This contemporary eye-witness report of the events of April/May 1968 by Columbia University economics Professor Albert G. Hart can be found in the economics department records in the Columbia University archives. Added to this transcription of a rather faint mimeographed copy is a link to a convenient overview of those events assembled by the Columbia University Libraries.
Hart was clearly writing for his colleagues but also for us historians (he closes with the German text from Buxtehude’s “Du Frieden-Fürst, Herr Jesu Christ”, and not just a phrase but three full stanzas without translation. Learned showboat?). He also didn’t want his report to leak to academic adversaries, but I think with over a half-century between us and this document, we can now legitimately “declassify” Hart’s 26-page typed “Annotated Narrative of the Columbia University Crisis”.
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Who’s Who and What’s When
Columbia University, Apr/May 1968
Columbia University Libraries. Web exhibit: 1968 — Columbia in Crisis.
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ANNOTATED NARRATIVE OF THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY CRISIS
CONFIDENTIAL
From: A.G. HART
4 May 1968
To:
J.W. [James W.] ANGELL
H. [Harold] BARGER
A.R. BURNS [sic, A.R.B. was 73 at the time, A.F.B. was 64]
C. [Carter] GOODRICH
C.S. [Carl S.] SHOUP
W.S. [William S.] VICKREY
You will all obviously find yourselves in a position where you must explain to outsiders what has been happening to us at the University; and I hope you will feel impelled to offer us some counsel. Hence, you ought to be getting some word from us as to how things feel, with enough detail on the happenings to show where we get these feelings. It’s quite plain I won’t get around to writing all the indicated personal letters; hence this circular. Please don’t take it as a complete briefing (even in my intention, let alone in fact): I was well-placed to observe and saw a lot; but I was watching at any time only one segment of one ring of the 12-ring circus and was rarely calm.
The format of this paper is an annotated narrative rather than an analysis. Diagnosis[,] prognosis and prescription have to go on while we’re sick and I am much involved. But it would be pretentious to claim full understanding; and a sketch of a chronology is necessary in any case. Hence I use a chronological skeleton. While I think one can produce a much more coherent report by addressing it to somebody in particular I want to be in a position to show this to a moderate number of people outside its address list. Largely for this reason, I avoid name-dropping except where I am clear that the act or utterance in question was designedly public and that to put a name to it is illuminating about the general process at work.
Before I dive in, let me say that so far as my observation an intake of reliable gossip reach, none of the economists (senior faculty, junior faculty and students) seem to have done or said things that will prevent us from working together in harmony and mutual respect. Things that may yet take a serious turn for the worse; but I think the Department of Economics is coming through in good shape.
Opening episodes
Tuesday, 23 April. While most of us knew there was ferment among the students (and my wife was hearing almost daily from Negro co-workers in West Side Relocation that the Morningside Park gym was going to be a focus for riots), it was a surprise to most of [us] that the troubles erupted so suddenly and strongly. I arrived on the 5th floor of Kent for a 12-o’clock class just as the announced protest and counter-protest got under way in front of Low Library. Having put together my normal prefabricated notes I was moderately coherent about regional problems within Latin American countries. When I told a student who insisted on gawking out the window that I’d “lower the guillotine” to reduce the noise; he walked out; wasn’t ours after all; but just a fellow with a camera? We heard some cries of “Let’s go” and a lot of rushing about. (The surge was first toward Low then towards Hamilton. Eyewitnesses tell me, what I could have seen from our window but missed that when the demonstrators crossed flower beds, they managed to avoid trampling the tulips, which were best-ever).
By early afternoon, we all knew that Hamilton was occupied. But while it was a curious sensation to walk past Hamilton — especially after rumors spread that Harlem had been invited in — the rest of the campus was more or less normal. The monetary seminar met in Haskell with only moderate signs of distraction; office hours were normal. Tuesday evening I read dissertations.
Wednesday, 24 April. Wednesday also had an air of quasi-normality; though one learned that the blacks in Hamilton had evicted the other occupants who in turn had “liberated” much of Low Library.* From the faculty standpoint, it was refreshing that the College Faculty met and passed some resolutions.1 Above all it called for cessation of work at the site of the Morningside Park gym project and for an announcement that work would not be resumed unless building there was accepted on behalf of the community by some group of community leaders.2
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*Spectator, which seems suddenly to have jumped from adolescent to adult approaches, reported this most interestingly—though with some confusion between hours AM and PM. The rumor that blacks imported by the “Afro-American students” from Harlem[?] as “representatives” of various organizations were taking charge with guns, was apparently traceable to what the ineffable Mr. [Mark] Rudd told his constituents inside Hamilton.
1 The Faculty of Political Science had met on Friday the 19th, with the weakest attendance I have ever witnessed—about 20, which I am told was a shade higher than the 1967 meeting when I was in Frankfurt. Robert Merton remarked near the end of this meeting that we had managed to sit an hour and a half without discussing anything that wasn’t merely procedural, and told us we’d simply have to find ways to revivify faculty meetings by having an agenda with real substantive content that would command participation.
2 I find I am unclear as to what stand was taken on “University participation in IDA [Institute for Defense Analyses]”: of course, I have no seat in the College Faculty, and I find I haven’t either brought the relevant papers to Connecticut for this breather Nor stored my mind with any clear memory of what I may have been told by the brethren who were at the meeting.
The IDA issue is of course typical on the interplay between the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] agitation and Kirk’s reactions. They chose to ignore (though never quite denying) the fact that the Trustees had voted withdrawal, and to concentrate on the fact that Kirk and one trustee remained as directors.
As one of the economics graduate students closest to the strike leadership said at the department gathering last night (May 3), the strike couldn’t lose while it had Kirk to oppose it! Why didn’t he have the wit to withdraw as director so as to make the University’s withdrawal unambiguous?
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Closing of Fayerweather
Thursday, 25 April. On Thursday morning I arrived at Fayerweather to find that there was a picket line circulating in front of the south door, and a solid mass of cheerful-looking youngsters sitting on the steps inside.3 Various classes (including Wellisz’s Development) had been held normally at 9 o’clock, but Wellisz, having left, was locked out.
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3 Yes, the grey-haired and unidentified professor the back of whose head (stuck into Fayerweather door at an interrogative angle) got into the Daily News, Times, and other spots was AGH. I was looking to see whether anybody on the steps looked to me like a student I’d ever seen before; none did. Paul Lazarsfeld, who came up with me (wanting to go to his office) also looked and recognized nobody; though other sociologists told me some of their students were on those steps.
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While Lazersfeld and I were at the door, people inside closed and locked it. Then there was thinning out of students inside. Presently there was a lot of talking and moving around, and inside the door appeared Eileen Christianson (at top of the steps also Eva Kiessling); Eileen was fumbling with a key in the lock. My impression was that she wanted out and was being kept in; so when in the confusion the door opened, I stuck my foot in it. None of us from outside tried to push in. It turned out that what was up was a protest-within-the-protest. Eileen objected to having her work (on behalf of students) interfered with; and if the lads said “strike”, she’d have them know that she’d worked six years for a trade union, knew what a proper strike was, and saw this “strike” was out of order! Things were getting hotter; messenger from Hamilton wanted to know if Fayerweather wanted some of them to come over: TV men on the steps were trying to tape the excitement, and I was afraid (though I didn’t actually touch anybody) that there might be pictures that looked as if faculty were hitting students. So I urged Eileen to adjourn upstairs; she and Eva later left by a 300-floor window (room 302 if that’s the seminar-room under the examination room) that later became the portal for an enormous traffic.
I met my 12:00 class in Kent, and we talked largely about affinities between this trouble and those in Latin American universities. One of the Argentinos had remarked to me outside Fayerweather that while they had strikes, LA students couldn’t have tolerated a strike that hadn’t been voted by a proper student-body meeting. I asked the students in Kent (about 2/3 of normal attendance) whether they’d had any notice of a meeting at which they could consider a strike, and not one had had such notice or heard of a meeting he could go to.
So far as I can remember it, Thursday afternoon was when arm-bands began to blossom, and there began to be people at the gates (only those at the ends of College Walk were left open) calling for a look at University identification.
Thursday afternoon and evening I still felt able to get ahead a bit with my current research project and with dissertations. It didn’t seem unplausible that one would wake up Friday and find everything had blown over. There was still blasting to be heard from the gym site, but one expected to hear that the University was backing off.
Faculty mobilization
Friday morning, 26 April. So far as I was concerned, my last more-or-less-normal act before plunging into the crisis as full-time occupation was to pick up some computer printout early Friday morning. By this time, one was getting reports of very awkward “confrontations” involving faculty. There had been some sort of hassle in front of Fayerweather and another around Low. I had the impulse (which evidently was rather common among the brethren) that we should be trying to get the faculties convoked. My notion was to get the 20 signatures on a paper addressed to Sigmund Diamond as chairman of the Committee on Instruction which (according to a conversation between Low and Fayerweather with Diamond and Dean Frankel on Thursday sometime) would be necessary to convoke Political Science according to the members’-demand procedure. My first thought was to circulate on campus with a clip-board; but my wife persuaded me that might help stir things up. Wellisz and I concocted a paper calling for a meeting with primary emphasis on trying to define in advance a distinction between modes of police action we must reject and modes we might accept in case of a decision to clear the by-now-five occupied buildings. Wellisz (though late for a meeting in Harlem) let me into the International Affairs building, which was the likeliest place to find any number of members of our Faculty that could be spoken to quietly. I came out a couple of hours later with several signatures (nearer 10 than 20) and with advice not to push a call till we’d heard from the Advisory Committee of the Faculties. (In the end the Advisory Committee never met, or at least did nothing I’ve heard of).
Friday early afternoon, 26 April. During Friday afternoon, the word was passed that an informal meeting was to be held late in the afternoon at the Faculty Club, consisting of available members of the three Committees on Instruction of the Graduate Faculties, augmented by such ex-department-chairmen types as me. Meanwhile, I dropped into Philosophy Hall, which bore a sign (one of the few conspicuous touches of humor in this dead-pan affair) “liberated by the faculty”, and where somebody-or-other at the door insisted on seeing faculty identification. I had been warned that a group of light-weights had been holding a marathon meeting in 301 Philosophy, urging all sorts of foolishness, and needed to be squelched by some senior faculty. So pending the beginning of the Faculty Club meeting, I thought I’d better visit 301 Philosophy just long enough to find a chink in their discussion into which I could insert a dignified protest. Where did these characters get the idea they could claim to speak for the faculty at large, or even could assert they were sensible enough to deserve a hearing? I sat about two minutes before I noticed that maybe I didn’t want to protest; within an hour I found that I very much respected the way they were working and might want to wear the white arm-band, which turned out to denote ad-hoc-faculty-group-as-peace-force.4
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4 As to becoming a member, I found I had already become one by showing faculty identification to enter Philosophy Hall and then entering room 301; if I chose, I could become a non-member by walking out at any moment without fuss, and could become a member again by walking in again. Once in a while I heard it said that to be a real member you had to put your name to a paper that committed you not to meet classes till certain “student” demands were met. But nobody either presented me with such a paper, claimed that non-signers were non-voters, or called upon me to take or authorize any action that conflicted with my quite-different principles.
By the time I came in, it was plain that the role of the ad hoc group was above all mediation. They had quite a team of mediators (among them Peter Kenen), who were rarely visible except in rapid passage — and who had to take horrible abuse from the SDS people and carry messages which they knew were not being properly transmitted to rank-and-file in the buildings.
It turned out that the group of faculty had also intervened to block an attempt of the “majority coalition” (jacket-and-tie types students, with a considerable admixture of athletes) to enter Fayerweather and dislodge the occupants, of whom (though I didn’t believe it when first told so by faculty who had been in and out the window, there were some 400. Furthermore, the group had resisted an attempt to move into Low a number of plain-clothes policemen. I think both of these were Thursday-night events, though my timing could be off here.
The white-arm-banded faculty by the time I came in were (1) manning the gates and checking University credentials for entrance; (2) circulating on campus to “cool” disturbances; and (I think so soon) manning the “ledge” around the foot of Low Library, to prevent entry through windows of people aiming to join the SDS occupants. (Exit—sorry, “egress” — was ok, with rainchecks for ingress to designated couriers escorted by mediators or members of the ad hoc group’s steering committee. Result: rapid accretion of improvised law, leading into the “Hedge-Ledge Treaty”.)
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Friday late afternoon, 26 April. The Friday afternoon meeting of the augmented Committees on Instruction was a heartening expression of sweet reason—but a little hard to remember in detail. For once, nobody said anything silly or inflammatory; but we did rather wonder whether we were saying anything applicable. The main outcome was a decision that the Committees should convene a joint session of the three graduate faculties.
Friday evening, so far as I can remember, went into a plenary session of the ad hoc group. Every now and then ther’d be an interruption because more people were needed at the gate, or there was need of white armbands to tone down some incipient mob scene. Early (that is, 1 AM) to bed for me.
Saturday, 27 April. Saturday was a day of prolonged meetings of the ad hoc group, with walks to talk to students. My memory is rather vague on details. Late in the day, Alan Westin (admirable chairman of the group) put it that the resources of mediation were about played out and we should move toward having a settlement-proposal. I went to dinner at the Clifford’s (Jimmy didn’t make it, being absorbed in the meeting); conversations with Kenneth Boulding, who stressed among other things seasonal aspects of disturbances.
Beginnings of formalization
Sunday morning, 28 April. Sunday opened with an 8 AM meeting of the ad hoc group, which voted some very good resolutions cooked up by the steering committee. The gymnasium-clause, especially, was a masterpiece—holding open the idea of building in the park only if agreed to by civic and community leaders picked by Mayor Lindsay. The Group held out against a commitment to amnesty for those occupying the buildings, and called for activation of a proposed tri-partite body (faculty 5, students 5, administration 2) with a named roster of members that had been negotiated (I gather largely by Peter Kenen, whose name is on it) with the strikers and Low Library.5
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5 Before I came in, a three-man committee with Lionel Trilling as draftsman had been proposed by the ad hoc group and empowered to draft a scheme for such a body by the administration — the first step toward a process of negotiation via agreement on a slate of people to take something in hand.
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The proposal to convoke the three Graduate Faculties had expanded during Saturday into one to call the “General Faculty”—an amalgam of all faculties within the Corporation (no Barnard, and no TC [Teachers’ College]) on the Heights (no medical, no Social Work). Western Union for once got some business: invitations by telegram. This met in Law School A-B. Trilling read the almost-final report on the judicial tripartite body; Westin got to explain the ad hocgroup’s resolutions, which he did not call on the General Faculty to adopt. We voted I can’t quite remember what (including some corrective to the Trustees’ goof in characterizing the Friday suspension of blasting at the gym site as a matter of “courtesy” toward the Mayor, nothing more), and avoiding any commitment to general amnesty.
Sunday afternoon, 28 April. The afternoon so far as I can remember it, was spent outdoors. The “majority coalition” decided to move in around the occupied side of Low Library (west) and set up a food-and-ingress blockade by occupying en masse the ground between the faculty’s ledge and the surrounding hedge. (Walks outside remained as a no-man’s land). SDS tried various run-the gauntlet tricks, and we had a thick white-arm-band line on the ledge, with confused mimeographed instructions (hedge-ledge treaty) which set up something like a game of capture-the flag. Incredibly picturesque colored children swarmed, with handfuls of our tulips.
Sunday night, 28 April. In the evening, there were the usual meetings. A bad night was forecast. At midnight we diverted a small fraction of the meeting to guard duty. Having donned a white armband for the first time in the afternoon, I had a spell of gate duty and then about two went on the ledge. Very quiet. There was a pleasant encampment of “coalition” people inside the hedge, and the College Walk a camp of SDS people, with candles, guitars, etc.—very serene and rather a beautiful sight. About four a bagpiper started to skirl between the two; but somebody whispered to him and he collapsed. Fuss over flag-raising at dawn, with the “coalition” very firm on singing Star Spangled Banner. The 4AM relief of faculty didn’t turn up, which made the night rather wearing as our numbers thinned out to an extent which we were told had proved dangerous the previous night; but no adverse consequences. About 7, new white armbands began to build up, and the night-guard went off to sleep.
Monday morning, 29 April. Monday the ad hoc group convened about 10AM, and Westin announced the day would be devoted to trying to get a real rallying of sentiment to our terms of settlement. Kirk had put out a statement (printed by the Times in a box with the ad hoc group statement[)] that represented substantial concessions. We voted for a terms of-settlement package with a useful sequence: If Kirk would make recommendation to the Trustees to meet the gymnasium proposition and activate the judicial body, we would then demand that the building-occupiers come out and submit to academic due process (no amnesty, but indications of “uniform punishment”). If the strikers refused this, we would cease to “interpose” and let the Administration have a free hand to clear the buildings. Kirk came through rather promptly with a response which many of us saw as “yes but”—with a readily-negotiable but. The SDS strikers, on their side, sent us at 6 PM a complete refusal to accept these terms.
Monday evening, 29 April. When the ad hoc group reconvened in the evening, it was plain that the steering committee was rattled. Westin was able to read a long list of telegrams (Javits, the AAUP, etc.) commending our terms. But there was a whole series of disastrously bad proposals. Before Westin and the Steering Committee were on deck, there was a proposal to evacuate our ledge because of physical danger to our people there. We took a recess, looked, and came back convinced this was nonsense—though a few eggs had hit our brethren, and one large-size fruit-juice can had scored a near miss. Next the Steering Committee moved a statement that treated as substantially identical the Administration’s yes-but answer and the SDS’s resounding no. (Westin’s slogan had been “bitter pills for everybody”; as I see it, the bitter bill [sic] for us in the ad hoc group was that we had to take yes-but as yes, or else negotiate the but). This not meeting acceptance, they moved t[o] invoke arbitration to be set up by Governor Rockefeller. But it proved that they’d no evidence that arbitration would be accepted, any more than mediation, by SDS.
Monday midnight, 29 April. Adjournment rather after midnight, with no program formulated, put a lot of our people on the ledge. For my part, I had shifted myself to the 4 AM list, reckoning that with so many of our people ready to drop from exhaustion, actual arrivals of 4 AM relief men were essential so that we’d at least have a presence as observers (lacking any basis for real effectiveness) in case the “blowup” came at the most probable hour of the night.
First steps toward unwinding
Tuesday morning, 30 April. My alarm didn’t sound at 4 AM: I hadn’t pulled out the can-ring peg. (Is this what happened to the 4 AM reliefs the previous nights?) But my wife, who never wakes at such hours, had set her internal timer and poked me when the alarm-clock said 4:05. (It was 10 minutes slow). So I got to the Amsterdam gate about 4:25. The police, who had been around in force almost all the time since Thursday mid-day6, were thinned out and more in motion; nobody checking credentials at the gate. The noisy Harlem demonstration that had been at the corner at 1 AM had vanished.
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6The Amsterdam-Morningside block of 116th was throughout a mass of parked police cars (including horse-vans, paddy-wagons sometimes, and on the last days ordinary city buses that had brought in large batches of police). There were always a good many police on foot on the block, who would talk pretty freely. Even the mounted police weren’t totally frozen: I regretted lacking a camera when I saw a small colored boy in a red sweater petting a very placid horse with a rider up.
The police apparently held all the “100-level” tunnel network from Thursday onward, but eventually entered almost all occupied buildings by campus-level doors. When I began to circulate on the 100-level of Low, I found a small reserve on the benches near the “Security entrance”. While on the gate, I passed lots of plain-clothes police that flashed badges. One of the objectionable features of the “blowup” was that plain-clothes men took a hand without putting on visible badges.
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Yes, the “blowup” had happened while I slept. The word was that mounted police had swept away the outdoor demonstrators. The Administration had given 30 minutes notice that the buildings would be cleared on bull-horns. At Hamilton (which had been the point we were afraid might lead to major trouble), there was token resistance; police went in without clubs, and occupiers came out in some order. In front of Fayerweather, a number of white-armband-types linked arms and got clubbed; police at the 54th St. station told a companion of mine that “if they link arms you have to use clubs”.7 There was a considerable fracas at each of the buildings with fairly solid masses of “radical” occupants (Low, Mathematics) and also at Fayerweather (into which most of the “moderates” had been displaced).
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7The TPF (“tactical police force”) had been around all week, and felt frustrated. A partly-rational explanation could be that they were aware that they were being kept away from other danger-points in the city and were losing sleep—hence were losing effectiveness in alternative uses. It occurs to me, too, that it may have been painful to be kept away from their taxi-driving and other “moonlighting” jobs, even though getting overtime pay.
The police group that took Hamilton must have been specially selected and indoctrinated. Most of the faculty feel that if an acceptable mode of police action was feasible there, it would have been so in the other buildings. There is no doubt, however, that the other groups were less disciplined than Hamilton. (Damage in Hamilton was limited to furniture used to barricade the doors. This may also have been true in Fayerweather before the police started smashing glass panes in doors to see who was inside. But in Mathematics and above all in the presidential suite in Low, there was damage on a large scale of strictly malicious character). The police also did not and perhaps could not have a huge superiority of numbers at points of contact: Fayerweather contained at the blowup some 300+/- 50 strikers, mostly on the 200 and 300 floors. I still regret that I wasn’t able to persuade faculty groups to consider in advance the difference between weaponless police action which would pull-and-carry and armed action which would club-and-push. We have no reports of guns being used; handcuffs were used as brass knuckles—an angle I hadn’t thought of at all.
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At the corner of 116 and Amsterdam, I found a few white arm-band people who like me were just turning out, and a couple who had been on campus. The word was that we’d go to somebody’s apartment on 116th and see what we could find out by phone. I dashed home to use my own phone, alerted my wife, and called up her brother (Bethuel Webster), who coached me a bit as to how arrestees could be advised. (Only family and attorneys have a recognized right to see them; family can designate attorneys.) As I turned the corner back onto 116th, I met a young-faculty type I didn’t know, in shock with a broken head, and with a middle-aged woman; they said they wanted a phone, and I referred them to my wife, who tells me she took them in. The previous knot of faculty being invisible and not in the designated apartment, I went through an unguarded gate to Philosophy for instructions, and found 301 was a dressing-station, with no ad hoc leadership in evidence. So I took it upon myself to visit police stations. Some students at 114th and Amsterdam, who had a car, ferried me around. We found at West 100 St. that all arrestees were blacks from Hamilton, and that somebody had taken our role. At West 54th Street we found also only Hamiltonians, and the police gave us a list. At West 68th Street things were more confused: they had about 25 arrestees in stock, and refused a list. I asked if any were faculty, and the produced “one somewhat older”, who turned out to be Dankwart Rustow. The police refused to give me a list, and refused to let me hand a clip-board around; but they conveniently failed to notice when Rustow opened the door of the room they were using and handed me a slip the arrestees had all signed. This was at 6:30; Rustow said not to call his wife till 8 o’clock, as she expected to hear nothing from him sooner. Following advice from a student reporter from WKCR (which throughout has done a first-rate job of reporting) I got WKCR to come and fetch the list from 7th-floor Philosophy.
Tuesday mid-day, 30 April. It developed that the General Faculties had been called for 4 PM, and the ad hoc group had called itself for 10, 10:30 maybe? This ad hoc group gathering shifted to Earl Hall because 301 Philosophy was disrupted, then to MacMillan because Earl Hall was too small. It was finally called to order at noon. Westin proceeded to lay out a resolution the Steering Committee had framed, in a state of shock, before 10 o’clock; it opened with a resounding vote of lack of confidence in Kirk and Truman and ended with a call to “respect” the new student strike that was already visibly shaping up. A “medical report” was called for, and proved to be such an incendiary utterance that Westin had to insist the doctor give us a few facts and sit down.8 The tone of most utterances was rather frantic; a move to adopt the revolution “by acclamation”, rejected by Westin, proved hard to head off. After about an hour, Westin (after whispered consultations) announced that the Steering Committee was amending its resolution to say that so far as the strike was concerned, the ad hoc group would reconsider its position after 48 hours. From my standpoint, this was crucial: I’d still have had to vote “no”, but if the amended resolution had carried, I would not have felt I had to drop out of an organization which, taking a wrong stand, guaranteed to reconsider. After a further hour, Westin announced that in the light of the discussion the Steering Committee was convinced that it could quickly frame a much better resolution; he withdrew the resolution and called for a recess. A motion to recess proved to draw shouts pro and con. Westin was about to call a vote when somebody (I can’t remember who) objected that what with the attendance being double that of any previous meeting and with the lack of screening of identification as we shifted from Earl Hall, we could be sure that many present were not faculty and that many were so unfamiliar with our operations that they couldn’t fully gauge the situation. He suggested that those who had attended no previous meeting of the ad hoc group should abstain from voting on the recess. Angry shouts opposed him. So Westin said that with or without a recess, he withdrew the resolution and called on the Steering Committee to move with him to a place where they could work. The moment he left, one of the more responsible survivors proclaimed that the meeting had adjourned, and the great bulk of those present left.
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8One clearcut scandal was that although the Administration saw violence happening and knew a “blowup” was imminent, it took no steps to set up emergency medical facilities on campus. The natural consequence was that there was a volunteer group linked to the strikers. One of the Communist stereotypes of the 1930’s (cf. various works of Howard Fast) was the noble doctor who worked inside rebel lines till the damned reactionaries played on his nobility to get him in their hands. Was it really necessary for the Administration to let this hackneyed scenario be reused on our campus?
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As I was leaving too, the preceptor on my left urged me to stay a minute. One of the more obstreperous members of the ad hoc group was saying very proper things—that “those who remained in the room”, as a non-meeting, might want to hear a statement on the new student strike by the Executive Vice-President of the Student Council. This lad then popped up, and with great propriety made a strictly explanatory statement (laced with hopes of faculty support), making it clear that this was a new strike to express revulsion against violence, not a continuation of the old strike, with a strike committee for the present composed of elected leaders from student organizations that had not participated in nor approved occupation of buildings, and with its statement of objectives yet to be formulated. Then the Student Council lad introduced a young African (seems to straddle faculty and student status, like many of the juniors), who had made a disturbance in the previous meeting. He started by an apology for the disturbance, went on to other remarks which I disliked but which in substance seemed admirable in spirit—and then rashly pronounced the word “motion”. Then he swallowed his tongue, evidently sensing that one can’t put motions to a non-meeting. But at least twenty voices cried “Yes: motion”. He started to unreel a form of words about “the faculty members present at this meeting”, and almost instantaneously a large proportion of us were on foot headed for the exit. (I had the sensation of leading a walkout from my well-chosen heckler’s position, second row on the aisle; but if I was leading it, come to think of it, why were there a hundred people ahead of me on the way to the exit?) According to one of the few New York Times stories that seems to check in detail—another evidence that the room contained unqualified people—about 125 people remained, claimed that the meeting had not adjourned and they were the ad hoc group, and passed “unanimously” the original Westin resolution. Since the story said also that there had been 600 present when Westin took the Steering Committee, [but] my feeling is that it isn’t necessary to repudiate this rump, but the figures will speak.
Second meeting of the General Faculty
The General Faculty meeting was transferred to the Chapel. It convened almost on schedule, with an almost full house. I missed the opening because I was in the porch taking a hand in leading to vacant places in the balcony 20 junior faculty who had somehow sifted themselves out to act as observers on behalf of the juniors in the ad hocgroup.9 The moment Ralph Halford came out to tell us the meeting had accepted the 20 observers, I helped pilot them to the north balcony.
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9Kirk had transformed a suggestion from the junior group that they participated in the first General Faculty meeting into a proposal in invite twenty by telegrams like those sent to senior faculty. But an accident (call to people framing the list of 20 to help “cool” a fracas outside Low) prevented completing the list, and the telegrams never went.
Kirk opened the first meeting with a request for unanimous consent to admit one junior representative as observer, which was done. It seemed to me that if tokenism was the order of the day, one wasn’t the optimum permanent level for it; so I got the question taken to Truman and he suggested 20, to be picked by some procedure the juniors were to find themselves.____________
Tuesday afternoon, 30 April. After a brief statement of his own and somewhat more from Truman, chiefly about the police action, Kirk introduced Hofstatter [sic, Richard Hofstadter], who presented a list of resolutions (half a dozen well-worded points, on one sheet of paper that had been handed to everybody) concocted by a stable of most estimable middle-of-the-road types including Hofstatter[sic], himself, Daniel Bell, and I think Trilling. The main content was a move toward constitutional reform (constitutional convention for the University; preparatory commission to organize the convention; demands upon the Trustees that they take a constructive part in reorganization). The first line of the resolutions referred to the “necessity” of the policy action and the last point to continued leadership by Kirk and Truman, so that this motion was vote-of-confidence sandwich, with lots of rather appetizing stuffings.
A number of prestigious professors were primed (as at the first General Faculty meeting) to support these resolutions, stressing the “no-recriminations” aspect of the first point, and the go-ahead character of the rest. But presently up rose Marvin Harris and moved as an additional resolution the original Westin proposal to the morning session, pointing out that its author would probably oppose it. This resolution too had a lot of sound where-do-we-go-from-here stuff in the middle; but since it opened by repudiating Kirk and Truman and ended by endorsing a strike, it was a vote-of-no-confidence sandwich. Kirk ruled from the chair that there was no use treating this as an additional resolution, but it had to be seen as a substitute. Since its main content seemed to be lack of confidence in him, he felt he should not continue to preside, and called upon Dean Warren to take over as presiding officer. By some miracle, previously non-existent chairs appeared just below the steps, and he and Truman stepped down into them.
Westin did get up to say that he opposed the motion of his drafting as an utterance from the General Faculty. From that point, discussion ran downhill as to content and got more and more shrill. Every speaker was being oh-so-parliamentary and trying to speak to the substitute proposal without reference to the original. Some sort of confused vote was taken on something which required a show of hands and a very slow count, and indicated that on any more substantive vote we were likely to split with at least a third dissenting. At this point up stepped Maurice Rosenberg and introduced a most valuable element of confusion by putting up a third set of resolutions as an amendment to displace the second (substitute). This was much less a statement of principle and more an action; its key clause was to set up the executive committee of the Faculty, to be composed of professors “such as” a specified list of ten (partly ad hoc group types like Westin and Bell, partly strong figures not identified with the group), to coopt two junior faculty; and another clause called upon the Trustees to cooperate with our Executive Committee in restructuring the University.
While Rosenberg’s proposal was received with a sense of relief, discussion again ran downhill. At this point, I somehow got it through my head how Rosenberg had laid the threads out so that one could give a tug at the right place and they would unsnarl. I came downstairs and planted myself by a pillar just behind the properly-seated people, whence it wasn’t too hard to watch Warren’s eye; he recognized me as a long shot, not knowing at all who it was. (Kirk, who must regard me as a bungler, winced when he saw me appear—as if it wasn’t bad enough to hear all the previous nonsense). I began by introducing myself as an economist, and pointed out that economists felt that in logic you could talk sense about a substitute only in explicit comparison with what it was supposed to be a substitute for. Hence it would not be out of order to deal not with one of the proposals before us, but with all three. To start with the second, its chief effect would clearly be to paralyze us; whether or not we fully approved of the leadership we had, we would be in a disastrous situation if the first order of business for the Trustees was to replace it. This was “proposal to use all available steam to blow the whistle”. The third proposal had the supreme merit that it would actually put well-chosen people to work on reconstruction. The very substantial merits of the first set of resolutions10 could best be realized by putting an Executive Committee to work.
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10 I hope I referred also to the constructive middle parts of the second resolution, but can’t remember how I said it if I did.
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At this point (though I hadn’t intended it when I rose), I realized that for the moment people were breathing more calmly, and that I should try to wind up the debate. So I said that in a moment I was going to move the question, but first wanted to say a word about our attitude toward the strike, I referred to the “very commendable weasel-word ‘respect’” used in the resolution. No doubt this word could be used in a technical sense; but we should take it in a much deeper sense. Whatever else the strike was, we must see it as an outburst of grief over what had happened to the University. Even though we might regard the form of outburst as uncouth, if we couldn’t show “respect” for the grief it expressed, who were we? Once we started putting more meaning into “respect”, must we not also say that we respected the view of some of our colleagues that if there was a students’ strike of this type, they must take some steps of participation? Reciprocally, must we not respect the view of some of our colleagues who hold that in the academic world there must always be some better vehicle for a protest, and that even in these conditions, they must refuse anything that might seem like participation? Mustn’t we also respect the need of many students to complete their work this semester, and to get completion properly attested on a University transcript? In sum, mustn’t we as a University find a way to move ahead in a climate of mutual respect? With that, I moved the question.
Dean Warren, in view of the previous fuss, called for a show of hands. “Voice!” called a number of people. All right, no harm in trying a voice vote first. In favor of the motion to call the question and terminate debate? Lots of aye. Opposed? Silence! Before he could call for the substantive vote, up rose some youngish man I didn’t know, with a question to the proposer of the motion. Would Professor Rosenberg agree that the motion would be clearer if he expunged the words “such as” in front of the roster of names for the Executive Committee. And yes, he would. (The fox! It looks as if he put those words in just to have something to concede. The effect was that instead of voting a rather ambiguous request to somebody—Kirk?—to name us a committee of a certain type, suddenly we were engaged in electing a committee on our own initiative, with no middlemen!) On the substantive question of Rosenberg’s amendment, Warren again called for hands. Again shouts of “voice”; again he tried it. Lots of aye; distinct but faint, a definite minority of no. No challenge when Warren said the ayes had it.
Then came a motion to adjourn. A count of hands did prove necessary this time. (I sprinted upstairs, to be able to certify that our junior-staff observers didn’t vote.) The count was 250[?] to adjourn versus 250 not to. Just what the vote meant, Lord knows. Some hoped still to roll up a substantial vote against Kirk and Truman on some motion or other. The Architecture folks had some proposition that never reached the floor. Maybe a good many were worried because of something I quite failed to register: that Warren had goofed; and after getting proposition three voted to displace proposition two as a substitute for proposition one, had failed to get a vote on proposition three against proposition one. A technically-fatal-but-practically-trifling error in procedure. Everybody knew that in fact we’d elected a new executive; and as people went out, a few of the Executive Committee were sorting the rest out of the crowd for an instant beginning on the new phase of activity.
Over the hump—perhaps
Tuesday evening, 30 April. Once again, prompt steps were taken to legitimatize what might have been challenged. The Trustees held a dinner meeting and afterwards sat till 2 AM with the Executive Committee. The statement from the Trustees that resulted was to my taste most satisfactory. As a position, it serves only ad interim; but it shows that the Trustees have engaged themselves in a process that if well guided can put us a sound footing. To begin with, the Trustees recognized the Executive Committee as a responsible body acting on behalf of the faculty. They recognized the tripartite judicial body, which under Rosenberg’s resolution was at last put to work. They appointed their own committee to look into reform of the “basic structure” of the University, and instructed that committee both to consult with our Executive Committee and more broadly to consult with faculty and students. On the gym, they proposed to “consult and negotiate” with a body of community leaders. Maybe they thought this was only a token concession; but of course they’ll find that to “negotiate” you have to be on terms with an opposite number that isn’t just your stooge; doubtless the Mayor will find himself on the spot with a need to select the “community” people.
A useful point of the Rosenberg resolution was to call for a “day of reflection” on the Wednesday. So far as I was concerned, the most urgent business was a dissertation-defense, for a candidate who is very ill and had been patched together by the doctors for this week only, between two spells of hospitalization. We had taken the precaution of arranging for him to come by taxi to my flat at 54 Morningside. One of the scheduled examiners was Terence Hopkins of Sociology, who was visibly so exhausted that it was doubtful he knew the day of the week; so I had hedged by inviting a historian ([Bailey W.] Diffie) who lives at 54 Morningside. We opened the defense (following the precedent set by Peter Kenen when we held an examination in subjects at my flat on—I think—Friday the 26th) by asking the candidate to waive objections to irregularities of procedure. Fortunately we were able to pass the dissertation in the first column—as was true also of the Kim dissertation on Thursday the 2nd and Sobestyen dissertation on Friday the 3rd.11
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11 We held three defenses and two examinations in subjects—Aspra and Deestlov[?]—at the flat between 25thApril and 3rd May. Newsprint-pad-and-wax-pencil proves in many ways much better than a blackboard! Several other flats in the neighbourhood have been in use, and on the whole examinations for the doctorate have gone as scheduled—though I hear rumors of one case where a colleague refused to examine because of the strike.
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Wednesday afternoon, 1 May. After lunch, the thing to do was join the conversation-bees on the campus. Most of us were looking for students we knew; once we started talking to them, others latched on.12 I found myself telling them that if they thought about the “Kirk must go” slogan, then so nearly the sole focus of the strike agitation, they would find that what their position really called for was “Kirk must go—but not yet!” My basic argument was that we couldn’t afford to let the Trustees get bogged down in the problem of a replacement, and that within a few months we’d have a much better Board to make selections.13
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12 But I didn’t succeed in spotting the SDS type who on Sunday had told me intensely that “to block food going into Low is murder, of course!” To choose the right moment to laugh has been tricky. One is reminded of what a Canadian colleague said about “Social Credit”: “You have to remember, it’s only a stop from the sublime to the ridiculous, and sometimes the line gets shifted a little.”
13 Advice by telephone from my sagacious son: a further argument for delay, still stronger, is that any immediate replacement must be made by the Trustees; while very likely the University-reform program should include selection of a President by the faculty, subject to Trustee ratification. This will obviously take time to organize.
SDS seems to be trying to avoid getting Kirk’s resignation on the list of the strike objectives. One can easily think up possible motives that don’t include getting sound leadership by sound procedures.
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Several students thought this idea (together with some comments on “respect” along the lines I’d presented before) should get circulation; and an undergraduate I’ve known for some 15 years showed me the way to the WKCR studios. They gave me a 5-minute interview, and later read off a page of typescript I left with them; besides, I got a chance to tell a couple of their staff how much my acquaintances were praising their handling of the crisis.
Wednesday evening, 1 May. In the evening, we held the usual musical open house (with Dean Morse [Columbia economics PhD 1965] as pianist) at my flat. Much of our time was spent on a Buxtehude motet. Bitte um Frieden. It’s musically first-rate, happens to fit the odd combination of people who came, and certainly has a most suitable subject.14
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14 While it’s most genuinely religious music, it’s an odd twist that the text tells the second person of the Trinity his business (“Remember your office!….Expedite the business.”) for all the world in the tone the Faculty tends to use in the new turn of events toward the Trustees.
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Thursday, 2 May. The situation on Thursday was much like that on Wednesday, except that there was a certain devolution of authority. The University Council, which on the whole has stayed tactfully out of sight, had to be consulted on the obvious necessity of doing something about the University Calendar and could think of nothing better than to toss it to departments and schools. A gathering of department chairmen (to which Peter Kenen sent Donald Dewey as his deputy) could offer no guidance either on the calendar or on how to handle classes in face of the amorphous strike movement.
Thursday evening (or was it afternoon), 2 May. Peter Kenen called a meeting of economics faculty and graduate students on Thursday, which was very heavily attended. I can’t remember that we did much but clear the air; but a number of suggestions were canvassed that crystallized next day.
Friday evening, 3 May. A more decisive meeting of the same composition was held on Friday evening. The students (apparent ringleaders Reischauer and Roosevelt) proposed a resolution in favor of getting on with our education, and then came up with a suggestion that if the strike was on, we should set up classes (“all classes” was amended by deleting “all”) in places off campus. Several of the faculty indicated it might be a matter of principle for them to appear, at stated hours and stated rooms, if the University was officially open. I drew attention to the fact that faculty as well as students had taken the line that we objected to having our education interrupted. For my part, I’d suffered rather heavily in some dimensions by the interruption; but in other dimensions, my education had been greatly accelerated. In particular, I’d come to agree with one of the young faculty who told me, “On the ledge, we learn to bend.” I felt we’d do well to bend by taking a stand that wouldn’t create avoidable points of conflict—without putting in the wrong any colleagues who felt bound to hold “regular” classes. We must remember that any signals we might send out by stating high principles were quite likely to be incompatible with the receiving apparatus of the people we thought we were signalling to. For my part, I proposed to hold classes at 54 Morningside drive if campus space was picketed—hoping that any classes held on campus would not meet with disturbances. If disturbances did happen, I’d be strongly inclined to move back to campus classrooms rather than leave colleagues isolated. Alexander Erlich said he felt bound provisionally to hold no classes—but must refuse to endorse beyond (say) Monday morning a strike that was so amorphous, and would have to reevaluate it as it developed.15
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15 If we were so hard up for information about the strike, it was partly because our graduate students largely stood outside it. Reischauer had been conspicuous among the green-armband-wearers, who registered disapproval both of forcible seizure of buildings and of violence to clear them; and one gathers this was rather typical of our students. The strike committee had invited any student organization with more than seventy students willing to sign a strike paper to send in one representative per 70 students signing; but our students did not include enough strikers to be represented. I learned however on the Monday (past the closing date of this narrative) that signatures by economics students had mounted enough to send a member.
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There appeared to be an almost-universal sense that we needed a student-faculty committee on departmental problems. Peter Kenen suggested that he would name a faculty group of 5, and urged the students to elect 5. For those who straddled faculty and student status, he suggested that they sit with the students or faculty in the committee-selection process as they thought they could be most useful. The committee roster turned out as follows:
|
Faculty |
Students |
| D. [Donald J.] Dewey |
A. Gandolfi |
| A. [Alexander] Erlich | C. Gersti [Gerstl?] |
| A. [Albert G.] Hart (to preside) | D. [David] Gold |
| C. Jordan | R. Reischauer |
| P. [Peter B.] Kennen (ex officio) |
A. [Anwar] Shaikh |
|
R. [Robert B.] Zevin |
The spread of opinions, ages, and backgrounds is very interesting.
This committee must face a number of sticky questions. I don’t want to particularize till things have shaken down somewhat. Problems will be accentuated by the fact that one platoon of senior staff ([Donald J.] Dewey, [Kevin J.] Lancaster, [Stanislaw] Wellisz) will be going on leave just as another ([Harold] Barger, [Arthur F. (more likely) or Arthur R.] Burns, [Carl S.] Shoup, [William S.] Vickrey) comes back from leave. But we will get benefits of continuity from the work on junior-staff selection that brought us as the assistant professors giving main-stream[?] graduate courses the team of [Roger E.] Alcaly, [Roger C.] Lawrence, [Raymond] Lubitz and [Robert B.] Zevin. We seem to have about the sanest set of graduate students in the University, and by good luck those with political flair also seem to have a more-than-superficial view of what’s happening. We are still very much at the mercy of events; but I remain optimistic.
______________________________
Text (from Jacob Ebert’s hymn, Du Friede-Fürst) of Buxtehude’s cantata Bitte um Frieden:
[Correct text from the Internationale Dieterich Buxtehude Gesellschaft website:]
- Du Frieden-Fürst, Herr Jesu Christ,
wahr Mensch und wahrer Gott,
Ein starker Nothelffer du bist,
Im Leben und im Tod,
Drum wir allein im Namen dein
Zu deinem Vater schreien. - Recht große Noth uns stößet an
Von Krieg und Ungemach,
Daraus uns niemand helfen kan,
Denn du, drum führ die Sach,
Dein Vater bit, daß er ja nicht
Im Zorn mit uns wol fahren. - Gedenk, Herr, jetzt und an dein Ampt
Daß du ein Fried-Fürst bist,
Und hilff uns gnädig allesamt
Jetzt und zu dieser Frist,
Laß uns hin-fort, Laß uns hin-fort,
Dein göttlich Wort
Im Fried, im Fried, im Fried
Noch Länger schallen. Amen.
Source: Columbia University Libraries, Manuscript Collections. Columbia University Department of Economics Collection. Box 10, Carl Shoup Materials. Folder,” Columbia University—General”.
Image Source: Columbia University Record, vol. 23, no. 5 (Oct. 3, 1997).
