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 "thinktank" 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 protesters, 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's 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.

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