by Mariah Blake
NARRATION:
A few weeks ago I was strolling through Columbia University's campus. People in shorts and tank tops were sprawling on the grass. I was about to join them when I heard something, well, strange.
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NARRATION:
I walked over to the main gates. About 25 people were marching in a circle. They were chanting, holding up signs and beating on plastic buckets.
It was a good old-fashioned protest.
A group of Japanese tourists were snapping photos. Maybe they wanted to take home a little piece of Columbia's great legacy of dissent.
After all, the protests that ravaged Columbia's campus in April of 1968 were one of the defining moments of the late 60s protest movement.
But, over the last decade, I've earned two degrees at Columbia and spent a lot of time on its campus. And I had never before seen a demonstration. I was convinced that the legacy of protest was dead.
The protesters I saw that day were Columbia teaching assistants. They were demanding benefits. Several days later, a different group was demonstrating. They were calling on the university to quit experimenting on animals.
That's when the thought occurred to me.
Maybe Columbia's activist spirit wasn't dead, just hibernating. And maybe, just maybe, the long slumber was coming to an end.
After all, the events that led up to the 1968 revolt seem to be happening all over again.
It was Columbia's planned expansion that triggered the last student revolt. The university wanted to build a gymnasium in the craggy strip of land known as Morningside Park. Opponents felt the building's layout would cut Columbia off from its black neighbors. And they worried it was the first in a series of land grabs by an institution set on taking over Harlem.
So the students and their supporters protested fiercely. They took over seven campus buildings and held them for more than a week. They only left when police dragged them out, banging their heads down the marble steps. More than 700 people were arrested, nearly 150 injured. But the gym plans were scrapped.
Now Columbia is planning another expansion. And it dwarfs the Morningside Park gymnasium. It plans to take over the entire Manhattan Valley neighborhood, nearly doubling in size. A project of that scope is sure to send ripples through the surrounding community.
And there are other similarities between 1968 and 2004.
Student discontent back then was fed by a conflict that was taking place thousands of miles away. The United States was locked in bloody war that had suddenly veered out of control. Body bags were showing up in newspapers and flickering across television screens.
Every day Iraq looks a little more like Vietnam.
Since I saw those two protests I've come to campus day-after-day thinking I might find another one. But there haven't been any.
Yesterday a student socialist organization did put up a sign in front of the 116th Street gate, showing photos of tortured Iraqi prisoners. It read: "You call this liberation?"
Nearby, undergrads were trying to hand out anti-war literature. But few people took it.
A new era of activism may be on its way at Columbia, but it hasn't arrived yet.
BACK ANNOUNCE:
Mariah Blake is a perpetual student Columbia University.