Visions of '68

Monday night, Robert Friedman, Editor in Chief of Spectator in 1968 came back to the office for the first time since he graduated 38 years ago to talk about his experiences reporting on the Columbia riot.

It's a story that pretty much every has heard by now, and going into the details of it here is unnecessary. What Friedman gave light to, though, was that Mark Rudd, Thomas Hayden, and the other revolutionaries were very much regular guys. Friedman, in fact, had been friends with Rudd and was invited by him to be a part of the strike steering committee. While I've talked to the Columbia students that New York magazine pointed to last week as leaders of the political resurgence on campus—and I'm pretty sure that none of them particularly hate me—I don't think that any of them would invite me to lead a strike with them.

The other thing that gets lost in the retelling of the strike story is the context. Everybody knows that it was 1968 and that they were tumultuous times, but the story that Friedman told about the lead-up to the strike felt an awful lot like the kinds of things that people are doing today. The difference? Whereas "The People who Rushed the Stage," as they were at one point calling themselves, still in many ways seem like like they're outside of the mainstream on campus—just look at how the College Dems have shied away from them this year—SDS was able to gather an enormous coalition of people to protest. When the Columbia Coalition Against the War tried to strike, they got about 300 people; 39 years ago, the coalition reached over 1,000. As Editor John pointed out last night, it seems like that's the inevitable difference between a war that employs the draft and a war that doesn't. Friedman appeared visibly disappointed in the apathy of today's Columbia class to stand up and force the powers that be to get involved in Darfur and to protest the war in Iraq.

After the speech, a few of us went out to 1020 (I drank a Diet Coke) and he told us that of the entire managing board that reported on the '68 riots, he was the only one who had gone into journalism. It was something that struck me as odd, especially considering that nearly everybody else at the table was in one way or another thinking about going into reporting despite not having had that kind of catalyzing experience.

And then we went back to the office, ready to put out yet another issue of Spec. (Just five left this semester.)