The Handcuffs of 1968

In April 1968 I was a Columbia University freshman, restless, raw and clinging to fond illusions. So when I saw three men with blackjacks pummel a Spanish-language instructor on the sidewalk and dump his semiconscious body over a hedge in front of Low Library at the center of the campus late one night, my first instinct was to run to the police for help.

It was sometime after midnight on the morning of Tuesday, April 30, and uniformed policemen weren't hard to find. Hundreds of them were taking positions around the campus preparing to evict student demonstrators who had been occupying the university president's office and four other buildings for a week to protest the Vietnam War and other sundry matters. One unit of the leather-jacketed Tactical Police Force, New York City's toughest and tallest officers, was lining up in a neat double row outside one of the entrances to Low. I dashed up to the officer in charge, a silver-haired sergeant who stood a good six inches taller than me. "You've got to send some men over there!" I pleaded, pointing to the nearby hedge. "Some thugs are beating the crap out of my Spanish teacher!"

He didn't move a muscle, didn't say a word, didn't even glance down at me, but just the hint of a smile grazed his lips. He must have thought I was either a particularly sardonic campus comic or just plain stupid. Because everyone else but me seemed to know very well what I was only beginning to realize——those three thugs, and dozens of others roaming the campus that night, were plainclothes officers sent to soften up the area by eliminating protesters and bystanders from the scene to make it easier for the uniformed men to carry out their mission with a minimum of witnesses and resistance.

Within hours hundreds of officers evicted the protesters and pacified the campus in their own special way, using clubs, flashlights, and handcuffs to administer beatings like furious parents lashing out at recalcitrant children. About 150 people went to the hospital to be treated for bloody heads and broken arms, and some 700 were arrested. I watched much of it in horror and fascination until someone whacked me on the back of the head with a nightstick and two plainclothesmen grabbed me by the arms and threw me down a slope into a wrought-iron fence bordering Amsterdam Avenue. I staggered back to my dorm room with a sore head and a deep sense of anger at the administrators who'd invited the police on campus to restore order by beating my classmates and me.

This April marks the 40th anniversary of that particular teachable moment. It will no doubt provide an opportunity for some aging baby boomers to renew the old culture wars with their dying elders and each other and brag about their exploits, real and imagined. I plan on doing neither. I was a wide-eyed witness to events I barely understood and only marginally participated in, and I'm still embarrassed and amazed at the arrogance and ineptitude on all sides—students, teachers, administrators, cops—in that long-ago struggle. There were more than 100 student university protests in the United States that spring, but none got more publicity than Columbia's. For the university, it was a terrible rupture that provoked years of soul-searching and institutional reform. For me personally the damage was slight—a nagging headache for a day and a permanently disrupted spring semester—but the lesson was unforgettable.