What a 1968 Columbia University protester makes of today's pro-Palestinian encampment

Eleanor Stein, law and human rights professor at State University of New York, was among hundreds of students protesting the Vietnam War in 1968 on Columbia University's campus.Eleanor Stein, law and human rights professor at State University of New York, was among hundreds of students protesting the Vietnam War in 1968 on Columbia University's campus.and led to hundreds of arrests is drawing comparisons to a movement that took place there nearly six decades ago.

In 1968, five of the campus' buildings were taken over by students protesting the school's links to military research during the height of the Vietnam War. Students also protested a new, mainly student-only gym that was being built in Harlem's Morningside Park, a public park in Manhattan. "Once the arrests happened, the university really came together and the level of support went from, you know, a matter of dispute to close to universal," Eleanor Stein, one of the protestors in 1968, told NPR's Michel Martin."The issue then became the conduct of the police and the choice of the administration to bring the police in rather than negotiating with the students."This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The second issue was that Columbia was in the process of building a new gym, and they were building it in Morningside Park, one of the few green spaces in Harlem. And we felt that it couldn't be business as usual, that the university itself was engaging in an indefensible takeover of Harlem Lab and an indefensible participation and complicity with the Vietnam War effort. And students felt so strongly about this.

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