College students in New York are occupying area and requesting shift. Executives at universities are under pressure to rein in power. Officers brought in to create arrests. At another schools: individuals taking note, and maybe taking action.
Columbia University, 2024 and Columbia University, 1968
Students at Columbia’s pro-Palestine demonstration and later arrests that have sparked similar demonstrations at campuses across the country these days and even worldwide are not new floor for students at the Ivy League school. They are the most recent addition to a more than five-decade traditions that Columbia has that served as inspiration for the anti-apartheid demonstrations of the 1980s, the protests against the Iraq War, and more.
” When you’re going to Columbia, you know you’re going to an organization which has an honored place in the history of British protest”, said Mark Naison, professor of history and American &, African National Research at Fordham University and himself a member in the 1968 presentations. ” Whenever there is a motion, you know Columbia is going to be correctly it”.
Individuals are aware of the history
Individuals taking part in this week’s demonstrations point out that it is a part of Columbia’s history and that it is being covered in class. It is also recognized by the university in its memorial programming.
” A lot of kids around are aware of what happened in 1968″, said Sofia Ongele, 23, among those who joined the camp in response to this season’s detention.
In April of that year, students took control of five college buildings, which was also approaching the end of an intellectual time. There were many factors. Some were against the school’s association with a research institute that used weapons to study the Vietnam War, while others were against the aristocracy school’s treatment of Black and brown students and minority students ‘ environment.
After a number of times, Columbia’s leader authorized the arrival of 1,000 New York Police Department officers to detonate the majority of the demonstrations. The detention, 700 of them, were not soft. Hands were flying, leagues swinging. More than a dozen soldiers and dozens of students were hurt.
It’s never been forgotten past. That includes presently, when pro-Palestinian students calling on the school to cut any financial ties to Israel over the Gaza war staged a tent camp earlier this month, and more than 100 were detained. Similar marches were sparked by it on other campuses all over the country and the world.
One of the factors driving Ongele’s decision to attend Columbia for school was the legendary protests that preceded her arrival from Santa Clarita, California. ” I wanted to be in an environment where people were really politically conscious”, she said.
When it comes to protest, Ongele said,” We have not only the opportunity but the responsibility to remain in the boots of those who came before us.” She stated that the goal is to “maintain the dignity of this university as one that is socially conscious, one that does have individuals who care deeply about what goes on in our neighborhoods, what goes on in our neighborhoods, and what goes on in the life of the pupils that make up our society.”
Representatives from Columbia University did not respond to an email asking about the institution’s place on the tradition left behind by the events of 1968. Those events, like the present opposition,” sparked a massive increase in student engagement around the state”, Mark Rudd, a head of that protest, said in an email to The Associated Press. After April 1968, “myself and others spent the entire year traveling the country and bringing the spirit of Columbia to campuses.”
Not everyone supports the protests
But the echoes of the past are n’t only in inspiration. Then, as now, the protest had its detractors. Naison claimed that many at Columbia and outside of it were upset by the disruption to campus life and law and order.
He claimed that” student protesters are not well-liked in the United States of America.” ” We were n’t popular in the ‘ 60s. We made a lot of progress. However, we also assisted in advancing the country to the right.
That has a correlation today with those who oppose the protests and who have condemned what they perceive as a descent into antisemitism. Some Jewish students have said they were afraid to be on campus and that their identities had been questioned. Additionally, university presidents have been under political pressure to repress and use tactics like police intervention.
When the camp first opened, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik had just testified in front of a congressional panel looking into concerns about antisemitism at elite schools. Republicans in Congress have asked for her resignation despite her request for police action the following day for what she described as a “harassing and intimidating environment.”
” Freedom of speech is so important, but not beyond the right to security”, said Itai Dreifuss, 25, a third- year student who grew up in the United States and Israel. This past week, he was standing in front of posters that had been taped to a wall of the people who had been taken hostage by Hamas in the Oct. 7 attack that sparked the current conflagration.
There is a difference between 1968 and the present, Naison said, in some students ‘ perceptions that personal animosity is being directed against them. That conflict between demonstrators and their decriers “is far more visceral”, Naison asserts, which he says makes this time even more fraught.
” It’s history repeating itself, but it’s also uncharted territory”, he said. What we have here is a whole group of people who view these demonstrations as a natural extension of fighting for justice, and a whole other group of people who view this as a deadly attack on them and their history and tradition. And that makes it very challenging for university administrators to manage.
