Columbia Struck

IT IS TWO in the morning the night before the third bust and second police battle. We are walking down Broadway from Columbia's 116th Street --Checkpoint Charlie, where you pass in and out the campus through credentials check. Shouting and sounds of riot draw us around the corner of 110th St. A dozen students standing in front of a small white-pillared building are shouting up at a 15-story Columbia dormitory, Carmen Hall. About half hold beer cans. Student heads stick out from every third window in Carmen and yell back. I am told that those on the ground are Jocks from "Beta" (the Jock fraternity). The Pukes in Carmen are egging them on. This scene has happened in altered form a couple of times before, I am told; and the Jocks are both serious and dangerous. To hear what they're yelling, we walk quietly (so they won't really notice) to within a door of Beta. A Jock yells, "You lousy Puke motherfuckers." He mocks them with their own rhetoric. A Puke screams back more of the same and adds that they're stupid.

A bottle smashes in the middle of the street in front of a dozen Jocks leaning against parked cars. Because it is completely dark and Carmen is a skyscraper, no one saw it coming. Three water bombs suddenly splat in front of them. More shouting and Beta huddles on retaliation. A squad car pulls in front of Beta, talks to a Jock who leans in the window, and leaves. A bottle shatters among a half dozen Beta people. A lot of Jocks immediately attack Carmen, running across the street and scaling a 16-foot gate. A bottle brushes through a tree I am standing under and smashes on the sidewalk three feet away. It is disintegrated, powdered into glass fragments no larger than pebbles. I calculate later that a bottle thrown from the tenth floor of Carmen's 15 floors is moving 60 miles an hour when it hits the street. We start a cautious retreat but stop when the Jocks pass us on their way two blocks north to the checkpoint (so they don't have to climb the gate). A bottle smashes at the sandaled feet of a Jock in a sweatshirt who is in the center of the group. He looks up and counts out windows on the facade of Carmen, deciding which room threw it, then heads for the checkpoint. We are hiding under the tree again; the last Jocks under the eves of Beta are looking out. A boxload of bottles crashes on the far sidewalk, off the top of a parked car, and into the street. Two patrol cars are here now; they are almost hit. After quiet, we walk back to the corner, watching for bottles out of Carmen, I with my hands in the air as if arrested and my friend holding up a two-finger V to his compatriot Pukes. Someone leans out an eighth-floor window: "Fucking Puke." Carmen, I am told, has Jocks in it too. We go back to Carmen and see a Puke's room where the Jocks broke in and threw a jug of his fermenting cider through a picture window. Everything was knocked on the floor; two lamps were broken. The next day the elevator walls are graffiti-ed with "Egg the Jock House."

PEOPLE have run out of new arguments at Columbia and are still where they were a month ago, when revolutionaries held the first sit-in. Everyone has dropped the usual debate niceties. A boy shouts at a red-armbanded striker that SDS has taken away something he earned $2000 for at $1.35 an hour, then tells him to shut up when he tries to answer. A girl in the student grill waves a New York Times article in the air asking how they are to trust an administration that planted police spies in student organizations. Students and faculty members grouped in front of Low Library at night exchange dramatic monologues on campus politics until one retires in frustration.

A lot of students have gone home. The Daily Spectator stopped publication a couple of weeks ago with the exception of occasional broadsides on major incidents. A few do course work; but most took automatic "p's" for passing. Most wait. Politics has replaced academics as the institutionalized rationale for living at Columbia this month. The huge apathetic majority has been forced to take a side. But politics does not give a student much to do unless he sit-ins or counter-demonstrates. As a result there is constant political potential for a large demonstration.

The Columbia student has been anonymous in his community. No social unit brings students together to meet. Students eat off campus in restaurants; the college doesn't have a major food plan. Dormitory room doors always lock automatically.

To be anonymous a person needs many others around to show him what a small fraction of his world knows him. The six dormitories house hundreds, most of whom don't know the people across the hall. All student activities are located in the same building and are given room numbers of three figures. Everyone goes through the same doors, rides the same elevators, and walks the same paths every day. This absence of individual identity leads to the mass of graffiti-ing all over campus and the disregard for the privacy of Grayson Kirk's cigars.

ANONYMITY encourages a student to throw a bottle out a high window without concern for hurting someone or fear of being spotted among a huge grid of windows. It is a feeling that leaves a greater sense of detachment from the administration. As an emotional act, sitting-in the president's office brought the argument of the demonstrators into an understandable reality. Before, their debate was not so much arrogant as unknown.

The police raid became both the demonstrators' and the spectators' most vivid experience with the university's power. The students had no empathy for the way Kirk's mind works, so they protested in their own reality. After the police came, they considered their relationship to the administration, as they knew it, a violent one. Or, at least, they held Kirk responsible for actions they considered outrageous while not considering his perspective. It is because most students at the college shared this mood of anonymity that they became such avid opponents of an administration which could not understand their tactics.