If Nemat Shafik, the president of Columbia University, has convinced the world of anything during these last several calamitous days, it is almost certainly that there is no position in American executive life as thankless, as depleting or less enviable than running a major academic institution in an age of chronic, reflexive agitation.
Criticized for capitulating to congressional Republicans in a hearing on antisemitism last week, she quickly found she had not been nearly ingratiating enough. On Monday some of those Republicans, joined in their disapproval by a considerable number of Democrats, called for Dr. Shafik to resign amid the “anarchy” stemming from student demonstrations in favor of the Palestinian cause. At the same time, roughly 100 members of the Columbia and Barnard faculties, representing a variety of opinions on the war itself, gathered to condemn her decision to summon the New York Police Department onto campus to arrest students involved in nonviolent protest.
“There is a pretty broad consensus that bringing in the police was precipitous and counterproductive,” Christopher Brown, a history professor who spoke at the rally, told me. “Whatever it was designed to accomplish, it didn’t.” It was as if, he said, university administrators “have never met a 19- or 20-year-old.”
As ever, understanding the past is crucial to making sense of the turmoil we are witnessing now. In the spring of 1968, Columbia’s president, Grayson Kirk, rarely depicted without a pipe, moved in comparatively slow motion in response to unrest that had become an inflection point in the wave of campus activism that was redirecting history. By the end of April, the expressions of rage over Columbia’s ties to the defense industry and thus the American entanglement in Vietnam, as well as its singularly ill-conceived plan to build a private gym on public land in Harlem, had gone way beyond chants and hand-painted signs. Within days, students had occupied five buildings, seized the president’s office and taken Dean Henry Coleman hostage, holding him in his office for 26 hours.
A week of mounting disruption followed before law enforcement was brought in to dismantle the uprising, resulting in hundreds of student arrests, injuries, next-level mayhem, a strike and Mr. Kirk’s resignation that summer. “It mushroomed beyond our wildest dreams,” Mark Rudd, the leader of Columbia’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, told me from his home in New Mexico recently.
More than a half-century later, it took Dr. Shafik about 24 hours to see that a significantly smaller group of protesters, about 108 in total, who had set up an encampment on the South Lawn in solidarity with Gaza, were arrested. Even the police seemed vaguely confused. John Chell, the department’s chief of patrol, described the targeted students as “peaceful,” telling a group of reporters after the sweep that they had reacted to the raid with “no resistance whatsoever and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.”
It was not as if Columbia’s leadership in the late 1960s had been noble champions of free speech. Administrators had begun the academic year by banning indoor picketing. In his address to incoming students, Vice President David Truman warned that he would not “tolerate efforts to make the university an instrument of opposition to the established orders of society.” What those established orders were anymore, a few weeks after Martin Luther King’s assassination, could hardly have been less apparent. But it seemed obvious to the aides of Mayor John Lindsay, several of whom were invited onto campus by university leaders in the hope of defusing tensions, that aggressive police action was only bound to inflame what was happening.
The administration listened, until it didn’t. But at the very least, it made an attempt to engage in a process of deliberation. As Jay Kriegel, a young member of the Lindsay team, put it years later in an essay included in the book “A Time to Stir: Columbia ’68”: “We tried to make clear that we didn’t think anything would be normal the day after a thousand angry students confronted a thousand angry cops.”
Similarly now, the arrival of the N.Y.P.D., accompanied by the suspension and eviction of students involved in the dissent, has quieted nothing. Protests have spread to campuses around the country, and the virulence has only escalated. After 120 people were taken into custody at New York University this week, some of whom threw chairs and bottles at the police, Mayor Eric Adams said he believed that “outside agitators” were responsible for the worst acts of defiance — people coming around who “latch on to any protest.”
When I asked Mr. Rudd what might have gone differently in 1968, a year of extraordinary tumult, he pointed to certain elements of restraint. “We weren’t careful about verbal violence, calling the cops pigs,” for example. “We didn’t understand that if you’re going to employ nonviolent tactics, you have to have a nonviolent strategy. We reacted to police violence with violence.” This, he would come to realize long after he helped found and then disavowed the Weather Underground, had been a mistake.
Dr. Shafik, an economist by training and a former vice president at the World Bank, became Columbia’s 20th president only nine months ago — perhaps too little time to have absorbed the centrality of activism to the university’s identity. Unlike some of her predecessors, she arrived with few ties; Mr. Kirk took the reins having served as provost under Columbia’s 13th president, Dwight Eisenhower. Over the years, Columbia has proudly commemorated the events of 1968, on the occasion of big anniversaries, in its literature and so on. In 1985, when students fought for the university to sever its connections to apartheid South Africa, thousands protested over the course of 21 days. The president at the time, Michael Sovern, visited student hunger strikers in the hospital. Within six months Columbia became the first big American university to completely divest.
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