The Handcuffs of 1968

What I first recall about my arrival at Columbia the previous fall was the decrepitude of the dorms. Livingston Hall, where I was assigned, was dark, dingy, and overcrowded. Most rooms were designed for single occupancy but had been fitted with bunk beds. They were so small students stacked the ancient wooden dressers atop each other and bookshelves atop desks to create enough space to get to the bed. There was no room for even the smallest refrigerator; in winter we would balance cartoons of milk and orange juice on the outside windowsill to keep them cool.

Everyone's experience was different, of course, but for me and the few friends I made the chill extended to the classrooms. Our teachers could be brilliant, but most had little interest in freshmen, and no one encouraged us to approach him outside of the classroom. I recall meeting with my academic adviser once in four years. Barnard, the women's college, was a distant fortress across Broadway, off-limits and out of sight. On most weekends I wandered the unruly, decaying urban canyons of Manhattan on foot and alone. It was my true education. Meanwhile, the draft was hanging over our head, forcing many young men to stay in school despite their abiding discontent. Opposition to the Vietnam War was hardening; that October, protesters staged the first mass rally in Washington.

One campus group that seemed interested in us was the Students for a Democratic Society. Members organized an orientation session for freshmen and arranged one-on-one meetings. I recall my roommate John and I going for coffee at the College Inn on Broadway with Ted Gold, one of SDS's leaders. We weren't exactly prime recruiting material for a radical student group. John, who joined the crew team and pledged a fraternity, was a conservative Democrat from Worcester, Massachusetts, who aspired to become a lawyer. I was an inchoate liberal with a soft spot for Robert F. Kennedy. I admired Columbia, felt lucky to have been accepted at such a prestigious Ivy League school. Still, for me Gold was logical, insistent, and amiable. Even John had to admit he was interesting.

There were various skirmishes between SDS and the administration during the school year. The group focused on two campus issues: Columbia's plan to build a new gym on city land in nearby Morningside Park, which bordered on Harlem, and its membership in the Institute for Defense Analyses, a federally funded national security research and development center. The two issues were stand-ins for broader questions: The gym was about racial justice, the IDA Vietnam. After an indoor demonstration in late March led to the proposed suspension of a half-dozen SDS leaders, the group added another demand: amnesty for the protesters.

Demonstrators on Tuesday afternoon, April 23, sought to march on Low Library but were blocked by student opponents and campus police. Some protesters tramped over to Morningside Park, where they confronted police at the gym construction site, then wandered back to campus. Running out of steam and options, they turned their focus to Hamilton Hall, the main undergraduate classroom building. Acting college dean Henry Coleman refused to vacate his office, so they sat down outside his door, blocking his freedom of movement. The standoff continued into the night until early the next morning when black students among the protesters seized control of Hamilton Hall and ordered out the whites. The evictees proceeded to smash their way into Low Library and seize the office of university president Grayson Kirk. Over the next two days, three more classroom buildings were occupied. The siege had begun.