An editor's notebook

...The subsequent investigation showed that overcrowding at social events was common...

...first, make City College a place where minority students, along with everyone else, can learn and can earn a degree...

...Those who pushed...

...that there had been a stabbing and death at a dance earlier in the year...

...Don't make your men the angry focus of those not getting into the gym...

...And where the public good is at stake, we are generally in a fog as to how it should be asserted...

...His words were moving...

...As Auden says of the old master Brughel's Icarus, "how everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the Commonweal /3 March 1992: 5 disaster;.../ the expensive delicate ship that must have seen/ Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,/ Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on...

...AN EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK WHY THEY DIED ACCOUNTABILITY AT CITY COLLEGE On December 28, nine young people, AfricanAmericans, died at the bottom of a stairwell leading to a basement gym at the City College of New York...

...Help yourselves...

...How many more young blacks will die before someone figures out how to do it differently...

...Last spring, Harleston persuaded the university chancellor that a student strike against a tuition increase should be allowed to run its course...

...The student affairs coordinator and the head of security were removed...

...The rap concert promoter...

...Thus the crush at the bottom of the stairs, thus the nine deaths...

...Were the police captain and the college president wrong...

...Criminal charges against anyone are unlikely, so in our society that means no one will be found responsible...

...In the case at hand, an individual's freedom of action does not extend to pushing people down the stairs...

...They were the administration's way of both managing and avoiding social conflict...

...Help your principal...

...So please help me...

...Adult fear and confusion about rules and responsibility have taken their toll at City College and elsewhere...

...But until now, the mayor, like President Harleston of City College, has managed social conflict by avoiding confrontation and sidestepped his duty to hold city officials accountable...

...So, living in a society where we are all free to act as we wish and where we are willing to allow others to do so too, we seem to count on some invisible hand to enforce the equivalent of Justice Holmes's dictum: An individual's freedom of speech does not extend to yelling, "Fire...

...Even the police captain on duty outside the gym was probably observing some version of this policy: Don't start trouble with these kids...

...The game was organized by the Evening Student Government and a rap promoter (neither of whom accurately represented the event to school officials...

...Something like the backdraft in a fire, those attempts made over the years to ease the social conflicts that rise from the efforts to compensate for our racist history now blow back on those at work trying to bring the fire under control...

...Until the nine deaths, Harleston's policy seems to have succeeded...

...Confrontation was avoided...

...But some have been held accountable...

...This "accident" could have happened anywhere...

...But the invisible hand did not reach out in a benevolent gesture on that Saturday evening...

...This past fall, he persuaded university trustees to allow Leonard Jeffries to continue, at least temporarily, as head of the Black Studies Department despite anti-Jewish and anti-Italian remarks in a speech...

...And the students followed their lead...

...He said to a shocked and grieving student assembly, "You must learn from this...

...All were black...

...Sixty-six police officers were stationed outside the building to control the waiting crowd...

...In the efforts of city and college officials to unscramble what happened at the gym in Mahoney Hall, this much, at least, has 4: 13 March 1992 Commonweal become clear: In a public building, operated by a public authority (City University of New York), innumerable and egregious lapses in the enforcement of university regulations were routine...

...the vice-president for student affairs took early retirement...

...By agreement with the university, New York city policeman do not enter college buildings...

...MARGARET O'BRIEN STEINFELS 6: 13 March 1992 Commonweal...

...The indifference of those crowded around them and the obliviousness of the police stationed outside remind me of Auden's "About suffering they were never wrong, /the Old Masters...

...nor did either have the required liability insurance...

...The student activities coordinator, the official immediately in charge, did not insist that the form for renting the gym be filled out properly, nor did he ask any questions about the event, about security preparations, or about insurance...

...In his report, the police commissioner said the police followed the rules—but transferred the captain in charge...

...Yet it is hard to turn back the nagging suspicion that the politics of race shaped and channeled choices, decisions, and behavior, even though most of those directly involved were black: the students who died, the crowd, the organizers, the school officials, and the president of City College, as well as those holding fiduciary responsibility—the police commissioner and the mayor...

...There may be a change in the college's president...

...in a crowded theater...

...The police captain, and at least some of the policemen, are white...

...Until now, he has not preached an ethic of personal responsibility...

...If the police captain can't prevent violence and enforce the law, who can...

...Two weeks ago, Mayor David Dinkins went to Thomas Jefferson high school where two students had just been shot and killed by another...

...How it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along...

...Who was responsible...

...The physical revulsion I felt as I read about the suffocation of those young men and women certainly rose from the fact that one of my children goes to City College, although he was not there that evening...

...The tangled explanations tell a story of irresponsibility and lack of accountability overlaid with the convoluted politics of race...

...On top of these, it is painful and difficult to raise issues of responsibility and accountabi lty with blacks who still have so much due them on the ledger book of American history...

...Five thousand people showed up...

...But if Harleston, who seems a decent and competent man, can't manage both to avoid confrontation and to set limits, who can...

...The nine deaths turn out to have been a tragedy-waiting-to-happen...

...The police...

...According to the coroner they were asphyxiated, their chests crushed as they were pressed against the gym doors or lay under the weight of the people piled on top of them...

...In the current cultural climate, responsibility and accountability seem to be public virtues called forth only by lawsuits or media exposés...

...As it became clear that not everyone would be admitted to the gym, some rushed the building, pressing forward against those waiting in the lobby and the stairwell...

...The nine young people who died were part of a crowd waiting to get in to watch rap stars play basketball...

...As it turned out, the deaths were more than a simple accident, more than the result of a crowd's momentary heedlessness pressing to get into a celebrity basketball game...

...But that policy, translated down the administrative ladder, clearly led school officials to ignore rules, to suspend judgment, and at times, to take leave of their common sense...

...The awful truth is that no one, black or white, will "mess" with young blacks, especially young black males...

...Don't assert police authority unless absolutely necessary...

...Violence was avoided...

...This latter policy has meant an openness to the community and a hands-off policy toward student activities...

...There is likely to be a renewed enforcement of the rules at City College...

...Bernard Harleston, the president of City College for ten years, has tried to do two things in his tenure...

...and second, insure that the campus is a place that neither affronts nor confronts the black community, neither the Harlem community that surrounds it, nor the larger New York black intellectual and political community...

...The student affairs coordinator...

...the gym had a capacity for 2,700...

...that even though the City University system budgets million of dollars a year for security, on December 28 no guards were posted in the lobby or stairwell of the gym...

...Will anyone ever figure out how to do it differently...