By Phil Cornell
Students at Columbia University protesting a war they consider unjust and intolerable? That must sound awfully familiar to Mark Rudd, who more than a half-century ago similarly confronted authority while a student at the Ivy League school and can still sound like a radical firebrand.
“In 1968 and students right now are reacting to a terrible moral tragedy, a crime, a catastrophe, disaster,” said Rudd by phone Tuesday, the 56th anniversary of the student takeover at Columbia. “In Gaza, 34,000 people, mostly innocent civilians, including lots of children, are being murdered. In Vietnam, the United States was murdering civilians by the thousands. In both cases, we had to respond with moral action. That’s what’s going on.
“The parallels are enormous, and it’s spreading in the same way. It spreading now, and it spread in ‘68. Columbia didn’t start the protests, but Columbia jumped it up to another level.”
Rudd was in the thick of it then, a suburban New Jersey kid and Columbia High School alum who had become chairman of the university chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, and a leader in the student occupation of the Upper West Side campus. In his 2009 memoir, “Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen,” Rudd recalls sitting at the desk of then-Columbia President Grayson Kirk after students had stormed Low Library and overrun his office, picking up the president’s phone and calling his parents at their ranch house in Maplewood before dawn to inform them, “We took the building.”
“Well, give it back,” his father countered.
But there was no turning back for the demonstrators, who objected to the Vietnam War and the university’s ties to it, as well as a school gym expansion seen as segregated. Five buildings were occupied before the police were summoned a week later to reclaim them, an act of “repression” mirrored by the current Columbia administration, Rudd charged. This time, the protesters are decrying the ongoing carnage in Gaza following Hamas’ killing and kidnapping spree in Israel on Oct. 7.
“There was a peaceful protest, and she (Columbia President Nemat Shafik) called the cops,” Rudd said of the current unrest. “We had a peaceful protest, nonviolent occupation of buildings, and seven days later the administration called the cops.
“The cops were much more violent in our case,” he added.
The current crop of Columbia protesters, he observed, set up a “completely peaceful encampment on the lawn that anybody could avoid if they wanted and they were considered to be a threat.”
Indeed, Rudd praised the nonviolent discipline of today’s protesters, likening their self-control to the Black marchers of the Civil Rights Movement.
“I don’t think I have much advice, because these students are smarter than we were,” Rudd said when asked what he would tell today’s protesters. “They’re better than we were. We had very violent rhetoric, like ‘Up against the wall, m-----f---er,’ calling the cops pigs, ‘The revolution is here’ and all that kind of stuff. Verbal violence is violence, and we thought that was OK.”
In 1968, Rudd found himself as a kind of marquee name for student radicals, or as he put it in his memoir, “an easy personification of an entire generation of students in revolt: the middle-class kid who had all the advantages, attended an elite university, but who angrily turned against ‘the system.’ "
Following the protest, he was expelled from Columbia, notified by mail the same day he learned he had made the dean’s list. He set his sights on a national revolution through the Weatherman faction of SDS and the Weather Underground, adopting a more militant, violent strategy that proved tragic in 1970 when three members died in an explosion in a Greenwich Village townhouse where bombs were being assembled. Rudd himself wound up a federal fugitive for seven years before surrendering to authorities to face charges in New York and Chicago on consecutive days in 1977, avoiding jail time. Outside the New York courtroom, “a stampede of newsmen surrounded Rudd, poking microphones and notepads in his face,” The Star-Ledger related on its front page, where he was described as a “sidewalk celebrity among the press.”
After his arraignment, the media spotlight followed Rudd to Maplewood, where his father, Jacob, informed the reporters his son “wants to return to society as quickly as possible.”
He soon settled down in New Mexico, resumed his education and taught at a community college. While he does organizing for environmental justice, some writing and construction around his property, Rudd, now 76, says he retired.
He recalls the New Jersey of his youth as highly segregated but says he visits the Garden State “all the time.” Rudd explained he still has family here and that his son Paul Robeson Rudd, who died four years ago, is buried in Woodbridge.
Though he stresses in his book how much organizational work went into building the SDS, Rudd acknowledges that the ‘60s protesters “made lots mistakes but there was kind of a momentum or an energy that sustained us, and our numbers kept growing, even with mistakes. And I think something similar is happening here.”
Does he think their actions at Columbia accomplished anything?
“The Columbia protests of ‘68 were part of a much larger movement to end the war in Vietnam -- and we did it,” he responded. “It took a long time, it took a full 10 years after the United States invaded Vietnam, and we ended that war. And that’s historic in American history. It’s historic in any country’s history, that a people stopped a war of aggression by their government. Without an antiwar movement, look at how long the absolutely failed, idiotic war in Iraq lasted, 20 years. ...
“Did we accomplish anything? I think we accomplished a lot. The example exists, and I think most likely the young people are aware of it.”
