The Battle for Morningside Heights by Roger Kahn

The Battle for Morningside Heights: Why Students Rebel
by Roger Kahn
Foreword by Senator Eugene McCarthy
William Morrow and Company, 1970. 252 pages

Roger Kahn's 1970 book, "The Battle for Morningside Heights: Why Students Rebel" does what few other books on the '60s can do: It captures both sides of an argument with precision and clarity.

This is partly due to the way the book is structured. First he introduces several Columbia students as characters. Each character's motivation for becoming a student radical is revealed. Some characters were former drifters; others came from rich families. Later on, he will introduce Mark Rudd as being a student who speaks in contradictions. Rudd headed the Columbia's Students for a Democratic Society. He urged confrontation. There's a temptation to investigate Rudd's background to see if all of this radicalism is due to some "family trouble." Kahn acknowledges this impulse and then indulges it.

But he also looks closely at Columbia's side of the fence. He investigates the history of the university, which includes heavy doses of authoritarianism. Kahn provides an assessment of Columbia's history with the Harlem community - a frightening vision of institutional racism and cultural insensitivity.

After outlining the characters in this drama, Kahn outlines the issues dispassionately: The "Jim Crow" gymnasium, the contracts Columbia faculty had with the military, and the university's shotty treatment of SRO tenants it was trying to evict. At the least, it reveals the university's gross insensitivities towards its students and the surrounding community.

As a Harlem resident comments in the book, "The man's got to know we don't take the basement entrance anymore."

So the recourse, for SDS and the community, was rebellion. Most people don't realize how much the community was involved in the event.

"A number of Cicero Wilson's Harlem acquaintances began arriving after six o'clock. Some brought food and blankets. Others, silent and expressionless, brought a sense of black power. The first group came from neighborhood organizations and from SNCC and CORE... These blacks, along with their seeming brothers, the middle-class young blacks who attended the university, had imprisoned the College dean and had captured a Columbia building."

The bulk of the book is spent outlining issues surrounding the controversy. The violence is described through the eyes of those he interviewed. In this way, he maintains his neutrality while allowing others to emote through their descriptions.

For all of the descriptions of the violence at Columbia, The Battle for Morningside Heights captures a steady perspective. It never ventures to answer the question directly: Why Students Rebel. Instead, it gives a myriad of reasons, each one with apparent validity.