Memories of Columbia 1968

IT ISN'T TRUE, I confess now, that three policemen gave me a boost in--like Lenin and his sealed train--to infect the 1968 Columbia protest with conservative bacilli. By that time Morningside Campus had been cut off from outside influence for three weeks or more. The general temper was gall and meanness. Liberal-arts education had become radical-skills training. No, I merely slid through Main Gate while campus police argued with some media person. Simple as NBC. Then again, if I'd known this was to be the night of the big bust, I might've gone home and, oh, done work on my neuroses instead.

I was a new conservative in 1968 and not very good at it yet. Columbia had sicked this brazen, compelling right-of-Burke English professor on me--Jeff Hart. (Wonder where he is now. Gone to the Sunbelt probably.) But in 1963, my senior year, Hart had been denied tenure for his conservatism--and, if you were halfway prescient, you could predict the outcome. When 1968 arrived, most faculty, old Roosevelt liberals, sympathized with SDS. Until it was too late. I remember, as that political Walpurgis Night ended, seeing whole file folders ride a thermal up, out of the Columbia math building. And, beside me, the dealt-out New Deal professor screamed, "They're in my office. Oh, God." How much of his life work blew over Riverside Church, I don't know. Responsible protest, they said it was.

Picture Low Library, held by the most photogenic radical children. Picture concentric rings out from it. Inner ring: faculty up against the wall looking spooked and rather stupid. Next ring: Center Coalition students, some conservative, most just pissed about losing an expensive education. Third ring: SDS and fellow easy riders. Coalition people, about three hundred or so, meant to starve SDS out of Low. (Faculty were between because some Center spokesmen had suggested a direct assault.) Now, as is well known, liberals can't throw. From ring three food was pitched at an open window in Low. Again and again it would miss. I recall one pickle jar smashing against brick. Glass, sour juice, and the odd gherkin came down on a rad-symp anthropology professor. He stood dripping. It seemed appropriate: a fine image for the distress of 1930s liberalism.

We all wore cloth armbands: Center, SDS, faculty, black. I forget now which color went with which. But I had a beard back then and, for some time, Centrists didn't trust me. One football player kept heaving me over the hedge toward ring three. (We were outnumbered 20 to 1 at least. Remember, SDS held seven or eight other buildings along with Low.) Once I was accepted, though, a Centerman told me this splendid vignette: That morning about two hundred blacks had sortied from Hamilton Hall in paramilitary fashion. (They had begun the insurrection at Hamilton. Throughout, their protest was, by comparison, dignified and methodical. They didn't much like white radical rich children crashing the party.) This task force insinuated itself between ring two and ring three. Some had nasty vials of ammonia. They threatened the Center. "Gonna off you, honky m-f," that sort of jive. Exuberant, ring three came in behind to mop up what was, apparently, an imminent attack. And the blacks charged. With SDS, long hair flying in naivete, right behind. The Center began to give. Then, blam, all blacks dispersed. To leave SDS and Center, white and white, head on. SDS broke but fast. It was as beautiful a moment of racial cynicism as you could imagine.

By 2 A.M. it was colder than bejesus. Some Center person lent me a coat. Word, Left and Right, was that the police were finally massing. Columbia's president, Grayson Kirk, an inept and charmless corporate stiff (he looked like the Monopoly Chance-card man) had given us as his cop-out, cop-in excuse. Police were sent, not to liberate Columbia from mutineers, but to forestall SDS-Center student violence. And I'll never forget that sight. Under TV lights they came, hundred after hundred, and came and came, marching in battalion strength--blue-helmeted and impatient riot police. It was a full army: one that couldn't care less about armband color or philosophical nuance. In 1968 policemen, remember, were regularly called "pig" by children. I felt the unmanning fear around. Everyone ran--rings one, two, three--but there was no room even for a decent panic. We milled and bucked against each other. Your nightstick is a great political scientist.

It was anticlimax, though. Columbia is knit by underground tunnels. Each building had already been penetrated from beneath. Flash: Mark Rudd, walkie-talkie to his ear (and, I think, a World War I aviator's helmet on), disposing his lost force. Flash: I am hit in the chest by some stolid plainclothesman. Another has knelt behind. I go down ass over nose. Flash: the professor who screamed, "Burn that building!" then wept, "Why haven't I guts enough to do it? Why? Why?" Flash: those magnificent, gentle police horses breast-boning through the mob, irresistible and huge. It was a brilliant operation. Not one person got noticeably hurt. And I rode an IRT train home to Flushing.