Lifting a Siege

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 police men--were injured; 698 people, mostly students, were arrested and charged with criminal trespass, resisting arrest or both. Although the action united hope essly 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.

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 plenty of provocation to call in the police. For one thing, the strike 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 Govern ment-supported research center.

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 ad ministration 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.

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."

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."

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.

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.

"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 protesters had preplanned every 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 even attacked newsmen, including a LIFE photographer and, of all people, Columnist Walter Winchell.

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.

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 Truman and joined S.D.S. President 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."

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.

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.

End of an 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."

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.

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 the 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.

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 As. 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 Students' 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.

* Including Law Professor Michael Severn, Critic Lionel Trilling, Philosopher Ernest Nagel, Sociologist Daniel Bell, Nobel Physicist Polykarp Kusch, Economist Eli Ginzberg, Historians William Leuchtenburg and Walter P. Metzger, Political Scientists Alexander Dallin and Alan F. Westin.

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