For anybody interested in the history of the 1960s, the ongoing protests at US universities have a peculiar resonance.
In the past weeks, riot police have entered several college campuses at the behest of administrators to break up unauthorised encampments of students protesting the war in Gaza and calling on their universities to divest from companies supporting Israel.
The scenes of police arresting hundreds of students at Columbia University and UCLA are reminiscent of police and National Guard actions against students protesting the Vietnam war in the late 1960s.
It is tempting to draw easy parallels with the worst examples of overreach against those anti-war students in the 1960s. Just over 54 years ago, on May 4 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of anti-war protesters on the campus of Kent State University, killing four students and injuring nine. Eleven days later, city and state police fired on protesters at Jackson State College, Mississippi, killing two students.
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Sinead McEneaney 