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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
We used it as our textbook for tactics!,
By Roy Gordon (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Up Against the Ivy Wall: a History of the Columbia crisis (Paperback)
This book details the Columbia University student revolt in 1968. It provides a very detailed, readable, amazingly inside view by the then editor of the Columbia Daily Spectator.
It's been nearly 40(!) years since I read this book. I was in New York at another university when the revolt occurred. It was a shocker! But, when I first read the book in 1969 I was now a graduate student in a university undergoing its own student rebellion. In addition, the graduate students in the world-esteemed department I was in revolted against the department. We used this book as our textbook! Really. There was some terrific advice of how to deal with those in power when you had no institutional or other supposedly 'legitimate' claim to power. Knowledge, of course, gleaned from the on-the-job training at Columbia. For example, I'll never forget its advice of never allowing them to get you to sit down. (Because once you do you've been co-opted back into the usual power/control relationship. You know, "Sit down in your seats, boys and girls, and we'll discuss this calmly.") This book comprises an essential document of the event, and anyone interested in it, or those times more generally, would do well to read it.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Consummate journalism,
By John Knox (Athens, GA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Up Against the Ivy Wall: a History of the Columbia crisis (Paperback)
I checked out this undeservedly out-of-print book from the library while living in the Columbia University area in the late 1990s. I come from a journalistic family, and "Up Against the Ivy Wall" struck me as the single best piece of at-the-moment journalism I had ever read. The scope of the reporting of such a contentious time is amazing; it has little of the tunnelvision you normally expect from even the best journalists in such circumstances. I had to keep reminding myself that....the authors were college kids, too--only a few awkward references to sexual antics reminded me of that. What an achievement! Please, somebody, bring it back into print.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Where have all the radicals gone?,
By Peter Freeman, former Editor in Chief, The Co... (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Up Against the Ivy Wall: a History of the Columbia crisis (Paperback)
This is the definitive account of how a small group of radical students at Columbia University convinced hundreds of undergraduates that class struggle, the Vietnam war, and racial divides could all be addressed by taking over several campus buildings and dumping Grayson Kirk. That many students today look longingly at the 1968 episode and try to emulate it suggests they haven't read this book and learned its lessons. What is truly fascinating about "Up Against the Ivy Wall," is how it captures the division within the radical ranks, specifically between the SDS and SAS. That black students took over their own building and barred white participation surprised the white radicals who had started it all, and illustrated how the radical message had splintered into a dozen causes--from opposing the construction of a gymnasium in Morningside Park, to scoring the administration for supporting a Defense Department arms initiative, to criticizing the University structure as necessarily oppressive to students, staff, and community. The resulting confusion doomed the movement. Administrators who didn't want to listen to the students' pointed to the changing message as another reason to ignore them or just to call in the police (whose brutality on this occasion is graphically detailed in the book) and end the uprising. Faculty who sought to work out a compromise saw the confusion in the student ranks and the intransigence of the administrators and simply threw up their hands in frustration. Today's student radicals ought to read this book to learn how not to conduct a massive campaign, for any cause. Because if you look at Columbia today, you will find a University with all the institutional arrogance of its predecessors, and not the least bit in fear of students who look to failed methods of change for guidance.
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