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Opinion: At Columbia, excuse the students, but not the faculty
Opinion | At Columbia, excuse the students, but not the faculty
By Paul Berman
April 26, 2024 at 7:58 p.m. EDT
Student protesters at Columbia University in New York on April 24, 1968. (Jacob Harris/AP)
Paul Berman’s books include “A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968.”
My own experience as a Columbia University student radical under arrest took place in late April 1968 in the course of a massive campus uprising. The uprising was led, or at least initiated, by a radical social-democratic organization called Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, together with the Student Afro-American Society, or SAS. And, since I was a stalwart of SDS, I spent a week camping out in the university president’s office and elsewhere, too, which I regarded as an exercise in insurrectionary citizenship. The authorities preferred to regard it as “criminal trespass.”
So I passed the night in the dismal Manhattan jail known as the Tombs, in the dankest of cells with a morose group of other criminal trespassers, among the nearly 700 of us who had been rounded up for arrest by the New York Police Department. And in the morning, when I returned to my campus dormitory, I discovered a further residue of the police raid, beyond the mass arrests, which consisted of large dark bloodstains coagulated on the walkway.
Those were large experiences, the bloodstains especially. And today those experiences cause me to observe Columbia’s new student rebellion through a lens of curious and strange emotions — amused at first, almost happy in a paternal spirit, for a deluded half-minute, and then, half a minute later, horrified, first on a simple level, in solidarity with Columbia’s harassed Jewish students, then on a deeper level.
Sympathetic adults used to say to us student radicals in 1968, “I agree with your ends but not with your means.” By this they meant to applaud our lofty ideals and to deplore our raucous and too-raucous riots and mayhem. But these days, I discover that my own views have taken an opposite turn. The raucous aspect of student protests seems to me only a secondary problem even now.
Student protesters assist one another in climbing up into the offices of Columbia University President Grayson Kirk on April 24, 1968. (AP)
The students want to take over the lawn? It would not be so terrible, if some of them did not insist on persecuting Jews. But I recoil at what are plainly the ends.
{snip}
By Paul Berman
April 26, 2024 at 7:58 p.m. EDT
Student protesters at Columbia University in New York on April 24, 1968. (Jacob Harris/AP)
Paul Berman’s books include “A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968.”
My own experience as a Columbia University student radical under arrest took place in late April 1968 in the course of a massive campus uprising. The uprising was led, or at least initiated, by a radical social-democratic organization called Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, together with the Student Afro-American Society, or SAS. And, since I was a stalwart of SDS, I spent a week camping out in the university president’s office and elsewhere, too, which I regarded as an exercise in insurrectionary citizenship. The authorities preferred to regard it as “criminal trespass.”
So I passed the night in the dismal Manhattan jail known as the Tombs, in the dankest of cells with a morose group of other criminal trespassers, among the nearly 700 of us who had been rounded up for arrest by the New York Police Department. And in the morning, when I returned to my campus dormitory, I discovered a further residue of the police raid, beyond the mass arrests, which consisted of large dark bloodstains coagulated on the walkway.
Those were large experiences, the bloodstains especially. And today those experiences cause me to observe Columbia’s new student rebellion through a lens of curious and strange emotions — amused at first, almost happy in a paternal spirit, for a deluded half-minute, and then, half a minute later, horrified, first on a simple level, in solidarity with Columbia’s harassed Jewish students, then on a deeper level.
Sympathetic adults used to say to us student radicals in 1968, “I agree with your ends but not with your means.” By this they meant to applaud our lofty ideals and to deplore our raucous and too-raucous riots and mayhem. But these days, I discover that my own views have taken an opposite turn. The raucous aspect of student protests seems to me only a secondary problem even now.
Student protesters assist one another in climbing up into the offices of Columbia University President Grayson Kirk on April 24, 1968. (AP)
The students want to take over the lawn? It would not be so terrible, if some of them did not insist on persecuting Jews. But I recoil at what are plainly the ends.
{snip}
