Page 4 - Mark Rudd News Today

Columbia University is once again the center of the radical universe. More than 50 years after anti-Vietnam War demonstrators roiled the Columbia campus in 1968…

With protests and building occupations at Columbia University 56 years to the day after a previous occupation, and in other ways, too, it seems like 1968 again.

Mark Rudd says a lot has changed in half a century, but not the reason college kids paralyze a campus.

Hulton Archive/GettyThe war is in Gaza, not Vietnam, as it was when Mark Rudd became the iconic leader of the protests that rocked Columbia University more than a half century ago.But 76-year-old Rudd says the anti-war protesters who are now encamped on a lawn in the heart of the Columbia campus share an essential motivation with those of his time.“They're pretty much the same as we were,” Rudd told The Daily Beast. “The basic impetus of the students, I think it's ...

Its a historical connection many Columbia students involved in this months protests are acutely aware of.

Over 700 students were arrested during the protests in the 1960s—but only 30 were eventually suspended by the school.

Students protested what they saw as injustice and demanded change. Administrators were under pressure to get things back to normal. Police came onto the Columbia University campus and made arrests.

Today's demonstrators are more virulent than their 1960s forebears, but they are still the ideological heirs of the New Left.

NEW YORK — College students taking up space and making demands for change. University administrators facing pressure to get things back under control. Police brought in to make arrests. At

University administrators facing pressure to get things back under control. The pro-Palestinian demonstration and subsequent arrests at Columbia that have set off similar protests at campuses nationwide these days and even internationally aren't new ground for students at the Ivy League school. “When you’re going to Columbia, you know you’re going to an institution which has an honored place in the history of American protest,” said Mark Naison, professor of hi...