Columbia and Union Theological Seminary

As a graduate of a divinity school, I am fascinated by the relationship that theological institutions have with the larger universities with which they are often associated. With this interest in mind, I sought to examine the history of Union Theological Seminary, with a special emphasis on its relationship with Columbia. What I found was that the Seminary, at the time of its relocation to Morningside Heights in the early 20^th century, simultaneously became part of the larger university community while distinguishing itself as an independent entity in various ways. This dual character is embodied by the location of the space and its architectural style.

(Union Theological Seminary, Park Ave. Campus, 1884)

In 1884, a new campus was constructed at 700 Park Avenue to house the seminary; after only 20 years, the campus was deemed inadequate for various reasons, and plans for the construction of a new campus were drawn up. This relocation was made possible in large part by a donation of 1.6 million dollars made by the vice president of the board of trustees, and construction commenced in 1908.

(The Seminary Under Construction)

In a paper, written in 1986, entitled “Union,” Mirande E. Dupuy details the circumstances and process of this construction. She notes that according to the initial design requirements of the Building and Site Committee, the site was to be conceived as a space “of Instruction and Administration, of Worship and Residence” and as “an institution of higher learning made distinctive by religious rather than purely academic motive.” Additionally, the committee called for the proposed site to be architecturally consonant with surrounding academic institutions (ie Barnard, Columbia and the Teacher’s College) “so as to promote a harmonious ensemble.” At the same time, the campus was to “have such individuality of treatment as to make evident [its] organic distinctiveness and peculiar character.” This tension – between its simultaneous inclusion in the university community and distinctiveness from it – manifested itself in other ways as well.

According to a timeline on the Union Theological Seminary Website, in March 1903, the seminary trustees received a letter from the trustees of Columbia which expressed “their great satisfaction that the Seminary had secured a site near the University grounds” and which offered “the literary advantages of our college to the Seminary students.” On the other hand, as Dupuy notes, in an article in the New York Times which appeared in 1905, the president of the seminary, Charles Cuthbert Hall, “was emphatic in his statement that the identities of the institutions would not change” and that the seminary “would not relinquish its ‘corporate independence.’” The quote is a telling one, as it suggests that Hall found it necessary to affirm the seminary’s autonomy from Columbia University, the status of which might have been seen as vulnerable given the location of the new site.

The firm chosen to design the new campus was Allen and Collins; their design reflects the manner in which the UTS campus is visually distinct from that of Columbia. Dupuy points out that the plan was influenced by the prevalence of the “High Gothic Revival” in architecture during the early 20^th century. This revival was perhaps inaugurated by the church architect Ralph Adams Cram (who, incidentally, designed St. John the Divine). She goes on to describe the movement as being defined by “a need to return to the monastic intensity of purposeful learning as there had been in the quadrangles of the medieval colleges.” The Union campus was directly influenced by the Cambridge University. The campus, closed off in a separate quadrangle, with its very different architectural style as compared to McKim, Mead and White’s Columbia, thus accomplished the task of distinguishing the space stylistically and spatially from other parts of campus. Perhaps the choice of this specific style, popularized by a church architect, was particularly conducive to the role of UTS as a religious and an academic space.

It is interesting to note that the Seminary quadrangle today is not as closed off from the rest of the Columbia Campus as it was once. 80 Claremont Ave., at its southwest end, houses the University's Religion department; Knox Hall, at its northwest end, houses the departments of Sociology and Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies. Reflecting on the relationship between Union and Columbia, one in which these two institutions are interdependent yet distinct, leads me to wonder how the University has related to the other educational institutions in Morningside Heights.

(Dupuy paper courtesy of Columbia University Archives, Buildings and Grounds Collection; Images Courtesy of New York Public Library Digital Gallery)

-Jay Ramesh

College Walk and the Acropolis of America

Since visiting the archives, my mind has continually been drawn back to the description of Columbia as the “acropolis of America.” This phrase is perhaps over enthusiastic (the acropolis of America? Not an acropolis-- the acropolis!) but nonetheless it has resonated with me and I think about it often as I wander about the campus. Having been to the Acropolis and many other ancient Roman or Greek places of discourse, scholarship and culture, I want to explore the ways in which Columbia’s campus compares this model. Most of us traverse College Walk at least once a day, and so it’s there I would like to focus.

As we are now well aware, Columbia’s campus was not designed with the south lawn in mind. Low was supposed to look down on the city. Yet, as we are again well aware, Butler and the other buildings of the southern campus were built, thus transforming campus into a box. But it wasn’t always a box-- until the early 20th century, 116th street continued directly through campus as an active motorway. Cars zipped past (undoubtedly dodging graduate students who meandered in the street fascinated by springtime sunlight, like children in a toy store) cars parked, people waited to cross the street, people looked both ways before doing so. Now, it is different. You could essentially cartwheel across College Walk with no real threat of being run over, and the old road’s median has become a lounge.


It is curious to me, in a way, that the notion of Columbia as being the “Acropolis of America” originated closer to the time that College Walk was a road than the time it was not. As Dolkart showed in his writings, Columbia’s campus was designed with ancient Greece and Rome in mind. In modern times, this illusion comes across strongly-- campus IS secluded, a little intellectual island in the midst of the city. But having an active motorway rip through the center of campus-- right between the Pantheon and a Greek-fascaded library-- would have a profound impact on this idea of Columbia as an intellectual forum in the style of the ancients. When I see photos like the one I’ve posted in this entry, campus seems immediately different: more included in the city, but separate from the design that had been intended for it.

The closure of the 116th street motorway through campus seems to me a major transition point in the landscape of Columbia’s campus. It didn’t change a whole lot physically, but that closure changed the ways in which we perceive that space and, resultingly, in how the north and south campuses are tied together into the unit we consider “campus.” Instead of two halves bisected by the outside world, Columbia is now an acropolis of sorts-- a sort of secluded place of cultural and intellectual exchange unimpinged by outside influences.

Photo credit: Columbia University Archives

The Most Dangerous Place in the Most Dangerous City

Last year, the local Columbia University press began to report on gun shootings taking place in Morningside Park, in addition to an increase in overall crime in the park. (Leland, 2011; Vigeland, 2011; Lopez, 2011)  Even the New York Times commented on the crimes, which shocked a neighborhood known for its extensive restoration of the area. (Leland, 2011)  Parents openly spoke to reporters about the pressure they felt to leave for the suburbs, and neighbors put pressure on the New York City police to patrol Morningside Park and make arrests. (Leland, 2011)  People raising children in million-dollar brownstones along the Park’s main boulevard expressed fear of enjoying its nearby playgrounds, ball courts, and pathways. (Leland, 2011) Most notable, however, was the immediate response of the city authorities in what seemed like a speech from a long-gone era:  that when crime happens in an area where “everyone knows crime happens,” such as a Harlem park, a basketball court filled with teenagers, or an area where drugs may be sold,  people should feel pressure to despair and let events take their course, as if city landscapes somehow have an immoveable identity produced by some heavy historical force, the weight of the past directing events which take place today, which cannot be altered. (Leland, 2011) 

Morningside Park ball fields.

While the subsequent response of local Morningside Park residents was immediate and successful in attracting assistance to their plight, the experience and the interest it generated for them highlighted the precarious nature of their neighborhood. (Leland, 2011; Vigeland, 2011; Lopez, 2011)  Morningside Park is hallowed and, in many ways, haunted ground in the Columbia University and Harlem area because of its history, and for the lingering memory it holds of an old New York City landscape which is still in the process of passing away.   

Morningside Park is famous, first and foremost, among Columbia neighborhood residents as the contested site of a gym which the university proposed to build in 1968 under circumstances which the community and its own students found unacceptable.  Dramatic public protests and students occupations of campus buildings erupted and led to the reorganization of university life. (www.Columbia1968.com)  However, Morningside Park has a second identity which was representative at the time of the city as a whole:  as a dangerous wasteland of romanticized urban decay.  This emblematic degradation was viewed as if it had always existed, both as some reflection of an existential state of mind which was projected on the world as a criminalized landscape, and as the result of elitist public policy which, through some undefined natural law, could somehow never extend to the residents of certain areas such as black Harlem because of an intrinsic flaw in the municipal system's identity.  

In the reality of the 1970s through the 1990s, Morningside Park itself was so dangerous that everyone near it was warned never to set foot in it at any time of the day or night. (Leland, 2011)  Drug dealers, homeless alcoholics, and criminals hid in the park's trees and cliff face caves, waiting to attack any wandering student or child who ventured near them.  Gangs pulverized whatever remaining markers of civilization were left standing.  From outside its grassy borders or from high terraces overlooking its paths, the innocent people of the neighborhood or tourists hoping to see the most dangerous spots in the city could peer inside and attempt to observe the guilty, a raggedy group of New Yorkers who could easily be stand-ins for every victim of Wall Street’s financial boom.  New York City seemed, from the outside, simultaneously like a preserve for the unstoppably successful and the hopelessly lost and left behind—and like a stray wanderer in the wrong park, any New Yorker could find him or herself on either path with one wrong step.  As a result, places like Morningside Park held a thrill of fear and fascination, because whatever urban force had made them so dangerous could not be contained and might spill over into the streets at any moment.  The park, and also the New York landscape which surrounded it, suggested that modern civilization had some elemental thanatos, a drive to self-destruct, as its inevitable companion.  For those who could not find a safe path through life in time, there might be a fall through every safety net of urban civilization to some dark lower region where one’s choices were limited to perpetrator, victim, or helpless bystander.  This process seemed to affect so many people in New York at that time, when the city was famed for its violence and trashy grittiness, that it assumed a self-perpetuating epic quality.

Morningside Park pathways.

This epic quality can still be seen in many contemporary discussions of racial tensions surrounding Morningside Park’s history, especially surrounding the Columbia gym and its impact on the neighborhood’s collective memory.  Although many years have passed since the student protests of Morningside Park, the story of those events still brings up strong emotions regarding racism, city politics, and the tensions between rich and poor New York residents.  This suggests not only that certain problems may still exist in the community, but also that the protest events of 1968 can still be seen as a backdrop for an ongoing battle between light and dark social forces.  Morningside Park certainly lends itself to such a staging, as its forested paths are attached to a cliff face that visibly separates a wealthy area that is primarily white and educated from an area that is primarily black with a mixed economic constituency.  

The cliff face divide between Columbia University and Harlem.

At first glance, logic would suggest that people produce landscapes.  Artists and philosophers may argue over the mythic qualities of an area as if it was representative of some eternal idea, but when public policy is put in place, neighborhoods change, and suddenly the disputed, seemingly unchangeable landscape fades from view.  Or the opposite may occur:  people may militate for a change in policy to alter an urban landscape as if this were easy, even as that landscape is generating obstacles to change that override all their efforts, as if it had a life of its own.  Over the past ten years, the Morningside Park neighborhood has seen median home prices triple, and median family incomes have risen 48 percent.  (Leland, 2011)  Yet the recent shootings in Morningside Park sent a chill through the community, as if its middle-class success was still, in people's minds, holding back some inevitable tide of violence that could sweep back over the neighborhood at any time.  In a white, educated neighborhood, it would be the violence, not the middle-class success story, that would likely be the anomaly.

Morningside Park brownstones in Harlem.

Are people a part of their landscapes, like the tiny villagers who populate medieval paintings of pastoral farmland, or do they create landscapes as agents of civilization, which makes civilized landscapes the responsibility of their creators?  And is civilization’s progress a force of creation or destruction?  These questions can paralyze people from taking actions that seem simple, such as mobilizing with a sense of entitlement to stop crime in a black neighborhood, or lead them to preserve what might be better off replaced, such as the ungentrified neighborhoods of old New York City, whose local color included public spaces that resembled war zones.   Few would suggest that Morningside Park be abandoned to crime again in order to spark a debate on the social inequalities of New York, or to expose the city’s lurking Wall Street-driven decay.  Yet people still point to it as a boundary between the rich and the poor, not between millionaire black and white homeowners, and the initial reaction residents met after the recent shootings in the park demonstrates there is still a lingering fear of shifting the landscape, once and for all, to one of integration, safety, and success.

References

City of New York Parks and Recreation Department.  http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/morningsidepark 

Friends of Morningside Park.  http://morningsidepark.org/ 

Leland, John.  “A Summer Idyll, and Then Three Bullets.”  The New York Times, Aug. 12, 2011: New York City/Region.   http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/nyregion/shooting-in-morningside-park-tests-harlems-bond-with-past.html?pagewanted=all 

Lopez, Lolita.  “Frightened Harlem Residents Avoid Morningside Park.”  Pix11.com, July 12, 2011.  http://www.wpix.com/news/wpix-morningside-park-shootings,0,7700292.story

Vigeland, Finn. “Community forums address violence in Morningside Park.”  The Columbia Spectator, Aug. 16, 2011: Spectrum.  http://spectrum.columbiaspectator.com/spectrum/community-forums-address-violence-morningside-park

Landscape of a university? A city? A nation?: 1968 and a moment of conflicting, fragmenting, collectivizing, restructuring

So my blog runs smoothly on from Mark’s. For the most part of this entry, I consulted the University Protest and Activism Archive Collection and a documentary film, Columbia Revolt (1969). I don’t want to recount all the events of 1968 here. I’m not sure if I myself know the ins and outs but I want to try to present a picture of the landscape and offer some interpretations on the conceptualizing of it. The Columbia Revolt documentary starts with showing close shots of Low library, from a ground position looking up at the monumental pillars, as well as shots of Low’s interior grandeur; in the background an authoritative voiceover affirms that “the modern university is the cradle of the nation’s future…the chief energizing and creative force in our entire social system.”

We then get a close up of the lion statue which starts to hone our attention to the specificity of the chain of events that the film is about to present. A significant event (in some narratives) took place on March 27, 1968 with a peaceful demonstration by 6 students in Low library who were subsequently put on probation for violating university policy of no indoor demonstrations. Subsequent protests were fought by various groups for various reasons; student voices in heard in the documentary attest to “different political identities,” including those protesting the “functioning of the corporate entity.” At the same time, we see close-up shots of new buildings on campus: engineering, business, international affairs, the law school representing the priorities of the university. The proposal for a new gym became particularly contentious; the site for which was a physical incline and one of the few panoramic shots in the documentary involves pivoting the camera around this incline and out towards the Harlem horizon, comprising mainly of low rise buildings. The proposal became nicknamed “Gym Crow,” as Harlem residents would have limited access and the site itself became subject to protest when demonstrators were refused access inside Low. The site was itself guarded by the NYPD and the students returned back to campus and “occupied” Hamilton Hall. The strike received much media attention given Columbia’s New York location.

The racial division amongst activists, a division thus on goals, led to a separation between blacks (who stayed in Hamilton) and whites (who moved in to Low), making the issue of race one in which all groups and networks had to navigate and consider in their decision-making processes. Black students felt that they had a particular militant advantage and their agenda would be better served by the split. One student in the documentary said that the black strikers had “militant tactics that we didn’t understand”.

 Two places of “occupation” thus emerged and the university and police worked on a fragmented and building-specific policy. The use of force in Hamilton had the danger of leading to race riots; black students garnered considerable support from off-campus black activists (according to one voice in the documentary, “the brothers who got it made were revolting” and this was especially powerful), the reality that Harlem was next door and the strikes occurred just days after MLK’s death which itself sparked race rioting meant that the authorities were wary of wider mobilization. Hamilton Hall was peacefully cleared since mediators were black lawyers and policeman, and indeed the students were allow to exit the buildings from underground tunnels.

Low became a place of tense standoffs and violent confrontation. A human blockade formed around Low called the “Majority Coalition,” referred more colloquially to as the jocks by students in the documentary, creating the a real possibility of violent conflict between students themselves. Despite occupying the higher ground (physically speaking), strikers looked rather disheveled and poor, to the fresher looking jocks stationed on the lower ground (a comment as concerns the conditions rather than to background, then again…). Scenes in the documentary show “jocks et al” preventing food from reaching the strikers, indeed confiscating and feeding themselves. In Low itself there was a cultural transformation of space as students talked of “collective feelings” trumping “individual feelings” in an environment described as “electric awakening.”

Yet groups across the occupied buildings were connected, taking advantage of existing physical structures and technologies to maintain contact; “every building has a communication room,” says one student, and the telephone system ensure that buildings were connected. Communication showed itself in the activity of print and media; pamphlets boasted that all buildings were ready to resist police infringement, and one suggestion floating around through the communication and gossip was that Hamilton Hall could become its own university. The landscape was transformed. Creativity arose out of the breakdown. There was an energy. Perhaps not speed, so often equated with efficiency and success in a modern sense, but in messiness came vitality. Word by mouth invigorated movements. Typed pamphlets and letters often had handwriting scrawled on them with the time and date of events; events that could be not made be arranged weeks in advance, but were those comprising ad hoc associations reacting to and trying to invigorate the spur of the moment.

Jocks and the police too showed solidarity. Jocks stood shoulder to shoulder while police, who arrived in great numbers in darkness as they were getting ready to storm Low, lined the each stair to the building; one student voice is recorded as saying that such a formation ensured that each line got their “licks in” as protestors were dragged out. How different and yet true to the description of the stairs, devoid of experience at the time, in Dolkart: “simplified, dignified and convenient.” In Mathematics Hall strikers attempted to make life difficult for the police, according to the police report, by dousing the floors with soapy water! I don’t know the composition of the strikers in that particular building, but I like to think that the majority were math majors!

When I started to research for this blog, I wanted to focus solely on the voice of external organizations during the events and how we could theorize the university landscape then (in relation to city and nation). Although the material was not so numerous, one section in the collection was devoted these organizations. What we begin to see in the literature is how building names and spatial awareness became familiar to those outside of the university network. Or perhaps they too were getting entangled via their various associations. What is noticeable is that directions are given based on what is already familiar; i.e. New Yorkers should know how Hamilton and Low look like and roughly where they are located on campus.

One letter in support of the protestors from an external group reads: “As residents in Columbia owned buildings, we have an opportunity, therefore a responsibility, to make our position in the current crisis clear to the board of Trustees of the University to whom we pay rent. We believe that the events of the last few ays have had a positive effect on the entire University community by putting the administration in a position where it must face up to its responsibilities to ties neighbors in Harlem, to the critics of its ties with the Institute for Defense Analysis, and the members of the student body…WE REQUEST THE RESIDENTS OF ALL COLUMBIA OWNED BUILDINGS TO WITHOLD RENT UNTIL THESE DEMANDS ARE MET. COLUMBIA TENANTS IN SUPPORT OF THE STRIKE (their emphasis!).” A telegram from “Morningsiders for the Students” to Mayor Lindsay exclaims, “we don’t kill college students in New York – do we?.. We are prepared to mobilize our respective memberships to support and defend those students whose demands in many cases are also community demands.” Another pamphlet reads: “SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST THE JIM CROW GYM, IDA, FOR AMNESTY, AND AGAINST VICIOUS POLICE BRUTALITY ON CAMPUS OR ANYWHERE!” Here we start to see the neighborhood strike back, but on a more serious level, the walls of Columbia are being penetrated. In closure, connections and links were being forged; things that were not possible when the school was open and running as “normal.” Strikers complemented the external groups' literature:

A few months later (May 1968), community residents occupied a vacant apartment building on 114^th Street to protest the university’s expansion and students went to reoccupy Hamilton Hall to protest the suspension of the initial six students who entered Low. A countercommencement on Low Plaza took place, including a picnic in Morningside Park. Clearly students were becoming conscious of the landscape; what could become possible when they disrupt the order of things. The direction of the expansion changed. What the protests did was bring to light the not so obvious side of Columbia’s ever changing/expanding landscape, sometimes, most times by stealth. The power of subtle expansion was scarier than the monumentality of Low or the much spoken about 116th gates themselves. Indeed, the physical structure is not so indexically symbolic of force of the “institution” and the campus extends beyond the gates. Perhaps the gates meant more to the white students, but for community residents and black protestors, there was a different sensuous experience of the injustice, which goes beyond the symbolic power of gates, which are anything if not just cunning. Indeed, one thing that is very noticeable about the documentary is the relatively short amount of coverage given to the Hamilton Hall black strikers. The events point to some of what we have discussed in class; namely our understanding of campus beyond just a thing, but perhaps a process-thing dialectic.

In his post, Mark touches on similarities between the discourse and conditions back then and now. One thing I got a sense of from reading the primary literature as well as watching the documentary was the feeling amongst the students that this was their moment. In political science parlance, variables that existed back then could be seen to exist now. A nation embroiled in an unpopular war. The approval of the return of ROTC. Columbia university expansion to surrounding areas. I suspect we might have missed our moment. And perhaps that was what some of the students of 1968 feared when they saw the transformation of the landscape by the introduction of buildings like Uris and International Affairs. But then again, the specificity of 1968 might have arose from a particularly black student activism, with the potential of greater mobilization from Columbia’s neighbors! Food for thought! And now I must go get mine.

Columbia Revolt (documentary)

Revson Plaza and Columbia's expansions

With Campus level above and traffic below it we will have a separation of academic and commercial life and provide students with a rural atmosphere in a great metropolis. (...) We are most fortunate at Columbia. The topography of the Morningside Heights area makes this unusual plaza development feasible, in an area where the land is level, such a project would be impossible.  -- William C. Warren, Dean of the Columbia Law School, at the opening of Revson Plaza on November 23, 1965.

In this post, I follow up on my earlier post about the views from Columbia's Campus. There, I wrote about the ways "the city" erases and plays with differences in elevation. However much may be learned from simply experiencing the landscape, there are certain things about which it is silent. How did people speak about this place in the past? What were their intentions? How did they speak about their experiences? The landscape may speak in many senses and with many of the senses, but usually speech is not among them. And so, here I want to dig into some historical voices, voices from the archive speaking about one of the places I encountered naively in my earlier post: Revson Plaza.

Warren's quote struck me as particularly interesting. Something is off, but what is going on? My first impression was one of a naive erasure of history, of the past choices of the trustees of the university, an erasure of what may be called sedimented human agency. Warren speaks as if "Columbia University in the City of New York" has never been located anywhere else in this city, or indeed as if it couldn't be anywhere else but on top of a hill in New York City. How fortunate is Columbia! This site, after all, was chosen very consciously and in line with a politics of space that Warren is merely reformulating: like the Christians who say they are in the world (saeculum) but not of the world, Columbia University is in the city, but not of the city.

But what is Revson Plaza? My earlier blog post here should give a first impression of the physical space. A quick scan of the recent archives of online Campus publication Bwog.com (an undergradute puvlication) reveals that Revson Plaza is rather peripheral to the daily experience of Campus space for most undergraduates (or for that matter: likely most non-Law School, non-SIPA, and non-East Campus dwelling students). At Bwog, the official name Revson Plaza is usually followed with a clarification along the lines of "the elevated walkway over Amsterdam Avenue" (here) or "an overpass above Amsterdam Avenue" (here). (Columbia Spectator's supposedly more established readership needs no such clarification). Furthermore, the Columbia University Archives' "Buildings and Grounds" section informs us that the plaza was dedicated in November 1965 after many years of delays due to construction errors and difficulties in meeting city demands. Indeed, the plaza had been first announced in 1956, after the university acquired the entire "superblock" between West 116th-118th Street, Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive and the bridge had originally been  slated to open at the same time as the new Law School building (Greene Hall opened in 1961).

Mock up of the East Campus plan with an impression of Revson Plaza, New York Herald Tribune, March 28, 1956.

This expansion was momentous in the architectural history of Columbia's Morningside Campus, as for the first time the original campus' architects were no longer involved, having been replaced by Wallace Harrison and Max Abramovitz. It should be noted that McKim, Mead, and White & Co had spearheaded Columbia's eastward proto-expanion, advising, for instance, the architects of the Casa Italiana in the 1920's. At the same time, the university was dealing with the problems of expanding
its campus in an expanding city. Public streets became an annoyance, an intrusion of the world into "rural" idylle that was Columbia's Campus. First of all, in 1953 the city ceded 116th Street to the university in anticipation of the University's bicentennial. However, since 116th Street was not much of a thoroughfare (traffic is blocked within a block from Campus by Riverside Park and Morningside Park, this was an easy gesture from the city (reflected in the university paying a nominal sum of $1,000 for the street section). However, this was not an option with regard to Revson Plaza: the city was not going to give up Amsterdam Avenue, which is a major thoroughfare. And so was born Revson Plaza: "a little vision of a future big city", in the words of architect Harrison, quoted in the Herald Tribune of March 28, 1956.

In light of the current squabbles over the university's expansions, it is interesting to note the similarities in language. The same Herald Tribune piece quoted before notes that:

A great transformation is taking place at Columbia. And it reaches beyond the university itself. For the entire Morningside Heights area, which a few years ago was turning shabby and even dangerous, is involved in the regeneration. --New York Herald Tribune, March 28, 1956

The neighbourhood is turning bad and Columbia will revitalize it. And just as today, protests were quick to follow back then. It is perhaps no coincidence that the famous riots on campus of 1968 were in reaction to the University's continued expansion.