Up to Liberalism

Fourteen months ago, a friend sent me a clipping from The Columbia Daily Spectator—the propaganda apparatus, as I remembered it, of my alma mater. Beneath the display type (“New Editors of Spectator: Return to the ’Fifties”) was a photograph of nine young men looking not unlike a Little League Supreme Court and wearing odd bits of silk stuff about their gullets. “For the first time in at least ten years, a majority of the new editors have classified themselves as either ‘conservative’ or ‘non-ideological.’ . . .”

For one brief but appalling moment I experienced the entirely unaccustomed suspicion that I had been born ahead of my time. During my early years at Columbia, the jitney proletarians who operated Spectator were clearly approaching violent intellectual breakdown; when in 1968 the cops tossed seven hundred larval Allendes down the steps of Low Library, the editors succumbed as one man to the howling crazies, which caused them to babble wildly of doing “something creative with the University—our University—that we may never have a chance to do again,” and, in the fall, to endorse Dick Gregory for President of the United States. As almost the whole of Columbia was more or less berserk in those days, the contagion was passed down from one generation of editors to the next, so that when I decided to leave off being a poor student to become a rich publisher, the paper was in delirium tremens still, with no recovery in sight.

CW

About the Author

Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Fourteen months ago, a friend sent me a clipping from The Columbia Daily Spectator—the propaganda apparatus, as I remembered it, of my alma mater. Beneath the display type (“New Editors of Spectator: Return to the ’Fifties”) was a photograph of nine young men looking not unlike a Little League Supreme Court and wearing odd bits of silk stuff about their gullets. “For the first time in at least ten years, a majority of the new editors have classified themselves as either ‘conservative’ or ‘non-ideological.’ . . .”

For one brief but appalling moment I experienced the entirely unaccustomed suspicion that I had been born ahead of my time. During my early years at Columbia, the jitney proletarians who operated Spectator were clearly approaching violent intellectual breakdown; when in 1968 the cops tossed seven hundred larval Allendes down the steps of Low Library, the editors succumbed as one man to the howling crazies, which caused them to babble wildly of doing “something creative with the University—our University—that we may never have a chance to do again,” and, in the fall, to endorse Dick Gregory for President of the United States. As almost the whole of Columbia was more or less berserk in those days, the contagion was passed down from one generation of editors to the next, so that when I decided to leave off being a poor student to become a rich publisher, the paper was in delirium tremens still, with no recovery in sight.