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Over the years, Columbia’s Hamilton Hall has been occupied or blockaded by student protesters seven times. The first was in April 1968 when students opposing the Vietnam War and Columbia’s plan to build a gymnasium in Morningside Park took over the building. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author and Moment contributor Glenn Frankel, had a front-row seat to the mayhem during his freshman year at Columbia. Moment contributor and former NPR host Robert Siegel, then a senior at the college, was an anchor at Columbia’s WKCR radio station and reported live on the takeover throughout the week. Author Susan Rubin Suleiman, professor emerita at Harvard University, was a young instructor at Columba at the time and served on the Ad Hoc Faculty Group attempting negotiations, taught classes on the lawn and joined the faculty’s “human chain” that sought to protect students who occupied Hamilton Hall from the police. Join Frankel, Siegel and Suleiman as they discuss the similarities and differences between the 1968 and 2024 protests, from divisions within the student body and faculty to free speech vs. radicalization to the construction and destruction of barricades to the food! In conversation with Moment Book & Opinion Editor Amy E. Schwartz.
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