Kelly: Former WPU professor was the face of the 1968 Columbia University uprising

He was the stern young man in the leather chair with the cigar.

But a half-century later, he says he was just kidding. 

On a late-April day in 1968, David Shapiro, now retired from teaching art and poetry at William Paterson University, took a seat behind the desk of Columbia University's president as fellow students at the elite Ivy League institution staged what would become the most significant of the hundreds of campus protests across America that year.

The Vietnam War was raging. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated only a few weeks earlier. Riots ravaged dozens of U.S. cities. On the sedate Columbia campus, which overlooks the Hudson River and New Jersey from Morningside Heights on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, revolution was in the air. 

Shapiro, then 21 and only weeks from graduating and heading to Cambridge University on a poetry fellowship, joined the swarm of students who barged into the wood-paneled office of Columbia’s president, Grayson Kirk, at Low Library and announced they were taking over.

Kirk abandoned his office to the student mob. Shapiro opened a drawer at Kirk’s desk and found a box of cigars. Another student, Gerald Upham, pointed a camera and asked Shapiro to strike a pose.

Shapiro, still wearing sunglasses even though he was indoors, settled into Kirk’s high-backed leather chair and crossed his legs. Upham’s camera caught him staring intently, a slight smirk under his bushy mustache, his long hair swept back over his ears, and his right hand raised with a cigar nestled between his index and middle fingers as if he were about to make a profound statement.

But Shapiro forgot something: He never bothered to strike a match and light the cigar.

“At that moment, I was very angry,” said Shapiro, now 71 and living only a few miles from Columbia’s campus in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. “I remember thinking, I’m going to get into deep trouble.”

Shapiro did not land in academic hot water. Instead, he became an instant pop culture celebrity.

Upham's black-and-white photograph captured Shapiro displaying a mix of serendipitous arrogance, seat-of-the-pants idealism and pranksterish humor. When it was published a week later in Life magazine, Shapiro was thrust into the role of poster boy for America’s student protest movement.

"It’s an iconic image,” said James Simon Kunen, whose best-selling book, “The Strawberry Statement,” chronicled the Columbia uprising. “Here’s a very young man sitting at the desk of the president of this huge university. This is the world turned upside down.”

Five decades later, with school protests once again as common as geometry classes — a fact underscored by walkouts at thousands of high schools across America to protest gun violence — it may be hard to recall how much the Columbia University protests shocked America during the spring of 1968.

“I feel there is a zeitgeist relationship between what happened in 1968 and the hashtag movement today for gun control and other protests today,” said Kunen, a former lawyer, journalist and author who now teaches English to new immigrants at LaGuardia Community College in Queens.

Even in the late 1960s, most college campuses were still considered protected, idyllic universes.

There were exceptions, of course — notably the free speech movement protests  that began in 1964 at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. And while college students surely took time away from studies to participate in the civil rights movement of the mid-1960s or to join the surging protests against America’s involvement in Vietnam, most universities were still largely off-limits to sit-ins or other forms of protest.

The Columbia University protests of April and May 1968 changed that. Suddenly, a university itself became the target of protests — in the nation's media capital, no less, which broadcast the story to the world.

A template for a new style of campus protest

With the Vietnam War looming as a divisive political issue in 1968, Columbia students became disenchanted with the university's military research, financed by multimillion-dollar Pentagon contracts. At the same time, another galvanizing campus issue was race — in particular, a simmering anger among Columbia's mostly white student body at the university's decision to build a new gymnasium in a portion of a nearby park used by Harlem’s African-American residents,

On April 23, 1968, nearly 1,000 Columbia students swarmed into Low Library, the university’s principal administrative headquarters, and other campus buildings. They proclaimed that they would not leave until the university halted all military-related research and canceled plans for the new gymnasium.

Columbia's administration declined to negotiate. And so began a standoff, pitting lefty students with long hair against administrators, police and counter-protesters, including dozens of Columbia’s short-haired athletes. 

Coming to the aid of Columbia’s protesting students were black activists from nearby Harlem, Latino civic groups such as the “Young Lords” and even nationally known student protesters such as Tom Hayden. The occupation became something of a world of its own. Two students protesters even used the occasion to get married — with fellow demonstrators cheering them on.   

The sit-ins lasted seven days, ending only when the New York City police stormed into Low Library and other buildings on April 30 and arrested nearly 700 students. The next day, Columbia’s students, with some faculty members supporting them, mounted a campus-wide boycott of classes that effectively ended the semester in early May and resulted in a decision by the university to cancel final exams.

Students at hundreds of universities across America soon adopted Columbia’s protest template of marches, sit-ins  and boycotts of classes. But two years later, the campus protest movement took a violent turn when four students were shot to death by National Guard soldiers at Kent State University in Ohio, and two students and 12 others were wounded by police at predominantly black Jackson State College in Mississippi.

“What was the pivotal thing about Columbia is that it was the first time there was a widespread takeover of buildings at a major, elite university,” said Jerry Avorn, then a reporter for Columbia’s student newspaper, The Spectator, who joined other student journalists in the summer of 1968 in writing a book about the Columbia protests titled "Up Against the Ivy Wall.” “Nothing like that had ever been seen.”

A figure at the center of the storm

In the middle of this social, political and cultural whirlpool was David Shapiro.

Avorn, now a professor at Harvard Medical School, remembers him well.

“David was a brilliant, quirky poet who clearly was marching to the beat of his own literary drum and was very much on his own wavelength, which people clearly respected,” said Avorn, who was in the office of Columbia's president when Shapiro found the cigar and struck his pose.

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Columbia’s president, Grayson Kirk, who had played a key role in the formation of the United Nations two decades earlier and succeeded Dwight D. Eisenhower as Columbia's president when Eisenhower became president of the United States in 1953, was widely unpopular with students by 1968. Avorn saw him as  “a remarkably remote, non-empathetic, arrogant person” who was “old-school" and “didn’t have a lot of use for student opinion.”

But now, unexpectedly and without opposition, students had invaded Kirk’s office and were going through his desk drawers, pulling books from his shelves and even examining bottles of pills in his private bathroom.

“It was like kids seeing their parents naked for the first time,” Avorn recalled.

Not surprisingly, the students acted like giddy children — and performed child-like stunts. Shapiro grabbed a cigar and dropped into the high-backed chair at Kirk’s massive wood desk, and assumed a confident, thumb-your-nose pose that mocked authority.

If not for Gerald Upham’s photograph, the moment might have just slipped away — remembered only by a few onlookers as just a goofy prank.

Upham, who moved to Los Angeles after graduating from Columbia and worked as a freelance photographer for many years, died last November. The Record and NorthJersey.com were unable to contact his family to obtain the rights to publish the photo he took of Shapiro. 

Paul Cronin, a film historian at New York’s School of Visual Arts, thought so highly of Upham’s photo that he tracked down Shapiro for the first of some 700 interviews for his new documentary film about the Columbia protests. The film, “A Time to Stir,” runs more than seven hours and will be previewed this Sunday at the Columbia Law School.

What Cronin discovered after talking to Shapiro is that he was nothing like the seemingly arrogant young man in Upham’s photo.  

“David Shapiro is the most mild-mannered, loving guy,” said Cronin, who also wrote a book that augments his documentary film. “He jokingly misrepresented himself in that photo.”

Joke or not, however, Cronin nevertheless considers the photo to be a poignant image that helps to frame an often confusing time in U.S. history.

“It became iconic because Life magazine published it in a double-page spread,” Cronin said. “But at the same time, it’s a great photo. It shows the defiance of authority in a poetic way.”

A life in poetry

On a recent afternoon, David Shapiro settled on a sofa at the spacious, sun-splashed Riverdale apartment he shares with his wife, Lindsey, whom he met at the Columbia protests only days after posing for the photo in Kirk’s office.

The apartment is a mix of serendipity.

Warm spring sunlight poured though the windows. Outside, the hum of cars on the Henry Hudson Parkway provided a steady soundtrack. A modernist print of squares and rectangles by the architect John Hejduk, a friend of Shapiro's, hung on the wall behind the sofa. Nearby, a plastic chair cradled a blue exercise ball. Across the room, a baby grand piano held piles of papers, including a collection of Palestinian and Jewish folks song by Shapiro’s grandfather, the renowned Jewish cantor Berele Chagy.

Shapiro, who grew up in Newark and was a child prodigy on the violin, no longer has the wavy brown hair that he had in Upham's photo. Nor does he sport the bushy mustache that framed his smirk. Perhaps most significantly, he says he never even thinks of trying to hold a cigar, let alone smoke one. He is battling Parkinson’s disease.

"I'm dying," he said at one point, quickly explaining that he was not joking. 

After graduating from Columbia in 1968 and studying poetry in Great Britain, Shapiro returned to his alma mater to teach for two decades. He then joined the art and poetry faculty at William Paterson University in Wayne, retiring in 2016. Over his career, he wrote more than two dozen books, including 11 anthologies of poetry, and was nominated in 1971 for a National Book Award.

As he sat on the sofa, Shapiro thumbed through his latest poetry anthology, “In Memory of an Angel,” which was published last year. On the floor across the room, a pile of books leaned against another sofa. More books lined shelves in the corridor that leads to the door. A wall in the dining room is home to portrait of Shapiro from his Columbia days, the same intense, earnest expression on his face.

What is missing from view in the apartment is a copy of the photograph that made him so famous. Shapiro says he never bothered to get his own copy from Upham and frame it. He has no regrets, he says. 

But Shapiro said he has a book with the photo — he just didn't know where it was. As he explained this, he got up and walked toward a pile of papers, books and magazines on the floor near the piano.

“I have it here somewhere,” Shapiro said, finally locating a 1973 book entitled “The Best of Life.”

He returned to the sofa and flipped through pages of the magazine's most famous photographs from wars, presidential elections and life in general. Finally, Shapiro found the black-and-white photo of his younger self holding the unlit cigar in a chapter titled “Growing Up.”

Shapiro studied the photo for a moment, then looked up and smiled.

“I made as nasty a face as I could,” he said.

He was joking, of course. And yet, the remark underscores what Shapiro describes as his intense discomfort with the photo — and how he has been trying for years to escape its shadow and explain what he was really attempting to convey with that pose.

“I’d like to apologize,” he said, “for the rudeness of my youth.”

He turned and looked again at the image, taking few seconds to run his fingers over the page. 

“That’s not a picture,” he said. “That’s a parody.”

Email: kellym@northjersey.com