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<text>
<title>
(1960s) Siege on Morningside Heights
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1960s Highlights
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
May 3, 1965
STUDENTS
Siege on Morningside Heights
</hdr>
<body>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> "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."
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p>WHY THOSE STUDENTS ARE PROTESTING
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p>May 10, 1968
Students Lifting a Siege--And Rethinking a Future
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> "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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
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