1968 protestors at the site of the Morningside Park gym construction (Credit: Columbia University Libraries)
“They were just so far from an understanding of rage. They didn’t understand the feeling,” says David Schiller, a Fayerweather Hall occupier during the 1968 protest at Columbia. Schiller captured what lay at the core of the divide between the student protestors and the faculty and administration: the feelings that fundamentally underlaid their political ideology. In my final paper for Frank Guridy’s history seminar, Columbia 1968, I wrote about the Ad Hoc Faculty Group, the faculty coalition serving as mediators between the protesting student organizations and the administration. Where the administration suggested harsh and punitive measures, like mass suspensions and early calling of the police, the Ad Hoc Faculty Group suggested rational discourse with the protestors and agreeing to some of their demands, like halting the construction of the controversial Morningside Park gym and forcing the Institute for Defense Analysis’s research off Columbia’s campus and dime.
Despite the Ad Hoc Faculty Group’s twenty-four/seven meeting schedule and several rounds of deals presented to the protestors and the administration, they did not end up getting much done. While the park’s construction was halted and not every student involved was arrested and suspended, the Columbia administration still called in the police and suspended many students. Fundamentally, the students and faculty disagreed on whether institutional change was ultimately for the better, and the emotions behind their beliefs separated their motivations, tactics, and ideals regarding the entire Columbia 1968 crisis. The professors took it as a space for learning, where discourse could be exchanged, and their role as faculty could be tested. It was not life-or-death and rage, like it was for the protesting students.
