Reminiscences of Columbia, 1968

Glenn Ricketts

  • Article
  • March 17, 2010

Recently, we took note of a story in the Chronicle of Higher Education which offered a retrospective from a professor whose office had been sacked and his research papers burned by student radicals at Columbia University during the Days of Rage in the Spring of 1968. The Chronicle has now followed up with the responses of many others, mainly students then, who had been on campus or in school in those troubled times. They're worth reading in any case, but especially for the contrition and regret expressed by a number of the posters commenting on the vandalism and destruction that resulted from the riots. It was, as several of them note, widely condoned at the time, particularly by those in authority. Better late than never, I guess.

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