Word: gyms
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Columbia University has been governed undemocratically. An administration responsible only to the trustees has made decisions that deeply affect students, faculty and the community. It has expropriated a neighborhood park to build a gym. It has participated through I.D.A. in the suppression of self-determination throughout the world. It has formulated rules and disciplined students arbitrarily and for the purpose of suppressing justified protest. The actions of the administration in the present crisis have exposed it to students and faculty as the anti-democratic and irresponsible body it has always been...
...wrold. Implicit in our I.D.A. demand is the right of these peoples, like us, to determine their own lives. We do not want students to take over the university's function of slumlord and expropriator of park lands in Harlem and Morningside Heights. Our demands around the gym were not intended only or even primarily to stop a particular injustice, but to support the right of the people of these communities to exercise control over the use of their neighborhoods...
...facility. A few Harlem leaders objected on the grounds that the project would deprive them of park land-though the area involved occupies barely two acres of the 30-acre park. A later objection arose over the architectural plans: while Columbia intended to make part of the gym exclusively available to Harlem youngsters, it blundered by providing for a rather grand entrance opening on to the campus and a separate, less conspicuous one, facing Harlem. Negroes seized upon the gym as a symbol of back-door paternalism...
Sudden Power. Last week's demonstration began quietly enough, with some 400 students gathering on the campus plaza. University officials promptly offered to meet with them to consider their demands that the gym be abandoned, as well as student objections to the university's ties with the Institute for Defense Analysis, a Washington "thinktank" that conducts military-related research for the Federal Government. But the students, carried away by their own heady sense of sudden power, shouted down the university's offer and marched to Morningside Park, where they tore down a fence at the gymnasium excavation...
...Coleman. After telling his visitors that he had "no intention of meeting any demands under a situation such as this," Coleman went into his office with two other school officials. Blocking Coleman's door, the demonstrators pasted up photos of Lenin and Che Guevara, and chanted "Racist gym must go." As night came, the demonstrators were still there-and Coleman and his friends casually played cards...