Watching the demonstrations at Columbia it’s difficult to avoid my clear recollection of the spring of 1968 as a graduate student at Columbia. While the underlying cause of the 1968 protests was just, the clear perspective of most of the Columbia community was resentment of the disruption of their expensive and hard won education. I was in Chicago for the 1968 convention as part of McGovern’s advance team. Those protests gave us Nixon. Similar protests this summer will likely bring another Trump term. True believers on the left occupy no higher moral ground than MTG and Matt Gaetz. Thanks for your thoughtful commentary.
These Soros backed, keffiyeh wearing protesters lose me with their support of Hamas, their wanton accusations of Israeli acts of genocide and the toxic "death to America" chants. The cynicism towards these people is aptly demonstrated by the prescient and arch John Lennon lyrics in the classic Beatles tune, "Revolution."
A litle history lesson: I was a freshman at Cornell in the spring of 1969 when the campus fell apart at the seams as a result of the takeover (with guns yet) of the student union by black students. Welcome to the Ivy League! Allan Bloom was a government professor who hightailed it out of Ithaca in disgust, landing at the University of Chicago. Eighteen years later he published THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, which those who knew understood to be the product of the bitter grudge he'd nursed all those years about the events of that academic year. The editor at Simon and Schuster who'd signed up the book was Erwin Glikes, who's been an associate dean at Columbia in 1968, but who hightailed it out of Morningside Heights, landing at Basic Books and becoming the publisher of choice for neoconservative thinkers. The success of Bloom's book was a shock to the largely liberal publishing industry and it essentially created the market for conservative books from mainstream publishers. (The leader of the black students ended up going to Harvard Business School and making a pile as an investment banker and head of TIAA-CREF, but that is another story.)
What is happening now on college campuses willl have the same profound reverberations in the political and cultural spheres, but they will arrive far more switfly, and the foolish protestors and their even more foolish faculty supporter -- because they lack the excuse of being young -- are not going to like the backlash. Elite (discuss . . . ) higher education is in for a real shitstorm, and I, who love Cornell for all it gave me, feel that it pretty much deserves it.
Joe…your finest writing possibly since your 1978 Rolling Stone article on Granola which made me famous for 45 years and counting. Jane and I are in NYC September 26 if you’re available for lunch?
From the perspective of one a few years older even than you, I share most of the thoughts you expressed in the article, but get off your bus when you characterize the Israeli response to Hamas' October 7 atrocities as "a disastrous mistake" and "blundering and poorly planned". Sure would like to know what response you would have considered acceptable and effective, particularly given the human shields and the tunnels.
Over the decades the campus protests have morphed from inarguably peaceful, to "in your face" to --now-- threats and harassment. And the faculties have morphed from supportive to incendiary.
What reminds me of yesteryear are the bongos and the rhyming chants. What doesn't remind me of yesteryear is the tuition. Talk about inflation!
Lou, I was hoping for something more surgical in Gaza, the targeted assassination of Hamas leaders . I was also hoping for an Israeli pre-reaction to the buildup of Hamas force. (I wonder how cynical Bibi is: his marriage of inconvenience with Hamas.) Anyway, thanks for your comment.
Joe, Thanks for the candid reply. We respectfully disagree on the "response" but are in harmony in our views on Bibi. Let us hope that when the current fighting concludes the Israelis give him and his ultra right enablers the heave ho.
Terrific essay. I've forwarded it to several friends, including one who is pro-Pal to the point of being anti-Israel (anti-"colonialism", anti-"apartheid", etc.). Thank you.
The standard used to be, that the first person to mention Hitler, lost the argument. The pro-Hamas may not be mentioning him, but if imitation remains the greatest form of flattery, many of them could not be giving a better impression of Springtime for Hitler.
i thought this was a terrific essay on a deeply divisive and complicated issue. like most of the folks commenting here, i remember my own mild-mannered protests as a student (it was apartheid and the philly police bombings for me in the 80s, i was a little too young for vietnam). as you note, i am proud of the principles i wanted to support back then, but i was certainly naive. the israeli war on gaza feels more complicated by a lot than south africa or SWAT teams taking out residential buildings, and students are if anything more naive and perhaps a bit less pragmatically inclined than even we were. from my perch, the desire to see the world as good or bad, and mostly to support the good, is driving too many students to propose simplistic solutions or slogans, which is dangerous. it is certainly not unique to this generation, but it is especially fraught in this moment. i wish there were more voices like yours - and that there were younger voices getting the same message out. at any rate, thanks for this excellent piece.
This is very good. I was also demonstrating back then. The slogans and simplifications "by any means necessary". "revolution". "Days of Rage", "off the pigs", “Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win”, etc. were obviously toxic to anyone not caught up in the "movement" but somewhat seductive to a lonely teenager. But even then as I marched, I wondered how all of this stuff actually would work in the real world I was in - really? revolution? - and why cops and veterans weren't people, too - at least most of them; at the same time, the compelling-seeming "leaders" were painting castles in the air and moving further outside the zone where people would actually vote for their program or join them. In fact, as you will recall, SDS largely gave up on the "system" almost immediately after Chicago. For me, once the building on 11th Street blew up, It became obvious that this was a Jesse James - or more properly Che Guevara - fantasy, not anything that would ever change anything in the US. I was 17 and I knew that, it shows how delusional these folks were. So how does that help us understand today? Young idealistic people are often blind to the consequences of what they advocate - they see only the goal. They also follow false gods - in SDS' case Castro/Guevara. It's unlikely that there are a large number of conscious antisemites among the students. But they excuse Hamas even if they don't explicitly endorse it. Certainly, professors should know better. And they should know the history - particularly at Columbia, where Mark Rudd famously said "the issue was not the issue." And they should understand the danger in waking up the beast of antisemitism. To me, it's the most disappointing thing about all of this - professors spouting the same nonsense that you could transpose from the Weather faction of SDS in 1969, unable to see the delusion of "revolution" and unwilling to take on the consequences of "river to the sea."
I'm a fellow geezer with similar politics, who lived in Chicago in 1968 and had a front-row seat. I'd say that the protesters were raising more important issues and the police were far more poorly behaved, but there were plenty of lefty crazies and fools around. "Power to the people, off the pig!" was a popular chant. And while there were never that many, the Weathermen and the Progressive Labor Party (extreme left factions who despised each other) were chic and attracted a lot of attention. I'm not sure the country was more stable then. Unlike modern media, Walter Cronkite was reassuring, but I think we were closer to civil war.
Watching the demonstrations at Columbia it’s difficult to avoid my clear recollection of the spring of 1968 as a graduate student at Columbia. While the underlying cause of the 1968 protests was just, the clear perspective of most of the Columbia community was resentment of the disruption of their expensive and hard won education. I was in Chicago for the 1968 convention as part of McGovern’s advance team. Those protests gave us Nixon. Similar protests this summer will likely bring another Trump term. True believers on the left occupy no higher moral ground than MTG and Matt Gaetz. Thanks for your thoughtful commentary.
These Soros backed, keffiyeh wearing protesters lose me with their support of Hamas, their wanton accusations of Israeli acts of genocide and the toxic "death to America" chants. The cynicism towards these people is aptly demonstrated by the prescient and arch John Lennon lyrics in the classic Beatles tune, "Revolution."
A litle history lesson: I was a freshman at Cornell in the spring of 1969 when the campus fell apart at the seams as a result of the takeover (with guns yet) of the student union by black students. Welcome to the Ivy League! Allan Bloom was a government professor who hightailed it out of Ithaca in disgust, landing at the University of Chicago. Eighteen years later he published THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, which those who knew understood to be the product of the bitter grudge he'd nursed all those years about the events of that academic year. The editor at Simon and Schuster who'd signed up the book was Erwin Glikes, who's been an associate dean at Columbia in 1968, but who hightailed it out of Morningside Heights, landing at Basic Books and becoming the publisher of choice for neoconservative thinkers. The success of Bloom's book was a shock to the largely liberal publishing industry and it essentially created the market for conservative books from mainstream publishers. (The leader of the black students ended up going to Harvard Business School and making a pile as an investment banker and head of TIAA-CREF, but that is another story.)
What is happening now on college campuses willl have the same profound reverberations in the political and cultural spheres, but they will arrive far more switfly, and the foolish protestors and their even more foolish faculty supporter -- because they lack the excuse of being young -- are not going to like the backlash. Elite (discuss . . . ) higher education is in for a real shitstorm, and I, who love Cornell for all it gave me, feel that it pretty much deserves it.
Joe…your finest writing possibly since your 1978 Rolling Stone article on Granola which made me famous for 45 years and counting. Jane and I are in NYC September 26 if you’re available for lunch?
From the perspective of one a few years older even than you, I share most of the thoughts you expressed in the article, but get off your bus when you characterize the Israeli response to Hamas' October 7 atrocities as "a disastrous mistake" and "blundering and poorly planned". Sure would like to know what response you would have considered acceptable and effective, particularly given the human shields and the tunnels.
Over the decades the campus protests have morphed from inarguably peaceful, to "in your face" to --now-- threats and harassment. And the faculties have morphed from supportive to incendiary.
What reminds me of yesteryear are the bongos and the rhyming chants. What doesn't remind me of yesteryear is the tuition. Talk about inflation!
--now--
Lou, I was hoping for something more surgical in Gaza, the targeted assassination of Hamas leaders . I was also hoping for an Israeli pre-reaction to the buildup of Hamas force. (I wonder how cynical Bibi is: his marriage of inconvenience with Hamas.) Anyway, thanks for your comment.
Joe, Thanks for the candid reply. We respectfully disagree on the "response" but are in harmony in our views on Bibi. Let us hope that when the current fighting concludes the Israelis give him and his ultra right enablers the heave ho.
Terrific essay. I've forwarded it to several friends, including one who is pro-Pal to the point of being anti-Israel (anti-"colonialism", anti-"apartheid", etc.). Thank you.
The standard used to be, that the first person to mention Hitler, lost the argument. The pro-Hamas may not be mentioning him, but if imitation remains the greatest form of flattery, many of them could not be giving a better impression of Springtime for Hitler.
i thought this was a terrific essay on a deeply divisive and complicated issue. like most of the folks commenting here, i remember my own mild-mannered protests as a student (it was apartheid and the philly police bombings for me in the 80s, i was a little too young for vietnam). as you note, i am proud of the principles i wanted to support back then, but i was certainly naive. the israeli war on gaza feels more complicated by a lot than south africa or SWAT teams taking out residential buildings, and students are if anything more naive and perhaps a bit less pragmatically inclined than even we were. from my perch, the desire to see the world as good or bad, and mostly to support the good, is driving too many students to propose simplistic solutions or slogans, which is dangerous. it is certainly not unique to this generation, but it is especially fraught in this moment. i wish there were more voices like yours - and that there were younger voices getting the same message out. at any rate, thanks for this excellent piece.
This is very good. I was also demonstrating back then. The slogans and simplifications "by any means necessary". "revolution". "Days of Rage", "off the pigs", “Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win”, etc. were obviously toxic to anyone not caught up in the "movement" but somewhat seductive to a lonely teenager. But even then as I marched, I wondered how all of this stuff actually would work in the real world I was in - really? revolution? - and why cops and veterans weren't people, too - at least most of them; at the same time, the compelling-seeming "leaders" were painting castles in the air and moving further outside the zone where people would actually vote for their program or join them. In fact, as you will recall, SDS largely gave up on the "system" almost immediately after Chicago. For me, once the building on 11th Street blew up, It became obvious that this was a Jesse James - or more properly Che Guevara - fantasy, not anything that would ever change anything in the US. I was 17 and I knew that, it shows how delusional these folks were. So how does that help us understand today? Young idealistic people are often blind to the consequences of what they advocate - they see only the goal. They also follow false gods - in SDS' case Castro/Guevara. It's unlikely that there are a large number of conscious antisemites among the students. But they excuse Hamas even if they don't explicitly endorse it. Certainly, professors should know better. And they should know the history - particularly at Columbia, where Mark Rudd famously said "the issue was not the issue." And they should understand the danger in waking up the beast of antisemitism. To me, it's the most disappointing thing about all of this - professors spouting the same nonsense that you could transpose from the Weather faction of SDS in 1969, unable to see the delusion of "revolution" and unwilling to take on the consequences of "river to the sea."
I'm a fellow geezer with similar politics, who lived in Chicago in 1968 and had a front-row seat. I'd say that the protesters were raising more important issues and the police were far more poorly behaved, but there were plenty of lefty crazies and fools around. "Power to the people, off the pig!" was a popular chant. And while there were never that many, the Weathermen and the Progressive Labor Party (extreme left factions who despised each other) were chic and attracted a lot of attention. I'm not sure the country was more stable then. Unlike modern media, Walter Cronkite was reassuring, but I think we were closer to civil war.
When I was reminded the other day the Democratic National Convention would be in Chicago, I thought "Oh No."