How Columbia Law School Escaped the Sixties

A Personal Memory

Post-World War II era Americans had a spirit buoyed by some simple realities. America had emerged from the war the most powerful country on earth. The good had triumphed over the bad.  Our industrial might was powerful and unchallenged. Inspiring leaders arose in the 50s and 60s, Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King.

The Ozzie and Harriet days were coming to an end, however. Major social changes were in the air, in which colleges and universities were to play a major role.  In the late sixties, the intensity of protest against the war in southeast Asia grew rapidly. What at first seemed like a phenomenon of Berkeley radicals, was about to surface on a host of other campuses.

In 1968, I saw Columbia erupt, and the next year Days of Rage ensued in the streets of Chicago. Campus life was about to be turned upside down.

You see, the Columbia kids realized that with universal service required it didn’t matter if you were a 4.0 class president from Scarsdale High School, you could end up on your back mortally injured on the floor of a jungle.

So another movement was underway.  It longed for the moral clarity of the civil rights movement, but it had a more urgent, a self-referential purpose. America had given itself a good ride, but its progeny was not prepared to die to preserve it. Violence ensued. And why not? It was a matter of life and death on a personal level. And they chose life. Wild, reckless life. It was revolution unrestrained. And then there was Woodstock. Free drugs, free sex. What a hoot. Wahoo! Rather than die over there, they were ready to take their risks at home. And have a ball doing it.

So buildings and institutions were overrun by wild young men and women, fighting as much for self as for others, and fighting fearsomely. And they terrified the custodians of the traditional order. What were those trusted custodians going to do? Well, maybe, they figured, they would just give up. Columbia replaced its President with a Labor Law professor from its Law School. He surely would know how to deal with antagonists. And he did. The way large organizations typically deal with antagonists. He gave up.

The summer of 1968 at Columbia was marked by all of its schools acceding to student (that is activist student) demands to change the fundamental teachings and curricula to the most bizarre and irrelevant of pursuits ever conceived.  It was a pattern of radicalization replicated in school after school across the country. The student revolutionaries had won. Good judgment and common sense? Toss them on the scrap heap of history. The kids were free. And they wanted it their way.

Faculties loved this new freedom. They saw nothing wrong with it. After all, tenure kept them immune from the consequences of lunacy. Besides it gave them license not to teach but preach their deeply held views drawn from their isolation from the real world. And to do so with the imprimatur of moral virtue and certitude. But whatever reservations they might have had, they mostly followed the direction of the kids. They were in power now.

I arrived at Columbia at ten minutes before midnight, just in time to be in caught in Columbia’s crisis.  It was 1967 when I came to Columbia as a first year law student to be harassed and intimidated by ponderously authoritative law school faculty members. It was the dreadful, Paper Chase law school experience that every aspiring attorney eagerly sought as the springboard to success. And everything about law school was appropriately wretched.

Except for one thing. I fell in love with a tall, beautiful graduate student from the South Asian Institute who had to take her classes at the law school. She wore a Greta Garbo hat with the brim covering the side of her face. We called her Greta.  Greta and I spent every day together in the spring of 1968 undistracted by anything else, even the anarchy that that swarmed around us, closing buildings occupied by unkempt kids screaming and demanding.  Love was my great escape, at least for a while. The summer of 1968 found my fiancé having to take an immersion course in Indonesian at Cornell. I, not wanting to let my love alone for a minute let alone a season, took a job replacing light fixtures in the cow stalls there at the Ag School.

But then we returned to Columbia in September 1968.

What we found there was not the Columbia that we left at the end of the last school year. The student revolutionaries had been busy all summer upending the university and radicalizing it. And not just the undergraduate College. The graduate and professional schools as well suffered under the coordinated tyrannical occupation. All authority and moral adherence had been humbled. Whole new bodies of courses and curricula, more political than educational had been imposed,  new grievance processes instituted and political propaganda advanced. It was quite an impressive bit of destruction, actually. The Law school was not spared from the imbroglio.

Columbia Law School was then and is now housed in a relatively modern building on 116th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. On the street level were arrayed the amphitheater type classrooms where anxious law students were abused and humiliated by hard-tempered jurists. In the center an escalator ferried students to the second floor where sat that temple of tedium for the bleary-eyed, the Library. Outside the Library’s glass wall was an orange wool-type fabric sofa and matching chairs. The latter space was the gathering place of a closely knit clan of our chums and drinking buddies who spent most of their non-class time at the sofa fatalistically anticipating the call to the Vietnamese jungle. None of this band of brothers (and a sister) was involved in the chaos on campus. In fact we were bewildered by and contemptuous of it.

So as you might expect, the reaction of the group to what had happened to their school over the summer of 1968 was shock. This is not what we bargained for; this wasn’t the school we applied and were admitted to, everyone agreed. We had sought out a grim, hard-driving legal education to prepare us for demanding, successful careers, not a fantasy world of the radical chic. So I took out a blank, long, lined, yellow legal pad and wrote in the top margin (pens and paper were still used in those days) the above sentiments and followed with something like “We demand that the school revert to the way it was before these changes were made.”

With that I took my pad to the bottom of the escalator and stood there to collect signatures of students who agreed with the petition, its sentiments and its demand. I did it all day, every day, for about a week. My course work suffered, but I felt this was of ultimate importance. Every day.  Then finally I felt a tap on my shoulder and heard someone saying, “Buzzy, you’re doing all the work. It’s time we helped out a little.” It was one of my dearest drinking buddies and classmates, George Pataki. He took the pad and my place at the bottom of the escalator. Then one after another of our Champions of Common Sense took similar petition pads and collected signatures. At the end of a couple of weeks we had amassed hundreds of signatures and those of nearly all our classmates.

The Dean of the Law School in those days was an elegant and brilliant man by the name of William Warren who had been a professor of tax law at the School. Several of our group accompanied me, and we marched our signed petition up to Dean Warren’s office on the top floor of the building and showed it to him. He was speechless. But I saw a gleam come into his eye. “Thank you, boys,” he said. “Let me take it from here.” In a couple of days, we got a call from the Dean asking us to attend a meeting in his conference room the next week. At the prescribed time our cohort met the Dean in his office. He escorted us down the hall to the door of his conference room. He opened it to display his fine long highly polished mahogany conference table. Along one side of the table sat the gathered leaders of the student revolution at the Law School. They were prominent students, mostly from the class ahead of us. The Dean sat us down with him on the side of the table opposite the rebels who had been dictating to him all summer.

The Dean explained what had just transpired. He allowed us to say our piece. And then he went on to explain that after consultation with the President of the University, the administration of Columbia Law would comply with the dictates of the petition and return the school to the processes, procedures, offerings and customs in place at the beginning of the previous school year.

The rebel side, as you might imagine was furious and vituperative. Red faced, they hurled vulgar epithets at all of us, including the Dean. At which point the Dean calmly rose from his chair and said, softly but firmly,”Gentlemen, this case is closed.”

Thus it happened that the Law School was the only school at Columbia University that did not suffer the ravages thrust on the entire rest of Columbia University’s  “Days of Rage.”

The infestation spawned by the student tantrums of the late sixties persisted, and the pathology intensified. Even until the children of the revolutionary 60’s became parents of progeny themselves. The kids of these kids became coddled by their anti-authoritarian parents’ culture and free spiritedness. As we all know, American colleges have fallen in line with this emasculation of the human spirit. It all started when those entrusted with the duty of preservation were intimidated to just give up.

Daniel Heninger writes an editorial for the Wall Street Journal that appears in that paper every Thursday. The June 21, 2017 article centered on the recent unanimous opinion by the Supreme Court overturning a regulation of the US Patent and Trademark Office that would have prevented an Asian-American rock band from calling themselves the “Slants”. The fortunate decision effectively quashed Harry Reid’s exhortation to the Commissioner of the NFL to ban the name Washington Redskins and the Commissioner of Major League Baseball’s urging the Cleveland Indians to drop their logo of Chief Wahoo. (It is interesting to note that the Navaho nation was polled to see how many native Americans opposed the logo.  The result…9 percent.) Heninger concluded that such PC nonsense happens because “people in positions of authority buckle.”

We must think. And when we think about what is right and good, we must have the courage to defend what is right and good. Without thinking through the consequences of of bad decisions minds will not learn. A mind that does not learn atrophies. And the malignancy implanted in the 60s will have run its course to its deadly end.  

It would help the world considerably if we all remained mindful of Edmund Burke’s thoughtful admonition, “The only thing necessary for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing.”  And, having understood that, to take heart, take courage and recognize that sometimes – as we discovered that at Columbia Law School in 1968 - a few can stand up to the many and prevail.