January/February 2009
Letters to the Editor
Lions’ Pride
What do the owner of the New England Patriots and the U.S. Attorney General nominee have in common, besides being Columbia College alumni?
Both Robert K. Kraft ’63 and Eric H. Holder Jr. ’73 played lightweight football during their time at Columbia.
Kevin DeMarrais ’64
Teaneck, N.J.
Editor’s note: The writer, who also played lightweight football at Columbia, later was sports information director and now is a business columnist at The Record in Bergen County, N.J. Also, both Kraft and Holder have served as University Trustees.
Bad Old Days
There’s a quizzical tone in your report [Within the Family, November/December] that there’s no story about Barack Obama ’83 and his College undergraduate experience because no one remembers him and he hasn’t said much. Why do you suppose in his detailed personal narrative Columbia gets barely glancing mention? And where was he?
Remember, in those days a transfer student such as Barack would have been barred from University housing, and University rules for student loan recipients would have left him with a heartbreaking struggle to get his school fees paid and survive. Every alumni story from that era tells of a fine education “in New York” despite the University’s neglectful, callous and even hostile posture toward the undergraduate experience. We all lived through it and moved on.
Dean Austin Quigley captures it well in the same issue: “Many an alumnus can tell you about the bad old days with great gusto and sorrow.” And he gets that only from those few engaged enough to speak! There’s no mystery why most alumni of that era show detachment through the weak financial support and involvement that underlies every challenge Columbia faces, and no reason to be puzzled by Barack’s obviously studied silence.
Why not plan a full, honest piece about student life in that era? I’ll bet that’s an angle that would at last prompt a few trenchant observations from that now-prominent unknown. And maybe engage some of those other detached alumni.
David S. Smith ’79
Darien, Conn.
True to the Core
I really enjoyed the September/October edition of CCT, especially your cover story about the Core Curriculum. I really really appreciate how much Columbia is investing in its undergrads. I only wish the College offered so much when I was there!
Thank you!
Jodi Cohen Lev ’91
Ramat Beit Shemesh, Israel
Looking over the required reading for Contemporary Civilization (September/October) was a pleasantly nostalgic experience for me. Maybe too much so. After the passage of more than 35 years, it shouldn’t be so familiar.
I think I know what the problem is. The reading list takes no account of the cataclysm in Western — indeed, world — civilization that occurred since I graduated: the rejection of state socialism by China, Russia and nearly the entirety of what was once the Communist world.
What readings should illuminate this momentous event, I’m not sure. Vaclav Havel? Friedrich Hayek? Michael Bakunin? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn? All of the above?
Taras Wolansky ’74
Jersey City, N.J.
Cover Subject
I was so looking forward to receiving my winter CCT issue. Having just witnessed and participated in an historic Presidential primary and election — one that resulted in the election of our first multi-racial president and the college’s first graduate to attain the highest office in the land and arguably most powerful in the world — I was awaiting with great anticipation and excitement to see what photograph you would choose of Barack Obama [’83] to grace what would become a treasured copy of CCT. What a huge disappointment to see Dean Austin Quigley’s picture (not that he doesn’t deserve to be featured for his many outstanding accomplishments) on the cover instead. Granted that there may not have been anything “new” to write about Obama that hadn’t already been written, but that should not have prevented you from at least giving him his due on a CCT cover “for the ages.” Can you imagine any newspaper failing to put Obama’s victory with pictures on any other page than its front page?
Given how hard I suspect a large majority of the College’s student body worked on Obama’s campaign and the likelihood that a clear majority of alumni not only voted for him, but took great pride in his campaign, I’m very disappointed. If Obama wasn’t indifferent to his alma mater before this issue, it sure wouldn’t surprise me if he is now. I love CCT, but with all due respect, I must say you blew it!
AJ Kuntze II ’71
Mount Vernon, Wash.
The Glory That Was Grease
I read George Leonard ’67 and Robert Leonard ’70’s article (September/October) with interest. I was a fan of Sha Na Na, starting with their appearance at Woodstock and continuing through seeing them in concert and watching the TV program. My memory agrees with their estimation that the group “invented the Fifties,” at least for liberal media.
But I take issue with the claim that Sha Na Na invented the term “greaser.”
As they point out, the group took on its trademark look in 1969. That was the year I entered high school in Utica, Mich., and I was already familiar with the term by then. Greasers were the lower-class white kids who made up much of the vocational track in my junior high and high school years, some of whom were responsible for cornering my brother and me frequently, or giving us charleyhorses in the hallway because of our long hair. At the other end of the spectrum were the “Frats,” who were slicker, richer and more likely to be in college prep courses. By 1969, those of us with long hair formed a group in between (more diverse both economically and educationally), the “freaks.” I know that the Frat/Greaser nomenclature was in place by the time I was in sixth grade, to define the principal choices one made in personal style. In college, I also learned that “greaser” was common slang for Mexicans.
So Messrs Leonard et al. may well have invented the term for Ivy League hipsters. But it was floating around for the rest of us quite a while before then.
Walter Bilderback
Philadelphia
This was an interesting and informative article. One small quibble, or maybe just a question: There was a passing explanation of the origin of the word “hood” to describe boys who slicked back their hair, rolled cigarette packs up in their T-shirt sleeves, swaggered about in leather jackets and struck threatening poses. As someone who grew up in the ’50s I assumed then, as now, that they were called “hoods” not because they turned up their collars, but because they were identified as “hoodlums,” of which “hood” was merely a shortened version.
This still strikes me as a more likely etymology than turned-up collars, but I’m willing to be convinced. Do you know of anyone else making a case for the connection between collars and “hood?”
Jim Hills
Salem, Ore.
Vietnam
In all of the conversation of the events of 1968 (May/June and thereafter), there is no discussion of what has happened in Vietnam since 1968. It is as if those events stand in splendid isolation outside of any context of what has happened since then. It should never be forgotten that the Americans dropped three times more bombs in Vietnam than were dropped by all sides in WWII, killing from two to three million Vietnamese for what, I’m not sure. Without a doubt, that indiscriminate bombing can be included among the list of human horrors and genocides. If the Americans had won the war, it is very likely that Vietnam today would be a divided country with a hostile North Vietnam, so that the United States would have had to deal today with not only a hostile North Korea but a hostile North Vietnam as well. One of the positive “unintended consequences” of the Americans losing in Vietnam is that that country was united, and Vietnam has become a state that is rapidly developing economically and has friendly relations with the United States and the West.
Two years ago, my wife and I visited Vietnam, perhaps to make amends for the horrors Americans committed in that country during the Vietnam War. We visited the Cochi Tunnels, 15 miles from Ho Chi Minh City. They are a series of more than 200 kilometers of underground tunnels used by the Viet Cong to hide from American bombing. They were never discovered by the Americans. We also visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, where there was a moving exhibit brought from Kentucky to Vietnam of American war reporters killed in Vietnam. The first question we asked our guide in Hanoi was, after fighting so hard and taking such incredible losses, why would Vietnam give up communist state planning so readily? She pointed out that while Vietnam had central planning, the country did not produce enough rice to feed its own population. It depended on the Soviet Union for its economic survival. Now Vietnam produces four to five times the amount of rice it needs for its people’s consumption, and rice has become a major export item. Everywhere you look in Vietnam there are new industrial parks sprouting up. The Ambassador to Canada from Vietnam visited John Abbott College, where I teach, and pointed out that if its economy keeps growing the way it has since the adoption of market economy, Vietnam will have a Western-level living standard within 20 years.
I see my life as contained by two related experiences. The first was in 1974, when I made my first trip to Europe. The owner of a bed and breakfast in Dubrovnik predicted at that time that Yugoslavia would become a popular tourist destination because unlike Italy, there was no terrorism or violence in Yugoslavia. Ironically, after all the mayhem and carnage during the Vietnam War, the first thing one of our guides said to us in Ho Chi Minh City was that Vietnam was becoming a popular tourist destination because it does not have terrorism. I guess the lesson of all this is that whatever you think may be the truth at any particular moment in time will probably be proved false sometime in the future by whatever developments take place.
Alan Weiss ’68
Nuns’ Island, Quebec