On the Steps of Low

(The author, a sophomore at Columbia, was advised by his legal counsel to use a pseudonym. This article will be continued tomorrow.)

Columbia used to be called King's College. They changed the name in 1783 because they wanted to be patriotic and Columbia means America. This week we've been finding out what America means.

Every morning now when I wake up I have to run through the whole thing in my mind. I have to do that because I wake up in a familiar place that isn't what it was. I wake up and I see blue coats and brass buttons all over the campus. ("Brass buttons, blue coat, can't catch a nanny goat" goes the Harlem nursery rhyme.) I start to go off the campus but then remember to turn and walk two blocks uptown to get to the only open gate. There I squeeze through the three-foot "out" opening in the police barricade, and I feel for my wallet to be sure I've got the two I.D.'s necessary to get back into my college. I stare at the cops. They stare back and see a red armband and long hair and they perhaps tap their nightsticks on the barricade. They're looking at a radical leftist.

I wasn't always a radical leftist. Although not altogether straight, I'm not a hair person either, and ten days ago I was writing letters to Kokomo, Indiana, for Senator McCarthy; my principal association with the left was that I rowed port on crew. But then I got involved in this movement and one thing led to another. I am not a leader, you understand. But leaders cannot seize and occupy buildings. It takes great numbers of people to do that. I am one of those great numbers. This article is the chronicle of a single revolutionary digit.

MONDAY, APRIL 22 -- A mimeograph has appeared around the campus charging SDS with using coercion to gain its political ends. SDS is for free speech for itself only, it is charged. SDS physically threatens the administration. SDS breaks rules with impunity while we (undefined) are subject to dismissal for tossing a paper airplane out a dorm window. Aren't you TIRED, TIRED, TIRED of this? Will Mark Rudd be our next Dean? Do something about it. Come to the SDS rally tomorrow and be prepared. At first anonymous, the leaflet reappears in a second edition signed Students for a Free Campus. The jocks have done it again. As with last spring's anti-Marine demonstrations, threats of violence from the right will bring hundreds of the usually moderate to the SDS ranks just to align themselves against jock violence. I personally plan to be there, but I'm not up tight about it. At the boat house, a guy says he's for the jock position. Don't get me wrong, I say, I'm not against beating up on a few pukes, I just don't think you should stoop to their level by mimeographing stuff. We both go out and kill ourselves trying to row a boat faster than eight students from MIT will be able to.

TUESDAY, APRIL 23 -- Noon. At the sundial are 500 people ready to follow Mark Rudd (whom they don't particularly like because he always refers to President Kirk as "that shit-head"), into the Low Library administration building to conduct a demonstration against IDA and the gym and test Kirk's anti--indoor demonstration edict. There are around 100 counter-demonstrators. They are what Trustee Arthur Hays Sulzberger's newspaper refers to as "burly white youths" or "students of considerable athletic attainment"--jocks. Various deans and other father surrogates separate the two factions. Low Library is locked. For lack of a better place to go we head for the site of the gym in Morningside Park, chanting Gym Crow must go. I do not chant because I don't like chanting.

I have been noncommittal to vaguely against the gym, but now I see the site for the first time. There is excavation cutting across the whole park. It's really ugly. And there's a chain link fence all around the hole. I don't like fences anyway so I am one of the first to jump on it and tear it down. Enter the NYPD. One of them grabs the fence gate and tries to shut it. Some demonstrators grab him. I yell let that cop go, partly because I feel sorry for the cop and partly because I know that the nightsticks will start to flagellate on our heads, which indeed they do. One of my friends goes down and I pull him out. He's on adrenalin now and tries to get back at the cops but I hold him, because I hit a cop at Whitehall and I wished I hadn't very shortly thereafter. After the usual hassle order is restored and the cops let Rudd mount a dirt pile to address us. As soon as he starts to talk he is drowned out by jack hammers but at the request of the police they are turned off. Rudd suggests we go back to the sundial and join with 300 demonstrators there, but we know that he couldn't possibly know whether there are 300 demonstrators there and we don't want to leave. He persists and we defer.

Like Pavlov's Dog

Back at the sundial there is a large crowd. It's clear we've got something going. An offer comes from Vice President Truman to talk with us in McMillan Theatre but Rudd, after some indecision, refuses. It seems we have the initiative and Truman just wants to get us in some room and bullshit 'til we all go back to sleep. Someone suggests we go sit down for awhile in Hamilton, the main college classroom building, and we go there. Sitting down turns to sitting in, although we do not block classes. Rudd asks, "Is this a demonstration?" "Yes!" we answer, all together. "Is it indoors?" "Yes!"

An immediate demand is the release of the one student arrested at the park, Fred Wilson, who might as well be named John Everyman, because nobody knows him. To reciprocate for Fred's detention Dean Coleman is held hostage.

At four o'clock like Pavlov's dog I go to crew, assuring a long-hair at the door that I'll be back. At practice, it is pointed out to me that the crew does not have as many wasps as it should have according to the population percentage of wasps in the nation, so don't I think that crew should be shut down? I answer no, I don't think crew should be shut down.

Back at school at eight I prepare to spend the night at Hamilton. My friend Rock is there. We decide that we are absolutely bound to meet some girls or at least boys since there are 300 of them in the lobby. Every ten minutes he yells to me, "Hey, did you make any friends yet?" I say no each time, and he says that he hasn't either but that he's bound to soon.

I go upstairs to reconnoiter and there is none other than Peter Behr of Linda LeClair fame chalking on the wall, "'Up against the wall, motherfucker,' from a poem by Leroi Jones." I get some chalk and write "I am sorry about defacing the walls, but babies are being burned and men are dying and this university is at fault quite directly." Also I draw some SANE symbols and then at 2:30 a.m. go to sleep.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24 -- 5:30 a.m. Someone just won't stop yelling that we've got to get up, that we're leaving, that the blacks have asked us to leave. I get up and leave. The column of evicted whites shuffles over to Low Library. A guy in front rams a wooden sign through the security office side doors and about 200 of us rush in. Another 150 hang around outside because the breaking glass was such a bad sound. They become the first "sundial people." Inside we rush up to Kirk's office and someone breaks the lock. I am not at all enthusiastic about this and suggest that perhaps we ought to break up all the Ming Dynasty art that's on display while we're at it. A kid turns on me and says in a really ugly way that the exit is right over there. I reply that I am staying, but that I am not a sheep and he is.

Rudd calls us all together. He looks very strained. He elicits promises from the Spectator reporters in the crowd not to report what he is about to say. Then he says that the blacks told us to leave Hamilton because they do not feel that we are willing to make the sacrifices they are willing to make. He says that they have carbines and grenades and that they're not leaving. I think that's really quite amazing.

We all go into Kirk's office and divide into three groups, one in each room. We expect the cops to come any moment. After an hour's discussion my room votes 29-16 to refuse to leave, to make the cops carry us out. The losing alternative is to escape through the windows and then go organize a strike. The feeling is that if we get busted, then there will be something to organize a strike about. The man chairing the discussion is standing on a small wooden table and I am very concerned lest he break it. We collect water in wastebaskets in case of tear gas. Some of it gets spilled and I spend my time trying to wipe it up. I don't want to leave somebody else's office all messy.

We check to see what other rooms have decided. One room is embroiled in a political discussion, and in the other everyone is busy playing with the office machines.

Sorel is Dead

At about 8:30 a.m. we hear that the cops are coming. One-hundred-seventy-three people jump out the window. (I don't jump because I've been reading Lord Jim.) That leaves 27 of us sitting on the floor, waiting to be arrested. In stroll an inspector and two cops. We link arms and grit our teeth. After about five minutes of gritting our teeth it downs on us that the cops aren't doing anything. We relax a little and they tell us they have neither the desire nor the orders to arrest us. In answer to a question they say they haven't got MACE, either.

In through the window like Batman climbs Professor Orest Ranum, liberal, his academic robes billowing in the wind. We laugh at his appearance. He tells us that our action will precipitate a massive right wing reaction in the faculty. He confides that the faculty had been nudging Kirk toward resignation, but now we've blown everything; the faculty will flock to support the president. We'll all be arrested, he says, and we'll all be expelled. He urges us to leave. We say no. One of us points out that Sorel said only violent action changes things. Ranum says that Sorel is dead. He gets on the phone to Truman and offers us trial by a tripartite committee if we'll leave. We discuss it and vote no. Enter Mark Rudd, through the window. He says that 27 people can't exert any pressure, and the best thing we could do is leave and join a big sit-in in front of Hamilton. We say no, we're not leaving until the gym, IDA, and amnesty demands are met. Rudd goes out and comes back and asks us to leave again, and we say no again. He leaves to get reinforcements. Ranum leaves. Someone comes in to take pictures. We all cover our faces with different photographs of Grayson Kirk.

It's raining out, and the people who are climbing back in are marked by their wetness. Offered a towel by one of the new people, a girl pointedly says no thank you, I haven't been out. Rationally, we 27 are glad that there are now 100 people in the office, but emotionally we resent them. As people dry out, the old and new become less easily differentiable, and I mourn the loss of my identity. I am trying for a field promotion in the movement so that I will not fade into the masses who jumped and might jump again.

The phone continues to ring and we inform the callers that we are sorry, but Dr. Kirk will not be in today, because Columbia is under new management. After noon, all the phones are cut off by the administration.

At 3:45 I smoke my first cigarette in four months and wonder if Lenin smoked. I don't go to crew. I grab a typewriter, and, though preoccupied by its electricness, manage to write:

Will the Market Quiver?

"The time has come to pass the time.

"I am not having good times here. I do not know many people who are here, and I have doubts about why they are here. Worse, I have doubts about why I am here. (Note the frequency of the word here. The place I am is the salient characteristic of my situation.) It's possible that I'm here to be cool or to meet people or to meet girls (as distinct from people) or to get out of crew or to be arrested. Of course the possibility exists that I am here to precipitate some change at the University. I am willing to accept the latter as true, or, rather, I am willing, even anxious, not to think about it any more. If you think too much on the second tier (think about why you are thinking what you think) you can be paralyzed.

"I really made the conflicting imperative scene today. I have never let down the crew before, I think. Let down seven guys. I am one eighth of the crew. I am one-fiftieth of this demonstration. And I am not even sure that this demonstration is right. But I multiplied these figures by an absolute importance constant. I hate to hamper the hobby of my friends (and maybe screw, probably screw my own future in it). I am sorry about that, but death is being done by this university and I would rather fight it now than row a boat.

"But then I may, they say, be causing a right wing reaction and hurting the cause. Certainly it isn't conscionable to hold Coleman captive. But attention is being gotten. Steps will be taken in one direction or another. The polls will fluctuate and the market quiver. Our being here is the cause of an effect. We're trying to make it Good; I don't know what else to say or do. That is, I have no further statement to make at this time, gentlemen."

The news comes in that Avery and Fayerweather have been liberated. We mark it as such on Grayson's map. At about 8 p.m. we break back into Kirk's inner office, which had been relocked by security when we moved into one room when the cops came in the morning. The $450,000 Rembrandt and the TV have gone with the cops.

We explore. The temptation to loot is tremendous, middle-class morality notwithstanding, but there is no looting. I am particularly attracted by a framed diploma from American Airlines declaring Grayson Kirk a