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By Root 1065 0

occupied buildings were beaten as they tried to hold up the two-finger V sign. Students who tried to keep peace outside, clearly marked by their green armbands, were also beaten, as were some faculty members. In their report the police complained that they had not been told how many faculty supported the students or how many students were involved. Right-wing students, the jocks, who were cheering on the police, were also beaten. One hundred and forty-eight injuries were reported. It was one of those rare moments in American history when class warfare became open. The police, working-class people, resented these privileged youth who would not support the war that working-class children were fighting. The conflict was increasingly becoming a division of classes. College students were using “hard hat” as a term of derision, and the police attacked them with raw hatred. Marvin Harris, a Columbia anthropology professor who witnessed the raid, wrote:

Many students were dragged down stairways. Girls were pulled out by the hair; their arms were twisted; they were punched in the face. Faculty members were kicked in the groin, tossed through hedges, punched in the eye. A diabetic student fell into a coma. One faculty member suffered a nervous collapse. Many students bled profusely from head wounds opened by handcuffs, wielded as weapons. Dozens of moaning people lay about the grass unattended.

The 120 charges of police brutality brought against the department were the most from any single incident in the history of the New York police.

The public was shocked. Initially the administration had the public relations advantage, due chiefly to New York Times coverage. A photograph had caught students in Kirk’s office. Student David Shapiro, today a poet, was photographed at the president’s desk in sunglasses with a purloined cigar. The Times abandoned all objectivity when deputy managing editor A. M. Rosenthal wrote an editorial disguised as a front-page news story centered on a quote from Kirk: “My God, how could human beings do such a thing.” Vintage Kirk, the “such a thing” was not the brutal beating of hundreds of unarmed people, but acts of vandalism, which Rosenthal attributed to the students, but most witnesses—the Times didn’t mention—including faculty members who signed affidavits, attributed to the police. Despite the claims of the New Left that such coverage was adopted by the rest of the media, both the press and the public were appalled by what happened and did not entirely blame the students. Time magazine wrote, “Much of the blame falls on President Grayson Kirk, whose aloof, often bumbling administration has proved unresponsive to grievances that have long festered on campus.” The Columbia faculty formed a board that set up a commission of inquiry headed by Harvard professor Archibald Cox, who came to a similar conclusion.

Strangely, the entire cast—the students, the administration, the police—did it all over again. There were ongoing discussions about changes at the university. But the administration, which had provoked the original incident by singling out Rudd and five others, decided in late May to suspend Rudd and four others from Columbia. Such suspensions had particularly serious implications in 1968 because they meant the end of a student draft deferment and often a sentence to the Vietnam War. How did the students respond? By demonstrating. What did Rudd and the other four do with the demonstration? They took over Hamilton Hall. So then another one thousand police attacked, in a battle in which sixty-eight people, including seventeen policemen, were injured.

Rudd returned to campus, suspended from school and out on $2,500 bail and vowing to keep Columbia protests going through the spring and summer. Time magazine asked his parents in suburban Maplewood, New Jersey, where they had been receiving a flood of anti-Semitic letters with such phrases as “fucking Jew,” what they thought of all that had happened with their son. His father pointed out that he had spent his own youth struggling just for enough money.