Twenty-four years ago this month I was arrested, along with four other students, at a sit-in at Jessup Hall, the administration building of the University of Iowa.1 It was eleven o’clock at night—shift change, we learned a bit later—and the UI police entered the building in force, told us we had to leave, and then (if memory serves), chained the doors shut to prevent us from doing so until they’d had their say. One of our number escaped and managed to alert the press; the rest of us waited. Some chose to leave when told again. Some of us stayed and got arrested.
I can’t speak for my comrades, but I’ve always felt we stayed in part because getting arrested is part of protesting, in part because it seemed pretty rich that the university had only suddenly—at 11 p.m.!—become concerned about our health and safety (there was a lot of “fire hazard” and “ingress and egress” in what the cops said) after we’d been there six days, and in part because, as a wise young person recently told me, the point of a protest is to build community. We’d built a community in Jessup Hall in those six days—and in the many months that led up to them—and I for one wasn’t about to abandon it because some guy in a polyester uniform with a badge told me it was time to go.
We were handcuffed and booked, charged with trespassing, and barred from entering the administration building without permission from the dean of students for a year. (One of my fellow arestees remembers that we were also given three years’ probation.)
You will note that, despite camping in the hallway of the administration building—president’s office on one end; provost’s on the other; general counsel in the middle—for almost a week, holding teachins for more than a thousand students during that time, getting food delivered, playing guitar, hijacking a phone line in the basement, and generally making a stinky nuisance of ourselves, we were not suspended. We were not given fifteen minutes to collect our belongings from our dorm rooms. We were removed, but we were not expelled. We remained—and remain—unmoved in our convictions.
I have watched the news from Columbia (and Barnard) the past few days with anger, sadness, and rage, and with utmost solidarity and respect for the student protesters there. Many of them have been suspended, but they remain unmoved—and their comrades remain, and return. My heart goes out to them, and to the people in Gaza whose existence they are fighting for.
Contempt is not an admirable emotion. But not all actions are admirable. University administrators have choices. The ones they have made with regard to student protesters leave me with little but contempt—contempt for their decision to call in police, contempt for their silencing of student voices, contempt for their disregard for the rights of students to hold opinions while getting an education, and utter contempt for their statements about the “proud history of protest” at their institutions.
Yes, I imagine the University of Michigan is proud to claim itself as the birthplace of Students for a Democratic Society, but how did they feel at the time? And when Mayor Eric Adams refers to the proud history of protest at Columbia, is he referring to the protestors or to the cops who beat students there in 1968?
I do not envy university administrators in any era. I also hold them to a very high standard. If you want to be an ivory tower, or a beacon, or a city on a hill, or just an institution doing its level best to prepare young peeople to be active participants in a democratic society; if you espouse humanitarian principles in your mission; if you talk about knowledge and truth; if you hold yourself up as an example of what the world should be, well, then, you have an obligation to try to live up to all that.2 It behooves you to behave as if you are in fact the head of a community that holds such ideals. And you don’t get to take pride in protesters of the past while surpressing protesters in the present.
Or at least you shouldn’t.
If you’ve ever been interviewed at a protest, you’ve probably been asked “What do you hope to accomplish here?”, and if you’re smart you’ll have a little soundbyte formulated for just that moment, and if you’re lucky the journalist will go off and write their story and your soundbyte will come through in a snappy and intelligent way. And maybe if you’re very lucky your protest will change something. People sometimes ask me if our protest did, and I used to say yeah, there’s one independent union at one factory in Mexico as a result.
But the protest also changed us, or at least it changed me. That movement—and every movement I’ve been involved in—gave me who I am. I’m still in touch with many of the people from that time, and I’m looking forward to gathering with them again in a year on the 25th anniversary of our sit-in and to hearing from current student activists about the things they are trying to change. Solidarity is important. Solidarity is real. A busload of striking steelworkers came to visit us on one day of our sit-in—piled into a bus (and a bunch of cars, because the bus ran out of room), drove two hours, went to our rally, and drove back home. I get shivers every time I think of them pouring out of that bus. We piled into cars of our own to attend a rally of theirs later that summer, because that’s what you do for the people who show up for you: you show up for them.
I send my solidarity out to Columbia and Barnard tonight, and to protesters everywhere, always.
Other news
Speaking of protest, I have a profile of the high school student as a young activist out in Truthout today (or, as they put it, a profile of “the Teenager Challenging Iowa’s Anti-LGBTQ Legislation”—there’s a reason we writers don’t write our own headlines).
And speaking of Columbia, in January 2002 I was able to travel there to visit the library and special collections thanks to a UI Student Government Research Grant. I was there to read things from my father’s time at Columbia in the 1940s, but I couldn’t resist picking up the roll of microfilm from April 1968 (which was labeled something like “1968 Special”) and perusing it. These days you can do cool stuff like that online, I’m teaching a class on research for writers where you’ll learn more than you ever wanted to know about how to find cool stuff to inform and inspire your writing. If you’re interested but $200 is more than you can afford, let me know and we’ll work something out.
In the interests of timeliness, the account of the sit-in here is based exclusively on how I remember things as I write them tonight. I wrote about the events at the time (see the 25th anniversary link for more), and they received a fair amount of press back then, but I have not fact checked my current recollections against them, and others who were there may, of course, recall things differently. We can discuss all that another time.
From the Columbia mission statement: “The University recognizes the importance of its location in New York City and seeks to link its research and teaching to the vast resources of a great metropolis…. It expects all areas of the University to advance knowledge and learning at the highest level and to convey the products of its efforts to the world.”
Among the many missions, visions, and core values the University of Iowa touts, it “provides exceptional teaching and transformative educational experiences that prepare students for success and fulfillment in an increasingly diverse and global environment.”
My undergraduate college, I just learned, seeks to “inspire each individual to lead a purposeful life.” You get the idea.
Protesting is how we got the University of Iowa to divest from South Africa in 1985. They had to bring school buses in to arrest everyone back then. I would love to see the students organize now the way we did in New Wave.