some 100,000 members on U.S. campuses; the Young Republicans, 150,000. The conservative Young Americans for Freedom has 25,000; the radical leftist Students for Democratic Society is much smaller--5,500 members--but more influential. What it lacks in size, the S.D.S. makes up in zeal and ability to play the press for headlines. Typically, the S.D.S. has only 60 active members among 4,700 students at Princeton, but it is the biggest partisan organization on campus, and one of its highly committed members was elected chairman of the undergraduate assembly last week. An underlying principle of S.D.S. activism is to make as much trouble as possible for the Establishment. Some of its members quite openly, if naively, espouse Marxism as their basic philosophy. Most activists seem to subscribe to the not unreasonable theory that in this era hardly anyone listens to a quiet man, so they make as much noise as possible.

There are many reasons--economic, social, educational--for the current activism of students. More than any prior generation, they are children of permissive parents, and the Spock marks are showing. Today's young are used to having their complaints acted on instantly. "They are the babies who were picked up," notes Harvard's David Riesman. They have less direction than previous generations, are challenged by their parents to think for themselves. For all the rather exaggerated talk of the generation gap, American student activists tend not so much to defy their parents as to emulate them. And their parents are inclined to approve of what they are doing.

The many studies of student activists show that the great majority of them come from families that are prosperous, politically active and liberal. Almost half of the protest-prone students are Jewish; few are Catholic. The most active students cluster in schools that have a tradition of dissent and a tolerance for it--universities such as California, Wisconsin, Columbia. Most of the activists are students of the arts and humanities; they are apt to be bright but dreamy, and not yet committed to careers. Few are in the professional schools--business, engineering or medicine. Since many universities no longer demand compulsory attendance at lectures, they have the time to ring doorbells for a candidate or march for civil rights. Some sympathetic professors spur the activists on, grant them long periods off, extend deadlines for tests and theses.

Activists are often economically liberated. They take their own prosperity for granted; affluence has become so common and scholarships so plentiful that few students have to work their way through. The youngsters may criticize their parents for devoting too much time to making money, but they like the freedom that money gives them. Describing student activists, the University of Michigan daily said: "They took their tactics from Gandhi, their idealism from philosophy class and their money from Daddy."

Wanted: Relevance & Involvement. Around the world, the first target of the student activists is the university. They feel, with some reason, that their education is not sufficiently existential, that it is not relevant to today's life. They want a larger voice in choosing professors and framing courses. Particularly in Europe and Latin America, student radicals view the university as a microcosm of society, with its lack of class mobility, its numerous bureaucracies, its concentration on material goals. Their aim is to transform the university from a personnel agency for the economy to a more vocal force for social protest and reform. They want it to take over the role once held by such recently tamed institutions as Britain's Labor Party, West Germany's Social Democrats, and U.S. trade unions.

In the U.S., this viewpoint has taken several directions: protests by Boston University students against acceptance of a $500,000 gift from a landlord who once had slum properties (he withdrew the gift); protests by Princeton students against the university's work for the Pentagon-allied Institute for Defense Analyses (trustees are considering disassociating from the institute). In the current uprising at Columbia, extremists forced the university to stop construction of a gymnasium on a location considered offensive to some people in neighboring Harlem.

Closely related to the student protests is the growing movement for lack student power. From Yale to San Francisco State. Negro activists and some white supporters have sought to make the university become more active in uplift drives in the slum community, to introduce more courses in Afro-American history, and to recruit more Negro students, professors and administrators. In most cases, the administration has quickly acceded to the demands. Last week, the trustees of California's 18 state colleges voted to increase from 2% to 4% of the entering class, the number of Negro, Mexican-American and other minority group students to be admitted under special standards--that is, not by grades alone.

Needed: Tolerance & Participation. The students have taught the university administration two lessons: 1) some of the changes that they want are really improvements, and 2) the way to deal with student power is to anticipate it, to initiate changes before the students demand them. Administrators who have permitted students to participate in some policy areas applaud the results, say that it prevents protest and often raises standards. Students should be permitted to voice their opinions on dormitory rules, on the performance of professors, and on what courses should be added or dropped.

But there is an all-important difference between student advice and student control. If students could dictate the hiring and firing of professors, they would tend to select those with whom they agree--and fall into an echo chamber. Latin American students have considerable control over many universities, and the consequence is chaos and inferior education. A university is not a democracy and cannot become one without degenerating into anarchy. At a conference on "Students and Society" at California's Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions last year, the president of the student body of St. Louis' Washington University put it aptly: "Were Washington University to be turned over to the students and faculty, it would fold in about six months because nobody would know how to run it."

Both the students and the elders have some other lessons to be learned. What is needed most of all is more mutual respect. The student activists are more critical than constructive. They often have no immediate, practical answers for the problems that they expose--but older people should not lightly dismiss them for that. Sometimes it is enough just to ask the right questions. Student protests have stirred authorities in Spain, Germany and other countries to some fitful steps toward modernization. And students have begun to move U.S. universities in some desirable directions--toward a more involved role in the local community, toward a rethinking of the relevance of education.

For their part, the students might recognize that they do not have a monopoly on idealism. After all, the drives against poverty and racism in the U.S. were energized not by them but by their elders. It would also profit the students to recognize the temporary nature of their power and the severe limits on it. Theirs is primarily the power to disrupt. They can interfere with the established authority, but they cannot change it without help from other powerful groups in the population--as Czech students learned in their successful protest and Polish students learned in their unsuccessful one. With that in mind, activist students might do more to court allies not only among their more moderate contemporaries but also among older people. In this, they are not helped at all by some of the retrogressive tendencies of the extremists: they are often intolerant of anyone who disagrees with them, all too willing to interfere with the rights of others, and sometimes ready to stoop to hoodlumism and fascist methods.

Student power can be beneficial; student tyranny never is. Student involvement in politics should be encouraged, but student abuse of the democratic process must always be resisted. Students might well bear in mind the fine distinctions between reasoned dissent and raw intolerance, between knowledge and wisdom, between compromise and copping out. Already 1968 has produced one supreme lesson: students have much more to gain by working actively for change within the existing system than by dropping out of it.

May 10, 1968 Students Lifting a Siege--And Rethinking a Future

At 2:30 a.m., said one combat-wise cop, "Harlem is asleep." At that propitious hour, 1,000 New York City police, armed with warrants signed by Columbia University trustees, marched on the Morningside Heights campus and dispossessed the student rebels who had occupied five buildings for nearly six days. In the inevitable melee, more than 130 people--including twelve policemen--were injured; 698 people, mostly students, were arrested and charged with criminal trespass, resisting arrest or both. Although the action united hopelessly confused Columbia in anger over police brutality, it also moved the campus toward order--and touched off a much needed re-examination of the university's future.

The decision to call in the police, said Columbia President Grayson Kirk, was "the most painful one I have ever made." Although the need for some drastic action to end the impasse was due partly to Kirk's own vacillation in handling the student protests, he had expanded well beyond its initial aims--getting the university to cancel plans for a gymnasium in nearby Morningside Park and drop its affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analyses, A Government-supported research center.

Holding the Line. After successfully capturing the campus buildings, the demonstrators--led by the far-left Students for a Democratic Society and the all-Negro Student Afro-American Society--seemed far more interested in a bloody confrontation with the administration than in any meaningful negotiations. They demanded a complete surrender on all points at issue, including amnesty for all participants in the rebellion. Kirk refused, on the ground that this would mean a complete abdication of all disciplinary authority.

A majority of the university's 17,000 students and 2,500 faculty members undoubtedly shared the initial goals of the strike. But many were also appalled by the hooligan tactics of the demonstrators, who had held university officials captive, broken into offices and overturned furniture. Kirk had reason to fear that some 300 members of the Majority Coalition of students, which included a large proportion of athletes, might touch off intramural violence by trying to dislodge the demonstrators. A fight did break out between some 40 of the burly "jocks," who had set up a blockade to starve out the occupants of Low Library, and 40 youths, mainly Negroes, trying to send in food. The attackers were thrown back, causing one of the school's disillusioned football fans to note that "it's probably the first time Columbia has ever held a line." Kirk was also aware of rumors that militant Harlem residents were vowing to "burn Columbia down."

While classes remained canceled, an Ad Hoc Faculty Group, moving helpfully into the dispute, thought it had found a reasonable solution. It urged uniform punishment for all offenders, under rules to be drawn up by a panel of students, faculty and administrators, and called on the trustees to provide an alternative gymnasium plan. Kirk said he agreed with "the essential spirit" of the proposals, would appoint such a tripartite committee--but did not agree to be bound by its decisions. "He's taking the posture of a neutral party," protested one of the faculty leaders. After the demonstrators also rejected the plan, the Columbia Spectator observed that the battle had degenerated into one between "the intransigent insurgents and the ossified administration."

Private Property. With the agreement of university trustees, Columbia lawyers drew up complaints that students were trespassing on the private property of the trustees in occupying the buildings, filed the papers with police. Moving to the campus in vans and squad cars, the police sealed off all gates, and then, on the orders of Commissioner Howard Leary, marched toward the five occupied buildings.

Inside Hamilton Hall, 85 Negro students, who had been advised by such cool heads as Negro Psychologist Kenneth Clark, decided that their most effective tactic would be to file quietly into the vans (unlike white demonstrators in other buildings, they had kept their occupied quarters immaculate). With the two highest Negro officers in the New York police force observing, it was a model arrest operation--except that no one had brought a key for the main door and it had to be forced open.

"More Police!" Elsewhere, the police were less carefully supervised--and less considerate of the rebels. Professors and students who had linked arms to keep police and demonstrators apart were charged by wedges of plainclothesmen. Uniformed officers plunged into the breach to smash open the doors, while others broke in through underground tunnels. At Fayerweather Hall, where protestors had preplanned very act by majority vote, students who intended to submit cleanly to arrest lined up at the door; those who preferred to be dragged out sat on an upper floor; those who decided to resist linked arms on another floor. The neat plans went awry as police kicked and clubbed their way through the building. For no clear reason, they've attacked newsmen, including a LIFE photographer and, of all people, Columnist Walter Winchell.

There were, of course, grandstanders who tried to exploit the situation with faked cries of pain. One youth, dropped gently to the grass by officers, lay quiet until they moved away, then shouted "Police brutality!"--and drew only laughs from bystanders. A girl wedged in a police van saw her plight in grandiose terms. "First they arrest the workers and now the intellectuals!" she shouted. As demonstrators were dragged or shoved into vans, unsympathetic students applauded, demanded: "More police! More police!" Among those booked at precinct stations that morning were a surprisingly large sprinkling of students from other campuses, nearby high schools, and even from no schools at all. They were all released on bail, and their cases will be heard in June.

Cooling tempers. Initial reaction to the police raid was an emotional tide of sympathy for the protesters. There were numerous student rallies on campus, one of which led to a brief but violent clash with police that contributed eleven more injuries to the week's total. Both the Spectator and the moderate student government called for resignations of Kirk and Provost David Mark Rudd in urging a campus strike--a suggestion formally supported by 400 faculty members. Rudd, 20, was leader of last March's sit-in at Low Library (for which he was put on disciplinary probation), and recently returned from a three-week visit to Communist Cuba, which he glowingly described as an "extremely humanistic society."

By week's end, tempers had cooled, nearly all police had left campus, and a few professors had even begun to resume teaching classes. Kirk announced that the academic year would be extended for students who need more time to complete their studies and prepare for examinations.

The most important outcome of the uprising is that the trustees, administration and faculty have begun serious internal study of the university, which could lead to a re-evaluation of the role played by the various campus interests--and potentially to greater student involvement in the direction of the school. Meeting for the first time in the university's history, the faculties of Columbia's 15 schools named a twelve-man committee to study ways of resolving the dispute and to propose a new alignment of authority on campus. Later, Columbia's trustees announced that they had agreed to consult with representatives of Harlem before making new plans for the gymnasium--a decision that might have been made months ago. They also set up a committee to re-examine and seek changes in the basic governing structure of the university, and to work with the faculty committee on the same task.

End of the Epoch. To Anthropologist Margaret Mead, who has studied and taught at Columbia for 48 years, the crisis marked "the end of an epoch" in the way universities are governed. She blamed the demonstration in part on student activists who took advantage of the university's traditional leniency toward on- campus pranks. But she also accused the administration of failing to recognize the right of students to share in campus authority, and of being unresponsive to community needs. Dr. Mead also reflected a campus consensus that the trustees were also at fault. Said she: "We can no longer have privately endowed universities governed by boards of trustees that are not responsive to anyone but themselves."

It is easy enough to argue that power at Columbia should be redistributed; it is harder to say how. Quite clearly, students have neither the maturity, time, permanent interest nor long-range commitment to play more than a contributing role. Quite clearly also, Columbia cannot accept guerrilla warfare against the administration as a valid strategy to achieve campus change. Columbia's highly individualistic faculty, while renowned for scholarly excellence, has never been noted for its community responsiveness, or for desire to undertake the drudgery of administrative responsibility. Thus the task Columbia faces in rethinking its goals and organization may be as traumatic and difficult as the disruption that led to it.

The chaos at Columbia seemed contagious, as minirevolutions broke out on other campuses across the nation. At Princeton, more than 500 students demonstrated in support of such demands as turning trustee powers over to faculty and students, got President Robert F. Goheen, 48, to promise "a fresh and searching review of the decision-making process of the university." At Stony Brook campus of the State University of New York, 50 students staged a 17-hour sit-in at the school's business office to express sympathy with the Columbia protesters and to assail the invasion of the campus by police in a drug raid last winter.

More than 200 students at Temple University picketed the inauguration of President Paul R. Anderson after Temple refused to grant tenure to a teacher who had protested grading systems by giving all his students A's. At Northwestern, 60 members of the Afro-American Student Union took over the school's main business office, and 15 sympathetic white students occupied the Dean of Student's office to support demands for desegregated housing and more lenient grading for graduates of Negro high schools. Most decisive of all in handling protesters was the University of Denver, a Methodist-affiliated school. When 40 undergraduates fighting for the right of M.A. and Ph.D. candidates to belong to the student government held a sit-in at the registrar's office, they were not only arrested but kicked out of school.