DIANA TRILLING
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ized. And Grayson Kirk, if anybody's windows can be peed out
of, it's his windows. He was a big stuffed shirt, and of course they
got rid of him, thank God . And also the Vietnam thing played a
big part too: Those war contracts should have been given up. The
gym, I think, was a fake issue. I thought that the campus was just
seething with discussions, and I saw jocks arguing with long-hairs
and I saw everybody giving out pamphlets and I thought this was
absolutely marvelous. This is what a university should be.
It
should be something alive and something, you know, anarchistic
in a sense.
DT:
Anarchism without violence. That's your slogan?
DM:
Yes. Well-
DT:
That'll be the day.
DM:
There wasn't any violence there. They did put aside gently
a couple of aged guards that tried to say you can't go in there, but
they didn't beat them up.
DT:
They just paralyzed a policeman.
DM:
Oh, that was a mistake. It's true, somebody jumped out of a
window-
DT:
And landed on him, and he's permanently paralyzed . And
some of the students picked up a tub in which a tree was planted
and dumped it over the railing of the bridge over Amsterdam
Avenue, onto a police car. Thank God, the car was empty; if
anybody had been in it, he would have been killed.
DM:
Well, to play with such a chance I think is absolutely disgust–
ing. I don't think they meant to kill anybody.
If
they did, then I
think they're pathological. And the guy that burned up the ten
years of research of that unpopular professor- that little business
I thought was absolutely disgusting and horrible, of course. But I
don't see what that has to do with it.
DT:
What do you consider to be the results of the uprisings?
DM:
Well, getting rid of Kirk, for one thing. And also getting a kind
of a [new] spirit into the university. And also I think it did liber–
alize and democratize- it gave the students more of a say in what
goes on, didn't it? Anyway, for a couple of weeks, at least, things
were sort of buzzing.
DT:
Anything for a good buzz, right?
DM:
No, no. No , Fred Dupee and I had just the same view about
the whole thing. He said, come up here, this is a revolution.
DT:
I have no doubt he went over there with an old revolutionary's
receptivity to something that was spontaneously happening in the
