Skipped History is a newsletter focused on overlooked and underexamined events, movements, and people that have shaped American history. In this installment, host Ben Tumin speaks to University of New Orleans historian and teacher Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America, about parallels between student protests in the 1960s and today. In conversation, they explore the growing disproportionality of violence unleashed on students.
As Tumin says, Dr. Shepherd reveals how, then and now, administrators didn't want the “power structure uprooted or shaken up in any way.”
A condensed transcript edited for clarity is republished below with permission.
Listen to the full story on Skipped History here.
Ben: What drove student protests in the 1960s, and why was Columbia a major scene of unrest?
LLS: Throughout the '60s, students protested against American intervention in Vietnam and in support of civil rights at home.
Columbia in 1968 represented a major hinge point in student activism. On one hand, a group of Columbia students protested the university's partnership with the Department of Defense. Some university-affiliated researchers and faculty were doing weapons research and had related contracts with the American military.
There was also a group of students protesting a new gym on the edges of campus and encroaching on the neighborhood of Harlem. The gym’s structure itself was meant to be racist in a way. While it was publicly accessible, Harlem residents had a separate entrance from students on the opposite side of the building and an entire floor below.
Ben: Conceptually, one entrance was through the Champs-Élysées, and the other was through the Times Square subway station.
LLS: Yes, an extremely stark difference.
So you had both groups of students protesting over the span of a week. The response of Columbia administrators is really instructive here, especially for today.
The Columbia president, Grayson Kirk, called in the NYPD to break up the sit-ins happening on campus; to forcibly remove the students who’d occupied campus buildings. They'd taken over the administration hall and the Low Library. Once police were called to campus, the whole situation escalated from a nonviolent sit-in to students being arrested, people getting injured, and violent battles with the police.
Then, like now, violence occurred after the police arrived, not before. When administrators call the police, that’s when people get hurt.
Ben: Something that stands out to me is how violent protests in the '60s and '70s were compared to now.
To cite some information from your book, throughout September and October 1968, activists bombed war-related spaces at or near universities on a nearly daily basis. Senate records indicate that over 4,000 bombs exploded on college campuses between January 1st, 1969, and April 15th, 1970. In the one week following the Kent State shooting on May 4th, 1970, over a million students protested at over a thousand colleges, and 169 bombs exploded on university grounds.
Those actions seem pretty aggressive when compared to students in tents today.
LLS: Yes, who’ve been peacefully in encampments.
Ben: There's only so much violence that can be conducted in a pair of Birkenstocks, both physically and spiritually —
LLS: — until the police get called in.
To me, speaking in April of 2024, it seems administrators are more willing to call the police pretty quickly — whereas, in the '60s, they were a little bit more hesitant. After seeing the police-led violence at Columbia, many university presidents retired in the following years. They were just like, we don't want to deal with this. We would rather retire and not have blood on our hands.
Campus responses grew more violent after Kent State. Administrators and municipal leaders worried that local city police wouldn’t be able to handle the sheer volume of protests that broke out on campuses nationwide. They deputized campus security guards, in many places turning them into police officers who can arrest, tase, and shoot you.
Another major distinction in levels of violence is rhetorical violence. In the '60s and '70s, students were calling to overthrow the U.S. government. There may be calls for that today, but they aren't really dominating the discourse. Instead, what are the student demands today? They're asking for things like universities to divest their endowments. They're calling for just a ceasefire, right?
Ben: You're getting at a really important point here, which is that politicization of the protests obscures what students are actually there for: advocating for the lives of people who are being killed every day. I don’t think it’s so out of left field to speak up on behalf of Palestinians, over 30,000 of whom have been killed.
LLS: You say not out of left field, but it sort of is in the literal sense that the protests have become a matter of leftist politics. Even centrists don't seem to support doing anything materially to stop the war. And though rhetorically, Trump has said student protests are worse than the Charlottesville white nationalist rally, practically speaking, President Biden's stance isn't much different. He’s said that college students don't understand what's happening in Palestine.
Ben: In your book, you cite the historian Nancy MacLean. She explains that the aim of conservatives was and remains “to turn state universities into dissent-free suppliers of trained labor.” What does she mean?
LLS: She’s pointing to a structural thing, right? Administrators’ goal — and I mean not only presidents but also trustees and people in positions of governance since faculty have lost that power over the years — is for students to show up, pay tuition, graduate, and continue sending in donations.
They don't want the power structure uprooted or shaken up in any sort of way. They don't want students to use any of the criticisms or lessons they've learned to question the powers of the institution and the people who run it. Clearly, that goal has become more of a shared political project today.
Again, we're talking about this really early on. We may yet see an escalation before school's out for summer. We’re not yet at the point that we reached in 1968 or after Kent State. And I’d bet protests pick up again in the fall because that's what happened before.
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