Columbia 1968 and 2024

I was a student at Columbia in 1968. Today's protests look familiar, but not for the reasons you might think.

“Protest” (1943-1944), Arnold Peter Weisz-Kubínčan (Slovak, 1898 - 1944).

I've only witnessed one pitched battle in person, and it cured me of any wish to see another. It was not a firefight, like those taking place between American and Vietnamese armies halfway around the world. It was more like the battles described in the Iliad, at that time the first text assigned to every entering Columbia freshman, or in The Peloponnesian War. On April 30, 1968 at the Columbia campus, police phalanxes and cavalry brigades opposed an irregular mob. Bricks and clubs were the weapons instead of swords and spears, but these sufficed. From the roof of my dormitory I could follow the trajectories of the bricks my classmates had hurled and hear them clattering off riot shields and helmets. They made a crisp, unforgettable sound, somehow perfectly audible over the taunts and chants and bullhorn warnings.

That crystal moment of confrontation was soon shattered. The shielded police moved forward and parted, as soon as the students wavered, to let their mounted colleagues through, and the standoff became a rout. Students fled towards me, over the grassy lawn where the recent encampments stood, and were run down, or beaten, or both, and the campus, to use the term then in parlance, was “cleared.”

I had some sense of how this felt.  I had been run down myself a few days before, by a large group of students seeking to break through an opposing group and provision the students occupying Low Memorial Library, who could not live on the president’s cigars alone. It was nothing personal, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. My parents in Ohio got to see me trampled on the evening news and for years, as my claim to fame, I kept a Life magazine picture in which the light blue shirt I was wearing was visible under contending boots and ankles.

But if I turned the incident into a good story over time, it was a sharp taste, at the moment, of rage feeding on rage. Rage—Homer’s proximate cause for everything that happens in the Iliad—was on abundant display at Columbia in the spring of 1968, but to take one step back from it was to wade into the bewildering context of the escalating protests. Here administrative complacency played a role, as did the excitement of media coverage, and even more the vanity and colossal emotional and intellectual immaturity of many students, which led to bizarre position statements, replicating lists of “non-negotiable demands,” and to the depersonalization and demonization all perceived opponents. But I judge now and felt then that the war was behind the rage, the war and the awful anxiety of a generation that felt it was being sacrificed to geopolitics. We were afraid, and whether that fear led to weekends in New Jersey, campaigning for Eugene McCarthy (as it did in my case), or to the first occupation of Hamilton Hall, it led to something, and all those somethings, on a national level, contributed to the election of Richard Nixon, and to the conservative turn in the country that was for a long time masked by the radical turn in the universities.

I don’t want to call out the Columbia protests, those of 1968 or today, as being of unique importance. One was and the other is part of a much broader development. But watching the far-more-deft NYPD intervention on Tuesday night, fifty-six years to the day after my long night atop Carman Hall, seeing much the same passion and rage in the foreground, and with a war again in the background, I have to ask: Are these events parallel? My answer has to be both Yes and No.

First, despite the fact that the outbreak of vigorous pro-Palestinian protests on campuses around the country seems to have rekindled Shadi Hamid's faith in the wisdom of mobs, I do not think that the war in Gaza is the fundamental cause of the student protests, though it certainly was the trigger. A different triggering event might have led to an even more general outcry. When I recall the 1968 protests, what comes back to me is the gnawing generational anxiety that linked me to the protesters, even if I didn’t share their politics. What strikes me about even elite students today is that sense of precarity that I had almost forgotten—one that I didn’t detect at all in the students of, say, twenty years ago—and more than enough of it to cause them to identify in droves with a Gazan population that suddenly found itself under siege. Yes, there are substantive policy questions here. Yes, there are ideological streams that are shaping both the response to the Gaza War and the “woke” phenomenon in general.  But a protest can be a distress call as well as a political statement.

Why would today’s students be anxious to the point of eruption? This is not the place to explore that question in detail, but numerous observers have pointed to many reasons: The change in young people’s prospects since the financial crisis; the less-certain advantages conferred by ever-more expensive educations; looming climate change; the trauma of the Covid years; the imperilment of knowledge workers by AI; the constant debilitating arousal that stems from political polarization; the mental health effects from spending adolescence relating through smart phone apps and social media.

It might be a big leap from any of one these factors to hyper-intense political expression and anti-Semitic rants. But taken in combination, these stressors make me wonder whether the over-the-top behaviors we are seeing represent symptoms and not just commitments. That youth are vulnerable to ideology has been known (or forgotten) since Erik Erikson. The greater the barriers to confident identity formation that young people face, the more likely its frustration will be, as Erikson wrote, in “the irrational self-hate of one’s negative identity and the irrational repudiation of inimical otherness.” By this standard, one might hear a common cry behind outbursts as different as the  “You will not replace us” we heard in Charlottesville and “From the River to the Sea” today heard everywhere. Idealistic or reprehensible, coded or not, youth’s urgent slogans may testify most of all to a desperate need for something to believe in.

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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