Thirty-one years ago this month, in April of 1985, as an undergraduate at Columbia, I spent, with hundreds of others, three weeks blockading the university’s administration building. The blockade was one of the final steps in a student-led, years-long effort to pressure Columbia to divest from South Africa.
During the entirety of the blockade, the Columbia administration refrained from calling in the police. They’d called in the police seventeen years earlier, in 1968, during a student protest against anti-Black racism and the Vietnam War. But siccing the police on your own students, they’d learned, came with consequences.
So in 1985, they chose to wait the blockade out. That was smart, for all involved: we protestors stayed peaceful; while staff who worked in the building were inconvenienced, having to navigate, from what I remember, underground tunnels to get to and from their offices, they could still perform their jobs without interference; and, importantly, the lack of police/student conflict allowed the media to focus on the issue at hand, divestment, rather than on a story of chaos and unrest.
Spurred on by our action, students across the country intensified efforts to pressure their own universities to divest. In time, the Free South Africa Movement emboldened not just American universities but also many of its corporations to stop doing business with the apartheid regime. By 1988, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill banning all business with South Africa. By 1990, Nelson Mandela was freed from prison. And then, in 1991, South Africa repealed its apartheid laws altogether.
It’s true that the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa likely would have succeeded without the help of American college students. But it’s also true that American divestiture, beginning with universities, sped up the process. And while the Vietnam War would have ended eventually, student protests most assuredly made the end come quicker.
In both cases, as is true with almost every instance of serious-minded American campus protest since at least WWII, the student protestors were on the right side of history. The difference was only in how the administration chose to react.
In the case of the Ohio State protest a couple weeks ago, in which forty-or-so students, united under the banner of #reclaimosu, peacefully occupied, for several hours, the space outside the president’s office in Bricker Hall, the administration chose what seems like a remarkably heavy-handed approach.
Police vehicles surrounded the building, the building’s doors were locked, and a university representative, a senior vice president, in consultation via phone with the university president, told the students that if they didn’t leave, the police would arrest them and take them to jail. In what seemed like a bizarre taunt, the university official told the students, “We will give you the opportunity to go jail for your beliefs.” And then the kicker: he told the students they’d not only be arrested but would also most likely be expelled if they didn’t leave.
The official knew he was being filmed. The footage of the incident shows many students with their phones out. This makes his reaction, to me at least, even more problematic: he appeared perfectly at ease threatening students at a public university with arrest and expulsion for their decidedly non-violent protest. What’s more troubling, as Connor Friedersdorf noted in the Atlantic, is that he framed his threat as a kind of protection. Members of the the building’s staff, he claimed, were afraid of the protestors.
That is a laughably outlandish statement. Watch the video of the protestors. They are hardly a hardened lot. The staff may not have wanted to be inconvenienced, it’s true. It’s true also that members of the staff may not have agreed with the protestors. But for a high-level university official to hide behind an obviously trumped-up fear seems pretty craven.
However craven, though, it worked. The students, fearful of being arrested and expelled, left the building. The next day, and at other times since, Bricker Hall has been locked to the general public. Police flank the doors.
