Columbia's student activism over Gaza echoes historic struggles

In March of 1967, Columbia University student Bob Feldman discovered documents in a college library detailing the school's affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analyses, a pro-armament thinktank linked to the United States Department of Defense.

Armed with the evidence, Feldman, a former Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) member, soon galvanised his peers into launching an anti-war campaign on campus. For one year, students demanded that the university abandon its affiliation with the institute, which supported US involvement in the Vietnam War.

As the university increasingly sought to silence anti-war protests on the campus, the SDS and the Student Afro-American Society (SAS) invited Columbia and Barnard College students to stage a more confrontational demonstration.

On April 23, 1968, students marched to Morningside Park in Harlem, where Columbia had been controversially building a new gymnasium on public land. The building would have required Harlem's mostly Black residents to enter on a different level and would only grant them access to part of the facilities, prompting the SAS to call it "Gym Crow."

The year of student protest

When the police intervened and arrested one activist, protesters returned to Columbia and occupied its Hamilton Hall. For seven days, the eyes of the United States and the world turned to the university. Since last week, this has been happening again, as students protest at Columbia, this time for Gaza.

Students encamped right now on the lawn of the university's campus claim to belong to the same tradition of anti-war resistance.

To this day, 1968 is known as the year of student activism, and for good reason. Around the world, from the North to the South, from the East to the West, in authoritarian or democratic regimes, students revolted against the status quo.

In the occupied buildings of the Sorbonne or on the streets of Cape Town, Prague, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo, student demands and goals varied, but many of them shared a common theme.

They sought to confront persistent white supremacy and neocolonialism, to bring an end to the Vietnam War, to stop the development of nuclear weapons, and to overthrow the dictatorial regimes that proliferated during the Cold War. Columbia and Barnard students were part of this worldwide struggle.

Standing against Apartheid

Less than two decades later, in April 1985, Columbia would return to the headlines when members of the university's Coalition for a Free South Africa chained closed the doors to Hamilton Hall to protest the university's investments in corporations operating in Apartheid South Africa.

A few hours later, more than 200 protesters joined them. The seven students at the origin of the movement had been fasting for days before blocking the building. The university's administration response is said to have been: "Keep fasting." Protests on multiple American campuses ensued.

"There is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience," Martin Luther King, Jr. once argued in another context. Columbia and Barnard students belong, indeed, to a long tradition of anti-war resistance.

A tradition that they rightly argue their universities have constantly commemorated and celebrated in the past decades. Once again, American students are turning to past political movements to find inspiration amid their current struggle.

But what is happening at Columbia is also part of a much more recent history.

Crisis generation

The generation of students participating in the encampments that are now rapidly proliferating on US campuses has been politicised throughout a decade.

They have grown up amid the constant perception that the job market is shrinking, that equal opportunity is a farce given structural inequality in the form of racism and sexism, and that previous generations are doing nothing to combat the climate crisis.

This is also a generation that, much more than those who occupied the Columbia campus in 1968 and 1985, learned in the classroom of their very institutions that they should be critical of the university's, and their specific university's, social role.

A new generation of professors, many of whom belonged to groups previously underrepresented in American academia, invited these students to take seriously the idea that universities are fundamental agents in the perpetuation of American military expansionism.

And they are right to think so: Universities with large endowments are companies, many of which invest in the production of armaments that fuel armed conflicts around the world.

They also actively contribute to the production of knowledge about the cultures, languages, and political traditions of the regions in which the United States seeks to expand its control.

What's next

The repercussions of pro-Palestine activism on American campuses can already be seen.

The same right-wing actors who until recently denounced the "cancel culture" in American academia and advocated for a university culture based on freedom of expression are now policing and aiming to criminalise criticism of Israel. The hypocrisy of these double-faced claims should not lead us to ignore how effective they seem to be.

In their crusade against measures to expand diversity, equity and inclusion in American universities, right-wing militants have sought to show that universities are instead a cradle for dangerous liberal and radical ideas.

By now associating student anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and terrorism, they seem to be persuading large swathes of the public that this is indeed the case.

The fact that US President Joe Biden's administration has mobilised the same discourse against the Columbia students will certainly contribute to this trend.

On social media, the government of Israel is also applying the same rhetoric against the students. The global right and far right will know how to adapt it to their local contexts.

The proliferation of anti-war encampments around the United States is rapidly growing and will probably increase even more in the days and weeks to come.

Given the visibility, positive or negative, that the press has given to these movements, and the debates that have taken place about them on social media, it is likely that similar encampments will begin to appear in other countries and continents as well, both as a strategy of resistance and as a gesture of solidarity toward the Barnard and Columbia students.

Since the 1960s, student movements have shaped and reshaped the world, often in unpredictable ways. We are likely just witnessing the start of a new global student movement with the potential to reconfigure American society and the role of the United States in the world.