VLVL College of the Surf

[jbor]

>> Pynchon's College of the Surf is Columbia University and Berkeley. See
>> Sale's SDS. 
>> But it's not Columbia or Berkeley. No, not at all. What is Pynchon up to
>> now? 
> 
> No, it's not Columbia or Berkeley. The protest is "not much by Columbia and
> Berkeley standards" (208.22), the curriculum and enrolment intake at the
> College is tailored to meet the specific vocational requirements of the
> local aristocracy (204 -- it's set up as a "private polytechnic", not a
> public university), and the students are indeed "docile" and conservative
> (205), 

And the other point to note is that College of the Surf had only been set up
sometime in the late '60s, with only "[f]ive years depreciation" and, I'd
imagine, therefore enough graduates to WORK for those rich Californians and
maintain the status quo before it is to be reconstituted as a resort complex
(209), and thus it's quite likely that it has been set up *in response to*
all the trouble at Berkeley and Columbia earlier in the '60s. I think it
goes quite a bit deeper than straightforward satire of the Berkeley and
Columbia protests.

best

> until the fateful intrusion of potent marijuana from someone's
> brother who was in Vietnam which really does blow some of their minds and
> which provokes some of the students to ring the cops (206). The "traveling
> Movement co-ordinators" and 24fps hear on the grapevine about the police on
> campus and arrive to try and stir up trouble.