Low, in case of a storming of the buildings by the so-called "jocks." After a period of tension most of both groups decided to go to Wollman to catch the SDS open meeting. A student tried to moderate the meeting impartially but it was fairly turbulent nonetheless. About 1,100 students were on hand. A few SDS students said that they had to do what they did. "The only way open to us was to coerce the faculty and administration," said one. The University, they alleged, did not consult the Harlem community about the gym nor the students on anything important to their lives. An SDS critic took the stage and said, "It's a question of SDS tactics. You guys are super-righteous law breakers. You've taken away the rights of all of us who want to study. It's obvious that SDS is now running the University." Wild cheers and sustained applause from the audience, which was about one-half against SDS, one-quarter for the radicals, and one-quarter neuh'al and curious. Then David Gilbert '66, former SDS chairman at Columbia and now a graduate student at the New School in New York countered, "Sure, we've made tactical mistakes. But it's the whole capitalist and university system that makes all the real decisions. We had to take the President's office to smash this rotten system of social coercion." Several anti-rebels tried to get the radical students to discuss the specifics of why they were disrupting the entire University or to respond to the Faculty resolution but the radicals skillfully evaded such questions. Instead, Shldents like Ted Gold or Paul Rockwell, an intense, loquacious graduate student, made long speeches about repression of the young, the Vietnam war, imperialism, and the race problem. At one point, Rich Wojculewski, a sophomore football player who had recently won the award as the top academic student on the football team, said "I agree with the professors on this point. We ought to get the Columbia gymnasium out of Morningside Park. Columbia ought to build its own gym, on its own land, and build a great gym. And, we ought not to give an inch to anyone else." This remark brought thunderous applause. The meeting broke up shortly before midnight. SDS leaders seemed to have SPRING, 1968
"That third night was the time when the somewhat haphazard demonstrations turned into a more smoothly engineered takeover of the University and possibly much more, by a tiny band of audacious tacticians seized by notions of guerilla warfare . ... "
made a few converts. They did call for a student strike, a boycott of all classes in the University, on Thursday to show "sympathy and solidarity with this movement." Around midnight, some of the older leaders of Harlem exh'emist groups began to appear in front of Hamilton Hall, possibly fearing a police bust was coming that night. Also, hundreds of students milled around in front of Low, Hamilton, and Avery, and in the lobbies of Hartley and Ferris Booth Halls. The reason for the sudden interest in Avery, home of Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, was that most of the architecture students had decided early in the evening to stay in their building all night in sympathy with the College revolutionaries. The deans tried to impose a 1:00 a.m. deadline on the sit-in, but the students refused to accept it and instead occupied the building day and night. Most of the students in Avery were aesthetic rather than political rebels. (A good number were not rebels at all but students who thought it would be exciting to sit-in and form a better community among themselves.) They felt that the University's long-range planning was very weak, that the design of the gymnasium was lousy, that the University's expansion was not humane enough or imaginatively conceived, that their deans were not audacious or forceful enough, and that students did not have a powerful enough voice in the school's program and policy-making. Unlike the other demonstrators, they had the sympathy of a considerable portion of their fac. ulty. Many persons did not go to sleep early that night. By 2:00 a.m. the rain had stopped. It was a starless night.
One group that did not sleep at all that night was the SDS leaders. In the early morning hours of that Thursday they decided to expand the sit-ins to a full-fledged revolution. That third night was the time when the somewhat haphazard demonstrations turned into a more smoothly engineered takeover of the University and possibly much more, by a tiny band of audacious tacticians, seized by notions of guerilla warfare and the necessity of destroying Columbia and the society around it in order to move into something better. Outsiders, many of them dedicated revolutionaries or anarchists, began to flock to Columbia by car, bus, or train. Dozens of walkie-talkie radios were brought in to aid the strike leaders coordinate the revolt more neatly. Chapters of SDS, Youth Against War and Fascism, YOWlg Socialist Alliance, and similar groups at other colleges were solicited for support to compensate for the relative lack of student support en the Columbia campus. Things got organized at Strike Central in Ferris Booth Hall that night. The whole tone of the demonsh'ation changed. Violence was now seen by many of the student leaders as being inevitable, even desirable, if it could be made to seem that it was brought 0n by the wicked University and city officials and not by the student rebe]~. Police action would swing the vacillating, principled, bourgeois liberals away from their hangups about law and order, academic freedom, and objectivity, toward sympathy for the radicals and their revolutionary program. "We had to go for broke. We had to find tactics that would radicalize the majority of the students and the younger and more progressive faculty members. Or we'd get clobbered and lose 33