When Collins Was King

'KING' COLLINS and his friends became public figures in Cambridge on March 4, 1969--a week after Radcliffe proposed merger with Harvard, a month before the Strike began, the same day the Faculty voted not to let students on the Fainsod Committee studying university governance. Collins was a former graduate student in social sciences from Columbia University's Teachers College who had helped occupy Columbia's Fayerwether Hall in 1968, and he started his Harvard career by attending a meeting of Social Relations 153, where Alex Inkeles, then associate professor of Sociology, was lecturing on juvenile delinquency. Collins told the class that juvenile delinquency was good, because it "radicalizes people." The next week three of Collins's friends took off their clothes and washed them in the Eliot House laundry room, before a crowd of interested onlookers. When Alan Heimert, Eliot's master, asked one of the three if he had "some kind of masculinity problem," the man pulled a cigarette from Heimert's mouth. "Fuck off," he explained. Collins went back to disrupting classes.

SDS repudiated him. Seven Harvard students who acknowledged having "been involved to varying degrees in the recent activities which the press has associated with King Collins" repudiated him. "King Collins's group has only one person in it," Collins said: "King Collins." When Harvard had him arrested for trespassing, inside of a week fundraising drives in Cambridge and New York raised almost $10,000 towards his bail--in 1963, the friends of a Harvard student sent to a Georgia jail for taking part in a civil rights demonstration had been able to raise about $2000 for his defense over several months. Undeterred, Collins went to Government 1b, where he called a question about "to what extent students are in control of themselves" "a pretty good fucking question." (A reporter once asked Collins what kind of world he envisioned after everyone had freed himself of authority. "Then we can fuck those bastards," Collins replied.)

At his hearing, Collins described Inkeles as "totally dead" and "a desexualized being," but it didn't help--he drew two years in prison. Some old SDSers now say they think he must have been an undercover policeman, because, they say, whenever a meeting was going well he would disrupt it. It's hard to imagine Collins drawing followers or contributions or for that matter "Fuck Authority" on Inkeles's blackboard in any spring but 1969's. For awhile, he'd challenged Disraeli's dictum that great revolutions aren't lightly begun, but he passed into Strike folklore and then out of sight.