Late last spring, the faculty of Columbia created a committee to investigate and evaluate the disturbances on campus during April and May. The committee was chaired by Archibald Cox, Professor of Law at Harvard, and its "General Observations," which conclude its recently released report, are reprinted below.

I.

The April uprising started and grew haphazardly. As it developed to the final academic cataclysm, its entire character was altered.

The long series of turbulent demonstrations beginning in 1965, which were tolerated by most of the University community, leaves a tragic sense of inevitability of the final escalation. Packing the lobby of Hamilton Hall--even the somewhat ambiguous obstruction of Dean Coleman's liberty--was scarcely different from the earlier confrontation in John Jay Hall or the sit-in following the CIA demonstration. SAS's decision to evict the whites and barricade the doors in a demonstration of black student power--one of the key turning points--was a response to an occasion thrust upon the black students. With each successive day the uprising gathered its own physical and emotional momentum.

We reject the view that ascribes the April and May disturbances primarily to a conspiracy of student revolutionaries. That demonology is no less false than the native radical doctrine that attributes all wars, racial injustices, and poverty to the machinations of a capitalist and militarist "Establishment." Student revolutionists within SDS planned turbulent confrontations and revolutionary tactics. They manipulated facts in ways that created distrust and bred unwarranted antagonism. There apparently was occasional talk of wider revolution to overthrow the present political system. A very few revolutionists may have been in dead earnest. More, we suspect, were half in dreamland, feverishly discussing romantic tactics but hardly contemplating realistic execution. Part of the responsibility for the disturbances rests upon the revolutionaries consciously seeking to subvert and destroy the University but their total number was small--much less than the full SDS membership--and their activities were only the catalyst that precipitated a deeper movement. (By the same token our comments concerning the above group should not be applied to the much larger number who seek fundamental change in the established order without embracing doctrinaire revolutionary theory and tactics.)

II.

By its final days the revolt enjoyed both wide and deep support among the students and junior faculty and in lesser degree among the senior professors. The grievances of the rebels were felt equally by a still larger number, probably a majority, of the students. The trauma of the violence that followed police intervention intensified emotions but support for the demonstrators rested upon broad discontent and widespread sympathy for their position.

The record contains ample proof of this conclusion. The very number of students arrested in the buildings--524 Columbia students in the first police action--is convincing. Many more had been in the buildings earlier. Some of the latter were doubtless curiosity seekers. For others in both groups the affair probably had many of the elements of the once-traditional spring riots and subsequent "panty raids." But even after discount is made for those elements, the extent of active participation in violent and unlawful protest is significant.

The existence of broad underlying unrest is also shown by the progress of the seizures. The action of the black students in Hamilton Hall was entirely independent of SDS. The seizure of Avery Hall by architectural students was their own movement. The occupation of Fayerweather Hall, in which a large part of graduate study in the social sciences is centered, was apparently spontaneous; no evidence of an SDS connection has come to our attention.

Outside the buildings the militants enjoyed visible support in the form of the thousands who watched from various points on campus, most conspicuously at the Sundial. A campus poll reportedly boycotted by those in the buildings showed that 74 percent of the participants favored "end gym construction," 66 percent favored severing ties with IDA, and 37 percent even favored amnesty for all students involved in the demonstrations.

The events after the police "bust" point to the same conclusion. The emotions excited by the brutality must have polarized opinion. There would be a tendency to put unjust blame upon those who called for police intervention rather than those--chiefly from SDS--whose deliberate efforts to provoke disruptive turbulence made it almost inevitable that police action would be required. Despite these complex cross-currents, the extent and persistence of the ultimate reaction against the University Administration is adequately explained only by the presence of strong but latent dissatisfaction quickened by the violence of events.

For the future it is equally important to note that the support for the activists has come from the portions of the student body who are most energetically concerned with university and community affairs.

III.

The avowed objectives of the April demonstrations, stripped of their context and symbolism, were inadequate causes for an uprising.

The University's IDA affiliation had little practical importance. It was being reviewed by the Henkin Committee as part of a larger study of Columbia's relations to outside agencies. There was not the slightest reason to doubt that the normal academic procedures could produce a reasoned and fair-minded decision upon the merits. The disruptive potential of the IDA affiliation at Columbia, as at other universities, was that it enabled the large part of the intellectual community, especially students, to transfer to the campus their intense moral indignation against the Vietnam war.