Students protested what they saw as injustice and demanded change.
FILE - Mark Rudd, a leader of the student protest at Columbia University in New York City, is interviewed outside Low Memorial Library, background, April 25, 1968, which has been occupied by students since the previous day. Rudd said the purpose of the protest was to"hit at" what he claimed was the university's policy of"racism and support for imperialism." – College students taking up space and making demands for change.
After several days, Columbia’s president allowed a thousand New York Police Department officers to be brought in to clear most demonstrators out. The arrests, 700 of them, were not gentle. Fists were flying, clubs swinging. Dozens of students and more than a dozen officers were injured. Columbia University officials did not respond to an email asking about the school’s position on the legacy of the 1968 events. Those events, like the current protest, “sparked a huge increase in student activism around the country,” Mark Rudd, a leader of that protest, said in an email to The Associated Press. “Myself and others spent the entire year after April 1968 traveling the country, spreading to campuses the spirit of Columbia.”But the echoes of the past aren’t only in inspiration.
“Freedom of speech is so important, but not beyond the right to security,” said Itai Dreifuss, 25, a third-year student who grew up in the United States and Israel. He was near the encampment this past week, standing in front of posters taped to a wall of the people who were taken hostage by Hamas in the Oct 7 attack that set off the current conflagration.
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