Never & a Pie in the sky balloon ride out of OZ

[Terrance]

SDS by no means embraced the new turn, the general sentiment seeming to
be that violence was not defensible morally, not persuasive publicly,
and not effective tactically. Carl Davidson took pains to disassociate
the resistance people from "'Left adventurers,' or, simply 'crazies'";
Calvert added that "the New Left has its problems with the Left-wing
adventurists who think that sabotage and terrorism will bring the
socialist revolution tomorrow"; and the large bulk of the membership
seemed to agree with a New Left Notes letter writer who argued simply,
"We can't succeed with violence. ... We cannot win in armed
revolution--never." And yet it fascinated, the idea of violence, and as
frustration grew, repression grew, the monumentality of the task grew,
and its necessity, so did the possibilities of violence. 

When the chapter finally did decide to mount an all-out drive against
military and corporate recruiting, it was effectively coopted (in a move
of rare sagacity by the Kirk administration) by the Universities
decision to ban all recruiting until the Columbia college student body
had a chance to vote on the issue and appoint a faculty committee to
offer its recommendations. Columbia SDS, like the chapter at many
universities, was hog-tied by the referendum tactic, for it did not
start out with the majority of students on its side, as it had with
ranking--most still did not see the connection between recruiting and
complicity, and were told that recruiting fell under the unassailable
mantel of "free speech" or "civil liberties" anyway --- and it was given
only a few weeks to persuade them. The student body voted three-to-one
for "open recruiting," the faculty followed this with a similar
recommendation, and SDS was out in the cold. The free election of the
masters by the slaves was invincible. As David Gilbert was to put it:
"SDS, which a few months earlier had successfully led the majority of
students against class rank for the war, was already discredited on
campus as both adventurist and do-nothing." It was in the wake of this
defeat in early 1968 that the action faction began to assert itself. The
turning point ...throwing lemon meringue pie in the face of an SSS
colonel come to sell Columbia on the virtues of military life. 

Resistance, 1965-1968, Spring 1968 pp. 430-33

Sale, SDS