On the Right

Los Angeles, June 18—Dear Diary: Yesterday, I delivered the commencement address at a very large university in California, and it was something, let me tell you. The campus has a reputation of being pretty calm, I mean compared to some of the others. But they had a lot of excitement just the same this year, and halfway through the winter, the Chancellor had to cancel the black studies program after threats had been made against the administrator of it. And then the morning of the commencement, authorities confiscated five hundred copies of the student paper, because it had in it a reproduction of a dirty picture that had appeared in another California college paper, which got the Regents into an uproar, saying they weren’t going to appropriate any more money for student pornography, the students would have to pay for their own. Free love yes, free smut no, I guess you’d call it.

Anyway, when I got to the Chancellor’s (he is a very nice man, and doesn’t give in to the kids when they are wrong, which is very often nowadays, I take it), he told me he wanted me to see a couple of things before the show went on. The first was a widely distributed letter from a student called “Jim” addressed to “Dear Mom and Dad,” protesting various things the Chancellor had done. One paragraph that, naturally, caught my eye, said “William Buckley is going to speak. We asked the Chancellor for permission to let some of our people speak too. He refused. So we have to find [Dear Diary, you know that I know that the right word here is ‘alternative’] means of expressing our sense of outrage at the invitation to Buckley and the hatred he sells. So we’re going to present . . . actions which in themselves are statements against the glib assurance and barely repressed hatred which Mr. Buckley represents.”

Los Angeles, June 18—Dear Diary: Yesterday, I delivered the commencement address at a very large university in California, and it was something, let me tell you. The campus has a reputation of being pretty calm, I mean compared to some of the others. But they had a lot of excitement just the same this year, and halfway through the winter, the Chancellor had to cancel the black studies program after threats had been made against the administrator of it. And then the morning of the commencement, authorities confiscated five hundred copies of the student paper, because it had in it a reproduction of a dirty picture that had appeared in another California college paper, which got the Regents into an uproar, saying they weren’t going to appropriate any more money for student pornography, the students would have to pay for their own. Free love yes, free smut no, I guess you’d call it.

Anyway, when I got to the Chancellor’s (he is a very nice man, and doesn’t give in to the kids when they are wrong, which is very often nowadays, I take it), he told me he wanted me to see a couple of things before the show went on. The first was a widely distributed letter from a student called “Jim” addressed to “Dear Mom and Dad,” protesting various things the Chancellor had done. One paragraph that, naturally, caught my eye, said “William Buckley is going to speak. We asked the Chancellor for permission to let some of our people speak too. He refused. So we have to find [Dear Diary, you know that I know that the right word here is ‘alternative’] means of expressing our sense of outrage at the invitation to Buckley and the hatred he sells. So we’re going to present . . . actions which in themselves are statements against the glib assurance and barely repressed hatred which Mr. Buckley represents.”