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By Root 996 0

large participation by American high school students who, starting in April, became increasingly organized, establishing by the end of the year their own chapters of the SDS and a network of almost five hundred underground high school newspapers. The Universities of Paris, Prague, and Tokyo were among those that participated. The Italian university system was barely functioning. That day alone there had been sit-ins, boycotts, or clashes in universities in Venice, Turin, Bologna, Rome, and Bari. The absolute power of senior professors remained the central issue, and the students continued, to the great frustration of the political establishment, to refuse an alliance with communists or other political parties. In Paris three hundred students stormed an American dormitory at Cité University in the southern part of the city over the issue of banning mixed-sex dormitories. It was noted with concern that this represented a successful attempt by student radicals from the suburban University of Nanterre to spread into other Paris universities. On the other hand, the University of Madrid announced that it would reopen for classes on May 6, thirty-eight days after being closed by student demonstrations.

In New York, it was an especially violent day. One girl was hospitalized from riots between pro- and antiwar students at the Bronx High School of Science, an elite public school. Three were hospitalized from Hunter College. But the campus that had captured world attention because of extensive press coverage was Columbia, where the police were now guarding the campus gates and occupying all buildings other than those occupied by students. Just off campus on 116th Street, the police troops waited in long green vans. Even though Kifner now wrote in the Times that the movement was leaderless, that Rudd was only an occasional spokesman, and that each building debated its next step with its own steering committee, the occupation was still widely reported as organized by the SDS and led by Rudd.

The Columbia Board of Trustees denounced what they called “a minority” that had caused the Columbia campus to close. Since there were estimated to be about 1,000 striking students and Columbia had 4,400 full-time undergraduate students in 1968, the claim that it was a minority was mathematically correct, though it was a very large minority. The New York Times, with its two seats on the Columbia board perhaps evident, wrote an editorial that said, “The riot, the sit in, and the demonstration are the avant-garde fashion in the world’s campuses this year. To prove one’s alienation from society is to be ‘in’ at universities as far apart as Tokyo, Rome, Cairo and Rio de Janeiro.” This kind of thing is fine for Poland and Spain, where there is a “lack of avenues for peaceful, democratic change,” the Times declared, “but in the United States, Britain and other democratic countries there is no such justification.”

Even the Times credited WKCR, the Columbia University radio station, with being the hot media outlet of the week. With almost nonstop live coverage, WKCR was in the best position to clearly follow the chaotic events. On Friday morning the university ordered the station to discontinue broadcasting but relented in the face of a huge outburst of student protest. Rudd and other leaders, though they spoke with such reporters as the Times’s Kifner, kept in closest contact with the university paper, the Daily Spectator, and WKCR. Rudd often forewarned the campus radio station’s anchor Robert Siegel of events. He had told him to cover the speech of Colonel Akst.

About ninety thousand antiwar demonstrators filled the Sheep Meadow in Central Park on Saturday. Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King’s young widow, spoke in the place that had been scheduled for him, reading King’s “Ten Commandments on Vietnam,” which denounced the White House version of the war. To the last commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” she received a thunderous round of applause. The police arrested 160 demonstrators, including 35 who attempted to march from the park to Columbia