"They always talked about the '68 protest as sort of a North Star," Sattler, 27, a graduate student of international human rights policy at Columbia University, said of the campus organizers there. Students there have taken direct inspiration from MIT protests against the Vietnam War and South African apartheid, including turning to the archives to study those protesters' strategies and using some of the same slogans on their signs and setting up the encampment in the same place. She says her parents took part in the anti-Vietnam protests during their college days, and that struggle has very much informed the current action, noting that students watched a documentary about 1968 and had people from those demonstrations speak to the protesters.