Students: Siege on Morningside Heights

Not since the battle of Berkeley has there been anything that could quite match last week's disorders at Manhattan's Columbia University. Demonstrators stormed the office of the university's president, held three officials hostage for 26 hours, took over five university buildings, eventually forced the 17,000-student university to suspend all classes.

Situated in Morningside Heights at the edge of Harlem, Columbia is an academic enclave surrounded by poverty and decay. Its students, a large number of them subway commuters, are both liberal and well integrated. But the school itself, while earnestly trying to deal with the urban ills in its neighborhood, has fallen far short of the expectations of either its students or its neighbors.

Long Challenge. Much of the blame falls on President Grayson Kirk, whose aloof, often bumbling administration has proved unresponsive to grievances that have long been festering on campus. Last month, when a group led by Students for a Democratic Society marched into Low Library to protest a university ban on indoor demonstrations, Kirk began disciplinary proceedings against six of the leaders. Feeling thus challenged, and long provoked, the SDS last week organized a defiant demonstration. The students demanded that the charges against the six be dropped, and also seized the occasion to protest the construction of a new off-campus gymnasium.

The gymnasium controversy has been simmering ever since the university in 1959 leased part of nearby Morningside Park as a site for the facility. A few Harlem leaders objected on the grounds that the project would deprive them of park land—though the area involved occupies barely two acres of the 30-acre park. A later objection arose over the architectural plans: while Columbia intended to make part of the gym exclusively available to Harlem youngsters, it blundered by providing for a rather grand entrance opening on to the campus and a separate, less conspicuous one, facing Harlem. Negroes seized upon the gym as a symbol of back-door paternalism.

Sudden Power. Last week's demonstration began quietly enough, with some 400 students gathering on the campus plaza. University officials promptly offered to meet with them to consider their demands that the gym be abandoned, as well as student objections to the university's ties with the Institute for Defense Analysis, a Washington "thinktank" that conducts military-related research for the Federal Government. But the students, carried away by their own heady sense of sudden power, shouted down the university's offer and marched to Morningside Park, where they tore down a fence at the gymnasium excavation site.

Returning to campus, the demonstrators next stormed ivy-covered Hamilton Hall, headquarters for undergraduate Columbia College. Inside they stationed themselves in front of the office of Acting Dean Henry S. Coleman. After telling his visitors that he had "no intention of meeting any demands under a situation such as this," Coleman went into his office with two other school officials. Blocking Coleman's door, the demonstrators pasted up photos of Lenin and Che Guevara, and chanted "Racist gym must go." As night came, the demonstrators were still there—and Coleman and his friends casually played cards.