BY HANK REICHMAN

Fifty years ago today, on April 23, 1968, members of the Students Afro-American Society (SAS) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and their supporters at Columbia University occupied Hamilton Hall, the main undergraduate classroom and administration building, demanding an end to construction of a segregated university gymnasium on public park land and to Columbia’s participation in secret military research through the Institute for Defense Analysis. The occupation soon spread to four additional buildings and on April 29, at the invitation of the Columbia administration, New York City police cleared the buildings, arresting over 700 and indiscriminately beating protesters and bystanders alike, prompting a massive student strike that lasted until the end of the academic year.

To commemorate these events Columbia University Press in January published A Time to Stir, a collection of over sixty reminiscences by participants of all stripes, edited by Paul Cronin. The book is tied to a seven-hour documentary film on which Cronin has been working for over a decade. It will debut in New York on April 29. Excerpts from the film, also titled A Time to Stir, were screened at last year’s AAUP annual meeting, followed by a panel discussion with historian Ellen Schrecker, who is writing a book about faculty in the ’60s; journalist, Rutgers professor, and Columbia strike veteran Juan Gonzalez; Cronin; and me. 

The following is my contribution to A Time to Stir, the book, posted here with the editor’s kind permission:

The Sound of Breaking Glass

By Henry Reichman

Years after the events of 1968, as a historian researching the Russian revolutionary movement, I came upon a memoir written by a railroad employee about the experience of activism during the general strikes that swept Russia in late 1905, precursors of the more profound transformations of 1917. “Only yesterday a drunken Makar Mikhailovich was . . . demanding ‘more vodka on credit’: today he is a delegate to the Liubotin railroad congress, a top-notch speaker, and the first to sing the Marseillaise,” the writer recalled. “It is difficult to convey the joyous agitation with which we greeted our entry into social affairs,” he continued. “In the first days of the strike everyone felt not quite himself: the institutional structure of everyday life that had existed for years was broken at the root.”

Those words struck a chord with me that I doubt they would with most other historians. For it seemed to me that the experience recounted in this yellowed memoir from an obscure publication of the twenties was eerily similar to what I lived so many years afterward as a twenty-one-year-old student at Columbia. To be sure, the Columbia rebellion was hardly a revolution, even a failed one. And most of my fellow students were more likely to abuse marijuana than vodka. But the sense that events were compelling us to abandon the distractions and frivolities of everyday life and to “enter social affairs” was equivalent. And in those days, I also felt “not quite myself,” or, to be more precise, I discovered something more about who I really was and might become.

When I entered Hamilton Hall on April 23, 1968, it was not the first time I had participated in a sit-in. The preceding October I had been arrested for blocking entry to the New York City draft office, briefly sharing a jail cell with, among others, the poets Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg, and Dr. Benjamin Spock, the famed pediatrician. So I was no stranger to antiwar civil disobedience. Nevertheless, as events developed that evening and the “institutional structure of daily life” began to give way around me, my commitment was challenged.

In my memory, the critical moment is most closely associated with the sound of breaking glass. It was early on the morning of April 24, after the white students left Hamilton Hall. A dwindling group of exhausted and demoralized protesters was milling about wondering what to do next when Mark Rudd led a small group of no more than fifty, perhaps fewer, toward Low Memorial Library. I followed in the rear, not certain of what would happen or even what I wanted to happen, when someone broke through the glass window of a door to that imposing building to gain entry and begin a second occupation.

In the weeks to come at Columbia and later at Berkeley, where I went to graduate school, I would grow accustomed to the sound of windows shattering, as young people took to the streets in growing numbers and with intensifying anger to “bring the war home.” But that morning, the sound seemed to smash more than glass; it seemed to herald the shattering of a once-sheltered existence and the beginning of a new and frightening phase, not only in the movement at Columbia but in my own life. My first reaction was to flee. Returning to my apartment, tired, confused, and uncertain, I fell asleep. A few hours later I returned to campus to learn that the occupation had spread. I rejoined the rebellion, ending up in Mathematics Hall, later deemed the most militant of the buildings.

I was never the strongest advocate for militancy, but days into the rebellion, I found myself committed to a movement that would shape the rest of my life. One morning, Tom Hurwitz was guarding the window through which people entered and left the occupied building. Suddenly I heard his voice boom, “Hank Reichman! Your father’s here.” Of course, I heard this as dripping with sarcasm. Here I am—the tough, now-embarrassed revolutionary youth with the concerned father. (Later I would learn that my wife, also in Mathematics but who I did not yet know, had the same experience with her dad.) My father arrived in his suit and tie. He had been a radical and student rebel at City College in the thirties. He invited me to breakfast and tried to convince me to leave the building.

“You’ve made your point,” he said. “Everything after this will be destructive.”

I replied, “No dad, we have to stick it out,” which is what, I’m now certain, he expected to hear from me. Years later, as a historian, I would study the generational conflict paradigmatically evoked in Turgenev’s classic Fathers and Sons, but that day I lived it. I went back into the building.

Sometimes it seems I never left. For what that building and the broader events of that incredible spring have come to mean for me is a lifetime’s commitment to the fight for social change and justice. But I need to wonder whether in some ways I ultimately haven’t embraced my father’s outlook. For as rebels always do, we students at Columbia in 1968 shattered more than glass in our efforts to end the war and defeat Columbia’s ill-conceived plan (that’s putting it far too mildly) to build a segregated gym on public land. I can recall how some militants in Mathematics voiced the opinion that we should “destroy the university,” at least as it currently existed. I remember timidly approaching Tom Hayden, who masterfully chaired discussions in Mathematics, to let him know that I didn’t fully agree with that approach. I didn’t want to destroy the university; indeed, I loved it. But I wanted, so to speak, to save it from itself.

And in a sense, that’s what I’m still doing. Eventually I earned a Ph.D.and taught for more than thirty years at multiple universities. During that time, I took to faculty governance, became active in my union, and ended up a national officer of the American Association of University Professors and chair of its hallowed Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. I therefore have thought much about the role of the faculty at Columbia and in student movements generally. And I have grown more sensitive to the threat to academic freedom and to the autonomous university that militant student rebellions can pose. Were something like the Columbia strike to happen now, I would be one of the active faculty thrust into the middle. I know what my position would be and it would not be the position that the young, rebellious me wanted the faculty to take. Having said that, I still think that too many of the faculty abdicated responsibility, and I think they did so not through their often hostile response to the strike but through their lack of response to what caused the strike. In retrospect, t seems to me that Columbia’s faculty basically never stood up. Why was it left to students to demand that the Institute for Defense Analyses get off campus? That should have been a faculty demand. Faculty should have been saying, “We do not do secret war research on this campus. This is not academic freedom.” But did they? By and large, I think they didn’t. Only a tiny minority, mainly junior faculty and mainly on the far Left, did so. Too many were simply silent.

The memory and lessons of Columbia were therefore much on my mind in the fall of 2015, when a new wave of student unrest swept American universities, focusing on demands for racial justice. As at Columbia and other universities in the late sixties and early seventies, the students frequently were condemned by the media—the Wall Street Journal called Yale protesters “little Robespierres”—and by many faculty members, too, for allegedly threatening free expression and seeking to impose their demands undemocratically. But it seemed to me that the students were doing what we did at Columbia; they were and are raising issues that their elders—their professors and the administrators of their institutions—were all too often eager to dodge.

And so, taking to the virtual pages of one of the preeminent online publications about higher education, I wrote in 2015:

[I]t’s necessary to credit the students for their courage and determination in addressing the sometimes unconscious but nonetheless real and persistent racism that infects our society and our campuses. In doing so, they have made and will again make mistakes. They will offend others even as they respond to deeper offenses against their own dignity. They may demonstrate indifference to the rights of others, as protesters everywhere always have. But, in doing so, they will learn. And that, it seems to me, is the essential point. Student academic freedom, in the final analysis, is about the freedom to learn. And learning is impossible without error. . . .

Faculty members should welcome the challenges the protesting students have posed. Student movements offer countless opportunities for students—as well as their teachers—to learn. To approach them in this way . . . is therefore simply to fulfill our responsibility as educators.

I hope the young man of twenty-one, who at Columbia in 1968 found his life transformed by the sound of breaking glass, would understand and, perhaps, even approve.