Subway College Strife

The City College of New York spring putsch started off as pure Evelyn Waugh. The spectacle of a Lincolnesque president who had “resigned” (was it for the third, or fourth, time in his fighting career?) engaged in “negotiating” with a self-declared nonentity calling itself “the black and Puerto Rican student community,” playing on his recalcitrant faculty—as one eminent professor nicely put it— “like a harp,” and then being served with a number of writs to reopen, one handled by Mario Procaccino, this was nice Ninian high comedy indeed. The only trouble was that about 28,000 other students, mostly Jewish, happened to be on the dirtier end of the stick, or schtick. As events showed.

From the start Gallagher evidently gloried in having his presidential face rubbed in the dirt, a task effected throughout the academic year by Observation Post, one of the college’s less legible (and pro-SDS) slander sheets, indirectly funded by the taxpayers, of course, and peppering its daily dish of libel with—wow!—the spice of obscenity. Last term OP did its Byronic best to rally the students to support of an Army deserter, induced to take “sanctuary” within the college’s bleak Finley Ballroom. But other balls were taking place and the main mass remained unmoved by this confectioned casus belli, even when cops hauled the youth off campus and Dean of Students Jim Peace (sic) was undemocratic enough to prefer charges against the handful of little Hitlers who had vandalized his premises and intimidated his secretary (terrorization of the secretariat has become no mean weapon in campus riots: the modern university can hardly operate without these good ladies, many of whom are, in our case, black). The yawning match that SDS “rallies” were provoking could scarcely be allowed to continue. A local sobriquet for the SDS was “the toads.”

GW

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Geoffrey Wagner

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The City College of New York spring putsch started off as pure Evelyn Waugh. The spectacle of a Lincolnesque president who had “resigned” (was it for the third, or fourth, time in his fighting career?) engaged in “negotiating” with a self-declared nonentity calling itself “the black and Puerto Rican student community,” playing on his recalcitrant faculty—as one eminent professor nicely put it— “like a harp,” and then being served with a number of writs to reopen, one handled by Mario Procaccino, this was nice Ninian high comedy indeed. The only trouble was that about 28,000 other students, mostly Jewish, happened to be on the dirtier end of the stick, or schtick. As events showed.

From the start Gallagher evidently gloried in having his presidential face rubbed in the dirt, a task effected throughout the academic year by Observation Post, one of the college’s less legible (and pro-SDS) slander sheets, indirectly funded by the taxpayers, of course, and peppering its daily dish of libel with—wow!—the spice of obscenity. Last term OP did its Byronic best to rally the students to support of an Army deserter, induced to take “sanctuary” within the college’s bleak Finley Ballroom. But other balls were taking place and the main mass remained unmoved by this confectioned casus belli, even when cops hauled the youth off campus and Dean of Students Jim Peace (sic) was undemocratic enough to prefer charges against the handful of little Hitlers who had vandalized his premises and intimidated his secretary (terrorization of the secretariat has become no mean weapon in campus riots: the modern university can hardly operate without these good ladies, many of whom are, in our case, black). The yawning match that SDS “rallies” were provoking could scarcely be allowed to continue. A local sobriquet for the SDS was “the toads.”