Columbia's Protest

THE student insurrection at Columbia this past week cannot be labelled a simple exercise in hoodlumism. The demonstrators succeeded in raising (and perhaps resolving) a major issue of University-community relations, and it is not at all clear that any amount of the peaceful placard carrying which critics of the protest advocate would have had this effect.

Columbia has a history of tactless expansionism and insularity in its dealings with the Morningside Heights community which surrounds it. A majority of the Faculty have voted that the immediate target of the protestors' anger, a gym under construction in Morningside Park, should not be built--at least until community leaders are given a chance to confer on an alternate site. The temporary halt in construction may well become permanent.

To this triumph, the demonstrators can add the wider victory of invigorating conventional channels of reform. Events like those of last week only slightly threaten the fabric of society--they serve chiefly to alert University administrators to the danger of a self-interested community policy or of a cool disregard of intense student feeling on the way the University is run.

While the accomplishments of the Columbia protest might not have been possible without the conspicuous seizure of an administration building, the demonstration gradually has disintegrated into a piece of civil disobedience in bad faith. When the protestors refused at first to talk with the Columbia Administration's spokesman David B. Truman, they opened themselves to charges of "protest for protest's sake." Since illegal demonstrations are intentionally public acts, how they look is not inconsequential.

Tiny acts of vandalism by a few of the demonstrators were blown to huge proportions by the daily press. So the demonstrators must blame themselves for providing the public with an excuse to ignore the substance of the protest.

NOW the protestors are intranisgently holding out for a promise of complete amnesty. While the small group which occupies five buildings at first spoke for the conscience of the majority of the Columbia community, now they are a minority, blocking the majority from going about its business as they lobby for their own interests. Having taken the brave plunge into civil disobedience, the demonstrators should not be dissipating the force of their action by refusing to face the possibility of some form of punishment.

Having secured their primary goal--the demonstrators should abandon their battle posts and swallow their anarchic threats to burn down the University to save their own skins.