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3. College Days, 1958–1962
- The University of Tennessee Press
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3 College Days, 1958–1962 Founded in 1754 as Kings College and renamed thanks to the American Revolution , Columbia College was one of the prestigious Ivy League schools. Over the next two centuries, it gradually relocated from its original home in lower Manhattan to permanent headquarters on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Along the way, it attracted other colleges and graduate schools—including Barnard College (for women), the College of Physicians and Surgeons, the School of Law, andtheGraduateFaculties—whichtogethercomprisedColumbiaUniversity.As the oldest component of this conglomerate, Columbia College viewed itself as the heart of the university, most of which sprawled between West 114th Street on the south and West 122nd Street on the north, and Morningside Drive on the east and Riverside Drive on the west. In 1958, when I began attending Columbia College, it had about 2,000 students (including some 600 in my class)—100 percent male, 99 percent white, and, for the most part, very intelligent. Despite these distorted (in retrospect, quite weird) aspects of the place, it played a key role in opening up new and exciting intellectual, social, and political horizons for me. In September 1958, I moved into the Columbia dorms, along with the other members of the Class of 1962, to begin Freshman Week. Wide-eyed and sporting freshman beanies, we underwent a dizzying barrage of exams (e.g., placement for language courses), socializing, registration information, and rah-rah activities . To familiarize us with the campus mores, we were assigned sophomore advisers . I still recall mine solemnly warning me never to talk with women about politics, religion, or sex—a rule that I broke repeatedly. As we lined up for meals or other events, cigarette companies helpfully passed out free samples of their cancer-causing products. After choking on one or two cigarettes, I gave that up. Many of these students were remarkably like me—bright, socially awkward, 40 College Days, 1958–1962 and bursting with energy—and my roommates and I stayed up late at night gabbing about everything that popped into our heads. School spirit was lathered on thick, and we were quickly introduced to the raucous singing of assorted songs (e.g., “Who Owns New York?” and “Sans Souci”) that have stuck in my brain to this day. Mixed among these were some pretty ribald ditties, as well as a variety of hearty male chants. Yet despite the atmosphere of traditional masculine fun and games, the contemporary world occasionally broke through. One of the chants, I remember, moved gradually from “1962” to “1984.” Columbia had a dormitory room shortage that year, so a substantial number of us were assigned to rooms in an old Upper West Side apartment house, the Arizona, located right across West 114th Street from John Jay Hall. After the excitement of Freshman Week, in which we’d been scattered about randomly in the dorms, I was looking forward to meeting my regular roommate. Therefore, it came as a shock when he showed up to announce that he planned to have a friend reside with him and that, to accommodate this, I should move out of the room and move in with his friend’s roommate. Annoyed and personally offended, I said I wasn’t planning to change rooms and that, if he wanted to switch things around, he could move out. He did, and that evening his friend’s roommate—a fellow named Michael Weinberg—arrived in my room and began moving in. Mike was a tall (six-foot-two), skinny, sixteen-year-old from the Bensonhurst area of Brooklyn. In a number of ways, he was very much like me. Jewish (though not religious), he was lower middle class and nearly as socially maladroit as I was. In addition, he had attended Brooklyn’s public schools, had been a very good student, skipped a year via “rapid advance” junior high school, and had parents who were fairly conventional and not very well educated. On the other hand, unlike me, he did not have much use for literature, the humanities , and politics. Instead, he was a math/science whiz who had received a New York State engineering scholarship and seemed perfectly content to become a civil engineer. Furthermore, he quickly pledged a social fraternity and joined the freshman crew team. These early interests and activities—so different from mine—gave us a somewhat divergent lifestyle that year. I would be studying in the room after dinner when he would arrive exhausted after an afternoon’s workout...