SEDUCED AND ABANDONED AT COLUMBIA
Crossland, R. L. & Carpenter, David B.
Seduced and Abandoned at Columbia Playing it Straight at Columbia R. L. Crossland Squinting into the poorly lit, smoke-blurred pub, one stumbles among crowded tables, bordered by serried booths...
...Alma Mater...
...No one writes editorials or poems about them...
...These are the veterans who fought for Columbia...
...This I refuse to do...
...Kind of chewy-but typical Times...
...In four years at Columbia I have witnessed the destruction of a once-honorable institution...
...That spring the Majority Coalition formed a defensive cordon hoping to keep open Low Library, the main arena for campus demonstrations...
...They have the same intensity of purpose (when it is the left's purpose the Times calls it sincerity) yet a little more humor than the left's youthful idealists...
...I went to court against the trustees when we thought that might stir them to head off future disruptions...
...is, U.S.A...
...Good Humor men in their militaristic white uniforms are part of a neofascistic plot to condition the masses...
...orces in Vietnam...
...He is like one of Larteguy's Centurions, abandoned and accursed by those he defends...
...A sock full of pennies, called a "Fiji special" after the fraternity that developed it, became the MC's standard weapon...
...For a time guerrilla war raged...
...Like Antaeus, the straight is suspended in an environment from which he can never derive much strength...
...Truman, gets the axe because he might offend the sensitivities of the mob...
...Gentlemen, I've seen all this and I have done my best to fight it...
...Gentlemen, I am angry and bitter not with the leftists who do what is predictable, but with you, gentlemen...
...This is where the defenders of forsaken ideals rehabilitate...
...For example, they had deplored the "rape" of Anguilla by the university suppported British war machine and founded a mock pressure group, the Columbia Italian-Americans (CIA...
...You have said that I should seek out my teachers and attempt to barter for a passing grade for my courses...
...At the bar, there is a scuffle between two "townies" or non-students...
...I will not attend Commencement, that would delay my departure too long and I can't get out of here soon enough...
...Finally, after what seemed interminable vacillation, the administration was compelled to call in police...
...Though most of the externals of the now generation are there, the substance is different...
...John Meyer, visiting from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, stands near Carpenter's table...
...The Folsom Prison Blues" just barely carries above the discordant hum of the crowd...
...In every class I'm in, I feel like the token 'reactionary.' In class my contributions are' greeted with the instructor's supercilious grins...
...Yeh...
...And the Rail has its supporting cast.but these straights are a little louder, a little rougher, a little more bitter than their more publicized adversaries...
...Bartenders always seem to understand...
...One fraternity held a rally last year against the Good Humor ice cream company...
...I have been told that I should try and finish my papers, but the last time I tried to get into the library I met a barrage of obscenities and was threatened with a club if I even attempted to try and get to the doors...
...At The Rail things are different...
...Gentlemen, continue with your myth that Columbia is still open, even though you can't get into your offices and the students can't get into the library...
...Just a few weeks ago I stood with others in front of Hamilton Hall while the mob threw bricks at it to prevent them from smashing their way in...
...Though the Tudor decor is hardly redolent of it, this seamy pub-The Rail-is the last stronghold of Columbia's counterrevolution...
...R. L. Crossland presently serves in the Armed Forces in Vietnam...
...In one corner a bulky ex-football player elicits giggles from a trinity of nurses and adds a roar of his own...
...I will not chase them all over the East Coast because they can't get into their classrooms or offices in this great university, which I am told by the president is still open...
...I no longer care...
...Even the ubiquitous buttons are different from those adorning the radical rich of "our generation," for these buttons proclaim disturbingly: "Tell It to Hanoi," "No Amnesty," "Free Prague," "Jim Buckley for Senator," and mysteriously "Irish Republican Army," or "Captain Bud-weiser Lives...
...Another in the booth observes skeptically that the ROTC building there has been razed three times...
...During the last three years I have had my life repeatedly threatened because I chose to stand against the mob and now I'm finished...
...I have seen a once-honored Columbia degree become a worthless scrap of paper while the only real leader Columbia ever had, Dr...
...Well at least I've seen some balance there, not like Columbia's phony claim to geographical distribution and heterogeneity...
...They were exploited for their strengths by dissimulating administrators who quietly sold them out...
...I have seen many of the university's best faculty members pack their bags and leave in frustration or fear or maybe simply because they didn't relish the thought of having their files burned...
...The dropouts and transfers since the riots of '68 have been largely from the Majority Coalition element...
...A Letter to the Grateful Administration of Columbia University from one of their Counter-Revolutionaries Gentlemen: Four years and over $8,000 ago, I came to Columbia College expecting to be able to get a good liberal arts education and in general spend my college years in the peaceful pursuit of this goal...
...Roger Crossland, wearing a paratrooper jacket, sits at another booth and converses with a knot of oarsmen in garish purple sweatshirts...
...The walking wounded weave about in the contemporary student's characteristic attire of discarded military haberdashery...
...So Columbia's administration carefully courts its enemies and rebuffs its supporters...
...Seduced and Abandoned at Columbia Playing it Straight at Columbia R. L. Crossland Squinting into the poorly lit, smoke-blurred pub, one stumbles among crowded tables, bordered by serried booths manned with boozey collegians...
...Though beards and mustaches are in evidence they seem strangely less repugnant...
...The Rail has its colorful cadre of steady patrons...
...But after a reverie of sunshine the sadness rolls in...
...For those like me Columbia is no longer worth fighting for, not when those whose duty it is to protect her fail to meet any crisis with courage and leadership...
...You may mail my diploma to my home address and may I never see or hear of Columbia again...
...And "Ban the Popsicle" for today's popsicle sticks are tomorrow's punji stakes...
...Meyer, son of one of National Review's senior editors, splendidly fills the role of the student Right's Tom Paine-though somewhat more versatile, for he has been the National Intercollegiate Chess Champion (another of the Times' jocks...
...They fought for ideals but their ideals never impressed CBS...
...Three inspired warriors retreat from their much-littered booth in the far corner and boisterously weave a path to the door...
...Members of the Coalition were in ties and jackets, clean-shaven and grim, as if such appearances could jar Columbia to sanity...
...I'm cutting out...
...One of the twelve students to, in 1969, sue the university's trustees for maladministration, he is now on disciplinary probation for constituting "a threat of violence" when he and three or four others led an incursion into an SDS occupied building...
...Allegedly he tossed two photographers out a first floor window during the same raid...
...In 1968 I stood with the Majority Coalition when the administration refused to act...
...An upperclassman in a ski jacket nods, "Here the dissenters are the Establishment...
...A waitress (wench in the vernacular) collects the empty pitchers and dumps the ashtrays onto the floor...
...I'm throwing in the towel...
...These students might exude the fatalism of those at war, but you probably have never heard of them...
...I have fought for Columbia for the last four years and now I believe that there is nothing left worth fighting for...
...Yeh, heterogeneous for a City school...
...Well, we all have our dreams...
...This mob rules while the spineless "leaders," of the university community cringe under their desks (when they can get into the buildings), and talk about whether they are relevant or not...
...David B. Carpenter Box 146 Barrington, Illinois, U.S.A...
...The academic environment, or rather the lack of it, at Columbia, at this time makes any attempt at scholastic endeavor ludicrous...
...Last spring I acted with others to attempt to open the buildings when it appeared that administration was vacillating...
...You have failed me and every other student who came to Columbia not for a war or to turn the university into a political tool for his pet cause, but for an education...
...I want no more of it...
...Bending with the student wind is far simpler at governmentally funded CCNY and NYC where student bodies are homogeneous and ingrown...
...When attacked with lead pipes and bicycle chains, the coalition members had to abandon the ties, for they provided too easy a handhold, their jackets were torn and stubble appeared on bitter chins...
...Gentlemen, I've had enough...
...For these young minds were not destroyed by their vices or velleities...
...This is a surprising development when one notes the alleged leftist disenchantment with Columbia during and since) the '68 disturbances...
...He plans to transfer to Stanford...
...They call themselves the Ministry of Disinformation...
...Sit around and debate the war in your cozy senate meetings while Columbia slides into the cesspool...
...Everywhere there are large pitchers of frosty beer indicating that at least these young, idealistic veterans are Hemingway's idealists...
...He clicks the salt shaker against the pitcher...
...An aging prostitute probably has more honor left...
...Dave Carpenter (see the following article) attired in a fisherman's knit sweater and a balmoral, bellows Scottish regimental ditties gloriously, but with little attention to tune...
...A pair of varsity wrestlers climb over the bar, subdue and then force the transgressors out the door in the time it takes to chug a stein...
...Concessions can not be made in the benevolent manner of men of good will bending to inevitable progress, and the moderates and conservatives at Columbia are viewed as more terrible than the New Left because they do not understand the need to bend...
...I have seen a once-great university become a third-rate political tool for a mob of Vietcong flag-waving animals who trample the rights of anyone who dares to disagree with them...
...Meyer's nervous energy adds a new turbulence to the smoke as he scurries out of the bar with a folder of leaflets under his arm...
...I am leaving Columbia this week to return to my native land, the United States of America, and I only hope its people will take me back...
...Entering as Meyer leaves are Lehr and Rossetto, the authors of caustic parodies of SDS propaganda which first confused, then amused the university's student body...
...Let your little friends wave their Vietcong flags, I'm sure my friends who went to Vietnam and never returned would appreciate their youthful idealism...
...Columbia draws a greater proportion of its student body from outside New York than the other Manhattan colleges, a situation which has caused the administration more anguish than it would care to admit...
...They never made the front pages...
...The New York Times described Carpenter as "a highly politically active jock...
...But it is time to leave and as we go we notice over the entrance a large American flag...
...It was here at The Rail, in 1968, that Frank Dann and Paul Vilardi organized the Majority Coalition...
...I've had it up to here," a freshman with wiry blonde hair asserts sourly...
...But from a typical conversation at The Rail you can draw your own conclusions...
...I have seen the last three spring semesters disrupted with the disrupters getting only a slap on the wrist by the administrators who so want to understand them...
Vol. 4 • November 1970 • No. 1
