Discovering My Bourgeois Self
DRAPER, ROGER
View from the Campus??IV Discovering My Bourgeois Self By Roger Draper Iwas 10 years old, and in the sixth grade, when the Great School Terror first entered my life. The New York City public...
...But 1 was unsatisfied...
...The junior high I attended was a pioneer of "integration...
...To me, politics is like a chemical reaction that never reaches equilibrium...
...This incident reveals the unity of my political and personal neurotic strands...
...Graystone Kirk continues to be a trustee of several ciA-financed outfits...
...Last, there is the spirit of our time...
...I wanted to do something for itself, and being totally unprepared for anything constructive, only debauchery seemed to have any internal integrity...
...Other students become nihilistically militant in their opposition to the present regime...
...I had never experienced that before, and today I miss it...
...My political attitudes amount to exactly the same thing...
...Most of all, a real sense of community existed, the result of being isolated in a small, cold, miserable place, hundreds of miles from home...
...the other half came from the Negro Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn...
...They demanded to see our green leaves...
...Last year an organization called "warmth" attempted to enliven things by sponsoring non-verbal happenings and hoe-ins on the campus, but they are now apparently a casualty of winter's icy winds...
...With Barnard across the street, fully 40 per cent of all Columbia boys do not date even once in their four years...
...Dow Chemicals and the cia once again recruit without interference...
...I also remember countless college application forms, coming from distant and unknown universities and due on unknown dates ("see page 25 of the college manual...
...While I sympathize with them, I am not revolutionary material...
...Ken-nan, though, fails to see that the radical protesters are the smallest threat to the disinterested university...
...That sent me back the other way, toward apathy...
...Eventually I did make the sp, but my attitude toward school and personal achievement was irretrievably perverted...
...The emphasis upon conspicuous accumulation of grades was much lower than in the East...
...In my case it consisted of liberating the pent-up debauchee within me...
...I entered junior high school already convinced that only the superficial accumulation of academic honors was important...
...I recall writing several essays on "Why I Want to Go to . . . "—who the hell knew, anyway...
...Even the non-political students appear to be more interested in that $10,000 job which lies at the end of their degree than in "knowledge...
...To close the circle, I have become so circumscribed within the canons of academic hypocrisy that, in the end, I would probably defend them...
...Roger Draper is a junior at Columbia University...
...In fact, there is even a true story about a Columbia Dean who sat on the Harvard side of the stadium during a football game...
...I never dated, drank, smoked, slept late, or indulged in any of those other undergraduate excesses which, even in those relatively primitive days, were so readily accessible...
...I behaved like the advance-guard of a decadent class for a year...
...I decided to go the University of Wisconsin, and so, in the fall of 1963 I left the maternal shores of Brooklyn for the Northern wastes...
...The radically inclined students can't change Columbia, much less the government...
...That week, however, you needed two green leaves...
...We, of course, didn't know what they were talking about, and this usually led to a half-hearted scuffle...
...Sometimes, I worry about Vietnam and the ghetto...
...There is an Army intelligence unit somewhere on the campus...
...Many students experience a sophomore Fall...
...Professors transform themselves into industries...
...In its essence, this is merely the old conflict between ideality and reality in politics...
...I should add that, in retrospect, there were quite a number of good features about Wisconsin...
...I was ready for The Fall...
...An exotic variety of radical ideologies did flourish in our The "View from the Campus" series, which began in The New Leader of January 1, presents the thoughts of college students on the issues of greatest importance to them...
...my concern always was to get into something, or to stave off some vague psychological danger, or to please someone...
...I wanted to go to . .. because it never occurred to me that there was anything else I could do...
...And folks, there wasn't...
...Everyone around me concluded that there was now no reason to continue living...
...The rest of America will no doubt heave an undeserved sigh of relief...
...During that period I learned that I was no more suited for the non-academic than for the academic life...
...A Negro gang called "the Chaplains" had hit upon a new, and dazzlingly bizarre method of terrorizing white students...
...The most depressing aspect of being a student is that you aren't needed...
...I felt very resentful until it finally occurred to me that I was the delivery boy...
...My next stop was Columbia University (not the famous undergraduate school, but the outhouse of Columbia, the twilight-session School of General Studies...
...When I entered high school, I was therefore a complete personality...
...What is more important, I discovered my bourgeois self...
...In our private lives we were terrified by our Negro schoolmates, especially their gangs...
...In a nation of massive accumulators, they are among the most massive accumulators—of monumental architecture, of prestigious professors who never teach, of government-financed equipment, of secret projects, etc...
...Having been absent during the initial phase of the affair, I returned to school forewarned and duly bearing my green leaf...
...This seemed to end my chances...
...Now Columbia is notorious as a place people do not like...
...I couldn't agree more...
...I had never done anything in school for its own sake...
...Johnson is silly to draft graduate students...
...I marched from test to test without knowing which I was supposed to take, or why...
...By the time of my sophomore year at Wisconsin, the tension had become unbearable...
...But recently I discovered in the New York Times that 60 per cent of my fellow-citizens classify themselves as "hawks...
...In any event, I managed to avoid those excesses of last-minute hysteria common in high school graduating classes...
...I didn't understand why neither I nor my friends received any sense of achievement from our "good" grades, but for the first time the question was posed articulately...
...So much for our political ideals...
...The quality of life oppresses us, yet I cannot pretend that we have any tangible solutions...
...We are a generation rich enough to worry about intangible problems...
...In politics I was despairingly hypocritical, in school despairingly cynical...
...I am at least as guilty as anyone else...
...The school administration was relatively sympathetic...
...George Kennan has demanded that the universities devote themselves exclusively to disinterested learning...
...Making sp is the first test of the budding scholar's academic adrenal system, and in one of the early sixth grade marking periods I did poorly...
...These tests were all of the intellectually challenging multiple-choice variety...
...My grades were satisfactory...
...Slightly more than half of the students came from my exclusively Jewish, totally middle-class neighborhood...
...ranks, but this was only the public side of the question...
...Needless to say, there was no social integration at all...
...Soon I was to become aware of the distance between political ideality and sordid reality...
...The most explicit memory I have of those days is the Great Green Leaf Crisis...
...The New York City public school system maintains an institution called "sp," or Special Progress...
...We still can't...
...Since I was always living entirely for the future, I can recollect only those aspects of high school that were related to college...
...Somehow, people in large cities don't seem to relate to one another and the atmosphere pervades Columbia...
...I remember the innumerable college entrance and scholarship exams...
...After my suspension I worked for a year...
...I certainly don't want any of my precious A's and A-minuses imperiled...
...I had received a middle-class education, circa 1959...
...By giving students the impression that he cannot continue his policies without them, Johnson is injecting new life into a radical student intelligentsia which, up until now, has been stupified by its own inutility...
...We are politically impotent...
...The universities themselves have become immersed in the worst aspects of our society...
...I have become so regimented myself that I don't know how the present system could be improved...
...Please don't tell me about the libraries and the museums...
...the sp classes were solidly Jewish...
...Don"t—this is more your fault than ours...
...But I went back to school...
...Then I was suspended...
...Then too, there is New York, a city which does not nourish an academic environment...
...I made the discovery while delivering a package to a well-known Negro author, who treated me like the delivery boy...
...I was actually accepted by two schools...
...The lucky matriculant is entitled to pass through the seventh, eighth and ninth grades in two years...
...It is the classic terminus for Harvard rejectees...
...I have attempted to describe what it is like to be a student today...
...In my freshman year I was a monk of learning...
...The pursuit of accumulation is absolutely essential to academic survival...
...None of my friends could imagine a year that did not begin in September and end in June...
Vol. 51 • April 1968 • No. 8
