COLUMBIA
391
Whether a restructuring of the University that will give the
faculty more responsibility in the general life of the University will
have the effect of overcoming the tendency of an urban faculty to
resist other activities than teaching and research is a question whose
answer must await the event.
As
things have recently developed, any consideration of the part
that the faculty ought to play in the making of the University's de–
cisions will inevitably involve a consideration of the role of the un–
tenured teaching staff, those below the rank
01
assistant professor.
Many members of this group have become intensely politicalized,
possibly even more than the students. Obviously their interests ought
to be represented, but the question of how far their influence in the
University ought to extend makes a delicate question and is likely
to make a sticky situation. In the nature of the case, egalitarian con–
siderations aren' t really relevant, although I am sure that efforts
will be made to prove the opposite. The impermanence of the young
teaching staff, which of course no one in university life understands
as a hardship or a degradation, makes it inappropriate and im–
practicable for them to have an influence equal to that of the perma–
nent faculty on the basis of one man, one vote.
INTERVIEWER:
Have your feelings about the Columbia situation changed
a great deal during the course of events? Are your feelings very dif–
ferent now from what they were at the outset?
TRILLING:
It's amazing to me how difficult I find it to answer that
question.
If
we speak of feelings, I scarcely know what mine now
are, Or even if I have any at all. And I find it increasingly hard to
recollect what my feelings were at the beginning of the troubles or
at any point in between. All I can recall is that I had a great many
feelings and that they were all intense. Very likely my present neu–
tralized state is the result of fatigue. The nearest thing to a feeling
that I can now recall or experience is my puzzled preoccupation with
what the students are and want. I'm not in the dark about the hard–
core radical students, the SDS-I think I quite understand them.
It's the relatively moderate but still militant students that make the
puzzle for me. I can't in the least draw upon my own attitudes as a
student to help me toward comprehension. Like all my friends at
college, I hadn't the slightest interest in the university as an institu–
tion: I thought of it, when I thought of it at all, as the inevitable
philistine condition of one's being given leisure, a few interesting
teachers and, a library. I find it hard to believe that this isn't the
natural attitude and when I hear about present student attitudes and
demands, as it were in the abstract, they seem to me to be chiefly
incomprehensible, even absurd, or, sometimes, merely willful and mis–
chievous. But it has almost never failed that when I meet the stu–
dents themselves-I've interviewed many of them as part of the work
of the Executive Committee of the Faculty-I find that, contrary to
my first expectations, I have great respect for them and that their
demands at least begin to make sense. I think that what happens is
that when I confront them personally I see them in their cultural and
social situation, and since I understand why this should arouse their
antagonism and rebelliousness, I am the better able to see why they
