20 Years After Shutting Down Campus : Columbia Alumni Relive ‘Days of Rage’

They are more subdued and thoughtful now, their hair shorter and their waists larger. But 20 years after they shut down Columbia University, these soul mates of the revolution remember those heady days with pride.

“The moment we had there--the power we felt, the experience of turning defeat into victory--has to be recovered,” historian Mark Naison told his classmates, gathered once more at the Morningside Heights campus for a weekend reunion.

At panel discussions, a picnic and a party, these veterans of the campus uprising recalled how about 1,000 people, mostly students, barricaded themselves inside five campus buildings for the week of April 23, 1968.

The protest closed the college and drew international attention to their opposition to racism, the Vietnam War and the status quo in general.

Acting Columbia College Dean Henry Coleman was held hostage. Prof. Orest Ranum lost a decade’s research when a protester torched his files. Protesters Andrea and Richard Egan were married in occupied Fayerweather Hall by Episcopal Chaplain William Starr, who crawled in through the window.

After a week, Columbia officials called in the police to clear the buildings. Nearly 700 people were arrested in brawls between police and protesters, and 103 people were injured, 85 of them students or teachers.

A student strike ensued, and a month later students again occupied a college building to protest the discipline of protest leaders; again the police moved in, this time with 68 arrests and 177 injuries.

“This reunion is an example of what the university has always provided--a forum for the open discussion of ideas,” said Columbia spokesman Fred Knubel. “Reunions can be useful. Looking back almost always helps us look ahead.”

Several hundred alumni milled around Earl Hall on Saturday, wearing bright orange tags that listed the buildings they had occupied.

“This is not the ‘me generation,’ ” said Tom Hurwitz of Manhattan, a free-lance cinematographer. “Everybody here and everyone I know is a trace of the good things.”

Hurwitz recalled “the incredible unity, a kind of physical feeling. It was a triumph of morality in a way that morality has rarely triumphed since.”

On Saturday, rain forced the picnic inside, after which more than 500 people listened to a panel of former campus activists discuss how their lives had been changed by the turbulent era.

Then everyone adjourned for Chinese food and a party, with dancing to rock ‘n’ roll, both old and new.

“There’s an atmosphere of great camaraderie, people talking about what they’re doing now. It’s a general good feeling,” said Eric Foner, one of the event’s organizers and a graduate student in 1968.

Dave Crebs, who attended Columbia in the 1970s, said the informal conversations after the panel discussion were most interesting.

“It’s sort of sweet, like people around the campfire,” said Crebs, 33, who lives in Boston. “When I was deciding on college, people told me, ‘Don’t go to Columbia, they go on strike there.’ And now it turns out all these are all well-meaning, kind folks who had the best interest of the rest of us at heart.”

On Friday night, the blue jeans were teamed with a few ties and sports jackets, a few paunches and plenty of smiles and embraces as former soul mates greeted one another at a campus auditorium.

Buzzwords like “the perversion of capitalism” surfaced now and then. Someone in the balcony unfurled a banner that read, “Smash U.S. Imperialist Revolution!”

“Up against the wall!” hollered members of the audience, invoking the once-familiar phrase to request that a podium be moved away from the movie screen.

The crowd applauded Abbie Hoffman, who wore a tie-dyed T-shirt and sat in the front row, a red bandanna adorning his frizzy gray hair.

Hoffman had helped fuel the strikers’ conviction, along with Tom Hayden, now a California assemblyman, black militants H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael, civil rights lawyer William Kunstler, poet Allen Ginsberg and the Grateful Dead rock band.