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A THREE New York Police Department squad cars lined up outside the gates of Columbia University last Monday night, 125 students called off a two-week effort to get the university to start an ethnic-studies department.
The protesters evacuated an administration building they had seized four days earlier. Marching out in pairs, they chanted, "The students, united, will not be defeated." Several students gave each other hugs, and some exchanged high fives. Three hunger striker who had gone without food for 15 days--subsisting on a solution of water and nutrients--sipped some soup.
Other protesters, however stood alone and wept.
The tears hinted at the real victor: Columbia's famous curriculum, heavy on the great books. By morning, janitors had erased the names that the protesters had scrawled in colorful chalk on the outside of Hamilton Hall: Cesar Chavez, Fidel Castro, Malcolm X. The additions were intended as a counterpoint to those etched in four-foot letters on the ornate facade of Columbia's main library--Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Cicero, and more.
The students wanted Columbia to start an ethnic-studies department and hire a half-dozen professors each for programs in Latino studies and Asian-American studies. The agreement that was struck between students and administrators after all-night negotiations. however, closely resembled a more modest approach that was already in the works: The university will hire one tenured professor and one assistant professor for each program.
MAINTAINING FACULTY 'LINES'
Campus officials promised to maintain those faculty "lines" even if individual professors leave and to consider creating a center for ethnic studies, but not a department. Students will be allowed to major in Latino studies next fall, and in Asian-American studies within a year or...