A week of mounting disruption followed before law enforcement was brought in to dismantle the uprising, resulting in hundreds of student arrests, injuries, next-level mayhem, a strike and Mr. Kirk’s resignation that summer. “It mushroomed beyond our wildest dreams,” Mark Rudd, the leader of Columbia’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, told me from his home in New Mexico recently.
More than a half-century later, it took Dr. Shafik about 24 hours to see that a significantly smaller group of protesters, about 108 in total, who had set up an encampment on the South Lawn in solidarity with Gaza, were arrested. Even the police seemed vaguely confused. John Chell, the department’s chief of patrol, described the targeted students as “peaceful,” telling a group of reporters after the sweep that they had reacted to the raid with “no resistance whatsoever and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.”
It was not as if Columbia’s leadership in the late 1960s had been noble champions of free speech. Administrators had begun the academic year by banning indoor picketing. In his address to incoming students, Vice President David Truman warned that he would not “tolerate efforts to make the university an instrument of opposition to the established orders of society.” What those established orders were anymore, a few weeks after Martin Luther King’s assassination, could hardly have been less apparent. But it seemed obvious to the aides of Mayor John Lindsay, several of whom were invited onto campus by university leaders in the hope of defusing tensions, that aggressive police action was only bound to inflame what was happening.
The administration listened, until it didn’t. But at the very least, it made an attempt to engage in a process of deliberation. As Jay Kriegel, a young member of the Lindsay team, put it years later in an essay included in the book “A Time to Stir: Columbia ’68”: “We tried to make clear that we didn’t think anything would be normal the day after a thousand angry students confronted a thousand angry cops.”
Similarly now, the arrival of the N.Y.P.D., accompanied by the suspension and eviction of students involved in the dissent, has quieted nothing. Protests have spread to campuses around the country, and the virulence has only escalated. After 120 people were taken into custody at New York University this week, some of whom threw chairs and bottles at the police, Mayor Eric Adams said he believed that “outside agitators” were responsible for the worst acts of defiance — people coming around who “latch on to any protest.”
