Some JdB backstory before we begin: I am a grandchild of Prof. Wm. Theodore de Bary, one of the leading—western—scholars of East Asia. His obituary is an accurate depiction of his life and I will not summarize it here, except to say that he was a key figure in the Columbia student uprising of 1968.
The second bit of backstory is that I, like my father, cousins, and aunts, attended Columbia for my undergraduate education from 2001 to 2005. (I moved in about a week before, 9/11, fun fact). Growing up, my attendance at Columbia felt almost inevitable, some of my earliest memories are of being dragged to a football game or some kind of event on campus. My grandfather was an imposing presence in my family and much about him was revered to the point of being mythological. How he came to study East Asia (he was in the navy during WWII), his deep knowledge and affection for Confucius, his passion for preserving the college’s core curriculum, and his role in the 1968 student uprisings, were all pseudo-legends among my large extended family.
me and my grandfather at my college graduation in 2005
Growing up, I don’t recall much specifics spoken with regards to my grandfather’s role in the 1968 uprising, but what I gathered was that he, as a young faculty member, was instrumental in maintaining order when students occupied buildings on campus and disrupted classes before being violently ejected by the NYPD. Our conversations were vague enough that I even thought for a while that my grandfather literally ran the school for a while when in fact he simply was the leader of the faculty group that mediated relations between the student protestors and the administration. The student protestors were never spoken about in a favorable light, we never really engaged with the substance of their demands; our conversations always felt like we were discussing some ne’er-do-wells who just wanted to cause a ruckus.
The truth of the 1968 protests is more complicated and more interesting than what I learned via half-heard and not-well-remembered family conversations. In the spring of 1968, after learning of Columbia’s involvement with a Department of Defense weapons research think tank as well as the university’s plan to build a private gym inside of Morningside Heights, a group of students known as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) joined forces with the Student Afro Society (SAS) in a series of protests. After the administration attempted to quell the protests, the group occupied Hamilton Hall, the site of the college’s administrative offices as well as where many classes are held.
The SAS was opposed to the university gym because it was racially segregated. Columbia’s campus is at the top of the park, which is a huge slope down from Morningside Heights to Harlem. The school planned to have an entrance for students at the top of the building and an entrance at the bottom for members of the predominantly black neighborhood, who would have minimal access to the gym. It was colloquially referred to as “Gym Crow.” Meanwhile the SDS’s goalsincluded not only cancellation of the gym but also had a broader goal of ending the university’s involvement with the military—they had been successful in ending some ROTC activities on campus prior to the 1968 protests. At some point during the occupation, the SDS, which was mostly white students, was asked to leave by the SAS, which was of course made up of Black students.
In an interview recorded shortly after the student occupation, my grandfather spoke disparagingly about the SDS. Implicit in his statement is that he views the SDS as merely a force for disruption and intimidation of the administration. He speaks dismissively about the SDS’s “general aim of creating a socialist society” and does not directly address the legitimacy (or morality of) the SDS and SAS’s goals of demilitarizing the campus and ending a racist construction process. At one point the interviewer asks my grandfather if he believes that Columbia was the target of outside forces hoping disrupt life on Ivy League campuses.
WAIT WHY DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR?
Oh, because it’s a xerox copy of what happened this week on Columbia’s campus in 2024—56 years to the literal day. Of course, certain key details are different: there is no construction project to oppose and the university’s investment in Israel isn’t quite the same as its involvement in Department of Defense think tanks and on-campus military recruiting. But there is an eerie similarity to the demands of the students today and the demands of the students in 1968. There were no encampments in 1968 but the occupation of Hamilton Hall in both instances was preceded by campus protests met with increasing opposition from the university administration.
On Tuesday night, the Columbia administration invited the NYPD to enter campus to end the occupation, and the images are startlingly similar. (Although it does not appear that an officer “accidentally” shot their gun inside of a school building 1968 like they did Tuesday night.)
In 2008, on the 40th anniversary of the uprising, my grandfather, writing for Columbia Magazine, laid out who he thought were the “real heroes” of 1968: those who opposed the SDS/SAS and the faculty who worked to restore order. He even goes to far as to say that the protests violated the university population’s constitutional right to free assembly. He denounces the SDS/SAS’s tactics and yet makes no mention of the underlying goals of the movement: to end the Vietnam War and stop construction of a racist building (yes, buildings can be racist—“structural racism” includes physical structures).
But the protests disrupted classes, so they’re the real bad guys. Okay.
My grandfather was a towering academic and I owe a great deal to him. He has been right about a lot of things but he was wrong about this. Protests aren’t supposed to be “civil.” They’re not supposed to center the comfort of those who thrive within and work to maintain the status quo. The ironic thing about my grandfather’s prioritization of civility above moral convictions is that he participated in the East Asian theater of WWII, which was generally regarded as one of the most violent and life-ending wars in human history. He was an intelligence officer, but still, he was in the navy all the same.
The funny thing about the protests in 1968? They got what they wanted. The gym was cancelled, the ROTC was kicked off campus and the university withdrew from the DoD think tank. If they were so wrong and misguided, why did this happen?
Since 1968 Columbia has a long history of divestment from morally reprehensible endeavors And I acknowledge the irony of Columbia retroactively lionizing the 1968 student protestors while violently cracking down on students doing the same thing today.
Yes, I believe that what the Israeli government is doing to Gaza is morally reprehensible and completely unjustified. I believe that what the Israeli government has been doing for decades is morally reprehensible and without justification. I believe that the west sees Israel as a proxy for—and outpost of—imperial white supremacist hegemony in the middle east and this is a belief I have held for a long time. I want to be clear that I am not talking about Jewish people or even the Israeli population at large. If anything these actions makes them less safe. (And for the record I feel pretty much the same way about the United States—it is textbook evil empire and I live within and am a product of the deep imperial core—and yet I do not hate all Americans and I only hate myself for unrelated personal reasons.)
I do not believe that the central animating force of these student protests is antisemitism. Of course in any mass movement you will find a wide collection of people and I’m sure many people who oppose the Israeli government’s genocidal rampages against Palestinians hold viewpoints I find objectionable. That’s fine. A movement to end American involvement in Israeli apartheid requires that we only agree on that one issue. I consider myself a part of a different cohort of people who oppose our country’s fascination with terrorizing trans people. I recruit a different cohort of people to improve the quality of life for workers in the restaurant industry. This is how mass movements work.
Also, I do not think that the students today are simply caught up in some trendy fad. Do you know how hard it is to get people to do things? It takes a lot of motivation for someone to disrupt their own life and live in a tent. I think that seeing the ongoing massacre of tens of thousands of people in Palestine and American institutions’ support of it is a pretty valid thing to be life-alteringly furious about.
The student protestors at Columbia were right in 1968 as they were in 1985, 2006, 2008, and 2024. And the administration was wrong in 1968 and they are wrong in 2024.
Protest is the last resort of the unheard.
me when i realise I’m a product of the imperial core