"Mark Rudd is a math teacher at a community college in New Mexico. 'I teach arithmetic, fractions, I teach algebra--it's very low-level--to working-class students,' he said.
This is a man who once tried to teach working-class students how to be revolutionary. In the late 1960s, after he left Columbia, Rudd would go into working-class neighborhoods and pick fights with students. A fight in Milwaukee landed him in a hospital.

'It was crazy,' he said of the experience. 'I think we were trying to prove that we were tough revolutionaries. It's a macho thing. It made no sense whatsoever.'

As the head of the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Rudd, CC '69 (with an asterisk--he was expelled in May 1968), led the April 1968 riots that brought the University to a halt for eight days. And in June 1969, at SDS's national convention in Chicago, he helped to present the manifesto of the Weathermen, a radical splinter group that immediately took control of SDS. The goal of the Weathermen, who took their name from a lyric in a Bob Dylan song, was to bring about a communist revolution in the United States. In the '70s, they set off bombs in government buildings to protest government actions.

Rudd was in town to promote The Weather Underground, a documentary about the Weathermen, now playing at at Film Forum, in which he is prominently featured.

The movie consists mostly of talking-head interviews with former members, many of whom look back upon their days as radicals with great bewilderment. Thirty years ago, they believed that the overthrow of the government was entirely possible, and that all white Americans who weren't revolutionaries were somehow complicit in the violence of the Vietnam War--and therefore deserved to be killed.

The group's blood-thirst subsided in March 1970, however, when three Weather members--including Theodore Gold, CC '68--were killed when a bomb they were building accidentally went off, leveling a West 11th Street townhouse. From then on, the group put safeguards in place to ensure that neither Weather members nor civilians would be killed.

'I'm hoping that people see the film because it re-establishes the context that we were reacting to,' Rudd said. 'I think it defuses the obvious criticism that we were just crazy. And it shows what was going on in the world--this terrible violence that the United States was perpetrating in Vietnam and also here, in this country, with the repression against the Panthers.' (He was referring to the December 1969 shooting of Panther leader Fred Hampton by Chicago police.)

The war was what drove Rudd to radical tactics in the first place. In the film, Rudd says that during every moment of his life between 1965 and 1975, he was in some way thinking about the fact that the government was waging a war in Vietnam.

'Not that we didn't ever do things that people do and just have fun and relax and get high and go to bars--go to the West End--but there was always, every day that consciousness of the need to do something about the war,' Rudd said in an interview on Monday.

Rudd was a proponent of the confrontational 'Action Faction' sect of Columbia SDS--as opposed to the more orderly 'Praxis Axis'--whose goal was to find a more active way of ending the Vietnam War. They felt that peaceful protest had not been effective.

In 1966, for example, Rudd, not yet head of SDS, and others petitioned administrators, asking that they not give grades to the draft board. Students with low grades could be drafted.

'We were polite,' Rudd said. 'And we got no response. And the war continued, and got worse and worse and worse. Every day there was an escalation, more troops and more troops and more troops, until by 1967, there were half a million troops there. It was a constant background. And our protests weren't getting anywhere.'

Because of Columbia's involvement with the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), University President Grayson Kirk's membership on the Council on Foreign Relations (a private think tank dedicated, in part, to 'contributing ideas to U.S. foreign policy,' according to its web site), and certain scientists' and study institutes' contributions to the CIA and Department of Defense, students came to see Columbia as a microcosm of the government's actions, Rudd said.

Rudd, who traveled to Cuba in January of 1968, said students were inspired in part by the power revolutionary movements seemed to place in the hands of young people. He recalled visiting a school in Cuba that was run by a 27-year-old.

'We were young,' he said. 'I was 20 years old in April of '68, and we wanted to be cool. We wanted to identify with the coolest people in the world, who were the ones fighting American imperialism.'

The goals of the April 1968 demonstrations--in which students took over five University buildings--were to end Columbia's involvement with the IDA and to halt construction of a gym for students in Morningside Park, which many students felt illustrated what they perceived to be Columbia's racist attitude toward the neighborhood.

But the protests didn't proceed as Rudd had planned: the University didn't immediately capitulate. 'All of our plans completely were shot to shreds in the first 15 minutes of the protest,' he said. 'It was all ad lib. And at many times, I doubted that we were accomplishing anything.'
File photo
Rudd is confronted by police in April 1968, after violence at the site of the gymnasium--dubbed Gym Crow by students--being built in Morningside Park.

The demonstrations came to an end on April 30, 1968, when 1,000 police raided the campus, evicting students from the occupied buildings.

Yet Rudd believes that the impact of the demonstrations was positive. 'Columbia as a model of student activism, [with] students who were willing to risk their careers and take over buildings and risk suspension, immediately caught on as a model, and that kind of action was replicated in the next couple years in a lot of places, probably hundreds of campuses,' he said.

Rudd believes that the legacy of the protests has been positive as well. 'Right next door to the community college where I teach is the University of New Mexico, and at the University of New Mexico there's a fairly large anti-war movement,' he said. 'And I think that on almost every college campus ... there is anti-war sentiment.'

About the legacy of the Weather Underground, as the group began to call itself when its members went into hiding in 1970, Rudd is more ambivalent. At the time, the Weathermen were accused of sullying the name of SDS. 'We were absolutely arrogant, and we thought we were right and everyone else was wrong,' he said.

Although he still endorses the Weathermen's conception of U.S. foreign policy as imperialist (that's why the war in Iraq was fought, he said), Rudd said the Weathermen's tactics weren't as effective as they should have been. 'We were in leadership and control of the national office, the headquarters of the largest radical student organization in the country, SDS,' he said. 'We had chapters in 300 or more campuses, including high schools. We could have fought for an anti-imperialist view and anti-imperialist actions in all of those campuses, but instead we chose to dissolve the organization and to go underground and to start guerilla warfare. I think that was a waste.

'I myself have turned against revolutionary violence,' Rudd added. 'I've turned against all violence. I've become a pacifist and I believe that no one should kill for any reason whatsoever. And that goes for the United States government, too.'

Rudd, originally part of the Weathermen's 'central command' (known as the Weather Bureau), 'went downhill' in the organization after it went underground, and eventually left the group at the end of 1970. He continued to live underground as a fugitive, however, until he turned himself in in September 1977.

Few members of the Weather Underground went to prison. Federal charges against members were dropped because the FBI had used illegal tactics in investigating the organization. Rudd had to contend with state charges, but he copped plea bargains to lower charges and never served any time.

While underground, he lived with an assumed identity and worked mostly in 'low-skill' jobs at factories, construction sites, and docks. 'It was a very insecure kind of life,' he said of the experience.

After working as a carpenter for his first year above ground, Rudd went back to college to get a degree in teaching from the University of New Mexico. Today he teaches at TVI Community College in Albuquerque.

Rudd, who rarely talks on the record about the Weather Underground, agreed to participate in the documentary because Green convinced him that the film would present a critical view of the underground, rather than romanticizing the group by concentrating on their Bonnie and Clyde image.

Still, Rudd said he had a difficult time 'talking about my moral dilemmas--which is actually really a euphemism for shame.' He says in the film that he is not proud of a lot of the things he did as a young man.

But he is pleased with the film. 'It's a good reminder to people my age, and I think the movie is a revelation to young people,' Rudd said. 'I've talked to a number of young people who have seen it. I think it's a great movie, and it recovers stuff that's been lost down the memory hall.' " (Ben Kenigsberg, Columbia Spectator, June 4, 2003)