In 1968, Lyndon Johnson was president. He was waging a brutal war in Vietnam that, by the time it ended several years later, would claim the lives of millions of Vietnamese civilians. At Columbia University, six students were placed on disciplinary probation for protesting Columbia’s involvement in the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a military research think tank.

Many Columbia students were already incensed by their university’s involvement in military research at a time when the US military was committing large-scale atrocities in Southeast Asia. The attempt to suppress the students’ free speech backfired badly, with “Amnesty for the IDA Six” being a key demand of the subsequent protests. Antiwar anger merged with controversy about a de facto segregated university building project, and the campus exploded. Five campus buildings were occupied by protesters. It took a violent crackdown by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) to clear them out.

Today, you can find out everything you might want to know about these events from a handy 1968 resource page hosted by the university itself. Reading it, you might get the impression that the administration no longer regarded antiwar students as dangerous enemies who needed to be silenced — that, perhaps, the university had actually learned something.