Columbia University — Bunk History

Charles Francis Phillips and Owen Cattell, two Columbia University students, seated.

In 1917, Columbia’s Clampdown Remade the Antiwar Movement

When police raided Columbia University in May, commentators drew parallels to the 1968. But the school’s hostility to the antiwar movement traces back to 1917.

by Dan La Botz via Jacobin on July 11, 2024

NYPD officers in riot gear march onto Columbia University campus, where pro-Palestinian students were barricaded inside a building and set up an encampment, on April 30, 2024.

Columbia’s Violence Against Protesters Has a Long History

An overlooked history of selective policing at Columbia has undermined the safety of those within as well as beyond campus walls.

by T. M. Song via The Nation on May 3, 2024

Side by side photos of Columbia University protests in 2024 and 1968.

America’s Colleges Are Reaping What They Sowed

Universities spent years saying that activism is not just welcome but encouraged on their campuses. Students took them at their word.

by Tyler Austin Harper via The Atlantic on May 2, 2024

Mark Rudd addresses students as president of the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society on May 3, 1968.

Mark Rudd’s Lessons From SDS and the Weather Underground for Today’s Radicals

The famous activist reflects on what radicals like him got right and got wrong, and what today’s socialists should learn from his experiences.

by Mark Rudd, Micah Uetricht via Jacobin on March 29, 2021

Margaret Mead in front of a bookshelf, with a book in hand

How Cultural Anthropologists Redefined Humanity

A brave band of scholars set out to save us from racism and sexism. What happened?

by Louis Menand via The New Yorker on August 29, 2019

What Can We Learn from the Radical Campuses of 1968?

The struggle at universities was never a simple conflict of generations.

by Richard Vinen via Literary Hub on July 3, 2018

Student protesters at Columbia University in 1968.

“The Whole World Is Watching”: An Oral History of the 1968 Columbia Uprising

In April 1968, students took over campus buildings in an uprising that caught the world’s attention. Fifty years later, they reflect on what went right and what went wrong.

by Clara Bingham via The Hive on March 26, 2018

A UC Berkeley student picket supports a strike protesting demonstrators’ arrests, 1964.

Whose Side Are College Administrators On?

There’s a long history of politicians targeting student protesters — and of campus leaders abetting those efforts.

by Lauren Lassabe Shepherd via HNN on March 19, 2025

Protest encampment at University of California Berkeley.

The Free Speech Movement at Sixty and Today’s Unfree Universities

Can speech be free when billionaires buy influence on campus?

by Robert Cohen via Academe on December 4, 2024

Student watching smoke emanating from the student center after 1969 protests.

The CUNY Experiment

The City University of New York has long stood at once for meritocratic uplift and for civil disobedience.

by Kim Phillips-Fein via New York Review of Books on May 23, 2024

A 1963 photo of Martin Luther King Jr. addressing the thousands of people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington.

Campus Protests Are Called Disruptive. So Was the Civil Rights Movement

Like student protesters today, Martin Luther King Jr. and other 1960s civil rights activists were criticized as disruptive and disorderly.

by Jeanne Theoharis via Made By History on May 9, 2024

Pro-Israel counterprotesters hold Israeli flags on the edges of a pro-Palestine encampment at Northeastern University in Boston, April 26, 2024.

The New Anti-Antisemitism

The response to college protests against the war on Gaza exemplifies the darkness of the Trumpocene.

by Rick Perlstein via The American Prospect on May 8, 2024

John Trumbull's painting of Alexander Hamilton, 1806 (National Portrait Gallery).

Founding Philosemitism

Alexander Hamilton always believed that the providential protection that kept the small Jewish world alive would embrace his own extraordinary nation.

by Juliana Geran Pilon via Law & Liberty on October 3, 2023

A group of students demonstrating during a counterprotest to an ongoing anti–Vietnam War rally.

The Right Uses College Campuses as Its Training Grounds

Conservatives love to bemoan their supposed status as oppressed minorities in universities. But the college campus has long been a key site for the Right.

by Scott Wasserman Stern via Jacobin on August 17, 2023

Class photo of white men medical students on the steps of a building.

Race and Early American Medical Schools: Review of "Masters of Health"

Medical schools in the antebellum U.S. were critical in the formation of a medical community that shared ideas about racial science.

by Natalie Shibley via Nursing Clio on February 14, 2023

Chains with ivy on it

Endowed by Slavery

Harvard made headlines by announcing that it would devote $100 million to remedying “the harms of the university’s ties to slavery.”

by Andrew Delbanco via New York Review of Books on June 2, 2022

The 1.25-million-square-foot USC Village residential complex in Los Angeles.

The Rise of the UniverCity

Historian Davarian Baldwin explains how universities have come to wield the kind of power that were once hallmarks of ruthless employers in company towns.

by Davarian L. Baldwin, Meagan Day via Jacobin on September 2, 2021

Remembering Past Lessons about Structural Racism — Recentering Black Theorists of Health and Society

A look at African-American scholars' contributions to health disparity discourse.

by Jeremy A. Greene, Alexandre White, Rachel L. J. Thornton via The New England Journal Of Medicine on August 26, 2021

The Defender of Differences

Three new books consider the life, and impact, of Franz Boas, the "father of American cultural anthropology."

by Kwame Anthony Appiah via New York Review of Books on May 14, 2020

AHA executive officers, 1889

White Supremacy in the Academy: The 1913 Meeting of the American Historical Association

The historical interpretations crafted by the men of the Dunning School might now be largely discredited and discarded. But their legacies remain.

by Bradley D. Proctor via The Activist History Review on December 6, 2019

The Life and Times of Franz Boas

The founder of cultural anthropology, Franz Boas challenged the reigning notions of race and culture.

by Matthew Wills via JSTOR Daily on December 1, 2019

Black and white photograph of Henrietta Schmerler.

How Henrietta Schmerler Was Lost, Then Found

Women anthropologists, face assault in the field, exposing victim blaming, institutional failures, and ethical gaps in academia.

by Nell Gluckman via The Chronicle of Higher Education on October 14, 2018

Scene of Martin Luther King assassination, with people around King pointing to where the gunfire came from.

1968: Year of Counter-Revolution

What haunted America was not the misty specter of revolution but the solidifying specter of reactionary backlash.

by Todd Gitlin via New York Review of Books on May 8, 2018

Blackfoot Chief, Mountain Chief making phonographic record at Smithsonian, February 9, 1916.

Eavesdropping on History

By all accounts, young Bill Owens was a natural song-catcher, trawling across Texas in the 1930s, the golden era of American field recording.

by Cynthia Shearer via Oxford American on April 5, 2016

Up Against the Centerfold

What it was like to report on feminism for Playboy in 1969

by Susan Braudy via Jezebel on March 18, 2016

Illustration of grave robbing

Body Snatchers of Old New York

In the 1780s, medical schools used cadavers stolen from the cemeteries of slaves.

by Bess Lovejoy via Lapham’s Quarterly on October 13, 2013

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