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STEPHEN DONADIO
I remain involved in it now. I don't think this is something you
win in a day.
It
has to do with the fundamental outlook of Columbia
as an institution in American society. It has to do with the sources
of funding of the University.
It
has to do with the composition of
its membership, both faculty and students. It has to do with an awful
lot of hard questions, and I don't say hard questions because they
need a lot of study, but because they'll take a lot of time to resolve
because we've got clashes of rather strong and fundamental forces
here.
On the issues relating to the governance of the University, I
think here you can say we're in luck. That is to say, there's no ques–
tion that the students have - when all is said and done, and what–
ever anyone feels about what they did - they have made it possible
in a way that it was simply not possible six months ago to talk about
changing fundamental structures in the University. I think people
should profit by this and press hard for their points of view - and
there are many points of view here, from those that come pretty
close to the status quo to absolutely radical ideas of what a university
ought to be like. We are now in the midst of a sort of two-year con–
stitutional convention. That's what it amounts to. And that comes
rarely in the life of a major institution.
Peter Gay
INTERVIEWER:
Professor Gay, to what extent and in what sense would
you regard the conflict at Columbia as a political conflict?
GAY:
Well, my first instinct was to regard it as a mixture of politics
for some and acting out of very considerable frustrations for others.
A great many of the people who acted
~ere
not specifically political
in their motivations ; one of the remarkable things about what is called
the "confrontation" on campus, has been how often people have
changed their minds about what was really important.
People would tell you that it was our involvement in the war
through IDA, or our so-called racism through the building of the
gym, or in turn we would be told that it was really a wider political
matter having to do with restructuring American society - an attack
on capitalism as such. Still others would argue that the gym and IDA
were important not so much because they were symbols for the war
and for the problems of civil rights and so on, but rather because
they were symbols of the failure of the University Administration to
communicate, to deal openly with the faculty or to consult students. So
I think that if you want to use the word "political" in this context,
you have to use it in a number of different senses.
INTERVIEWER:
Given the positions taken by the Administration and the
student demonstrators in this dispute, do you feel that mediation by
the faculty was ever a real possibility?
Peter Gay is William R. Shepherd Professor of History at Columbia.
