COLUMBIA REVISITED

...when the super-leftists of SDS and the Birchite police blew things up, the middle was leaderless...

...Such action would have kept open the channels of communication to the many on the campus who despaired of Columbia when the police violence began...

...Actually, some months earlier, a student vote rejected SDS demands for exclusion of Dow Chemical emissaries from the campus and affirmed a general policy of "open" recruitment by any agency or enterprise...

...Did it begin when some New York cops, in defiance of orders, struck out blindly and furiously at bystanders and demonstrators alike...

...In accordance with New Left doctrine (really as old as the U.S...

...But no Columbia president in modern times has been judged by his gift for inspiring the young...

...Then, as now, comparatively small matters ignited the large convulsions because of the accident of history...

...His dignity is equated with pomposity, his shyness with indifference...

...in another early-morning "clearing" operation, they ruthlessly and indiscriminately cracked heads...

...Nothing could have provided a more timely signal for "mass action" than the dismissal of a college editor whose publication had acquired some renown as a voice of undergraduate concern and dissent about the state of things, circa 1932...

...If poor Dean Hawkes had noted the calendar, so many things might have been so different...

...delay did, in fact, permit an armistice on that front...

...By contemporary standards, we were gentlemen if not always scholars...

...his austere bearing suggests the Union League Club...

...Yet for perhaps a startling number of young Americans that confrontation at Columbia altered the course of their lives...

...At that point the University's chief preoccupation became the peaceful evacuation of Hamilton, just as it was no doubt the hope of some of the SDS experts in guerrilla warfare that the Negroes would become the central figures in the "confrontation" and all Harlem would rise up in the convulsive conflict...

...The sector of Morningside Park chosen as the site was a wretched wasteland...

...Possibly Columbia's real failure is that it never gave much direction to those who were groping for some relevant role in a universe that burlesques the usual business of a university...

...But what do the battles of Columbia really prove, beyond the role of personality and accident in history...

...Aware of its numerical and spiritual weakness in the battle for support, SDS chose the strategy of seizure and sit-ins...

...There are even some who contend with superior hindsight that, if the police had been called at once in the initial test, much of the later strife would have been avoided...

...Then, as a high police official later admitted to me, "Some of the Birchers just went wild...

...In the ensuing days many tried to begin the process of conciliation...

...he is singularly incapable of imparting passion to his words or doing public justice to his intelligence...

...But once again a segment of the police— especially the plainclothesmen—salvaged the SDS cause...

...while there was some valid debate over the proper allocation of gym time and the space for Columbia and neighborhood uses, these were obviously negotiable matters...

...No buildings were seized...

...To state my view in its simplest terms, breaking Columbia's ties to the Institute for Defense Analysis seems inconsequential when compared with the mission of ending the war...

...His demeanor is that of the chairman of the board...

...But when the history-books are written, the young men and women who walked the lonely roads of New Hampshire and Wisconsin with Eugene McCarthy, defying the "inevitables" of U.S...

...But it is too easy to make Kirk the lonely scapegoat...

...Communist Party's ill-fated slogan of "self-determination for the black belt" abandoned more than three decades ago), the whites filed out and moved into other buildings...

...Some weeks later the technical dispute was terminated by an agreement under which Harris was formally reinstated, and, in turn, promptly tendered his resignation...

...But in the new atmosphere of "black power" rhetoric, SDS abruptly transformed the gym into a symbol of Columbia imperialism (or paternalism) and succeeded in selling that case to the undergraduate Afro-American Society...

...Possibly no episode in the student revolt of that decade had more lasting repercussions than the large—one-day—student strike staged on the Columbia campus in Harris' behalf...

...But this wasn't really the point...

...public hearings—boycotted by SDS—were held...

...The scenes of violence that day were confined largely to a few scuffles between athletes and Harris adherents...

...The administration eventually won this skirmish...

...During the first hours the police, planning to clear the other buildings, had acted with notable restraint...

...like Dean Rusk, he may be kept in office for a while by the volleys of his critics, whose intemperate-ness enhances his stature among some venerable donors, alumni, and trustees...

...Neither am I persuaded that the most enlightened system of academic dialogue could have dissuaded the SDS adventurers from pursuing their battle-plan...

...For those who earnestly believe our society is so sick that only random destructiveness makes sense, the achievement of chaos at Columbia comes under the heading of progress...

...But they ignore the fact that the most dangerous situation—in the larger context of the city and even the nation—involved the Negro enclave...

...Certain glib analogies offered between the Columbia upheaval and the Sorbonne revolt are more romantic than real...

...The first phase of the occupation was marred by an unhappy mixup between the SDS ideologues and the black student group...

...suddenly students—or at least far more than ever before— began to choose up sides...

...But in the ensuing tumult, symbol overshadowed substance, and, whatever the people of Harlem privately felt, others truculently spoke for them...

...It was a pitiful, dead-end, diversionary battle...

...Even if no effective control could be exercised during the hysteria, there could have been urgent, authoritative reports within a matter of hours...

...several days earlier eleven students had been expelled from Columbia's Medical School for participating in an antiwar group and "illegally" gathering on academic property...

...While most of my class participated in the rituals, I joined the campusi picket line...

...The accident then was that Harris' ouster occurred at a time when American society seemed to be disintegrating, when faith in existing institutions was crumbling and when American radicalism—Communists, socialists, and some splinters thereof—was beginning to achieve some semblance of an attentive hearing on many campuses...

...I do not believe Columbia had any real alternative once the issues were drawn...

...The structure was conceived almost a decade ago...

...And now, perhaps confirming the stereotypes of some of the dominant spirits of the New Left, I found myself an alienated alumnus—estranged not from the university but from the modern inheritors of the tradition of rebellion on Morningside Heights...

...And without Columbia's $3 million investment, the plain fact is that no alternative development on this bleak site could be visualized...

...His editorial page wrote of breadlines in the city...

...Returning to the embattled campus in 1968, one could only reflect on how mild and mellow—in retrospect— were the radical tactics of that earlier time, despite the presence of animated Marxist promoters, and the desolate state of things in the world...

...A journalist who was in Paris during the Sorbonne story remarked on his return that "a Sorbonne student would regard Columbia as a country club...

...if a small bloc of left-wing students (bearing no resemblance to a majority) can paralyze a campus by occupation of buildings, there is no reason why a comparable faction of John Birchers could not similarly seize-and-sit to demand the ouster of suspiciously liberal professors...

...This time the more fiery revolutionaries really lit things up—including the burning of cherished faculty research documents and student dissertations and, later, the smashing of windows, random brick-throwing, and the setting of fires in other buildings...

...politics and forcing at least a halt in the escalation of the war, may claim a larger place than those who put a torch to research files on Morningside Heights...

...JAMES A. WECHSLER is editor of the editorial page of The New York Post and one of its featured columnists...

...The other specific cry raised by SDS was aimed at Columbia's projected construction of a new gymnasium in Harlem...

...By the time the explosions occurred Columbia and other universities were, in fact, in the process of severing these ties and President Grayson Kirk was preparing to abandon his position on the IDA board...

...Indeed, if SDS really believed that a large section of the University community regarded these as life-and-death conflicts, it would have first proposed a referendum and, if victorious, a student strike...

...Did it begin at last December's conclaves where the master strategists of Students for a Democratic Society talked of Columbia as a target for an historic "confrontation...

...Probably there will be some changes of value, but I must confess skepticism about the price of the procedures employed...

...They could not, of course, care less about so bourgeois a notion as academic reform...

...But perhaps some perspective may be gained by reducing to appropriate absurdity the two sloganeering "issues" that were the formal pretext for the rebellion...

...It is my own judgment that the Columbia crisis would never have achieved major dimensions if the police madness had been avoided...

...no one even seriously advocated prolonging the strike...

...Obviously the flagrant incitements of French universities—such as fantastic overcrowding— are far more characteristic of New York ghetto schools than of an Ivy League campus...

...Clearly reasonable men could have evolved a formula that would have made the gym a mutual asset for Columbia and the community...

...They smashed wantonly through lines of faculty and students standing in front of one besieged hall...

...But the outcry over the gym was a crudely synthetic—and belated—one...

...In reviewing the debacle, one confronts the ancient question: When did history begin...

...It is argued by some that the total effect is salutary...

...overnight the fringe SDS uprising became a large-scale movement and, in the new campus phrase, "Columbia will never be the same...

...Or would they...

...This time SDS was even more conspicuously rescued by another display of police frenzy...

...but soon after this exercise in revolutionary solidarity, the Negroes decided—-with the abject acquiescence of most of the white militants—-that they preferred to conduct their sit-in as a separatist event...

...I was a freshman in that April of 1932 when Reed Harris, the editor of The Columbia Spectator, was abruptly and, one must add, ineptly expelled just before he was to finish his term in that post...

...Did it begin with the escalation of the war in Vietnam, and the widening "generational gap" between those who talk about the war and those who (especially in the light of the new draft rules) face deeply personal decisions about service or defiance...

...That was the real turning point in the battle of Columbia...

...At the risk of challenging some who have read excessive world-wide meaning into the Columbia rebellion, I lean to the view that the human equation was crucial to the disaster...

...My own tenure as editor of The Spectator was climaxed by a strike of the staff which I led against the attempt of the student council to acquire a voice in the paper's editorial policy—a question which currently troubles some experts in participatory democracy...

...They blame the ad hoc faculty committee for clinging to the delusion that SDS was prepared to negotiate anything except the University's surrender on all counts...

...It is generally assumed that they were assured of minimal disciplinary action as well as at least a temporary halt— subject to further negotiation with the community—on the gym construction...

...Yet it seems clear that neither Columbia's tenuous relations with IDA nor the building of a gym, as isolated issues, could have set large multitudes in motion...

...Harris' tenure as Spectator editor (I was a freshman member of that staff already vagrantly dreaming of the editorship I achieved in my senior year) had certainly shaken things up...

...almost inevitably the result will be that the disputed territory will remain a largely uninhabited shambles of rock and dirt where dope-pushers occasionally transact their affairs...

...In protest against the beginnings of disciplinary action, a new seizure of Hamilton Hall was undertaken...

...No sit-in, no violence—just assemblage...

...Kenneth Clark, the noted Negro scholar, worked out a formula for a peaceful exodus of the Negro group...

...In this, as in other matters, the University was implausibly inept about presenting such obvious facts, and the vision of Columbia as a major collaborator in the napalm business was steadily promoted...

...his primary duty has been to inspire gifts from the wealthy, and Kirk has performed that function as conscientiously as did Nicholas Murray Butler (whom I saw exactly once during my four years at Columbia—the day he delivered the freshman orientation lecture) and Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose Columbia tenure was a leisurely preparation for his quiet time in the White House...

...no massive police presence was required...

...of the left-wing student pilgrimage to Harlan, Kentucky...

...But once the police were called, the University surely had no excuse for abdication...

...After a six-day war of nerves (during which an ad hoc faculty committee had helped to resist pressures for summoning of the police), intermediaries, including Dr...

...one of the victims was an assistant dean who had spent the night striving to curb disorder...

...When a University is obliged to summon police to handle its affairs, it is confessing the breakdown of its own community...

...Too few senior faculty members had invested much time or energy in student relations...

...We were untroubled...

...One was the University's connection with the Institute for Defense Analysis, the agency which solicits academicians for varied forms of war research...

...Did it begin with the seizure of the buildings, or with the University's unresponsiveness to warnings of a long, hot spring...

...Under Harris, The Spectator had become a rebel journal in a time when the depression was the central fact of life...

...Columbia's campus stands above the Harlem area, and some have wryly contended that the University "overlooked" its impoverished neighbors for many long years...

...Almost from the start Grayson Kirk became the invisible man, and his vice president and provost, David Truman, who, as dean of the college, had previously won wide undergraduate esteem, was unable to function independently...

...The truth is that many of the questions that have subsequently evoked agitated discussion and concern—about President Kirk's aloofness, about the University's structure, about administration-faculty relationship, about the role of the trustees—were only mildly alive before the storm broke...

...At sixty-four, Kirk's time of retirement was near even before the recent collision...

...I felt almost as uncomfortable with them as with the "old grads" who now, as in the 1930's, were faulting the university for excessive "permissiveness" in dealing with the upheavals...

...Even gestures of sympathy for the victims of the police action and forthright condemnation of the assaults (as well as the provocations) might have altered the script...

...countless politicians— black and white alike—had heralded the plan as a serious contribution to Harlem's starved recreational facilities...

...It had really never occurred to us that the capture of a university building or the imprisonment of a college dean might be valid strategies of campus warfare...

...They had jointly taken over the major undergraduate classroom center known as Hamilton Hall...

...Kirk is vulnerable to harsh carica". . . I must confess skepticism about the price of the procedures employed . . ." ture...

...There is no evidence that any large bloc of Harlem residents regarded the gym as an "encroachment" and many undoubtedly welcomed it as a prospective playground...

...I dwell on the point because it is illustrative of the grotesqueness of the larger story...

...that many on the campus have been stirred to new contemplation of old questions about intra-uni-versity relationships, a larger voice for faculty and students in academic affairs, a greater awareness of the underlying unrest that afflicts our young men in a war-torn, mechanized, materialist society...

...Absurdly, when as a Federal Government official he was to be summoned before the McCarthy Committee some two decades later, he was grilled most closely on a volume he had written called King Football in which he lamented the high-pressure recruiting system Lou Little brought to Morn-ingside Heights...

...As these episodes spread, there was widespread campus revulsion and SDS and its camp followers seemed doomed to isolation and futility...

...Princeton's President Robert Goheen could walk into the middle of an SDS-sponsored melee and cool it...

...Like myself, Harris was to suffer through many long seasons as an alumnus in which a certain nostalgia for those successful exercises steadily mounted...

...of threats of war...

...When the uproar began, some Harlem politicos swiftly revised their remarks and discovered that they had been resisting the Columbia invasion all along...

...if the University had been too grudging in the early stages, it was plainly disposed to grant maximum concessions as the construction phase approached...

...we viewed the council (it was called Student Board) as a company union, no matter what majority its members had won by secret ballot...

...Columbia awoke to examine new moral as well as physical ruins...

...A commission of thoughtful men was named to explore the background of the clash...

...But the long night wasn't over...

...Commencement then, as now, was for some of us an occasion for protest rather than sentiment...

...It was the tragedy of Grayson Kirk that he felt obliged to concede to police demands that he remain out of sight during the turmoil...

...a lot of radicals were born, and most of my own student memories are those of the strikes and protests we staged over the dismissal in consecutive years of two radical members of the economics department, the annual antiwar strike that began in 1934 (highlighted by the recitation of our version of the Oxford pledge), and other lesser themes of agitations that now elude recollection...

...Yet the issue on which he was finally expelled was a series of articles alleging malfeasance and mismanagement in the operation of the university's dining halls...

...Whether this was in fact planned in detail much earlier or contained some elements of spontaneity is not highly important...

...Far more important, I believe, is the question of why, once the conflict achieved such momentum, the administration was unable to achieve any meaningful communication with so large a number of non-doctrinaire students and faculty members...

...But any hope that the damage could be swiftly retrieved was dispelled when what is called the Second Battle of Columbia erupted...

...There is no easy cut-off place...

...What happened afterward matters...

...then, as dawn approached, they moved to "clear the campus" and, in the process, beat up a number of students and teachers who had actually been dedicating their efforts to peacemaking...

...It would have required no large imagination, for example, to place responsible faculty members at key places, and to insure that their protests be heard the moment some of the police broke loose...

...and of bungling, fumbling world leadership...