1. The Alcoves
It appears now, in the judgment of history, which is not irreversible, that there was something special about CCNY in the 1930's. So one need not invoke Nostalgia (neither the greatest of virtues, nor the lowest of pleasures) to justify a recollection, even an analysis, of those times. I choose the early 1930's because that period coincides with my attendance there.
Among the latter-day Decade-Analysts of the 20th century, the Twenties have fallen behind the Thirties. This is now the hottest of the decades—here lies treasure trove for fiction writers, sociologists, journalists, fantasists, and other searchers amongst ruins. True, the decade of the Twenties has won itself an adjective (Roaring), which is more than we can say for the Thirties (The Trying Thirties? The Dismal Decade?), but maybe it is in the nature of that decade to repel adjectives, the way it is inconceivable for a certain kind of person to have a nickname. To point up the possible reversibility of history's judgment, the London Times Literary Supplement referred in 1955 to “the happy, self-confident 1930's. . . .” Now some college students, in between identity crises, are apparently upset that they did not live through those years of social struggle, social hope. Or is that, too, an indication of identity crisis, to wish to be contemporary with one's parents? There is a retrospective glamour in grayness, the Great Depression has its worshippers.
And then City College in the 30's. What happened at Berkeley once in a lifetime might happen, or looked as though it might happen, at City every Thursday between 12 and 2 in the afternoon. That was when student clubs met, when outside speakers came onto campus, when the distinction between a meeting and a demonstration was kind of tenuous, sometimes broke down. The sound of the police siren was sometimes heard on St. Nicholas Terrace.
But the occasional riots were only part of the story of student radicalism, itself only part of the story of the College (in reply to a question as to what college you attended, the answer would be CCNY or City College; basketball fans referred to the school as City ; among ourselves, we usually referred to the College, though the formal title was the College of the City of New York, and the technico/legal, or super-formal, title was the City College of the College of the City of New York). Most of the students were not involved in the radical movement. That was a point made by administrative officials to appease the clamor of the enemies of free higher education. It was a correct point, but not always relevant.
Most of us finished our classes and went home, but others stayed on, some in the libraries, some—the frivolous types—pursuing the comely nursemaids on the Terrace, and a mixed lot winding up in the Alcoves. These alcoves (a word calculated to bring bemusement, a joyful glint of remembrance to most CCNY men of those days) were kinds of booths, in the basement, adjoining the cafeteria. There were alcoves for each class, and there were benches in the alcoves. These alcoves were the heart of the college—like the furnace of the ship in Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape. Even those who finished their classes and went home spent time down there, between classes, or maybe lingeringly before going home. To understand CCNY in the 30's it is necessary to understand the Alcoves, the very word is like a knell, I mean like a bell, summoning up images, no, memories of conversations (the images are of the conversationalists) desperate and idle, doctrinaire and pragmatic, with subjects (predominantly, certainly most heatedly, political) of the wide-ranging spectrum typical of free-speech forums. Have you ever group-hopped in the Union Square park, or on Columbus Circle before the Arterial-Sclerotic people took over?
The benches in the alcoves were not much used. We were vertical (not peripatetic), the soft leather was wasted—some student with enormous powers of concentration might try to read, occasionally someone stretched out, even snoozed, oblivious to the clamor above. But there were also quiet moments in the alcoves, usually late in the afternoon, when you didn't have to concentrate to read, and could carry on conversations of a serene, if not courtly, manner. Our best sports, basketball and talk, were indoor. In the alcoves it was dark, Dostoevskian dark, corresponding, no doubt, to the soul's needs at that time.
The discussions down there (“Let's discuss the situation”) often turned into arguments (from talk to conversation to discussion to argument are easy gradations) and these of a sometimes violent nature. When that happened, a crowd gathered around the contestants, the way kids do, waiting for a fight to explode. But there were no fist-fights, even when the provocations seemed unbearable. Personalities were supposed to be out—we were arguing positions. The political discussions ranged from the sectarian to the loftiest, most Utopian matters, from issues of the day to questions of the “withering away of the state,” of the famous leap from “necessity to freedom” (there is a “leap forward”), of the quality of life under socialism (what will be the nature of conflict once the class structures disappear?). The political spectrum at the College, as compared to that of the population at large, was somewhat eccentric. There was no doubt a Republican somewhere among the students. There were, of course, Democrats, but their position was not considered a political one—to be a Democrat meant that you wished to become a lawyer, teacher, civil servant, and were protecting your future. The radicals ranged from right-wing Socialists (followers of Morris Hillquit, Algernon Lee) to splinters from the Trotskyist left wing. In between was a bewildering variety—Austro-Marxists, orthodox Communists, Socialist centrists and Socialist left-wingers, Kautskyites, followers of the Independent Labor Party in England, the Lovestoneites, Brandlerites, and many another group, faction, or splinter, to say nothing of the student organizations. Sometimes a distinct position turned out to be held exclusively by a family, even by an individual. Most of these groupings were Marxist-oriented. We also had in our midst philosophical anarchists, supporters of the IWW, and all kinds of sympathizers, fellow-travelers, and indeterminists.
I don't mean to imply that all the energy was dissipated in talk (“What are you doing this afternoon?” “Nothing.” “How about picketing J. P. Morgan?”). It was the time of “Deeds, Not Words,” of “Art Is A Weapon.” In the midst of our dying world shimmered ivory towers, wherein dwelled Symbolists, other strange creatures who lived lives apart—far from relief lines, from Hoovervilles, from Harlan County, from Tom Mooney, the Scottsboro boys and the memory of Sacco-Vanzetti, far from the doomed farmer, from the struggle for Manchuria. There were harsh words spoken about James Branch Cabell. A Socialist speaker, urging on his audience, wound up with the exhortation: “Educate ! Agitate ! Propagate !” (the word “propagandize” not fitting into the rhythm of the slogan). There were (mostly on the outside) picket lines, demonstrations, meetings, forms of action. The liberals were treated with some condescension; we were considered indecisive, but were always needed when it came to signing petitions, fighting the administration on matters of civil liberties. We tried not to be among those who, in the words of Yeats,
. . . must to keep their certainty accuse
All that are different of a base intent.
The arguments raged. What was the relation between economics and freedom? Was justice possible without economic equality, class transformations? Among the liberals were skeptics, ironists, fierce logicians. Many wore what Sidney Hook (class of '23) called “the mark of Cohen.” That would be Morris Raphael Cohen. You isolated a monist position and hammered away. You caught your opponent in a fallacy, preferably a logical one, but a historical one would do. You smiled. Let him get out of that one. Then the bell rang, new period, changing of the guard in the Alcoves.
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2. Lost Causes
It is possible to argue that the lost causes are the most meaningful ones—
Only the buried can flower
Only the losers have won
Homage to Samuel Greenberg
And to Emily Dickinson
—but that can be a mood rather than an objectivity, and it's certainly not part of The American Way. The notion even smacks of self-pity, of masochism (the psychological correlate of the Lost Cause?), for we are future-bound (some of us, anyway), think of great social harmonies coming, think with Emerson “that this country, the last found, is the great charity of God to the human race.” But our alcoves were alive with lost causes—all that activism, fanatical intelligence, emotional investment, never paid off in the great world. Power was not seized, society was not being transformed, (except for the worse), the dream of justice (practical or millennial) was not being realized. The unemployment figures mounted, the Scottsboro boys stayed in jail, the New Deal hadn't come to power, international fascism was on the march, the heartland of America was not deeply impressed by the cries of the students; the country was not moving in the direction of peace, harmony, and justice, and resisted the analysis of Marx the way other lands in other times had resisted the thunderous anguish of Isaiah. Something stubborn, intractable, stood in the way, and that led to the problem of Human Nature. There was the great enemy to human progress. But Human Nature was created by its social surroundings. Change society and human nature would be changed. But societies had changed, and human nature remained the same—aggressive, murderous, selfish (present company excluded). So ran another of the interminable arguments. It was before the flowering of Freudo/Marxism.
There is nothing so pure as a lost cause which has no power connection. In that way the Communists, heady with ideology, though making little headway, were not lost causers, because of the Soviet power base. The Socialists were quite genuine lost causers, for their dream of a cooperative commonwealth had rough going in a land so recently seized from its native inhabitants and among a people so property-oriented, so money-oriented, so power-oriented (even the cooperative elements—unions, fraternal organizations, manufacturers' associations, teams, and groups of friends, cooperate in a competitive way). But the Art of the Possible had its adherents: voices were raised asking the students to pay some mind to the less glamorous intramural matters—to the college curriculum, for example! The radicals either disregarded such matters, or pinned on the label of Escapism, for preoccupation with curriculum, better teaching, a clean lunchroom, meant that you did not comprehend that the college was caught up in the world struggle, that you could not isolate one kind of problem from the other, and if you persisted, why then you were “confused,” a common, if mild epithet. Undue preoccupation with curriculum, etc., was escapist, but taking sides, “involvement,” in the Manchurian War was for real. There was one intramural issue that generated steam, and that was Military Science, which, after a period of struggle (Felix Cohen—untimely dead—the main fighter there) had lost its compulsory character in 1926. The first World War didn't enjoy much of a reputation, Hitler was not yet in power, the tides of pacifism ran high, and Mili Sci on the campus remained the focus for agitation, for reasons ranging from honest pacifism to the exploitation of this genuine feeling.
But this issue, and the one of Free Speech, led right into world issues. And there the possibilities of fruition were not great. The Socialist struggle for a cooperative commonwealth, the Communist demand for a Soviet America (the Trotskyists had to transform both the Soviets and America), the hope and struggle of the liberals for a transformation of capitalism, spreading the benefits, strengthening civil liberties and minority rights—well, the situation was not hopeful, was not “ripe,” in the Marxist way of putting it. America was a stony ground, there waved the banner of the Lost Cause (a curiously pessimistic phrase which assumes a future condition, rules out, with a crushing finality, the possibility of a victorious outcome). Most everyone was interested in the cause and cure of the surrounding social horrors, but few were deeply involved.
Meanwhile, in another sector of the college, crowds, including a few of the hard-liners (a little escapism is good for the soul: Cabell was one of the three favorite authors of the class of 1932, together with Eugene O'Neill and Edward Arlington Robinson) and many of the Utopians, were involved, as spectators and adherents, in a world far from the sources of power, but a world of Victory. It is Saturday night in December, and across the cement campus (though we were not without trees) one hears the Allegaroo (the famed cheer baffling to etymologists) urging on our basketball team to yet another triumph.
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3. Allegaroo
Coached by Nat Holman, the City College basketball team taught us the meaning of victory. Week after week, in the flowery reports of the metropolitan sports writers, in the cold and immutable statistics of the box-score, we were taught the meaning of victory. These triumphs, to which the world paid so much attention, were based on the principle of a weave around a flexible pivot. That would be the man in the bucket, usually a bit more impressive in height than his team-mates. The game was coming to the end of its primitive hierarchical organization: the rangy center, the shifty forwards, the dogged guards. Now this man in the bucket was tall—that meant six feet (“he's a six-footer”), the way tall today is seven feet (there may have been giants in those days, but they were not on the basketball courts). The other four players moved around this pivot, this center, worked in and out of the corners, using all manner of feints and reversals (“shake him off”), worked the ball into the pivot, who sometimes took his shot, but mostly looked to pass off to a free man, a man in the clear (how marvelous to be in the clear), one who through speed, agility, mobile intelligence, had shaken off his opponent, and was one step ahead of him. All the weaving, screening, elaborate ball-handling, the famed City razzle-dazzle, was calculated to shake this one man free under the basket, for the lay-up shot. These shots were hardly missed—much higher percentage than the remarkable 50 per cent which today's pros average over-all—and if the man was fouled, that was in the act of shooting, and it usually meant two points from the foul line.
So you built up a lead, and then, at a certain point, you began to freeze, to kill time, that most precious of commodities, what it is we are forever and unsuccessfully trying to contain, but here we were destroying it, fighting not so much the timekeeper as the clock, canny metaphysicians trained in the settlement houses, the Y's, the school playgrounds, the streets, meaning the fire-escape rungs which doubled for the peach-box rings of James A. Naismith (he the founder of the game), for we didn't get too many of the high-school stars. So we wove and scored and froze, and if the final score was 31-25, well that was a victory, that was worked into the flowery prose of the sports writers, the irreversible statistics which spelled victory to the hungry heart. Like so many elaborate skills, this amazing team-play—now you see the ball, now you don't—a kind of competitive socialism in action, was based on many tedious hours of practice in fundamentals, so many kinds of passes, dribble techniques, shooting styles (never off balance) . But all that day-to-day boredom, interminable and wearing hours of practice, was buried (the way the iamb and dactyl are buried in a great poem), in the flash and dexterity of these winning combinations, in the dithyrambs of victory. We rarely lost on our home court (any home court is worth a half dozen points in familiarity, crowd support, the give of the backboard, etc.) and seldom lost away from home. Defeat was not the style of the City basketball team, every defeat was a shock, a surprise, even an accident.
Now many of these victories, and this is the moral nub of it, were won over famous colleges and universities, those we today term prestigious. Our victories were important beyond the actuality of score; immigrants or (mostly) sons of immigrants, we triumphed over the original settlers, retrospectively hacked out for ourselves (“hacking”: a basketball term) a place in the aboriginal wilderness, became Americans, became winners, understood what it meant to belong, the way we never belonged as critics of society (though that, too, is a traditional way of belonging). We came out of the settlement houses, off the streets, into what seemed the mainstream of American life, for we received newspaper space the way the big-league baseball teams did, and the politicians and celebrities who died. And all this based on the fundamentals of shooting and passing and dribbling, of a complex team play meant to shake a man loose, to put him one step ahead of his guard, to build up and protect a lead (an extreme of competition, but without exploitation) against the onslaughts of time and teams whose forebears (some of them, anyway) had landed on Plymouth Rock off the Mayflower. And this pride, this need, was reflected in our attitude toward famed alumni.
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4. Ancestor Worship
Milton Munitz, philosophy professor at NYU, tells the story of a student who had just come out of a philosophy class and rushed into the office of Professor Morris Raphael Cohen.
“Look,” cried the student, “can you help me?”
“What is it?”
“I am very upset about this.”
“Well?’
“It has just been proved to me that I do not exist.”
“Why are you coming to me?”
“I want you to prove to me that I do exist. Could you do that?”
“Well,” said Professor Cohen, “it is not impossible, I could try, but tell me, young man, to whom should I address this proof?”
This existential-type identity crisis was rather atypical of the times—worry about employment in an increasingly jobless world set up tensions different from those produced by fear of imminent, universal destruction—and we went in for a kind of ancestor-worship, did not pray to our famed alumni, but were very proud of those who had made their way in the great world. Upton Sinclair, the powerful Socialist tractarian and novelist, ranked high in the list. So did Felix Frankfurter and Senator Robert Wagner. We were, curiously enough, impressed by the financial wizardry of Bernard Baruch. Rumors abounded, the most spectacular of which was that Leon Trotsky had been a student in the Evening Session in the course of his short stay in New York City. He would, at the time, have been a man near forty, but there were people of that age in the Evening Session. So why not Trotsky? Mark Twain and Albert Einstein had spoken in the Great Hall of the college, which didn't exactly make them part-time students, but it wasn't as though they had no connection at all with the school. Anyway, they were the kind who would have gone to City had they been brought up in New York. We tossed around a wide variety of names—Lewis Mumford, John B. McMaster, the historian; Robert H. Lowie; James K. Hackett, the actor; Alexander Smallens, Ira Gershwin, John Kieran, Edward G. Robinson—we enjoyed mentioning these names, and others, depending on our interests, enjoyed the knowledge that so many of our boys (for the preceding is just one typical medley) had made the big time. We admired accomplishments against odds (going through college, from homes not usually affluent, was working against odds) and “it is no accident” that our totem was not one of the great beasts of the jungle, lion or tiger, but the industrious beaver. Did we not number among our alumni great bridge-builders—George W. Goethals, who built the Panama Canal, and David Steinman? And did not our graduates fairly honeycomb (though our totem was not the bee) the professional sectors of New York life, with doctors, teachers, lawyers, judges, to say nothing of the Civil Service and the business world? And again it is no accident that the opening line of our Alma Mater song should refer to
Sturdy sons of City College
—a modest adjective among possible adjectives of praise. These middle layers of accomplishment we took for granted, our deeper feelings went out to those who had achieved a more signal fame. No doubt the going economic debacle made more vivid the image of worldly success, and this success was responsive to a certain defensiveness (cockiness being the other side of the coin). Now the ancestor worship seems contrary to the struggle of the generations which Lewis Feuer has been emphasizing in his articles on Berkeley (it's rather curious to note the opposition to basic psychoanalytic facts of life he's been affirming), but there is no contradiction between the ancestor worship and the struggle against the elders (of which struggle we had our fair share), it is the family conflict transformed to society, a dubiously higher plane. At any rate, we were fiercely proud of our great progenitors, sneering at the same time at worldly success, and reserving our deepest admiration for the justice fighters (City or not) and the exemplars of disinterested intellect. That brings us back to Morris Raphael Cohen.
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5. Our Teacher
You know how it is about some people? The prospect of seeing them intrigues, could be someone you love, maybe a friend, or a public figure of unusual power and charm (not charisma). It can even happen with a teacher, someone you see on a regular basis, three times a week at the same hour, in the same place. So it was with our teacher, we approached his room with expectancy, with a certain amount of trepidation (for he uncovered our ignorance, that ignorance a shameful thing), with the sure knowledge that we would not be let down. He never let us down, we always left a bit more confused, a bit wiser, always more hopeful, even giddy with hope, for he was a living example of the power of reason, was forever setting us on explorations into the labyrinth of truth, from which one always returned with prizes of worth, dazzling prizes. It was even better than beating Harvard in basketball. Bound as we are from day to day in an endless species of criticism (just look out the window, and you see contaminated air), I am happy to praise our teacher, though I will not avoid his faults. Let me get them out of the way immediately. Some say that Morris Cohen was cruel in the classroom, that he had a way of humiliating a student, maybe enjoyed that discomfiture. I think that is way off base, and could only be said by those who did not take thought seriously, who for one reason or another denigrated thought. Morris Cohen did not rate modesty high in the virtues, and had a certain amount of vanity. Perhaps, like Socrates, he took pleasure in exposing contradictions, in leaving a student with no way out, but this was not basically a personal matter, so how could it be cruel? I suppose he did not see every easy or thoughtless answer as reflecting a personality problem, but if you push that kind of determinism too far, there is no right or wrong, and what would be the function of a teacher? He was not among the keenest in the way of individual psychology, and with some students should have tempered his severity (with others he could have been even tougher), but that severity invariably disappeared in the flow of the argument. The argument was the thing, finally the emotion went into that. We fared better if we were thoughtfully wrong rather than conventionally right. He opposed the follies of fanaticism, and in his rather imperceptive critique of psychoanalysis, feared, I think, for his lamp of reason, that it be snuffed out by the hot winds of irrationality (even a hot wind will blow out a candle), generated by a glorification of the unconscious. Like that of an actor, the reputation of a teacher is an ephemeral thing (the sound movie gives the actor a better shot at immortality, but that movie has not yet gone into the classroom). Unless the discourse is written down (lucky Socrates had his Plato), time swiftly obliterates the most brilliant analysis, what is finally remembered are anecdotes, apocrypha, stray remarks, and an image. I summon up this man (about five foot seven), with his great head and brow, jutting chin, and his dancing eyes, which moved in the way of severity or approbation, as though to ask: “What do you mean by this?,” or, as though to say: “Good, good, all will be well, continue the struggle, the truth will prevail.”
So were we chastened and so were we encouraged. One recalls his famous probing, combative style—a kind of smiling struggle to the death. The room was electrified, we jumped to the defense of our fellow-student, but our teacher took us all on, in a razzle-dazzle of knowledge, of analytic power, of fighting intellect. But truth was the quarry, and we were really fellow-participants in the hunt. There was another style, a kind of entrancement—he stood at his ease, his eyes looked off, away from us; we recognized his mood in an instant, the timid ones straightened up, for he was not seeking us out, our ignorance was safe for the moment, he was bemused, followed some wraith of thought into the caverns of history and mind, as though he were alone, but for our sakes nevertheless. We were safe, could even day-dream, for the year was coming to an end, and our college days, the horrors outside that window were coming closer, the class was at its ease, our teacher was entranced, but now his eyes were coming back to us, there was a question to be asked, and pursued, and yet another question. We girded for the struggle, against the remorseless voice of reason, which taught us over and over again that if we fear thought and intelligence, we are but deluded and perishable brutes, but if we love and pursue thought we need not be ashamed of our ignorance (which is easily, or not so easily, countered by knowledge), might even help keep alive the fitful light our teacher so passionately cherished, might even make something of ourselves in the world where irrationality was at a premium.
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6. Some Omissions
I have neglected mention of the college's non-coeducational character. Men, to quote Hemingway, without women. There were boys too, some of them preternatural whiz kids (looked maybe twelve or thirteen) hot out of Townsend Harris Hall—our Andover—even wearing knickerbockers. But give one of them a piece of chalk and the use of a blackboard in a math class, and he'd have us all, including the teacher, cowering in a corner. But where were the girls?
The fairest of the sex
are on 68th and Lex.
So sang one of our humor columnists. But there was something odd in the relations between City and Hunter (we were brother-and-sister schools, so maybe the incest taboo was at work). I used to hear of literary/philosophical meetings at which both schools were represented—the accounts didn't indicate that life ran too high (more Matthew Arnold than the Charleston), but I'm probably jealous because nobody invited me. I remember the curious feeling, in the gray area between amazement and incredulity, on seeing, years later, a girl wearing a CCNY sweatshirt. The current presence of the girls must be playing Hobbes (always a favorite game in the government classes) with the school song, to say nothing of the effect it must be having on certain kinds of discussion. Is the Circulation of Commodities or the Kronstadt Rebellion the kind of thing you'd want to talk about with girls? But that was no problem of ours. The problem of Total Maleness no doubt requires deeper attention.
Nor have I gone into the details of the struggle, on specific issues, between the administration and the students, nor made estimates of President Frederick B. Robinson and other members of the Administration, nor of the faculty, nor gone into the composition of the student body, the nature and variety of our publications, the styles of political action as compared to today's style (the nod, I think, goes to today's pragmatic idealism as against the ideology—cruel and sentimental—of our time), the life and doings of the Intramural politicians, deepest practitioners of the Art of the Possible. I have said nothing of the curious fraternity get-togethers in the seven minutes between classes at specific points in the Lincoln Corridor on the ground floor of the main building (a parochial touch), nor of the more collegiate aspect of the basketball games—girls, dates, parties, victory celebrations (though we couldn't get the Bronx landlords to free Tom Mooney). I have said nothing of the lazy afternoons in Lewisohn Stadium, watching some of the track men jogging, or maybe the lacrosse team at practice, the strolls into Morningside Park or along Riverside Park (we were surrounded by natural wonders), the drugstore lunches (“Buddy,” asked a panhandler in a New Yorker cartoon of the time, “can you spare 20¢ for a double-rich malted?”), the witticisms in the humor magazine (chap leaning over the rail of a transatlantic liner, the caption: “A Contributor to the Atlantic”), the violence of some of the classroom discussions (we had not only Marxists, but Thomists, Aristotelians, Talmudists, Pragmatists, Symbolic Logicians, all kinds of Neo's and Crypto's, all sorts of positions and all sorts with no positions at all, for some people can believe without holding a position), and the torpor in other classrooms. I have omitted many other factors, problems, events, activities, and personalities, all grist for other mills (I throw in the name of John Stuart and his gifted father in grateful remembrance of College Humor Magazine), enough omissions, no doubt, to have flunked me in any writing course.
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7. The Eager Beaver
The main thing about City College as I lived it is that it was a place where young people were learning, and where the process of learning had a certain excitement, and led to further learning, further growth. The particularities of a given time are less important than this process, which nevertheless lends the weight and drama which always make the contemporary the most interesting. We learned from one another, we learned from our teachers, we learned from the world outside, we learned from our books and from ourselves. We did not all learn at the same rate, some were less interested than others, some were hardly interested at all. But for those who wanted it and were drawn to it, the world of knowledge and meaning and commitment and process was there for us to explore, and if you do not explore that world when young, you will never learn to explore it at all. It is easy to end such a remembrance on a dying fall, create an archaic sense to time past, to an institution that has no doubt been transformed, but I don't have that feeling about the matter at all. This is not a forgotten past that is being dredged up from the sewers of history. When a couple of inhabitants of East European towns meet, in the West, after long separation, they cry out: landsman!, translated as old neighbor (but it sounds better in Yiddish); when two Texans meet in the big city, after long separation, they holler at one another: “You ornery critter you,” “you seventh son of a horse thief” (sounds better in Mark Twain); when a couple of City College men meet, after long separation, that effusiveness is absent, but we size one another up with interest—there is a bond, a kind of exclusiveness, a sense that we had a good thing going for us, maybe something special. That's certainly my feeling, I was always proud to be a City College student, I knew of nothing better.
Against the continuing struggle by the economy-minded to destroy CCNY as a free institution, it is argued that the college more than makes up for the money spent by the quality of its alumni, who pay back in greater measure by virtue of their labor, their tax money, etc. True enough, but the heart of the matter is elsewhere. We were told that we ought to feel grateful for this free education, but gratefulness is a two-way street—the society, too, was benefiting, and continues to benefit from the kind of kids this school graduates. It is not too clear why free education pretty much stops in America after high school. The story of City College is the best argument for universal free higher education.
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The push toward learning, the need for learning, emphasizes the contemplative, brings to mind the marvelous recitals in the Great Hall of our world-famous organist Samuel A. Baldwin, recalls the Gothic spires which put us (architecturally, too) in the tradition of great universities. Any description of the typical City student of the time (one who never existed, but typical in the way of the most significant, even the best, qualities) has to emphasize, too, the outgoing, the combative. An extreme of this combativeness showed up in a kind of insolence, an airy flouting of authority, tradition, a putting to rights of age-old institutions, of some misguided teachers. This gall was joined by a liveliness and sharpness of mind, refusal to take matters for granted, an inclination to challenge, to have something proved, to deepen the sense of the argument. (“A characteristic of rebellion,” wrote Charles Ives, “is that its results are often deepest when the rebel breaks not from the worst to the greatest, but from the great to the greater.”) This combativeness showed up in struggles with the administration, in struggles among student groups, in arguments among students; it was a reflection, a reinforcement of the life of the city, the brash newcomer among the great cities of the world. “Ah, you're a City College boy.” There might be contempt in that Ah (nothing but a bookworm), anger (bunch of radicals), envy (to have missed out on something), approbation, meaning that you are a serious boy, that you sought learning for its own sake and to put it to use, that you were some curious compound of a scholar, a basketball player, an agitator, a wise guy, a solid citizen, an unsparing critic, a searcher for the truth, a fighter for the good cause, an eager Beaver.
