Columbia University Hasn’t Learned Anything Since 1968

Columbia University students, angered by the United States’ involvement in war half a world away, took over their campus buildings in protest in late April.

Except this is not 2024.

This was in 1968, 56 years away from the day students on the same campus would do the same to protest the indiscriminate violence in Gaza inflicted by the government of Israel.

The students in 1968 protested the Vietnam War as well as their campuses plans to construct a segregated gym. They took over their campus buildings for a week.

Then law enforcement was called.

One thousand officers descended upon Columbia’s campus clearing out campus buildings, resulting in 700 people arrested and 100 people injured.

This would not be the last time students occupied halls, specifically Hamilton Hall, at Columbia in protest. According to NBC News,

“Columbia student demonstrators occupied the building in 1985 to demand that the school divest from companies doing business in apartheid-era South Africa. Seven years later, students seized the building to rally against…