MELTING POT
SHOW ME THE WAY TO GO HOME
My membership
in
the Faculty Senate at the City College
of New York. This was to be a ceremonial function. Only three times
a year, the chairman insisted as he put my name down for nomination.
"You want some power in this place?"
There and then I should have known that fatal and bizarre con–
tradictions would be contained in this seat. The Faculty Senate was
the culmination of a long struggle by the liberals at City College to
gain some power from an educational conservative, its president, Buell
Gallagher. Yet any schoolchild knows that the budget is the source of
legislative power. An assembly without power to levy is straw, hollow
men. And a thousand other councils, committees, at City are jealous
of their academic power. The Senate only recommends. Yet when the
thunderclap of Black Power burst over City College where were you, 0
Judicial councils, oh Faculty committees, oh deans? The Faculty Senate,
hungry for something to do, alone, sat out in the open.
A perfect heath, forum, for dramatic effects, which
is
what much
of the dreadful
pudder
over City was. No condescension here. Drama
overwhelms reality. Drama overwhelms budgets, duly elected officials,
democratic process, good sense. Drama releases terror, guilt; and as I
walked down Convent Avenue, passed the locked gates of the campus
seized by the Black and Puerto Rican students, saw two handsome fresh–
men, one standing to the right of the gate on top of its concrete parapet,
upholding a flag of Black Nationalism in the best Iwo Jima style, a
Puerto Rican on the other side, with defiant eyes sweeping the horizon,
the standard of Puerto Rico a spear in his arms, the T.V. unit perched
only a few hundred yards away, waiting to sweep down for the shot,
I realized that issues would be secondary to the sheer joy of a good
grade B movie. And not to be unfair to students, weeks later the
invisible cameras were still grinding in the mind's eye when the Senate
Investigating Committee threatened us and the grey-haired Civil Service
nonenities rose on the Faculty Senate floor to declaim about the beauty
of America, how proud they were, our fruitful land, how willing to
