COllntry, we have only a limited number of institutions of comparable (luality. We are living through a period in which the need for teaching and research-for the services a universitv performs and the things it stands for'::' is greater than it ever was before. \Vhat kind of a people would we be if we allowed this center of our culture and our hope to languish and fail?
(Above) Radical students and sympathizers walking out of the Commencement ceremony in St. John the Divine Cathedral. (Below left) Ex-president of Sarah Lawrence Harold Taylor speaking at the leftists' Counter-Commencement. (Below right) Student with protest-advertisement sign at the Amsterdam Avenue mlly during Commencement.
The radicals among the degree recipients, and their svmpathizers, never heard Professor Hofstadter's remarks. Just prior to his address, at 3:35, College senior Ted Kaptchuk stood up and with the help of SDS marshals, led 240 students (110 of them \loung women, mostl\' Barnard girls) and 18 young faculty members out of the cathedral. The marshals kept saying, "Please leave in a dignified manner," and the students did. At one point in the exodus, SDS leader Ted Gold, a fellow student named Keith Kornofsk~r, and an English department preceptor named James Goldberg, turned on transistor radios that thev had hid路 den under their academic gowns. But security guards quelled the noise quickly. (It was this music, b~' Bob Dylan and Countrv Joe and the Fish, to which the demonstrators outside had alluded. According to one protestor, it was made possible b~' requesting some acquaintances with leftwing svmpathies at FM radio station WBAI to play those records at exactly that houL) After the walkers-out and the protestors in the streets arrived on Low Plaza, the Counter-Commencement began. Rabbi Bruce Goldman gave the invocation, standing 10 feet awav from a heavilv bearded \louth with a huge red Rag. He asked for a "restoration" based on the "highest law, the moral law." His partisan prayer said, ":\lay God grant wisdom and compassion to the administration and trustees b\路 allowing them as a show of good faith to drop all charges against the students." Facing a long list of speeches, many of the 300 participants and 600 spectators sprawled on the grass, found seats on ledges and steps, began looking for friends to chat with during the long ceremonv. A Columbia economist, Alexander Erhlich, spoke with passion; a College senior, Nigel Paneth, spoke dispassionatelv; and a young College alumnus, Michael Nolan '64, said that his 95