Fighting the War against Blight: Columbia University, Morningside Heights, Inc., and Counterinsurgent Urban Renewal

Abstract

During the post—World War II era, Columbia University undertook a bold and comprehensive expansion and redevelopment initiative to remake their immediate surroundings. Drawing upon the language of Cold War anticommunism, the university—in partnership with such redevelopment groups as Morningside Heights Inc.—undertook such a self-proclaimed ‘‘war on blight’’ in an attempt to ‘‘liberate’’ the surrounding community from the horrors of urban decay. This essay positions the 1968 student—community campaign against a proposed gymnasium in Morningside Park within this longer narrative of university-sponsored urban renewal. In light of such a history, those that campaigned against the university’s expansion efforts also adopted a language clearly influenced by the imagery of warfare in the mid-twentieth century: the language of anticolonialism.