Columbia College's September 1965 Freshman Week Revisited

In September 1965, Columbia University's undergraduate Columbia College school on the Upper West Side was a college-level, glorified prep school for predominantly upper-middle-class white men.

Each entering Columbia College freshman was assigned a dorm room on campus during Freshman Week. Each freshman student was required to wear a Freshman beanie and a suit and tie to many of the Freshman Week orientation events.

In September 1965, the sound of radios playing the top hit record of the moment—“Eve of Destruction”—could be heard through the open dorm windows during Freshman Week.

The entering freshmen at Columbia from the private high school prep schools and from the wealthy backgrounds seemed more sophisticated and self-assured than the small number of students from the working-class public high schools and proletarian backgrounds. Barnard women were always characterized in sexist and anti-feminist ways when they were discussed by the white male juniors and seniors who served as Freshman Week hosts.

In September 1965, Freshman Week indoctrinated entering Columbia College freshmen with the notion that being a “Columbia whole man” meant screwing without love as many women on weekends as you could, during your four years of college. You were then supposed to go on to either graduate school, professional school, the officer corps of the military, or some high-paying corporate manager or free professional job.

During Freshman Week, there was a big meeting in the Low Library administration building rotunda, where a white upper-middle-class male Columbia University professor told the entering freshman students that they were a “special group of people” and “the nation’s future elite.” A well-dressed “tweed”/preppie, in a suit and tie, who was the student coordinator of Freshman Week, then told the freshmen to “use New York City as your campus” and urged them to “look into the faces of people on the subway.” And at a student union building reception for freshmen in Ferris Booth Hall’s Hewitt Lounge, punch was served and the then-friendly Dean of Columbia College, David B. Truman, shook each freshman's hands, individually.

A mini-tour of Greenwich Village was provided one evening to a group of freshmen, who were escorted on the Broadway IRT local from 116th Street to the Christopher Street station. After leaving the Christopher Street station, the Columbia College freshmen were led around the West Village for a few hours but, in September 1965, were not shown any of the gay bars.

Meals during Freshman Week in September 1965, were eaten together by the entering freshman in the John Jay Hall dormitory cafeteria. And a freshman from the New York City area would often find himself spontaneously involved in a conversation with an entering freshman from some place like Tyler, Texas. But only a small number of Black students were members of the entering Columbia College freshman class in September 1965.

The white student left at Columbia was nearly invisible during most of Freshman Week in September 1965. Prior to one of the Freshman Week events, a lone leftist tried to sell the freshmen who were lined up to go inside Ferris Booth Hall some kind of leftist newspaper. The newspaper claimed that Columbia University was controlled by Wall Street corporation directors, was nothing more than an instrument of these corporations and was not really an institution concerned about the pursuit of knowledge.

But in September 1965 the lone leftist wasn’t able to interest any of the entering Columbia Columbia freshmen in buying his newspaper. From the freshmen on the line who bothered to notice him, there was much snickering and some taunting of him for being a “commie.”

The highlight of Freshman Week in September 1965 came near the end of the week, when representatives of various student clubs spoke to the entering Columbia College freshmen in Wollman Auditorium and tried to use sexist humor and sexual innuendo to interest them in joining their clubs. Most of the freshmen cheered and laughed all night, as the junior and senior Columbia College tweed-preppie-types tried to demonstrate how hedonistic and sexually virile and sophisticated they and their clubs were.

The anti-intellectualism of this student club recruitment night, which was called “King’s Crown Activities Night,” undercut the credibility of the pious words which Columbia administrators and professors had thrown at the entering Columbia College freshmen during the more solemn previously-held Freshman Week events in September 1965. Club night seemed to indicate that what the all-male Columbia College student body found most important was the sexual conquest of Barnard women, not the pursuit of knowledge and truth, or the love of other people. Columbia students seemed no more intellectual in their personal priorities than their male counterparts at less selective universities, like Indiana University or the University of Miami in Florida.

The only student speaker at this “King’s Crown Activities Night” who seemed to be intellectually hip was the representative of Columbia’s ACTION group. Along with student demonstrators from a wide range of campus civil rights, peace and left-wing Movement groups (like Congress of Racial Equality, the recently-formed Independent Committee on Vietnam and the Young Socialist Alliance), some ACTION members had participated in an anti-war, anti-NROTC demonstration in the spring of 1965, which the Columbia Administration had broken up by calling in New York City cops to arrest the less than 150 demonstrators. The ACTION speaker was the only student who mentioned the need to oppose the war in Viet Nam on campus at this club night. But his presentation was interrupted by jeers from the entering Columbia College freshmen who were politically right-wing; and by much heckling.

Yet in less than 3 years, five Columbia University buildings would be non-violently occupied by anti-war and anti-racist Columbia University students until then-NYC Mayor John Lindsay--in response to the request of the Columbia University administration--authorized 1,000 New York City policemen to invade the Upper West Side's Columbia campus on April 30, 1968.