It isn’t true, I confess now, that three policemen gave me a boost in—like Lenin and his sealed train—to infect the 1968 Columbia protest with conservative bacilli. By that time Morningside Campus had been cut off from outside influence for three weeks or more. The general temper was gall and meanness. Liberal-arts education had become radical-skills training. No, I merely slid through Main Gate while campus police argued with some media person. Simple as NBC. Then again, if I’d known this was to be the night of the big bust. I might’ve gone home and, oh. done work on my neuroses instead.
I was a new conservative in 1968 and not very good at it yet. Columbia had sicked this brazen, compelling right-of-Burke English professor on me —Jeff Hart. (Wonder where he is now. Gone to the Sunbelt probably.) But in 1963, my senior year. Hart had been denied tenure for his conservatism— and, if you were halfway prescient, you could predict the outcome. When 1968 arrived, most faculty, old Roosevelt liberals, sympathized with SDS. Until it was too late. I remember, as that political Walpurgis Night ended, seeing whole file folders ride a thermal up, out of the Columbia math building. And, beside me, the dealt-out New Deal professor screamed, “They’re in my office. Oh, God.” How much of his life work blew over Riverside Church, I don’t know. Responsible protest, they said it was.
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