Students: Crisis after Calm

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For a time, calm seemed to be returning to Columbia University. Last week, though, the troubled Morningside Heights campus was shaken by another ugly, brutal pitched battle between students and police—providing a clear indication that the university's problems are far from over.

Until the night of bloodshed, the university seemed to be on the road to recovery. Faculty and administrators were getting down to the first serious talks about reform, and when student rebels occupied a university-owned tenement on Morningside Heights to protest conditions in the building, police managed to break up that demonstration without ruffling a collar.

Defiance Duplication. Later in the week, though, the university announced the suspension of four S.D.S. leaders, including its chairman, Mark Rudd. In protest, Rudd and a band of his faithful followers then seized Hamilton Hall, the main classroom building of Columbia's undergraduate college. The demonstrators threw up barricades, apparently trying to duplicate last month's five-day defiance of the administration.

This time, university officials presented the dissidents with two alternatives: vacate the building or be suspended. About half of the revolutionaries marched outside; the rest, including Rudd, stayed on and were later taken into custody by police who moved in through underground tunnels. Rudd himself was arrested by a long-haired plainclothesman who, passing as a protester, had mingled with the students and won their confidence.

As news of the arrests spread across campus, other students began jeering at police, tearing bricks from sidewalks to hurl through windows, and constructing barricades at campus entrances. Fires were lit in two academic buildings; in one, the unpublished research papers of an unpopular professor were used as kindling to feed the flames.

At Low Library, hooligans shattered windows in the office of President Kirk, who finally gave the order for police to clear the campus. When a brick slammed into the face of a patrolman, 1,000 outraged police charged through the crowd, swinging night sticks and chasing students up the stairs of their dormitories. By the time an uneasy peace was restored, 68 people—including 17 policemen—had been injured, and 177 persons were under arrest.

Exquisite Timing. In the aftermath, it was evident that the police, though certainly provoked, had once again cracked plenty of heads with unnecessary roughness. The university administration had displayed its customary exquisite sense of poor timing in suspending Rudd and the S.D.S. leaders during a period of relative calm and then heightening tension by ordering a full-scale clearing of the entire campus.

But it was equally clear that Columbia's academic rebels are so concerned with the failures of an intransigent system that they themselves are intransigently determined to prevent the university's restoration at any cost. "The events of Tuesday night," said Columbia Provost David Truman, "brought home to a lot of faculty and students just what we're up against with the hard core of the demonstrators."