Nobodaddy’s children were saying no, and still no one knew what was going to happen next.
Ferguson was scrambling. The five-day-a-week paper had become a seven-day-a-week paper, and there were articles to write, places to go to, people to talk to, meetings to attend, and all on little or no sleep, barely more than two or three hours a night, and all on little or no food but rolls, salami sandwiches, and coffee, coffee and a thousand cigarettes, but the scrambling was good for him, he realized, to be so busy and so exhausted had the double effect of keeping him awake and numb at the same time, and he needed to be awake in order to see the things that were happening around him and write about those events with the quickness and accuracy they demanded, and he needed to be numb in order not to think about Amy, who was all but lost to him now, all but gone, and even though he kept telling himself he would fight to win her back, do everything he could to prevent the unthinkable from happening, he knew that whatever they had been to each other in the past was not what they were now.
She was with the group in Low, one of the diehards. On the afternoon of the twenty-sixth, as Ferguson was rushing across the campus on his way to Mathematics Hall, he caught sight of her standing on the second-floor ledge just outside the window of Kirk’s office. Standing to her right was Les Gottesman, who was no longer in the college but a student in the graduate English Department, and standing to her left was Hilton Obenzinger, Les’s good friend, who was also Ferguson’s friend, one of the stalwarts of the Columbia Review, and there was Amy standing between Les and Hilton with the sun shining down on her, a sun so strong that her impossible hair seemed ablaze in the afternoon light, and she looked happy, Ferguson thought, so damned happy that he wanted to weep.
SPRING 1968 (IV). What he was watching was a revolution in miniature, Ferguson decided, a revolution in a dollhouse. SDS’s objective was to force a showdown with Columbia that would reveal the administration to be exactly what the group claimed it was (intransigent, out of touch with reality, a small piece in the large American picture of racism and imperialism), and once SDS had proved that to the rest of the students on campus, the ones in the middle would come over to their side. That was the point: to eliminate the middle, to create a situation that would thrust everyone into one camp or the other, the fors and the againsts, with no room left in between for waffling or moderation. Radicalize was the term used by SDS, and in order to achieve that goal they had to behave with the same stubbornness as the administration and never give an inch. There was intransigence on both sides, then, but because the students were powerless at Columbia, SDS’s intransigence came across as a strength, while the intransigence of the administration, which held all the power, came across as a weakness. SDS was goading Kirk into using force to clear the buildings, which was the one thing everyone else wanted to avoid, but the spectacle of hundreds of policemen storming the campus was also the one thing that was bound to provoke horror and disgust in the ones who were still in the middle and turn them to the students’ cause, and the dumb administration (which turned out to be even dumber than Ferguson had supposed — as dumb as the czar of Russia, as dumb as the king of France) fell right into the trap.
The administration stuck to its hard line because Kirk saw Columbia as a model for all other universities in the country, and if he caved in to the students’ preposterous demands, what would happen elsewhere? It was the domino theory writ small, the same theory that had put half a million American soldiers in Vietnam, but as Ferguson had discovered in his first days of living in New York, dominoes was a game played on milk crates and folding tables by Puerto Ricans on the sidewalks of Spanish Harlem and had nothing to do with politics or the running of universities.
SDS, on the other hand, was making it up as it went along. Every day was packed with unexpected developments, every hour felt as long as a day, and to do what had to be done required absolute concentration as well as an openness of spirit found only in the best jazz musicians. As head of SDS, Mark Rudd became that jazz man, and the longer the occupation of the buildings went on, the more impressed Ferguson was by how fluidly Rudd adapted to each new circumstance, by how quickly he could think on his feet, by his willingness to talk about alternative approaches to each crisis as it came up. Kirk was rigid, but Rudd was loose and often playful, Kirk was a military band leader conducting John Philip Sousa numbers, but Rudd was onstage doing bebop with Charlie Parker, and Ferguson doubted that anyone else from SDS could have done a better job as spokesman for the group. By the night of April twenty-third, Ferguson had already forgiven Mark for the Dear Grayson — motherfucker fuck-up, which, by the by, had not offended people in the way he had thought it would — student-people, that is, pro-SDS and anti-administration students — which in turn had led Ferguson to ask himself what he knew about such things anyway, for not only had the words not offended people, they had become one of the rallying cries of the movement. It wasn’t that Ferguson felt happy when he heard masses of students shouting out the phrase Up against the wall, motherfucker!, but it was clear to him that Mark had a better sense of what was going on than he did, which explained why Rudd was leading a revolution and Ferguson was only watching it and writing about it.
Swarms of people on the campus at all hours, even in the middle of the night, round-the-clock swarms for an entire week, then intermittent swarms during the month that followed, and whenever Ferguson thought about that time later, the chaos that began on April twenty-third and lasted until commencement day on June fourth, the swarms were always what came back to him first. Swarms of students and professors wearing different colored armbands, white ones for the faculty (who were trying to keep the peace), red ones for the radicals, green ones for the supporters of the radicals and the six demands, and blue ones for the jocks and right-wingers, who had named themselves the Majority Coalition and held angry, clamorous demonstrations to denounce the other demonstrations, launched an attack on Fayerweather Hall one night to evict the occupiers (they were repulsed after much pushing and shoving), and formed a successful blockade around Low on the final day of the sit-ins to prevent food from entering the building, which led to more shoving and punching and some bleeding scalps. As might have been expected from a university of Columbia’s size (17,500 students counting all graduate and undergraduate divisions), the faculty was split into numerous factions, ranging from full support of the administration to full support of the students. Various suggestions were put forward, various committees were formed, a new approach to disciplinary procedures, for example, the tripartite commission, which advocated combined adjudication by equal numbers from the administration, faculty, and student body, and the bipartite commission, which advocated a panel of faculty and students only with no members from the administration, but the most active committee was the one that called itself the Ad Hoc Faculty Group, which was largely composed of younger professors, who held long and frantic meetings over the next days searching for a peaceful solution that would give the students most of what they wanted and get them out of the buildings without having to call in the police. All of their efforts failed. It wasn’t that they didn’t come up with some good ideas, but every one of those ideas was blocked by the administration, which refused to compromise or back down on any of the demands concerning discipline, and thus the faculty learned that they were just as powerless as the students were, that Columbia was a dictatorship, mostly benevolent until now but veering ever closer to absolutism, with no interest in reforming itself into anything that resembled a democracy. Students came and went, after all, faculty came and went, but the administration and the board of trustees were eternal.