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other one-time unprintable epithets poured from the building for a half hour without cease. One student threatened to set the whole building on fire if any cops came in. The two warnings of the University and the police were scarcely audible. After the doors were opened, the police spent another 20 minutes removing a mountain of furniture, taken from dozens of professors' offices, from the entrance hall. The police started up the stairs slowly, because each step was covered with soap or vaseline to cause the cops to slip and fall. Several persons started throwing chairs down on the heads of the front police, but an officer warned the students that assaulting a policeman is a serious charge, so the barrage stopped. At the top of the stairs a group of about 20 students chose to resist arrest and the police carried each of them out, four cops to each student. To many people's surprise, most of the other180 Strikers opted to walk out peacefully, although a small group of those who did suddenly charged their police escort at the doorway to provoke a little police brutality for the TV cameras trained on them. There were shrieks of "police brutality" from several of the students leaving the building. Near the end of the ~Iath evacuation, a middle-aged professional agitator with a long criminal record pulled out a knife and tried to force several students around him to resist violently against the police. He didn't succeed. He was charged with possession of a dangerous weapon, inciting to riot, and resisting arrest, in addition to criminal trespass. Mathematics was the only building with several older men in it. It also had such occupants as a 16-yearold boy from Texas and a mother of several children. The police had expected to find about 400 students in the buildings. Instead they found 692. This caused them to move several of the police vans from Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue to College Walk, at the center of the campus. Several of their buses parked to the east, or Amsterdam Avenue side, of the famous Sundial. Thus hundreds of arrested students had to be brought down stairs through the plaza in front of Low Library to enter the vans. But most of the now swollen crowd of 2,000 spectators (at least half of 68
whom hated to see police dragging students into police wagons) was gathered in precisely that area. About 400 police outdoors, who did have nightsticks, tried to form a cordon to the buses; but the crowd kept pushing in on them. Many in the crowd were screaming unbelievable obscenities. One group was chanting "Hei!, hei!!" Some officer then ordered the policeman to push the crowd back, which they did vigorously, causing several dozen students to fall back or down and get trampled. Then several hundred students began pressing in around the police wagons, still shouting abuse. Some police officer, never identified, ordered his men to clear the area this time. About 100 cops with raised nightclubs and numerous plainclothesmen began beating students and onlookers back into South Field in front of Butler Library. At least 20 angry patrolmen leapt over the hedges after especially vociferous students in hot pursuit. Dozens of students were clubbed bloody. Fifteen students and one policeman were taken in the police ambulance to Knickerbocker Hospital; another 74 students, faculty, and administrators, and 13 policemen, were treated in St. Luke's Hospital, adjacent to the campus. Many of the injuries were nothing more than light bruises, slight sprains, small cuts, and severe fright; but at least one-third of the 103 persons had scalp lacerations and bone bruises. Only two persons had serious injuries: one student with a fractured jaw and one policeman with a heart attack caused in part by a bull-like student charge. Of the 692 persons arrested, 524, or 75 per cent, were Columbia students; 178 were older persons, students from other colleges, free-floating radicals, and 24 young Columbia alumni. Undergraduates made up three-quarters of the student group. A breakdown of the 524 Columbia students by schools: College Barnard Graduate Faculties General Studies Architecture Engineering Law
239 III
74 44 18 11 11
Crad, Teachers College Graduate Art International Affairs Grad. Business Grad. Tournalism Dental Hygiene
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About the "police brutality" that was to become a central issue the next
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Indignation on campus against the police action teas high, although mail to Pl'esident Kirk ran 10 to 1 in favor of the police rem owl.
day. One Columbia high official said, "If all the striking students had behaved as the ones in Hamilton Hall and some in Avery and Fayerwether did, there would have been no violence. What should be remembered is that numerous students resisted arrest either passively or violently, and that several young faculty members tried to prevent the arrests with their bodies." When asked about the police assault and clubbings on College Walk and South Field, he said, "That was another matter. The police were obviously being verbally provoked, but they overreacted to the student fear and abuse." A liberal professor on the scene said, "The police seem to take a lot of petty violence-like yanking people out of doorways and throwing them aside-as a matter of course. Is this 'brutality'? I don't know. Compared to most foreign police actions it certainly is not, but by American standards it could be so defined. The clubbings on South Field, in my opinion were uncalled for, and definitely brutal-I mean unduly harsh, not savage." Chief Inspector Sanford Garelik visited Columbia for three straight nights following the early Tuesday raid. He observed philosophically, after the raid, that Rudd and several other strike leaders were not in any buildings during the bust and that many in Mathematics walked out peacefully. "It ofCOLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY