Volume 12, Number 2 · January 30, 1969
Who Cares for Columbia?
By Allan Silver
Crisis at Columbia: Report of the Fact-Finding Commission Appointed to Investigate the Disturbances at Columbia University in April and May, 1968
Knopf (Vintage), 222 pp., $1.95
Up Against the Ivy Wall
by Jerry L. Avorn. Other Members of the Staff of the Columbia Daily Spectator
Atheneum, 297 pp., $3.25 (paper)
The Closed Corporation: American Universities in Crisis
by James Ridgeway
Random House, 273 pp., $5.95
In 1965, my second year on Columbia's faculty, I was invited to the University's annual Yule Log Ceremony. Two students, dressed in Colonial costumes and wigs, carried a log across the campus, past a statue of Alexander Hamilton (an alumnus), and into a panelled room with a fireplace. On its walls hung a full-length portrait of George II, who had granted a charter in 1754 to the ancestral King's College at which Hamilton had been a student. The afternoon's ritual featured a discussion of Columbia traditions and a reading of ' 'Twas the Night before Christmas.' Its author, I learned, had been a student at the Columbia of post-revolutionary New York, and later a devoted trustee. President Kirk made some good-humored remarks, and lit the log. A Negro in the uniform of Columbia's security police was standing to one side of the President. He was there to keep the fire within safe limits and he busied himself with it while a student chorus sang carols. The thick windows and the students' voices dulled the roar of the trucks and buses outside on Amsterdam Avenue.
Review, 6704 words
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