The following comments from Chronicle.com are about the article "The Night They Burned Ranum's Papers," by John Castellucci (The Chronicle Review, February 19).

I was serving in the Army at that time. I was back on campus in the fall of 69, a bitter, antiwar veteran. I saw the Movement dominated by young, pampered drugstore revolutionaries with no real experience in the world. I feel terrible for Professor Ranum's loss. Some of the events of those years were akin to the burning of the library at Alexandria and in the spirit of Pol Pot, the Nazi book burnings, and Mao's Cultural Revolution. It was good for Mark Rudd to finally 'fess up. Looking back, there were some noble acts by some noble people, and there were punks.

kilchis

Even though this revelation comes late in the day, it is extremely valuable that it has occurred and been publicized. I was born in 1965 and view "JJ," Rudd, and their ilk as absolutely having squandered their birthrights (i.e. an orderly and liberal culture) and, more importantly, the birthrights of later generations. I and many in my cohort are still blindingly angry at these childish criminals. They seem to have been ably assisted by the incomprehensible weakness of the academic establishment.

zhizn35

This story treats the incident as if SDS burned Ranum's papers. But it is actually clear from Rudd's apology that SDS as a whole had no knowledge of this despicable act and that only Mark Rudd and John Jacobs knew about it or approved of it at the time. It was a terrible thing, and JJ was an unstable fanatic who decided on his own (or with Rudd's approval) to do it. Using this incident to disparage SDS as a whole when it and its members generally condemned the act (and thought it had been done by the police to cast blame on them) is unfair and feeds into the myth that all of SDS was represented by the crazies and the Weathermen—who turned out to be only a very small minority, albeit one that helped destroy the organization.

stannadel

The largest lesson of this little "period piece" is that the New Left was arrogant enough to believe its actions didn't constitute extremism of any sort. But at least the youths among them can be forgiven for their naïveté. Their elders, however, could learn a lot from Professor Ranum. Activists on the Left then and now refused to acknowledge a simple truth: Extremism on either side of the political spectrum comes to the same end—totalitarianism.

Rickinchina

I was a student of Orest Ranum's between 1963 and 1967. He was a good teacher and a person of liberal disposition. He reinforced those of us who were interested in learning and refused to wear the spectacles of the popular leftist determinisms.

My fellow students who ended up as "radicals," book burners, bombers, and members or sympathizers of SDS generally were spoiled upper-middle-class kids who sought attention and meaning for their lives by having (often violent) tantrums, which they justified by facile moralisms or by reference to the esoterics of scholastic Marxism.

The sad result was that these intellectual thugs signaled the beginnings of a rejection of the aims of classical education, a characteristic of which is the capacity to deal with ambiguity and contradiction without needing to impose arbitrary intellectual straitjackets.

Unfortunately people with these antecedents and attitudes now make up a significant portion of people who pass as "academics" today.

Philobiblos

The article presumes that somehow SDS was running the student strike. In fact, the 1,100 students, including a few outsiders, who occupied the buildings, met as communes in each occupied building to make decisions and elected representatives to a Strike Coordinating Committee. Yes, there were SDS members in both the communes and the SCC, but they were a minority of both.

Why were so many students willing to put their academic careers on the line, and to risk police violence and criminal records for their participation? Our government was bombing peasant villages in Vietnam, and strafing civilians with napalm. Our university was engaged in weapons research to make this warfare more efficient. Despite larger and larger demonstrations against the war, and the shifting of public opinion as the death toll of American GI's and Vietnamese mounted, our government was determined to ignore demands to end the war and sought instead to increase the violence.

At the same time, Columbia over the years had bought up real estate in the Morningside Heights area. Mostly minority residents had been evicted from their houses, which were rehabbed and turned into faculty and student housing. The university sought to build a private gym for students in the public park nearby that delineated the border between the university on the hill and Harlem below. About two weeks before the Columbia strike began, Harlem had erupted after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Students felt as if they had an obligation to protest. Many remembered that at Nuremberg, "I was only following orders" was not considered a valid defense for those who turned away as the Nazis murdered millions. Black students at Columbia, who had been subjected to racism for years while attending the university, were the first to formalize the occupation of the first building, and the white students emulated their action.

It's easy to condemn the 60s, but a few weeks ago, we celebrated the anniversary of the Greensboro sit-ins, which began the desegregation not only of Woolworth's but of a whole lot more in the South. And as the next few years go by, we will celebrate the anniversaries of important civil-rights victories, important accomplishments in the struggle for gender equality, and many other advances.

Those of us who participated in bringing about those advances are quite reasonably proud of what we did. Was every aspect of that perfect? Of course not. But we set important historical trends in motion that have improved society since then and that still represent many of the best American tendencies today.

morris_older

First, those of us who were involved in 1968 organized a conference on the 40th anniversary in 2008. It was held at Columbia, and Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, welcomed the 400 or so conference participants back. There was, in a small way, a reconciliation—despite the fact that there was yet another war (in Iraq), the university was expanding into Harlem again, and controversies raged. For some people, it was very difficult. One African-American participant had refused to step back on campus because of how racist Columbia had been. He said those four years were the worst experience of his life, except for his wife dying of cancer. Now he's a judge in the South.

In any case, if anyone is interested in learning of the 1968 rebellion from the perspective of those who took over the buildings and organized the strike, we have a Web site with video and audio of the conference (plus accounts of people's lives since 1968, documents, and lots of photos): http://www.columbia1968.com

At the time Orest Ranum's papers were burned I, along with everyone I knew, believed it was done by a police agent. In many respects, JJ, who was an amazing person but also regarded by me and others I knew as one of the "crazies," created a provocation. We condemned his action then, and still do. It was a failure on the part of Mark Rudd to allow him to do it, and it's good that he's clearing this up. But Mark Rudd was not the sum total of the strike. Burning Ranum's papers was a terrible injustice. At the same time, there were far more terrible crimes taking place. In a time of upheaval (just a few weeks after Martin Luther King Jr.'s murder), a lot of people were pushed to extremes.

I was in Low Library when Orest Ranum flew in the window in his academic robes (we thought it was a vision of Batman), and we didn't accept his position that we had done all that we could and that we should evacuate the president's office and leave it up to the grown-ups to negotiate. Sorry. I still think we made the right decision to stay.

I don't have a survey, but from personal knowledge, I would say that many if not most of the students protesting did not come from upper-middle-class backgrounds. Many, like myself, were first-generation college students. An underlying dynamic, in addition to the racism suffered by the small number of black students, was that Jews had been admitted to Columbia without restrictive quotas for only a few years. Many of these Jews, like myself, had had family members murdered by the Nazis, or were keenly aware of what it meant to be "a good German," or came from left-wing families who were deeply antifascist. We refused to be good Germans.

hiltono

I was in Low Library when Orest Ranum came through the window and tried to convince us to leave. He was always considered something of a character for wearing his academic robes around campus.

I quoted something from Georges Sorel, the French anarcho-syndicalist who advocated the use of a general strike to effect significant social change. Ranum said: "Sorel is dead."

Anyway he didn't persuade us to leave, and he left. I think he was accompanied by a couple of New York's finest.

I knew Mark Rudd and John Jacobs, but I agree with James Simon Kunen's assessment that the 68 uprising at Columbia was a spontaneous and basically leaderless event. We were a bunch of young students quite disillusioned with our university's involvement with a war we considered cruel and unjust. We were also upset with Columbia's rather cavalier attitude toward its neighbors in Harlem.

We may have acted with the brashness of youth, but our actions were in line with Thoreau's concept of civil disobedience as the right response to injustice. We had student deferments and were less in danger of dying in Vietnam than many others of our generation. It wasn't simply about us, as some of the posts to this article suggest.

Columbia had a roster of exceptional historians in 1968—Fritz Stern, Peter Gay, James Shenton, Eric Foner, Richard Hofstadter, among others. I don't think that academe would place Orest Ranum in that pantheon, but neither I nor many other participants in the 68 uprising would have ever endorsed destroying a scholar's work. That kind of behavior has nothing to do with ending wars or racism. It was because we were students who believed in scholarship and learning that we found Columbia's involvement with war and destruction so repugnant.

cgettle