Bright New York youngsters from poor families were supposed to go to CCNY, the City College of New York, which Jews called "our Harvard," and with reason. City College fielded a gifted faculty and offered a first-class education at taxpayer expense. It opened access to the finest graduate schools -- more so than other colleges when you consider that Ivy League bastions still used informal quotas to hold down their number of New York Jews. But CCNY served only city kids, and the still striving refugee inside me mistook that for provincialism. I yearned to cross yet another frontier and invested extraordinary energy in the journey. Unlike CCNY, the private colleges demanded that I take the College Board entrance exam, an alarming prospect.

My desultory reading habits were finally taking their toll: I could not recognize half the words on the sample vocabulary test the College Board sent me. I could not begin to match word pairings like "hammer:nail" with "despot:peon." Self-help manuals, like Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary, did not relieve the crisis. And the College Board boasted that cramming was useless; it was testing a "lifetime of learning."

My vocabulary may have been shallow, but my skepticism ran deep. I resolved to cram and somehow prove them wrong. I discovered that the library at Columbia's Teachers College housed a file of all College Board exams ever devised. In just half a dozen visits, I copied out every unfamiliar word and word pairing, filling two shoe boxes with index cards that bore the strange words on one side, their definitions on the other. For months, I traveled everywhere with some of those cards until I had memorized, although in no true sense acquired, this new vocabulary. When I came upon the boxes a decade later, I was startled to find how many of those once intimidating words appeared routinely in The New York Times, and in my own writings. But at the time, the cards were cork to a drowning swimmer. When I finally took the board test, I recognized three fourths of the words, enough to qualify for all three of the private colleges to which I had applied.

At the top of the list was the University of Chicago, whose curriculum struck me as suitably bohemian and whose campus was attractively far from home. Chicago taught the Great Books without even requiring that you attend class. It was led by Robert M. Hutchins, the university's president before he was 30, who banished football and not only favored world government but composed and published its constitution. Then, too, Chicago would let me hover near Sandy, a high school flame who had incomprehensibly committed herself to a rival suitor. Mom's prayers against Chicago were answered only when it denied me financial aid. I would have to stay inside the borders of New York after all and take advantage of the state's scholarship, worth a significant $350 a year. That was almost enough to cover tuition at NYU and more than half the cost of Columbia.

Pop argued fervently for Columbia. It was famous even in Europe, he insisted, so its degree would always be worth more. His endorsement would have surely soured me on Columbia if I hadn't heard the siren songs of David Wise, my predecessor as editor of Overtone at [the High School of] Music & Art. Dave had followed his father to Columbia and told rhapsodic tales about writing for The Columbia Daily Spectator -- the Monday-to-Friday Spectator! As a daily, he emphasized, Spec was hungry for new recruits; NYU and City offered only weeklies, he scoffed. Besides, at Columbia you met "downtown journalists" who came to cover campus events and to teach at the Graduate School of Journalism. Dave had already sold two features to International News Service!

That's how I chose Columbia; I followed the ink. I reported for duty at the Spectator a full week before the start of classes, an order of priority that remained immutable for four fateful years.

In just one week, Columbia bleached out all my frustrated ambitions for elective office. Though shy, chubby, and unimposing, I'd been emboldened by Mom's faith to believe that I could be a popular as well as articulate leader. But the absurdity of it dawned at the first meeting of the freshman class, when we were invited to nominate ourselves for the posts of class president and secretary-treasurer. The winners would cast votes on the Student Board, arrange assorted "smokers" with professors and dances with Barnard girls, and, of course, get a leg up on admission to good medical and law schools. A dozen classmates ran eagerly toward the stage, and I, too, felt the undertow of high school campaigns yanking at me. In an epiphanous moment, still vivid a half century later, I stopped in midmotion for a rush of calculation: stick with journalism and you'll be writing about these clowns; give up frivolous self-promotion and deal instead with "real" issues. With a memorable thud, I sat back down, never to feel the candidate urge again.

My immersion in campus journalism seemed to have the university's highest sanction. In Ike's first speech to our class, he promised a new gym and a better football field and stressed the importance of "nonacademic" pursuits. "The day that goes by that you don't have fun, that you don't enjoy life," Eisenhower said, with a syntax prophetic of his political career, "is to my mind not only unnecessary but un-Christian." Indeed, we non-Christians were drawn in great numbers to the fourth floor of John Jay Hall and the adjacent offices of the Spectator, the chess club, the debate team, the Review, the Jester, and the Varsity Players. Religious or not, we devoutly believed in extracurricular fun and turned those rooms into bustling fraternity houses, and more: a place where individual growth also produced communal value.

Sniffing out the trustees' secret plot to raise tuition and spreading the news turned out to be more gratifying even than deciphering a Shakespeare sonnet. Embarrassing the dean about the girls-in-the-room rule -- Could the order to keep doors open by at least "the thickness of a book" be satisfied with a slim volume of poetry? -- was far more amusing than defining the comic nature of Don Quixote. I could not resist the lures of journalism: the license to pry into all corners of campus life, the chance to champion remedies for discovered wrongs, the easy access to persons of every rank, and the reliable armor to shield an otherwise debilitating shyness.

Columbia, with a wisdom since abandoned, did not then require undergraduates to "major" in any one subject, so we prejournalism dilettantes majored aggressively in Spec. We hung around its shabby offices, eager to take any reporting assignment or to run photographs to the engravers, to dummy page layouts or to change typewriter ribbons. Although I slept at home and was due in my first freshman class at 8:00 a.m., I cheerfully volunteered for frequent duty at Cocce Press down in Greenwich Village, where we cobbled stories into their pages until dawn, then hastily skimmed a Saint Augustine essay on the subway ride home. I soon suspected that I lacked the necessary devotion for a career in scholarship.

Even so, the seductions of Columbia's Core Curriculum were not easily resisted. Two freshman courses in particular imposed massive nightly readings and opened our minds to an intoxicating flood of ideas. Each met four times a week in intimate settings of about 15 students. Humanities Lit burdened us with a big book a week, from Aristophanes to Zola. And with so few targets in the room, there was no ducking the provocations of senior professors: How would you compare Yahweh's character in Genesis with that of the gods of Sophocles, Mister Frankel?

Still more demanding was "CC" -- Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West. It dragged us through a parade of Western ideas with excerpts from the writings of scores of philosophers like Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Kant, Mill, and Adam Smith. Despite the density of these texts, they magically transformed our adolescent sense of history. The ancient Greeks ceased to be just authors of myths and fairy tales and became impressive tutors in the meanings of tyranny and democracy. Europe's past ceased to be a tiresome succession of monarchs and emerged instead as a cascade of speculations about the nature of man and the ideologies that might tame him. These readings let us connect the debates of sages like Plato and Marx, Aquinas and Kant.

We were encouraged to join in this chain of conversation across the ages and taught the fundamental laws of disputation. My clarifying moment came in an encounter with Prof. Charles Frankel (no relation), in an instruction that has focused all my reading ever since. Explaining why he, a liberal, and C. Wright Mills, a Marxist, were willing to wrestle so publicly and passionately in our weekly philosophy seminar, he said: "You never know what anyone is for until you know what he is arguing against."

That whole categories of humanity, especially women, were left out of our readings and discussions did not then strike us as remarkable. In our sense of the natural order of things, the girls across Broadway at Barnard College, with obvious exceptions, were preparing for mate- and motherhood; they were the engines of biology, not of philosophy. Little did we realize that those very women would become a driving force in our generation's history.

From The Times of My Life and My Life at The Times by Max Frankel. Copyright © 1999 Random House. Reprinted by permission.