Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories:Chap.3: Freshman At Columbia, 1965

Chapter 3: Freshman At Columbia, 1965 (viii)

During the Spring 1966 term, my strongest feeling was falling madly in love with Pat. Pat was a senior at Barnard, majoring in Sociology, who planned to become a social worker. She was a beauty who I met after Stein re-organized the day care program at Grace Methodist Church.

In the middle of the fall semester, a Columbia student named Juan had become an enthusiastic volunteer in the program. He was a sophomore from Brooklyn who was a very good-natured and friendly guy. When, at the beginning of the 1966 spring semester, Stein renamed the program “P.A.C.T.” and increased the number of student volunteers recruited into the program, he also named Juan as the program’s coordinator. Pat was one of the new student volunteers recruited after Juan began coordinating P.A.C.T. Like me, Pat worked on Tuesday afternoons as a group leader during the Spring 1966 term. Her group consisted of 8 to 10-year-old girls, while my Tuesday group consisted of 8 to 10-year-old boys.

After each day’s activities, all the student volunteer group leaders were required by Stein to meet for an hour in a group discussion that was led by a bohemian-dressed older woman social worker. As a result of hearing Pat speak in these weekly discussions, I fell in love with her. She and I seemed to be the ones most willing to participate in an emotionally open way in these group discussions.

I also began to feel some affection for another Barnard woman named Anne. She was my co-leader in the group of 5 and 6-year-old boys I took care of on Thursday afternoons. Each week, Anne and I would talk on the phone to plan our group’s activities. Anne was friendlier towards me than Pat was, but my obsession with Pat’s beauty caused me to be blind to Anne’s beauty and not adequately respond to Anne’s warm personality. Although both Anne and Pat always wore jeans and dressed in a bohemian way, Pat was more anti-war politically than Anne.

But nothing developed out of my wild longing for Pat—who often wore a scarf on her hair—except some more love poetry, songs and emotional frustration for me. Yet I still found my two afternoons of volunteer work with the children and with other students at the P.A.C.T. daycare center more meaningful than being inside the classrooms of Columbia.

Although my volunteer work in P.A.C.T. did enable me to meet Barnard women more easily, I was not motivated to work in P.A.C.T. primarily to meet Barnard women. Guided by the integrationist Civil Rights Movement’s assertion that non-exploitative education and cultural exchange between white students and ghetto children was progressive, I saw my volunteer work as a daycare group leader as a concrete, tangible way of expressing my commitment to African-American and Puerto Rican liberation. In Spring 1966 I was more committed to working in P.A.C.T. than to my academic studies. Pat also seemed more committed to serving people than to academic careerism, which is one reason why I fell in love with her.

Despite my obsession with Pat, however, I continued to browse in Butler Library. I read books on Nazi Germany, Hitler, Mussolini and fascism because I feared that, under LBJ, fascism was developing in the United States. I also tried to understand why the 6 million Jews were exterminated in Europe in the early 1940s. In the stacks of Butler Library, I also thumbed through 1950s issues of Time magazine, Life magazine, U.S. News & World Report, and Newsweek and noticed how inaccurate and anti-communist their reporting was in those years.

When I wished to be surrounded by other students while studying, I would sometimes sit in the Burgess Library on the fourth floor of the Butler Library building. I also would sometimes try studying in either the main 2nd floor reading room of Butler Library or in the Columbia College Library within the same building.

My mind wandered whenever I sat in the Butler Library building. I would start to get restless after about a half-hour and start to feel myself drawn to the various women students who might be sitting near me while I was attempting to study. In the library, though, people didn’t generally talk to each other unless they already knew each other from classes or after-class activities. During my freshman year, I didn’t meet anybody new as a result of studying near people in the library.

For the second term of a “Contemporary Civilization” course, I wrote a term paper on the 1848 romantic revolutionaries and read Marx’s Communist Manifesto for the first time. After reading Marx, I felt his view of the world was possibly as accurate as the viewpoint of C.Wright Mills. I began to think of myself as somebody who was carrying on an intellectual tradition of siding with and identifying with the international working-class. But still influenced by Martin Luther King’s ideology, I was too completely a pacifist to be a Marxist.

In doing research for the 1848 romantic revolutionaries’ paper, I examined many books on the subject. Of all the books written about this period, Engels’ book on Germany’s Revolution and Counter-Revolution seemed to provide the clearest explanation for the 1848 historical events. Engels also described the wavering, over pedantic intellectuals and academics of 1848 in a way which reflected my growing disdain for the wavering, over pedantic U.S. academics of my own time, who appeared to me to be insufficiently resisting the U.S. war machine. In my term paper, I compared the romantic revolution of 1848 with the developing youth revolt of the 1960s. I expressed strong identification with the revolutionary democratic sentiments of all historical eras.

My most interesting course was Stade’s English Composition II course. For this course, I spent much time attempting to write the definitive term paper on W.H. Auden. Auden interested me because in an article on Dylan in the New York Times Magazine a Times writer had called Dylan the “Auden of the 1960s.” In studying Auden, I focused primarily on his 1930s poetry of commitment to changing the world and his work around the time he wrote his poem about the Spanish Civil War.

I felt that the Spanish Civil War issue of the 1930s was the intellectual equivalent of the war in Viet Nam issue. I evaluated Auden and his contemporary literary artists by the stand each had taken in relationship to the 1930s rise of fascism. If a poet had been activist against Franco in some way in the 1930s, then I felt his or her poetry was worth spending time reading. If a poet had either sat out the Spanish Civil War controversy or opposed the Spanish Republic, then I felt that he or she was so insensitive that his or her poetry could not be worth reading.

I ended my Auden paper by comparing him with the folksinger protest-song poets of the 1960s like Dylan, and I expressed my confidence that Auden’s dreams of the 1930s would be actualized by the followers of Dylan in the 1960s. I came out strongly in favor of the young politically-oriented Auden, in preference to the older Auden who wrote poetry after he converted to Catholicism and lost faith in the left.

I worked hard on the term paper. But Professor Stade trashed it. He gave me a “D” for the paper because I didn’t reflect his preference for an art for art’s sake aesthetic and for poetry which was “above politics” and beyond any partisan political commitment.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories:Chap.3: Freshman At Columbia, 1965

Chapter 3: Freshman At Columbia, 1965 (vii)

The Thanksgiving break came and I went back to Queens to visit my parents. I felt much more distance between us and felt I had changed as a result of being away from home. My sister had returned from a stay in Berkeley and was spending much time in my parents’ apartment, listening to an Erik Satie album and Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited album. My parents were pressuring her to become less bohemian.

I went to Flushing High School’s annual Thanksgiving football game at Memorial Field. The crowd was large, but I didn’t bump into Rona or anyone else I had known the previous year. Then I returned for the family Thanksgiving dinner and watched a football game on TV.

When Thanksgiving vacation ended, I felt both relieved and a little bit sad. Relieved to get back to my dorm room in Manhattan where I was free of old family constraints and actively living on my own in a whole new scene. But also, I was a bit sad that my parents could never really be as close to me again, now that I was living apart from them and starting to act out a different direction in my life than they wished me to go.

Back in school during the three weeks before the Christmas break, I finished writing my A Ball In A Basket play and mailed it out to one producer. By the time he returned the play and a rejection slip to me by mail a few months later, I was in the middle of writing a new play, with songs that could be sung a cappella, entitled The Barrier. The idea of either re-writing or devoting more time to trying to market A Ball In A Basket didn’t appeal to me.

A Ball In A Basket had been set in a Midwestern setting and reflected feelings of alienation produced by life within an All-American small city atmosphere and an All-American high school within white America. The Barrier was about the difficulty men and women found in communicating and becoming emotionally intimate with each other, in the context of a society moving towards escalated war in Viet Nam. The Barrier reflected some of the feelings my year at Flushing High School and contact with Rona had generated. It contained a folksinger narrator who tied the story together with the songs I had been writing. It also attempted to express a generational point of view.

I still continued to work at Grace Methodist Church in the afternoon. I listened to on-campus speakers in the evening. I began to spend more time trying to catch up on my schoolwork and pump out term papers, in order to avoid failing any courses. I became increasingly obsessed with the immorality of U.S. military intervention in Viet Nam and moved away from left-liberal radicalism to a mixture of anarchism and radical humanism. I read Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd and bought a paperback anthology of anarchist writings. I started to dress more like a radical and took haircuts less frequently. I continued to wear a sweatshirt or a turtleneck and blue jeans everyday.

I began to evaluate people primarily in terms of their attitude towards the escalating war in Viet Nam. I began to feel that U.S. military intervention in Viet Nam might lead to World War III. In The Barrier play, I included the song “Viet Nam,” which contained the following lyrics:

Viet Nam
Viet Nam
Will it end my life?
Viet Nam
Viet Nam
Subtract me in my youth.

During Christmas vacation, I felt like Holden in A Catcher In The Rye by Salinger. I tried to catch up on meaningless academic work, in-between listening to Highway 61 Revisited and a few Joan Baez records. “We Can Work It Out” by the Beatles and “The Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel were two hit records at that time which also reflected my mood.

Away from Columbia’s campus, what especially struck me as hypocritical was the way people could still be into celebrating the Christmas spirit through shopping and ceremony, yet be so passive in terms of resisting the immoral U.S. war effort in Viet Nam. I also felt very lonely since I wasn’t emotionally involved with anyone. The people around me seemed cold and politically passive. The young women my age attracted me sexually but appeared emotionally closed to getting involved romantically with me in a way that I felt would not limit my freedom. I was glad to get back to Columbia in January 1966, where I then prepared for my final examinations.

The January exams were given and I felt the finals didn’t really measure the knowledge I had acquired. I received an “F” in Astronomy, instead of a “Gentleman’s C.” But I passed all my other courses and felt satisfied that I was able to keep up academically with the other Columbia students, without turning myself into an academic grub.

I returned to my parents’ apartment for a few weeks again, watched TV, read anti-war material and more anarchist writings and then began my second semester at Columbia. I still contemplated dropping out or transferring to Berkeley for the last three years of my undergraduate days.

Sundial:Columbia SDS Memories:Chap.3:Freshman At Columbia, 1965

Chapter 3: Freshman At Columbia, 1965 (ii)

During Freshman Week, there was a big meeting in the Low Library administration building rotunda, where a professor told us that we were a “special group of people” and “the nation’s future elite.” A well-dressed “tweed”/preppie, in a suit and tie, who was the student coordinator of Freshman Week, told us to “use New York City as your campus” and he urged us to “look into the faces of people on the subway.” At a student union building reception for freshmen in Ferris Booth Hall’s Hewitt Lounge, punch was served and the friendly Dean of Columbia College, David B. Truman, shook our hands, individually.

A mini-tour of Greenwich Village was offered one evening. A group of us freshmen were escorted on the Broadway IRT local from 116th Street to the Christopher Street station. After leaving the Christopher Street station, we were led around the West Village for a few hours but were not shown any of the gay bars.

Our meals during Freshman Week were eaten together in John Jay Hall cafeteria. I would often find myself spontaneously involved in a conversation with a freshman from some place like Tyler, Texas.

I was interested in getting to know African-American students at Columbia. So I spent some time during Freshman Week looking through my Freshman Directory book, which pictured all the freshmen, and noticed where the small number of African-American students in the class had gone to high school. I hoped that Columbia College would be a place where I could form inter-racial friendships. In 1965 Black nationalism was still not dominant in liberal and left Civil Rights Movement circles. Inter-racial friendships and love relationships were not yet discouraged for political organizing reasons.

The white student left at Columbia was nearly invisible during most of Freshman Week. Prior to one of the Freshman Week events, George tried to sell the freshmen who were lined up to go inside Ferris Booth Hall some kind of leftist newspaper. The newspaper claimed that Columbia University was controlled by Wall Street corporation directors, was nothing more than an instrument of these corporations and was not really an institution concerned about the pursuit of knowledge.

George wasn’t able to interest any of us in buying his newspaper. From the freshmen on the line who bothered to notice him, there was much snickering and some taunting of him for being a “commie.” After glancing at his newspaper’s headlines and listening to his sales pitch, I thought to myself that George’s view of Columbia was intellectually simplistic and inaccurate, and that it was ridiculous to argue that Columbia University was “just another U.S. multiversity like Berkeley.” But the longer I attended Columbia, the more my own views about Columbia began to change.

The highlight of Freshman Week came near the end of the week, when representatives of various student clubs spoke to us in Wollman Auditorium and tried to use sexist humor and sexual innuendo to interest us in joining their clubs. Most of the freshmen cheered and laughed all night, as the junior and senior Columbia College tweed-preppie-types tried to demonstrate how hedonistic and sexually virile and sophisticated they and their clubs were.

But these Columbia student leaders didn’t strike me as being the kind of men I wished to emulate. If they were “Columbia Men,” I was not interested in being a “Columbia Man.” The anti-intellectualism of this student club recruitment night, which was called “King’s Crown Activities Night,” undercut the credibility of the pious words which Columbia administrators and professors had thrown at us during the more solemn previously-held Freshman Week events. Club night seemed to indicate that what the all-male Columbia College student body found most important was the sexual conquest of Barnard women, not the pursuit of knowledge and truth, or the love of other people. Columbia students seemed no more intellectual in their personal priorities than their male counterparts at less selective universities, like Indiana University or the University of Miami in Florida.

The one student speaker at this “King’s Crown Activities Night” who impressed me was the representative of Columbia’s ACTION group. Along with student demonstrators from a wide range of campus civil rights, peace and left-wing Movement groups (like Congress of Racial Equality, the recently-formed Independent Committee on Vietnam and the Young Socialist Alliance), some ACTION members had participated in an anti-war, anti-NROTC demonstration in the spring of 1965, which the Columbia Administration had broken up by calling in New York City cops to arrest the less than 150 demonstrators. The ACTION speaker was the only student who mentioned the need to oppose the war in Viet Nam on campus at this club night. His presentation was interrupted by jeers from right-wing Columbia freshmen and by much heckling.

When it came time to sign up for campus activities, I signed ACTION’s mailing list. ACTION, however, became defunct early in Fall 1965 because most hard-core Columbia and Barnard activists joined the Independent Committee on Viet Nam (ICV).

I also signed up to be a Columbia Citizenship Council volunteer. I volunteered to tutor every week at Charles Evans Hughes High School at West 18th St. and 7th Ave., and to work as a group counselor in an African-American church on 104th St., between Amsterdam Ave. and Columbus Ave. Citizenship Council provided me with a way to make contact with people who lived in the neighborhoods around Harlem.

Because I saw myself as a writer-activist, I went to the freshmen recruiting meeting of Columbia’s literary magazine, The Columbia Review. During the previous academic year, the Columbia Administration had tried to curtail the campus distribution of the magazine because too many of the literary articles contained too many explicit references to sex. But the Columbia Review people seemed more snobbish, less dynamic, more self-centered, less socially concerned and less warm than either the Citizenship Council people or the ACTION recruiters. So I didn’t get involved with the Columbia Review crowd.

Sundial:Columbia SDS Memories:Chap.3: Freshman At Columbia, 1965

Chapter 3: Freshman At Columbia, 1965 (i)

The Columbia scene in September 1965 had little connection to the people I had known at Flushing High School. Columbia was a college-level, glorified prep school for upper-middle-class whites. In entering Columbia, I was, temporarily, escaping from my social class and linking up with the left-wing intellectual youth of the U.S. white upper-middle-class, on a political and personal level.

I was assigned a dorm room in Furnald Hall during Freshman Week. My mother and father drove me and my suitcase to the campus and went with me to open a bank account at Chemical Bank's branch office at 113th St. and Broadway. I did not like having to wear a Freshman beanie, and I felt uncomfortable being required to wear a suit and tie to many of the Freshman Week orientation events.

My father and mother were proud of me because I was attending a high-status school like Columbia. They assumed that admission to Columbia meant I was going to become a teacher, a professor, a lawyer, a conventional writer or some other kind of middle-class professional, eventually marry some upper-middle-class Jewish Barnard College woman, settle down after graduating from Columbia, buy an automobile and provide them with two grandchildren. Little did my parents realize, at the time I entered Columbia, how alienated from conventional middle-class values and U.S. society I already was, and how rebellious, non-conformist and artistic were my aspirations.

To my parents, my admission to Columbia was proof that the U.S.A. was an open society for people from my class background. But Columbia wasn’t paying me to sit in their elite Ivy League classrooms. I was taking out loans, using my New York Regents scholarship and my $50 Knights of Pythias scholarship, my summer job earnings and a portion of my father’s hard-earned money to pay Columbia for the right to secure a Columbia BA and interact with upper-middle-class people. After my freshman year, I no longer asked my father to help pay for my Columbia student status.

My memories of Freshman Week are vague. I met Tom by the elevator in the lobby of Furnald Hall dormitory. Tom was from Utica and was friendly. His political views were close to Barry Goldwater’s and William Buckley’s views in 1965. But he was interested in seriously debating intellectual issues.

I enjoyed the view of the Columbia campus from my Furnald Hall window during Freshman Week. I quickly became used to living in a room alone, without the presence of any family to exchange conversation with, and without the presence of a television set. But the sound of radios playing the top hit record of the moment—“Eve of Destruction”—could be heard through the open dorm windows of some other freshmen during Freshman Week.

The other freshmen at Columbia were a varied group of people. The students from the prep schools and from the wealthy backgrounds seemed more sophisticated and self-assured than the small number of students from the working-class schools and proletarian backgrounds. Barnard women were always characterized in sexist and anti-feminist ways when they were discussed by the juniors and seniors who served as Freshman Week hosts. Freshman Week indoctrinated Columbia College freshmen with the notion that being a “Columbia whole man” meant screwing without love as many women on weekends as you could, during your four years of college. You were then supposed to marry the prettiest showpiece you could seduce, and go on to either graduate school, professional school, the officer corps of the military, or some high-paying corporate manager or free professional job.

The only senior I met during Freshman Week inside Furnald Hall who seemed like a serious intellectual was a philosophy major named Barney, who urged me to “get involved in some form of activism.” Barney had moved back into his dorm room before most of the other juniors and seniors who were not Freshman Week hosts arrived back on campus. He was active in the Ethical Culture Society in Manhattan but wasn’t a member of the New Left.