For those who remember it, the chaos and disruption plaguing the campus of Columbia University are drawing parallels to a similar demonstration that occurred in April 1968.
Fifty-six years ago, a group of students occupied areas and buildings on campus, including the academic building Hamilton Hall, as an act of protest against the Vietnam War and Columbia’s plans for a gymnasium. The illegal demonstration culminated in police action that took place in the wee hours of the morning of April 30, 1968. The New York City Police Department used tear gas to clear the occupants, and more than 100 students were injured along with 12 police officers. Over 700 people were arrested.
On Tuesday evening, 56 years to the day since the 1968 occupation was suppressed, the NYPD entered Hamilton Hall to arrest student protesters who had illegally occupied the building in protest of Columbia’s ties to Israel and the war in Gaza. Chants of “Free Palestine” echoed all through the campus. City officials said 109 people were arrested in the operation.
The parallels are striking. Anti-war protests that expressed sympathies with a communist government in 1968, and anti-war protests that are expressing support for the terrorist organization Hamas. Police called in to conduct a nighttime operation to clear an illegal occupation. All on the very same day of the calendar.
As the nation hurtles through a bitterly divisive election year, the ghosts of 1968 are haunting Democrats and the Left as they desperately try to ensure President Joe Biden is reelected and Donald Trump does not return to the White House. Not helping matters is the party’s decision to hold its 2024 nominating convention in Chicago, the same city that hosted the event in 1968 amid widespread rioting.
But in the 56 years since the student protests and occupations at Columbia were suppressed, campus activism has changed in considerable ways, just as the participants themselves have changed. After all, the occupiers of Hamilton Hall in 1968 could very well be the grandparents of today’s demonstrators.
Unlike their predecessors, however, the occupiers of Hamilton Hall in 2024 are operating with an aura of entitlement and expectation that was not present 56 years ago. The occupiers of 1968 were far more radical and revolutionary than their successors of 2024.
In a laughable exchange with the media this week, a doctoral student at Columbia involved in the demonstration demanded that the university provide food to the students who had occupied Hamilton Hall.
“It seems like you’re saying, ‘we want to be revolutionaries, we want to take over this building, now would you please bring us some food,'” a reporter told her.
At the University of California, Los Angeles, where similar demonstrations are taking place, demonstrators are begging for allergen-friendly hot food, zip-ties, epi-pens, and inhalers.
Indeed, the demonstrators of today are a far cry from the militant self-righteousness that characterized the anti-war protests of the 1960s. As much as the anti-Israel activists fancy themselves the heirs of their anti-Vietnam war forefathers, their generational sensibilities betray an entitlement that is poorly masked by revolutionary rhetoric.
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The baby boomers that occupied Columbia in 1968 were raised in a harsher and less wealthy nation than the one that raised the keffiyeh scarf-wearing doctoral students of today. And this has been borne out in their different protest tactics. Rather than a revolution of disruption, today’s occupiers are engaging in a demonstration of entitlement and expectation. Instead of making aggressive and militant demands as their predecessors did, they are seeking accommodation and appeasement.
For this spectacle of radical campus demonstrations, the parallel may be 1968, but the 2024 edition of campus radicalism has still very much retained its 21st-century flavor.