The A Minus Rebels

THE BATTLE FOR MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS: Why Students Rebel by Roger Kahn. 254 pages. Morrow. $6.95.

It was just after the New York City police used nightsticks, saps, blackjacks and large, bony knuckles to sweep the student occupiers from the sanctums of Columbia University. At this moment, a woman identified as Mrs. Jeanette Cohen was heard to cry: "That the police should do this to such boys! They are all ninety percenters, A minus at the least." The police, most of them from lower-middle-class backgrounds where the status climb stopped with the civil service, had a slightly different view. To many of them, "such boys" were a puzzling, infuriating, foulmouthed, cop-baiting bunch of nigger-loving, Commie-Jew bastards.

The Columbia confrontation is by now a familiar classic of student dissent. Yet Roger Kahn, a 42-year-old New Yorker who spent many months interviewing the participants, has turned the 1968 spring uprising into a thoughtprovoking, if slightly Wagnerian drama. His book is both broader and more perceptive than the accounts that were rushed into print at the time.

Kahn traces Columbia's flowering both as a temple of educational enlightenment and a vast real estate company with assets of $425 million. He cites numerous incidents in which the educational ideals of the university conflicted with its drive to preserve and expand its equity. Elsewhere he draws useful distinctions between Columbia's schizophrenic structure and the reasonable, though uninspired and often outdated men who attempted to manage it. Former President Grayson Kirk, for example, is viewed as an aloof, poorly informed man who rode around in a black Cadillac licensed GK-1. By contrast, S.D.S. Leader Mark Rudd shows a jungle instinct for the weakness of his elders; he emerges as a troublemaker, possibly useful as a goad in a good cause, but essentially a shortsighted opportunist.

What happened at Columbia, Kahn suggests, was a significant warning to the men in power that ideals parroted as commencement rhetoric may not be safely compromised at board meetings.

Although Kahn's own sympathies are clearly with the radicals, he preserves a fine eye for the humor and irony in the midst of turmoil. For example, one earnest young man attending the off-campus S.D.S. Liberation School proudly proclaims: "I feel that I have begun my personal liberation. For the last two weeks I haven't read the New York Times." And Mark Rudd, who completely liberated himself from Columbia, now gets up to $750 a lecture.

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