A leaflet prepared by the SDS strike committee
(NYU Bobst Library)

NEW YORK — In March 1967 a Columbia University SDS activist named Bob Feldman discovered documents revealing Columbia’s formal relationship with the Institute for Defense Analyses, a Department of Defense think tank. This discovery, along with the University’s encroachment into Harlem – the attempt to build a gymnasium on public park land – triggered a series of protests that culminated in the 1968 Columbia Strike. The strike, violently put down by the NYPD, was ultimately successful in attaining two of its goals: Columbia’s disaffiliation from the IDA and the scrapping of the plan to build a gym in Morningside Park. The victory prompted Tom Hayden to urge, “Two, three, many Columbias” in a 1968 Ramparts article.

On April 23, 1968, Columbia University SDS rallied to protest the university’s relation to the Institute for Defense Analysis, the school’s encroachment into Harlem and Columbia’s placing the “IDA Six” – SDS members who had peacefully protested in the Low Library on March 27 – on probation. The rally eventually escalated into the takeover of Hamilton Hall by SDS and the Student Afro Society. Shortly afterwards SDS vacated Hamilton Hall – at the request of SAS – and took over Low Library. On the morning of April 30, 1968, the NYPD violently cleared the library, injuring 150 students and arresting over 700 protesters. In an ironic twist, Police Officer John Brower – husband of current MDS activist Elaine Brower – stood on the opposite side of the barricade from SDS in 1968.

Mark Rudd with Elaine Brower in 2007
(Photo: Thomas Good / NLN)

After Columbia, Feldman went on to co-found the Richmond College chapter of SDS on Staten Island – in October 1968. Since that time he has continued to agitate – and educate – for peace and progress. A believer in intergenerational organizing, he is supportive of the new Students for a Democratic Society – and the new Movement for a Democratic Society as well. Feldman maintains a blog that chronicles the Columbia University strike and has autobiographical sections that provide a glimpse into the Sixties from the perspective of someone who experienced the turmoil and remains a committed radical.

Recently Feldman became involved with the Columbia University 40th Anniversary organizing committee. In his efforts to publicize the commemorative event – being held at Columbia’s School of Journalism – he works with other SDS veterans including Mark Rudd. Initially, Columbia University offered support, including financial, to the organizers. When the program didn’t evolve the way Columbia envisioned much of the support was withdrawn. However, Columbia president Lee Bollinger will speak at the Welcoming Ceremony on Thursday, April 24. Feldman and other organizers are not sure what he will say.

Mark Rudd told NLN, “There was a problem a few months ago, when it appeared that the Columbia administration didn’t want to work with our organizing committee anymore. So they pulled out and are holding some sort of official academic event the following week, when students are busy with exams. However, lately President Lee Bollinger has agreed to give a welcoming to our opening session. We’re all holding our breaths to see whether he’s going to Ahmadinejad us.”

The full program for the event can be found at www.columbia68.info. It opens Thursday, April 24 and tuns through Sunday, April 27. Speakers include Nancy Biberman, Kathleen Cleaver, Tom Hayden, Mark Kurlansky, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Rosalyn Baxandall, Manning Marable, Juan Gonzalez, Mark Rudd, Frances Fox Piven and others.

Promotional poster from Columbia 1968 – 2008
(www.columbia1968.info/)

Intrigued by the idea of a commemorative event that does not focus exclusively on nostalgia and features panelists with very different perspectives – from liberal academic Maurice Isserman to radical social theorist/activist Manning Marable – NLN approached Feldman and requested an interview. Bob agreed and the following material gives the reader an insight into Feldman’s positive, militant and nonviolent approach to politics.

NLN: What is your relationship to the 40th anniversary event/organizing committee?

BF: A recent New York Daily News opinion section column by some right-wing propagandist tried to characterize the 40th anniversary event/organizing committee as “leftist” and “radical.” But, in reality, the political orientation of the 40th anniversary event/organizing committee is just left-liberal, I think. Not radical left. For instance, there’s no panel at the 40th anniversary event devoted to discussing the current situation of the still-imprisoned David Gilbert, who spoke on behalf of the Columbia Strike Committee at the June 1968 Counter-Commencement.

I’m a subscriber to the 40th anniversary event/organizing committee’s yahoo group list and I have been helping to publicize the event on the internet. Also, I was asked last week to speak on the IDA issue for 2 to 3 minutes at the Friday night “What Happened” session.

NLN: What is the purpose/mission of your blog?

BF: The purpose/mission of my blog is to try to promote amnesty for all U.S. prisoners in 2008 and more sustained anti-imperialist non-violent mass resistance to IDA and to university complicity with the U.S. war machine. Another purpose/mission of the blog is to try to promote radical democratic change and more sustained anti-imperialist non-violent mass resistance to U.S. media conglomerate censorship in 2008.

By providing my blog readers with the alternative historical information and alternative news about Columbia University and other U.S. power elite institutions that generally gets hidden by the media gatekeepers in the USA, my hope is that my blog readers will then tend to organize themselves more rapidly to non-violently resist Columbia University and other U.S. power elite institutions; and create participatory democracy in the USA in the 21st-century–before U.S. imperialism drags humanity into yet another endless war.

NLN: Why is the purpose of this event?

BF: The 1968 Columbia Student Revolt was a turning-point in 1960s anti-war movement history. And the U.S. war machine is waging an endless imperialist war now. Maybe holding an event that commemorates how anti-war students in 1968 non-violently resisted university complicity with the war machine at Columbia then, might encourage more anti-war activists to non-violently resist university complicity with the war machine now?. Also, one of the 1968 Columbia Strike leaders, Columbia-Barnard SDS Co-Founder David Gilbert, is still a political prisoner in New York State. Maybe holding an event that commemorates the 1968 Columbia Strike might encourage more people to support the “amnesty for all U.S. political prisoners in 2008″ demand?. Those are my two reasons for wanting to hold this 40th anniversary “68/08 commemoration of the student rebellion at Columbia.

But if you check out the www.columbia1968.info link for the schedule of events, you’ll notice that some of the other folks involved in setting up this event are more into holding the April event to “reexamine events from a wide range of viewpoints,” to “engage current students in a dialogue” and/or to “reconnect, reconcile and reflect” with other 1968 Columbia event participants. So I think the event is being held for a variety of reasons.

NLN: Who are you working with to make this happen?

BF: Some current students at Columbia and Barnard have been involved in working to make this event happen, along with some current Columbia and Barnard faculty members. But most of the people working to make this event happen have been the now-aging veterans of the 1968 Columbia Student Strike like myself.

NLN: What role did you play in the events of 1968 at Columbia? What would you have done differently?

BF: I was a member of the steering committee of Columbia-Barnard SDS between March 1967 and September 1968. Also, one of the six demands of the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt was that Columbia University end all its institutional ties to the Pentagon’s Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] weapons research think-tank. And I was the Columbia SDS activist who first discovered–14 months before the 1968 student revolt–that Columbia University was an institutional member of IDA.

I was brutalized by the cops when they cleared Fayerweather Hall on April 30, 1968. And I was suspended by the Columbia University for participating in the May 21-22, 1968 non-violent occupation of Hamilton Hall, shortly before the cops were again called in by the Columbia Administration to clear its campus of its students.

After the first police bust, Columbia-Barnard SDS’s mass student base grew so rapidly at Columbia and Barnard that it appeared that the “action-faction”‘s strategy of relying on militant, confrontational, non-violent mass disruption of Columbia University to both radicalize students and end institutional racism and university complicity with the war machine at Columbia was the most effective strategic approach. Yet, despite the further radicalizing effect on many young people of the August 1968 “Battle of Chicago”–where Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies played such a prominent role–when Columbia-Barnard SDS was unable to re-mobilize enough anti-war students to prevent Columbia from reopening in September 1968, it became evident that there were limits to how effective the “action-faction” strategic approach that had worked in the Spring of 1968 could be–in the absence of a political alliance with the African-American student radicals who had aligned with us in April 1968.

So, in retrospect, I think Columbia-Barnard SDS steering committee members should have devoted more time to attempting to reconstruct its April 1968 political alliance with the Student Afro-American Society leadership at Columbia. Also, I think Columbia-Barnard SDS steering committee members were too slow to respond to some of the discontent that was developing among anti-war movement women in 1968 about the level of male chauvinism that then existed within the New Left student movement.

And I think we also should have handled the post-April 23, 1968 mass media attention to Columbia-Barnard SDS people and mass media circus atmosphere at Columbia in a different way, in retrospect. But it’s often difficult in the current moment to see what might have been done differently, especially when it seemed that world history was moving in a more revolutionary democratic direction all over the globe in a rapid way in 1968.

NLN: Do you have the support of Columbia University?

BF: Columbia University is not financing the event. Originally, it appeared that the Columbia University Administration was going to co-sponsor, finance and help organize the commemoration event. Perhaps to try to project the image that “Columbia University has changed since 1968″? But after seeing that the commemoration program of panels and events proposed by the veterans of the 1968 Columbia Strike was not exactly what the Columbia Administration had envisioned, the Columbia Administration decided not to co-sponsor, finance and help organize the commemoration event. The Columbia Administration did agree, though–after some subsequent Columbia faculty and current student pressure– to permit the current students and ’68 Columbia Strike veterans to hold the commemoration event at Columbia’s School of Journalism.

NLN: What is the message you hope to get out?

The message I hope to get out is that the 1968 Columbia University Student Revolt was a morally justified act of student and community non-violent resistance to Columbia University’s institutional racism, complicity with the U.S. war machine and undemocratic attempt to suppress anti-war student dissent. Some of the other folks involved in helping to set up the commemoration event may be seeking to get out other messages about the late 1960s and current historical era.

NLN: Who are you trying to reach with this event? Is it a reunion or are you trying to reach organizers who are currently active?

BF: All of us hope to attract as many currently active students and current organizers as possible, in order to learn from them, share ideas with them and attempt to create as much of an intergenerational discussion as possible. That’s one reason that, unlike some academic left conferences, the 40th anniversary commemoration event is free and there’s no admissions charge. But it’s also a reunion of people who felt their life direction changed dramatically as a result of the impact of the 1968 events at Columbia.

NLN: Do you see any similarities between Gym Crow and Manhattanville?

BF: As a co-author of the 1968 Columbia Citizenship Council pamphlet, “Columbia and the Community,” which took the position that an institution that serves as a tool of U.S. imperialism, like Columbia University, has no right to expand its campus over the objections of local community residents, I’m, obviously, opposed to Columbia University’s latest land-grabbing campus expansion project in West Harlem/Manhattanville. In the same way that Columbia University undemocratically ignored the community groups’ demand that no gym be built in Morningside Park in 1968, Columbia University in 2008 is also undemocratically ignoring the demand of various neighborhood tenants’ groups that the local community board’s West Harlem/Manhattanville development plan–not Columbia University’s expansion plan–be the plan that is implemented north of West 125th Street. Just because “tax-exempt” Columbia University has spent a lot of money lobbying various local and state politicians and agencies in New York–despite its tax-exempt status–on behalf of its private special interests, doesn’t mean it has anymore of a right to expand its campus north of West 125th Street than it had to build a Jim Crow Gym in Morningside Park in 1968.

NLN: What is your opinion of new SDS? And it’s non-student counterpart, MDS?

BF: I think if the new SDS and MDS were able to get as much mass media access as Columbia-Barnard SDS activists got in the New York Times and on local New York City tv stations after April 23, 2008, they could both possibly be able to recruit large numbers of people during this current “era of permanent war” and economic crisis of the U.S. economic system. Because I think large numbers of people of all generations in the USA now realize that some radical democratic change in U.S. society is required and I think people are open to eventually mobilizing behind anti-imperialist and anti-corporate groups like the new SDS and MDS.

Before Martin Luther King was eliminated on April 4, 1968, there were only about 30 hard-core Columbia-Barnard SDS activists who, on a daily basis, attempted to politicize the campus and recruit other Columbia and Barnard students into the Columbia-Barnard SDS chapter. And even after Martin Luther King’s assassination and before April 23, 1968, there were still less than 40 hard-core Columbia-Barnard SDS activists doing day-to-day organizing at Columbia. Yet look how many more anti-war students ended up rallying in support of Columbia-Barnard SDS on April 23, 1968 when the Columbia Administration tried to repress Columbia SDS people for non-violently protesting against its complicity with the U.S. war machine, as evidenced by Columbia’s IDA connection.

NLN: Do you need any help with the event – how can people plug in?

BF: If people can let others know about the 40th anniversary commemoration event that would be great. People can also plug into the event by checking out the www.columbia1968.info site. And I think that’s where they can also find out about where organizations table can be set up. If the weather in late April is good, I’ve heard that some of the organizational tables for the current student activist groups might be set up on Low Plaza, so I imagine the organization tables of non-campus groups can also be set up on Low Plaza in late April.

NLN: Is there anything else you like to say?

BF: Freedom Now. Peace Now. End University Complicity With The War Machine. Amnesty for All U.S. Political Prisoners. All Mass Media Power To The People.