...ributing to the repugnant foreign and discriminative domestic policies of the United States during the Vietnam War. Tensions grew exponentially between the student body and the ROTC on Columbia’s campus between 1965 and 1968. In 1967, some members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) discovered that the university was working with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), which was a think tank for the Department of Defense. This was...
...in Egypt and Tunisia. The strands continue, and they will continue. That’s the point of this birthday. Whether 20,000 or 200 show up on September 17, this isn’t over. It’s another (big) link in the chain. Many hearken back to 1968 as a yardstick for today. But it’s more apt to think of 1956. The Montgomery bus boycotts had just ended, and some said the movement for equal rights was dead. It wasn’t. It took years of organizing, studying, strategiz...
...me. This established a link between them, which was highlighted by the effective use of the Internet, Facebook and Twitter as a means to coordinate each other. Days after, students met in Tlatelolco (a park emblematic for the 1968 student protests and shootings) to organize the movement. It was then that “La Coordinadora”, the original group of students leading the organization was created. It was formed by a group of 25 students representing var...
...ast life lost, and life to be sacrificed in the coming days and years is more important than an election. There is a time for criticism. I’m not prepared to say when and where that will take place. Vietnam was on the table in 1968 and the Iraq War was fair game in 2004. Our democracy necessitates redirection when gone afoul. And even though I certainly feel that the present predicament varies significantly from ‘68 and ‘04 there is no concrete wa...
..., and neither should we. Unfortunately we have a slight disadvantage: Administrators stay at Columbia for a long time, even decades, while most undergraduates come and go in four years. Almost everyone “remembers” 1968, but we need a deeper memory than just “it happened.” We need to remember Barnard and Columbia have over a century of principled dissent. We need to know why the protests happened, how they were organized, what worked a...
...egularly offered flood coverage in a basic homeowner’s insurance policy. As a result of this natural disaster, private insurance companies increasingly dropped its flood policies, which then led Congress to create the NFIP in 1968. Under current legislation, residents who live in designated flood areas are required to buy federal flood insurance while voluntary coverage is available to all homeowners. According to FEMA, the NFIP has at least $45...
...ussian Arctic” from bases located in Svalbård and Stavanger in southern Norway. But while the Barents Sea dispute is largely resolved, it bears heavily on an even more important issue for Moscow: the Polarnet project. Between 1968 and 2010, global warming shrank the polar ice caps by 40 percent, and the pace is increasing. As of 2010, a 62 mile-wide strip of the Arctic Ocean along the Canadian and Alaskan shores is free of ice year-round. Still,...
...illingness to compromise, but instead students with their endless creativity who advocate new approaches to stagnant problems. Let us not forget, regardless of whether you agreed or disagreed with their grievances, it was our 1968 protests that advocated a spirit of change in colleges across the nation. Therefore, I cannot understand why the failures of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are echoed on our campus. Last year, Students for Justice in...
...complaining about the incredible pressures involved in finishing his pieces. Some readers might not warm to his unorthodox approach to journalism. Thompson’s credentials, however, are impressive. He’d attended and covered the 1968 convention. He followed McGovern throughout much of the primary season and through the general election. And he had enviable access to McGovern’s staff throughout much of the year because of his favorable coverage. He e...
Brown Spectator: Why did you decide to pursue a violent disobedience despite the remarkable success of the non-violent protests that had taken place in the 60s, such as the Civil Rights movement? Mark Rudd: My friends and I were entranced by the heroism of Che Guevara and the Vietnamese and the Black Panthers and various people around the world who had taken up the gun to fight for freedom. We wanted to be like them. It was a losing strategy, i...
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