VLVL College of the Surf and PR3

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> While it's a shame that there's no-one posting who has any actual first-hand
> knowledge of the youth movement and protests at Berkeley and Columbia in the
> early '60s, there are many reliable memoirs and well-researched secondary
> sources available. From these it's clear that anti-War, Civil Rights,
> feminism, free speech and other worthwhile causes were once on the student
> protest agenda, whereas at College of the Surf they're not. 

Yes, I still would like to hear from some of our elders. Obviously I
have no first-hand experience ... didn't even see it on the Tube. 

However,  I think we agree that the events in Pynchon's novel are set
sometime in 1967, 68, 69, 70. If, as I contend, Pynchon's College of the
Surf is a fictionalized Columbia-Berkeley (1968), it makes perfect sense
that none of the issues above are on the agenda. 

Sale describes the organization at Columbia, Fall 1967

Throughout the fall of 1967, at a time when resistance was in the air
everywhere, SDS at Columbia was quite, confused, congealed: it was going
through the doldrums that practically every chapter encountered  at one
time or another. Several of the former chapter leaders had graduated or
dropped out. Drugs proved a more satisfying answer for many, and
certainly less frustrating. Progressive Labor members were gumming up
chapter debates, turing the weekly meetings increasingly into battles
between "correct lines" rather than forums to thrash out ideas. Elitism
and male chauvinism turned away many potential recruits who could not
find the in-group congenial, and lack of coherence and lack of action
turned away still others. And above all a sharp disagreement had grown
up in the chapter between the moderate leadership, now dubbed,
half-mockingly, the "praxis-axis"___Kaptchuck, Gold, David Gilbert (a
1966 Columbia graduate) and others---and the resistance followers, who
became known as the "action faction"---among them Jacobs, Papert, and
Rudd. 

Sale describes their aborted all-out drive to rid the Campus of
corporate recruiting and how this issue was effectively coopted by the
Kirk Administration and the majority of the students who voted for open
recruiting. 

Sale continues

It was in the wake of this defeat in early 1968 that the action faction
began to assert itself. 

I've already described the pie incident, Slothrop tossing a pie at the
SSS colonel come to Columbia to tell the students about the virtues of
military life. (Sale 433)





According to Sale (Pynchon's source) the slogan of SDS,  governed by
the  "action-faction" becomes,  "The Issue is the Issue." This slogan is
indicative of the "polarization" (the term Sale says SDSers used most
often to describe their movement) in SDS and the fact that the issues
mentioned above are no longer viable ones at Berkeley or Columbia.   


In Pynchon's
> depiction of where "the Movement" ended up by the late '60s it's ADHOC, All
> Damned Heat Off Campus (and the police are there because the students called
> them), and secession from the USA to keep the College from being turned into
> holiday condos (and the PR3 kids don't even realise that their college is
> really only a training camp for wage slaves). A farce. Not like Columbia and
> Berkeley at all, I'm afraid.

What happens at Columbia in 1968? What is the issue. It's Land
Development. Who are the ADHOC at Columbia and what is their role? What
about the police? Who calls the police? According to Sale, the police
are called in a few times prior to the final assault is launched. SDS at
Columbia has fewer than 300 members. What are the other students up to?
What about the Conservative groups, they  also seize  a building? The
Black students? What are names of the buildings seized. Hamilton, Low,
Mathematics  Fayerweather, Architecture. Not Surfer's names. Can't be
Columbia. Right? Why is their more resistance and violence at
Mathematics? 

> 
> I think the description of the student protests at Cornell in Pynchon's
> 'Intro' to the Fariña novel, and the description of Oedipa's visit to
> Berkeley in the early '60s in _Lot 49_, provide a relevant contrast to the
> description of PR3 in this novel.

No doubt about it.