Insistent Change: Columbia’s Core Curriculum at 100

Columbia College Citizenship Council

Founded in 1959, this student-run Columbia College Citizenship Council provided Columbia students with opportunities to serve the surrounding community. The group's members began by providing tutoring for neighborhood children. By 1965 it had become involved with political action groups in Harlem and helped organize tenant rent strikes.

Rules for Radicals

In January 1961, radical community organizer Saul Alinsky sent a letter to John Herman Randall, Jr. In his letter, Alinsky – already famous for his work throughout the United States organizing urban communities for social action – asks permission to reprint Randall's 1938 essay "The Importance of Being Unprincipled." Randall, a founding CC instructor and author of its first textbook The Making of the Modern Mind (1926), must have granted permission: The piece appears in Alinsky's Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. Published in 1971 the book quickly became the bible of counterculture community organizers. 

CC Course Revised

Unlike Columbia's senior administrators, Contemporary Civilization staff were in constant dialogue with students and well aware of the simmering discontent on campus by the start of the 1968 spring semester. CC Chair Orest Ranum had clamored throughout the year for permission to organize a staff retreat where instructors might deliberate on the purpose of the course and how it might be revised to address the concerns of student critics. Indeed, what's remarkable about the sweeping post-1968 reforms to the CC curriculum is that they were actually hammered out the weekend before the occupation began.

Columbia 1968

The occupation of five campus buildings in April 1968 marked a sea change in the relationships among Columbia University administration, its faculty, its student body, and its neighbors.

For more information about these events please view our online exhibit, 1968: Columbia in Crisis