In a way, the black-and-white Palestinian scarf draped over Hannah Sattler’s shoulders this week and the tie-dyed T-shirts of 1968 are woven from a common thread. Like so many college students across the country protesting the Israel-Hamas war, Sattler feels the historic weight of the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations of the 1960s and 70s. “They always talked about the ’68 protest as sort of a North Star,” Sattler, 27, a graduate student of international human rights policy at Columbia University, said of the campus organizers there.
You know, I think we need to shift the framing of these college protests, in fact, in my view. I think college campuses have been the place for antiwar protests for as far as I can remember. I think recent protests haven't even reached the scale of the major student protests that we saw in the late 1960s against the Vietnam War, or even the 1980s against South Africa's practice of apartheid. We saw calls during apartheid to divest from South African companies, and that was very successful. Nelso
Before students set up a pro-Palestinian protest encampment on a Columbia University lawn last week, some of them took an optional course called "Columbia 1968" about protests against the Vietnam War, a similarly galvanizing moment of campus activism. Frank Guridy, the Columbia history professor who has taught the class since 2017, along with a couple of his students stopped by the encampment at the New York City campus on Thursday to discuss the parallels at a teach-in called "1968: Continuing the Fight."
“There has been this discourse that Columbia is this hotbed of antisemitism, but it’s just a bunch of nerds sitting on the ground playing games, chanting and doing homework,” said one student who has been at the college protest camp.