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When we look back at the student upheavals at Columbia University in 1968 and compare them to what happened in the spring of 2024, we might take comfort in some basic metric such as size and dismiss the more recent student demonstrations and unrest as the smaller of the two, and therefore the less consequential. That’s probably a mistake.
Last spring, the students weren’t wasting their time. The 1968 upheavals led to changes across American universities; the more recent student radicalism at Columbia could, in time, change the world.
1968: The Mother of All Student Revolts
In April and May of 1968, Columbia University underwent the mother of all student revolts in its history, which upended every corner and cranny at the university. But if the climate at the school in 1968 was intensely political – mainly because of the ongoing Vietnam War – the actual demands of the students were not especially radical: they focused mainly on questions of student power vis-à-vis the campus administration and an amnesty for protestors who were arrested by the police.
On April 24, 1968, a sit-in at one university building escalated quickly into an occupation of five buildings by close to a thousand students. Six days later, when members of the New York City Police Department (NYPD) cleared the buildings, they arrested close to seven hundred people. Incredibly, about a tenth of the entire student body got “busted” that night for trespassing and unlawful assembly.
No one on campus could escape the upheaval. Petitions circulated. Emotional speeches were made. Rules were broken. Committees of one kind or another were formed among the faculty as much as among the students. It was a case of university political activism at its highest pitch and the most notable example of Ivy League political activism up to that time, and for decades afterward.
The radical group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) soon occupied the Low Library and in it, the president’s office. Other groups of students allied with the SDS took over three additional Columbia buildings. The Black Students Afro-American Society (SAAS), in turn, took control of their own building, Hamilton Hall.
The Mystique of Revolution
The mystique of revolution was in the air. The SDS leaders wore Che Guevara berets, smoked cigars Fidel Castro-style with their boots up on the university president’s desk and referred to the buildings they controlled as “communes.” A red, communist-style flag flew over Mathematics Hall. The aesthetics and rhetoric observed by SDS and SAAS made them the most recognizable campus radical movements of the 1960s.
Some students cited more prosaic motivations behind their decision to support the demonstrations and building occupations. More than one student participant observed that these “communes” were the only places on campus where they could spend the night with their girlfriends.
However, among the more radical student leaders there were some who were clearly gunning to “bring down the system” and believed that the “uprising” they were instigating on Columbia’s campus was as good a start as any. The ambitious scope and radical intentions behind their actions has set the SDS and SAAS, and particularly the SDS, apart from other groups in American student activism history.
Administrators worried that moving against SAAS in Hamilton Hall would spark riots in Harlem. They also worried the students who were against the protests, the “jocks”, would physically attack the hated “pukes,” as they called the radicals.
When the police finally came, they did not hold back.
Only at Hamilton Hall did negotiations lead to an orderly exit of the building (along with 88 arrests). In other buildings, both students and faculty formed human chains around the structures. The police had to gain entrance by force.
In addition, the police found themselves arresting far more people than they had anticipated, prompting the provocative act of bringing paddy wagons right on campus, despite NYPD assurances to administrators that this wouldn’t happen.
The police ordered a crowd on the big South Lawn in the center of the campus to disperse. Unfortunately, the exit gates were locked. The melee that followed sent ninety students and thirteen policemen to the hospital.
From the ‘Bust’ to the Strike
After “the bust” came the SDS-led student strike, which effectively ended the spring term. Those professors who tried to teach were harassed, and at least one had his office broken into. A May 21 reprise of the original demonstrations—which was all about the disciplinary measures being taken against student leaders—ended with Hamilton Hall being briefly taken over again, as well as more student arrests and injuries.
A Columbia University fact-finding report, The Cox Commision Report published in late 1969, did not mince any words about what had happened.
The report was simply titled “The Crisis at Columbia.” It said: “The violence has now yielded to bitterness and distrust. Only heroically open-minded and patient efforts can repair the injury.”
It also wrote: “The radical demonstrations for ‘student power’ illustrate what can occur when thoughtful groups trained to criticize and dissent are forced into tactics of manipulation instead of the rational correction of defects in education and research…Among the young, inflated rhetoric and bizarre personal appearance have become symbolic behavior indicating disapproval of the ‘Establishment’ and the older generation.”
So, what did the students want?
It is much easier to say what they were against.
Changing Demographics and Vietnam Motivated the 1968 Protests
For one, the student demonstrators of 1968 scorned what they viewed as a tin-eared university administration taken completely off guard by a rapidly changing student body.
Columbia in the late sixties was evolving. Ivy League colleges were transitioning from being finishing schools (and professional feeder schools) for a largely private school, Yankee elite into institutions seeking the best and brightest students of all backgrounds from across the nation. Students from public schools were, thankfully, making up a larger share of their student populations.
In addition, there were fewer than 25 Black students on the entire Columbia campus in 1968. The student demonstrators of that year believed passionately in the further recruitment of Blacks and other minority groups to diversify the student body. In essence, elements of the student body were demonstrating in favor of affirmative action.
Additionally, the college was still all male. Before 1968, women were only allowed in the dorms on Sunday afternoons, and then you had to keep your door open to prove no ‘hanky panky’ was going on. This was a highly traditional arrangement for a major northeastern university, given that the “summer of love” had already happened in 1967.
Politically, the demonstrators were also deeply opposed to the Vietnam War.
The students had skin in this game, because, of course, there was a military draft system in place at the time. As full-time students, they could defer military service, but this only meant that, if you won a deferment, you went to school knowing that someone less privileged was serving in your place and might not come home.
To some degree, the guilt felt by students holding prized military deferments can be seen as an underlying, emotional motivation for the 1968 unrest.
The ’68 occupiers clearly despised the Vietnam War—but what they could do to stop it as they manned their campus barricades was unclear. The American public at large was turning against the war in 1968. President Lyndon Johnson had just declined to run for reelection that spring due to increasingly vocal opposition to his handling of the war. But if Johnson took pushback from union men and midwestern housewives to heart, it was unclear whether he was moved by the protests of affluent Ivy League students.
The Student Demands of 1968: Less Than Meets the Eye
Yes, there had been protests early in the 1960s at Columbia against Marine recruitment on campus and against the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). But the only specific student demand directed at the war when the buildings were occupied was that Columbia end ties with an obscure organization called The Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), a think tank no one really cared about.
Links between IDA and Columbia were minimal—it involved three professors—as was IDA’s influence in the wider world. The sad fact was that at the time of the protests, Columbia had no outstanding research contracts with the military. Kicking the IDA off campus would have posed little difficulty for the college administration, and its practical effect on U.S. handling of the war would have been next to nothing.
The most consequential of the student radicals’ demands was for Columbia to cease construction of a new gymnasium inside neighboring Morningside Park, a facility Columbia needed and a project the university once touted as part of a drive “to cleanse and restore” its Morningside Heights neighborhood. Fierce opposition to the gym, however, had already arisen in the surrounding, largely Black community.
Columbia’s student radicals came late to this party. During the gym’s planning stages, in March 1966, 1,500 Columbia students had actually signed a petition in support of the project, and event which received scant attention.
By April 1968, however, after construction began, over 4,000 out of approximately 6,400 students polled agreed that construction should stop. Halting construction was one student demand the university quickly met. The project would ultimately be abandoned, and belated student opposition certainly influenced that decision.
The students’ other demands had to do with student disciplinary bodies, the right to demonstrate indoors, and amnesty for protesters who had been disciplined by the university or arrested by the New York City police—essentially questions about student power and expression and how punishment would be meted out to the students who had disrupted the peace of the university.
1968: A Largely Symbolic Uprising Organized by A Tiny Group of Radicals
As the Commission’s report said tersely: “The avowed objectives of the April demonstration, stripped of their content and symbolism, were inadequate causes for an uprising.”
Mark Rudd, the campus SDS leader, would later admit as much. In his words, the SDS had “manufactured the issues…the gym was bull. It doesn’t mean anything to anybody.”
The most radical student leaders wanted a dramatic, shocking ending to the demonstrations of spring 1968 and did not negotiate seriously. Scenes of police in riot gear, damaged buildings, and mass arrests were the images that they wanted beamed out to the country from the Columbia campus, in hopes of igniting more demonstrations on additional American universities and eventually, they hoped, a revolution.
As the Commission put it: “One of the causes of the April disturbances was the organized effort of a tiny group of students…whose object was to subvert and destroy the university as a corrupt pillar of an evil society.”
As one participant explained: “The point was to show our opposition to the Vietnam War and racial injustice—and stick it to Columbia.”
Showing opposition to the Vietnam War and racial injustice was very different from doing anything about either, however. In later years, this contradiction would profoundly inform the actions of many former student radicals as they ditched their Che Guevara garb, put on tweed jackets, and joined the faculties of the universities they had once confronted from behind barricades.
The internal politics of elite American universities in the 2020s have been strongly influenced by the views of the generation of 1968. In this, we can say that their consequences have been felt principally in the domain of elite American education. Their impact on geopolitics in the half century after 1968 was pratically nil.
2024: BDS Movement Ideas Formed the Core of Student Demands
The recent student protests, by contrast, were concentrated on one central, specific, and consequential demand: that Columbia University should end all academic ties with the State of Israel and divest from companies doing business in Israel.
Such divestment, the radical students of 2024 reasoned, contributed to the pressure that resulted in South Africa ending its apartheid regime in the early 1990s. Divestment, as they say, has a track record.
These were not your granddaddy’s student demonstrations—they had much more substance and kick even if they were smaller in size and somewhat less disruptive to campus life than the bigger and louder demonstrations of 1968. The 2024 student unrest was also a show of the continuing popularity of the well-organized Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, which started in 2005, among left-leaning students at America’s elite college campuses.
2024 Marked by Higher Tension Between Student Groups
Tensions between groups of students on campus quickly became acute following the October 7, 2023 surprise attacks inside Israel by Hamas — the largest one-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
Supporters of Israel – both on and off-campus – were outraged at the lack of sympathy among certain segments of the student population, who at best showed something of a “what do you expect?” reaction and, in some cases, openly applauded the Hamas fighters who had slain Israeli civilians and taken over 250 Israelis and foreigners, including several American citizens, back to the Gaza Strip as hostages.
Within days of the October 7 attacks, as Israel’s heavy-handed military response in Gaza began, pro-Palestinian protests broke out on campus and in the streets of New York and other cities. Counter protests also flared up and simmered for months. Both sides, at times, claimed to feel unsafe. The university closed its gates to outsiders.
A student walkout in the winter of 2023-24 eventually led Columbia to ban several Pro-Palestinian student groups, one of which was a Jewish peace group. The college administration also placed some restrictions on demonstrations, making the argument that they needed a campus ‘that felt safe to all students’.
For the first six months after the October 7 attacks, it is fair to say that the tensions on campus cut in several simultaneous directions: between students and the Columbia Administration, but equally between opposing groups of students who felt compelled to advocate for their points of view and cross-pressure the administration.
The Gaza Solidarity Encampment and Its Critics
On the morning of April 17, 2024, the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, a collection of several dozen tents, popped up on one of Columbia’s lawns. Columbia president Nemat Shafik, who had just seen two Ivy League presidents be pressured out their jobs, sent in the police the next day. Over a hundred students were arrested for trespassing.
A new tent encampment sprung up on a second lawn the next day. It would be an intense and cohesive little community for about a week and half.
Undoubtedly, at this point the Columbia administrators were much more concerned about damage to the Columbia brand than they were about what was happening in Israel and Gaza. Debates over whether a genocide was, or was not, occurring in Gaza took the back seat to a student recruitment drive.
That week Columbia was holding its “welcoming activities” for admitted students and their families. The encampment greeted prospective students with a sign that read “Admitted Students Enroll in Revolution.”[i]
Conservative publications like The Wall Street Journal railed that Columbia was reaping what its “politically monoculture facilities have sown” and was becoming a hotbed of ‘woke’ policies.
In The New York Times, Bret Stephens would wonder if it wasn’t time for American Jews to “abandon” the elite Ivies, given that at these universities they were getting: “a cheap and easy revision of history that imagines Zionism is a form of colonialism (it is decidedly the opposite), that colonialism is something only white people do, and that as students at American universities, they can cheaply atone for their sins as guilty beneficiaries of the settler-colonialism they claim to despise.”
Prominent benefactors of Columbia also began halting their donations, a trend covered by that hard hitting muck-raker rag, Town and Country.
Who Were the Student Radicals of 2024?
How radical were the students who occupied portions of the Columbia campus in 2024? By all accounts, the campus green occupiers were much more concerned with the single issue of what was going on in Gaza, in relation to the broader controversies surrounding the Israel-Palestinian conflict, than they were with fomenting a socialist world revolution, about which they expressed scant interest.
Was there a core of dangerous “outside agitators” pushing the students to extreme views and actions, as some conservatives claimed?
In the end, about a third of the hundred people arrested after demonstrators occupied a college building were indeed non-students, but most of these fellow-travelers had resumes with little on them that implied professional agitation—they only joined the students near the end. The New York Times found the “outsiders” brought with them experience in a variety of professions such as professional saxophonist and nanny.
Columbia had changed enormously since 1968; over a third of its student body was now composed of foreign students from over 100 countries, a far cry from the still largely white and Anglo-Saxon student body of the late 1960s. The makeup of the demonstrators last spring reflected this diverse student body.
It is worth pointing out that, with the closing of Columbia’s campus gates in April 2024 (the gates remain shut as of March 2025) came a substantial reduction in reliable outside reporting on what was happening behind those gates. Columbia students of various ideological stripes, either in the college or those at the journalism school, did their best to fill the void.
Here is how one student-journalist describes what she found in the tent encampment:
“Student protestors seemed committed to building a community from scratch. Every day, it seemed there were new spaces popping up among the carefully organized tents: a food distribution area, a library, first aid, trash collection, a sunscreen table, peer support, a writing corner, a laptop charging station, a ‘nut zone’ for snacks, a whole table with stacks of matzah for Passover.”
It is a noteworthy detail, and perhaps surprising to many, that a significant portion of the 2024 protestors were Jewish. The same student-journalist recounted afterwards:
“Media coverage seems to have portrayed the protesters as rampantly antisemitic, belligerent, and spoiled. From interviews with dozens of protesters over the weeks, however, it is clear that many students had a lot at stake, from immigration status to their ability to graduate to their relationships with family. Jewish protesters said they felt safe and welcome in the encampment, and spoke of their protest as stemming from the core tenants of the faith.”
One Jewish activist who was among those arrested in the initial encampment snuck back onto campus to take part in a Passover seder in the next encampment after being held by the NYPD for eight hours, hands bound by zip ties, and getting suspended by the college.
The same protestor told the Independent, “There’s never a substantive response to people like me who are anti-Zionist Jews. There is a long tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism. I have so much love for the Jewish people of my community. We just have a political dispute, and that’s it.”
A Deep Generational and Religious-Secular Divide in Gen Z
The conventional view in the U.S. is that support for Israel among American Jews is overwhelming, and any news report of the Gaza demonstrators having Jewish supporters must be cherry picking a few people from a lunatic lefty fringe (a pinkish fringe many Jews are very proud of).
However, survey data from conventional sources such as the Pew Research Center suggest a far more complicated picture.
Even before the latest round of fighting Gaza, younger Jewish adults were more likely to harbor negative feelings towards Israel than their parents or grandparents. In addition, the more secular they are, the less likely they are to feel a bond with Israel.
The generation gap, this time, is found mainly between secular and religious Jews. Younger American Jews who are more religious continue to evince strong emotional bonds with the State of Israel, and more positive feelings toward it.
Of course, this recounting of a happy, peaceful student encampment protesting the war in Gaza last spring may come across as having the same romanticized, rosy hue that might tinge your old great uncle’s recollections of the vibes at Woodstock. All this contributor can say is that my Jewish family members who visited the encampment affirm that the mood there was, for the most part, orderly, serious and welcoming.
How the Protests of 2024 Ended
The leaders of the 2024 student encampment were also more willing to negotiate than their 1968 predecessors.
The college administration repeatedly extended deadlines for dismantling the encampment, given what the university described as a “constructive dialog.” The protestors agreed to steps such as reducing the number of tents, limiting the protests to Columbia students only, and prohibiting discriminatory and harassing language.
Finally, on April 29, the administration declared the talks deadlocked. Student demonstrators were suspended.
The next day, protesters broke into and occupied Hamilton Hall, site of the SAAS occupation fifty-six years before. The police cleared out the building the following day, arresting more than a hundred people.
Much of the encampment ended up in a trash-compacting dumpster. Graduation was cancelled. Classes continued with an online option. The police were invited to stay on campus through the end of the 2024 spring semester.
What happened in Columbia inspired similar demonstrations and encampments at universities across the U.S. Between April 12 and May 13, police arrested over 2,950 people at pro-Palestinian protests on at least 61 different campuses. By May 6, 140 colleges across America had experienced Pro-Palestinian demonstrations, according to Axios.
Will There be Geopolitical Fallout from the Latest Protests?
The student unrest at Columbia University in 2024 had markedly different characteristics from its 1968 precursor.
In 1968, a large minority of undergraduates, organized and, to some extent, manipulated by a small group of highly radicalized student leaders, completely disrupted the Columbia campus for several weeks. While the intentions of their most radical leaders were revolutionary and global, their actual demands were modest.
Nothing changed internationally due to the 1968 students’ actions. The Vietnam War ended seven years later, after they had graduated.
By contrast, the 2024 protest were initiated by a broad sub-set of student groups focused on one issue: the Israel-Palestine question and the war in Gaza. Many of these student groups, both Palestinian and Jewish in origin, profess an allegiance to the BDS movement, which aims to exert economic pressure on Israel.
The most committed demonstrators in 2024 accounted for a larger proportion of the student body. Nevertheless, a smaller number of students overall participated in the 2024 protests, the encampments and the occupation of buildings. Only 100 students were arrested in 2024 compared to nearly 900 in 1968.
The media frenzy surrounding the 2024 protests was probably greater and more sustained than in the late 1960s, but the campus overall was less disrupted.
The end of the protests makes clear that the BDS movement and its student sympathizers at Columbia face enormous institutional powers and hugely potent enemies (as well as having some potent friends and sympathizers of their own, such as the government of Qatar). However, it is also clear that the BDS movement is not going away anytime soon.
The pro-Palestinian student demonstrations on American college campuses in 2023 and 2024 have shown, to the surprise of many Americans, that Gen Z is as deeply polarized along political and religious-secular lines as are other generations of Americans. Young progressives view the pro-Palestinian cause as central to their worldview — even if they happen to be young, secular progressive Jews.
About 60% of Columbia college students polled in 2020 voiced their support of Columbia divesting from Israel. In April 2024, a new student referendum showed that support for the BDS campaign had risen to 76%.
In this article, we have compared the student demonstrations of 2024 to those of 1968. But perhaps the previous demonstrations we should look at were those at the Columbia University campus in 1985.
Those protests lasted for three weeks, had thousands of participants, and the president of Columbia visited hunger-striking students in the hospital. Within months, Columbia became the first large US university to completely divest from South Africa.
Could the protests of 2024 have similarly consequential geopolitical effects as the demonstrations and hunger strike of 1985? It’s probably too soon to say.
In view of many military analysts, Israel inflicted a heavy defeat on Hamas and Iran’s broader ‘Axis of Resistance’ in the recently concluded war. With the Trump Administration in power in Washington, Israel’s current government has a close ally in the White House. The rapprochement sought by the Trump Administration with Russia is likely to keep the UN Security Council from making any moves against Israel.
But as this site pointed out at the beginning of 2025, major tectonic shifts in the structure of global power are well underway, be it between Israel and Turkey, Turkey and Iran, and the U.S. and Europe. How the war in Ukraine ends will influence events on other continents. It is an old adage, but one that bears repeating: Anything can happen.
RHC
Robert Cox is a novelist and short story writer residing in New York City. Mr. Cox worked as a financial writer and editor in the banking and insurance industry for over 30 years. He is a graduate of Harvard University and is the nephew of Columbia Fact Finding Commission’s lead author.
