students of the educatIon they had paid to receive. Once, Spectator, the student daily, was mentioned, and there were boos. "Spec is with the radicals 90 per cent," shouted one voice in the crowd. By Friday, Spectator had dropped all pretense of objective reporting and was almost totally supportive of the strike. A few of the reporters, such as Jerry Avorn, a hard-working but somewhat puerile and volatile College junior, were close to acting as spies for Strike Central by abusing their press privileges, while others almost abandoned the paper's traditionally high professional standards of journalism. The ccnsensus among the students was that Spec had "sold out" to the revolutionaries. The next day, Saturday, Spec's managing editor, Michael Rothfeld, reSigned because of what he felt was the blatant pro-rebel slanting and selection of news. "Half the guys, including my roommate, also an editor, have become ~Che Guevara types." By contrast, the campus radio station, WKCR, had, after a shaky start, started reporting the rebellion blow-byblow with astounding thoroughness,
fairness and alertness. They had student reporters with walkie-talkies at all key points, talking in the news, with a minimum of opinion or editorial bias. So impressive and unbiased-and instant-was their coverage that possibly a million interested people in metropolitan Jew York started listening to the student F~1 station (89.9 megacycles) continuously as the chief source of news about Columbia; dozens of young alumni came back to campus to help the sleep-starved staff of 50; and WKCR president Robert Papper of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and his staff were praised in Saturday's New York Times by TV-Radio critic Jack Gould. "Under extraordinarily difficult conditions it has been doing a remarkably alert and responsible job ... The mature young people of WKCR are performing with a credit to themselves and broadcasting." At the Majority Coalition meeting one of the College's more popular history professors, James Shenton '49, was, like Spectator, also booed. In fact, he was shouted out of Ferris Booth Hall when he asked to speak to the Majority Coalition. Shenton had been one of the
handful of senior teachers supporting the sh路ikers and denouncing the Administration, the athletes, fraternity students, and even the moderates and civil libertarians, it was felt. Finallv, economics professor C. Lowell Harris, a thin, greying, Jebraska-born expert on U.S. fiscal policy, got up, after someone suggested that the group sit-in in front of Philosophy Hall as a show of support of the faculty proposals, and said, ''I'm very impressed by that suggestion. Let's all go over to Philosophy Hall to show our strength and opinions in peace." The 700 students marched out of Ferris Booth at 5:45 with Professor Harris as their pied piper and sat and stood in front of the building in which the Ad Hoc Faculty group was meeting. Professor Harris told them: "I assure you that some of the finest, most brilliant persons in this University are working around the clock to end t];js uglv affair. Right now, both SDS and the Administration are deliberating on the three faculty proposals. Stay calm. Be reasonable." Frank Dann, the tall, blonde, handsome captain of the College'S swimming team, who was emerging as the most articulate, sensible, and forceful leader of the Majority Coalition Undergraduate e~gineer at ',VKCR. The student-ntn campus radio station drew high said, "Amnesty is the key issue. I don't praise from many quarters for its reporting and reasonably obiectilJe reporting of the care if SDS gets out in three hours or minute-by-minute developments during the spring uprising. three days, so long as they get punished for their incredible behavior, for the damage they have done to Columbia, for their violation of the rights of thousands of students and faculty." Several faculty members who saw the Majority Coalition students on the grass outside their windows expressed their djstinct discomfort at having the athletes, fraternity men, young Republicans, and numerous moderates staunchly supporting their proposals while some of their favorite student poets, intellectuals, and radicals were calling the faculty obscenities. While the Ad Hoc group talked, and the Majority Coalition students sat ontside, SDS had called "an important press conference" at 7 :30 in the Schiff room of Ferris Booth Hall. (SDS had begun playing heavily to the press, hoping to use it as its broadcasting arm.) Before 150 members of the press, ., standing alone before four micro~ phones, bathed in the intense, slightly ~ eerie blue-white TV lights, a tired-lookI ing l\Iark Rudd read his comlnittee's COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY