Image by Chenyu Guan.
When I read about Columbia University in the news, I think about how much it has changed. I arrived in 1966, coming from MIT, to study for a doctorate in philosophy. Our country was in a difficult transition moment. In those days, the new grad students were almost all white males, as was the faculty. And because there was a draft, and financial support for students, the graduate programs were crowded, and the students not closely supervised. But life in the city was inexpensive. Graduate students were paid $4,000/year, with enough support to finish the degree, and there were good apartments to rent for $125/month. I had very little knowledge of the history of philosophy and so found the classes challenging.
In those days, what overshadowed our lives was the Vietnam War. The draft board system was decentralized. And so, if you were reasonably lucky (or wily) it was possible to hold a student deferment. Thankful as I was personally for that policy, I was aware that it very unjustly put the burden of military service upon the males from poorer families who weren’t in school. But soon enough, in 1968, the war came home, and there was a Columbia student uprising, which occupied the campus until the police evicted us, in a physically dangerous riot. I certainly did’t have any coherent political plans. Few of my friends did, though we knew that the war was a moral disaster. And none of us wanted to serve in the military. But what propelled our protests was, in part, the carnivalesque sense that they provoked. An ad hoc social life was created.
Of course, the 1960s were, for many of us, a time in which regular use of drugs was important. I remember, as if it were yesterday, standing on the roof of a building with a fellow grad student who had put up the spotlight on the red flag. For a philosopher, I was oddly unreflective. We believed, many of us, that being high allowed us to see through the murderous lies of our political establishment. That was a simple, but stupid idea. Much later, when I published my book High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernist Painting. (1996) I realized how deluded our thinking had been. We were no wiser than he had been in the 1840s, when he thought that getting stoned was a poor man’s version of owning a Delacroix painting. Baudelaire, the greatest art critic, was a moral idiot. But so were we at least momentarily, for there was a fashionable 1960s literature glorifying the drug culture.
Jewishness was an essential part of Columbia’s life. I took classes with Meyer Schapiro, the magisterial art historian, and Sidney Morgenbesser, a philosopher famous for his sharp wit. (There is a whole website devoted to his jokes.) Going to dinner with him was a trip. But Columbia Jewishness was complicated then. Much later, when I met Steven Marcus, he pointed out to me that he was just the second Jew to get tenure in the English department. (The first was, of course, Lionel Trilling.)
A more immediate circumstance influenced my own experience of Jewishness. I had a Jewish philosopher-intended roommate who told me that after the 1968 War, he had to live alone, and so he fixed me up with a substitute, a cantor, who needed a room. And this man, who introduced me to lots of other cantors, brought me into the world of the Jewish Theological Seminary. My roommate sang with the then-famous Scholomo Carlebach (1925- 1994), a charismatic (posthumously controversial.) personality. And he made a record, singing with the cantors with backup music provided by his friends, some older Black musicians.
The 1960s was a strange time. Only one really bad thing happened to me. I was mugged by two men who told me never again to hold open the door for someone coming behind me. But the city felt dangerous. And of course, you could get drafted.
When, after my time at Columbia, thanks to Seinfeld, Tom’s Cafe became world famous, I was astonished. Who imagined that the hamburger joint where I ordered cheeseburgers, usually stoned, would become renowned? But the whole time of the 1960s looks to me, in retrospect, like a instrument designed to take apart all but the most mature people. Certainly that’s what happened to me. In the midst of all this, living in the West Village when I consulted a psychiatrist I told him, I was worried that I might do something strange. ‘What could you do?’ he asked me; ‘that could you get noticed here?’ He was right.
After I graduated, Arthur Danto, who had been my PhD thesis advisor became one of my closest friends. And for all of his instinctive sympathies, he could not really comprehend my generation’s student activities. What was missing, he rightly observed, was any real awareness of the interests of women, who was marginalized in the political protests. And gay people too were almost totally marginalized. My best friend was another graduate student who only gradually discovered that he was gay. This man died of AIDS. After we had fallen out, this man and I, Arthur had lunch with him, when he was dying. He worked for the NYC police department. “I feel better,” Arthur said, “knowing that officer ( ). is on the force.”
Because the world has changed so drastically, like most people of my generation I hesitate to give advice. What has disappeared is inexpensive life in the city and plentiful, good tenure-stream academic jobs. If there had not been a draft, maybe the Vietnam war would have ended sooner. In any event, now of course all the political concerns have become very different. When I taught philosophy to freshmen in Pittsburgh in the late twentieth century, I devoted one section of the class to feminism. Then, I told the students two things about my own experiences at MIT and Columbia. I never had a female professor. And, more remarkably, I never realized that I was missing something. One of my best friends was a visiting philosopher, Gillian who was rich, beautiful, Jewish, and English. Now, after a sadly premature death, it has been much written about.
I was lucky to be a survivor.
