Dossier, Volume 14 #1

From Hope to a Hole in the Park

No baby boomer, I was already thirty when the 1960s began. As a theology student in the first half of the decade, I was swimming in hope, optimism and hard work, trying to realize in Canada the openness proclaimed in the great documents of the Second Vatican Council. Later in the decade I would be caught in the stress and pain of the inevitable confrontations as pressures for social change reached explosive levels both within and outside the church. And in the raw environment of the student revolution at Columbia University, I would have to take, for the first time in my life, a political decision that risked a great deal.

From 1962 to 1966, I benefited from the hope generated by Pope John XXIII and his summoning of the Second Vatican Council. When the council began, I had spent almost ten years in the Society of Jesus, a group of men that in its training sometimes seemed to be trying hard to leapfrog backwards in time past their dynamic and mystical founder, St. Ignatius, into a monastic lifestyle slightly modified by a nineteenth-century Jesuit mythology about being "Soldiers of Jesus Christ." Like most of the official church, they were out of touch with the modern world and, for the most part, out of sight.

Now the church wanted to relate to the modern world. The council sought a renewed Christian ecumenism, proclaimed affection and respect for the Jews and God's irrevocable saving covenant with them, and expressed the Church's esteem for Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and other faiths. I felt that the Holy Spirit was vigorously animating the Church--including especially good Pope John but also the more adventuresome among my friends and colleagues.

Even in straight-faced English Canada we were breathing in the optimistic international atmosphere that was hard to resist. Many usually dour church administrators were shifting from their ordinary modes of thinking: they began to wonder if the presence of the Spirit in the Church shouldn't be trusted after all. And they started asking questions: "Why not some changes?" "Does the church have to behave as though only the elderly and unimaginative could be moved by the Spirit?

Some senior Canadian Jesuits were affected by this optimistic atmosphere. After years of attempts, I finally had a superior, the late Fr. Angus MacDougall, who was willing to allow me to try seriously to understand how art and religion are related, especially in the modern world. Thus my horizons expanded rapidly. With my lifelong but undeveloped interest in religion and art, I could finally see myself as part of the liberating convergence of all that was good and creative.

I was excited. A new attitude towards Christianity and culture was being created, and it was one in which I could discern a role for myself. The Spirit was especially evident, it seemed to me, in the talents and works of contemporary artists whom I valued for themselves and could see as necessary companions for the modern reforming church.

I found I had a lot to learn about art and the world when I worked on an exhibition shown in January 1963 in the spacious suburban buildings in north Toronto that then housed Regis College. Entitled "Canadian Religious Art Today--I," it was helped enormously by the late Alan Jarvis, who recently had been director of the National Gallery of Canada. Through this and a second exhibition (we presented "Canadian Religious Art Today--II" in April 1966 and in June toured it to the Musée du Québec), I had my first experience of close contact with many artists. I saw how basically religious they were, although most of them had long since lost interest in organized churches or synagogues.

It was a happy time because my small world and insignificant energies seemed connected--a part of the whole Church that was meant to be there in the modern world to help mediate God's healing presence.

IN THE FALL OF 1967, THESE ENTHUSIASMS brought me to graduate studies in the history of modern art at Columbia University in New York. However, I had lots of insecurities. I had been a less than impressive student in Jesuit programs of theology and philosophy and so the responsible--and perhaps skeptical--Jesuits did not give me carte blanche. I had to prove that I could handle these studies in art history. My first fall term was difficult but rewarding. I settled into the second term--the spring of 1968--needing no extra persuasion to keep mind and energies focused on my main goals and my fascinating studies. I was the very image of determination and concentration and tried to avoid being distracted by any other concerns.

But that changed one morning when I arrived at Columbia's Morningside Heights campus. The night before, the campus was as it had been for a few weeks. Protesting undergraduate students had taken over many of the buildings including Low Memorial Library, which housed the office of the university president, Grayson Kirk, on the big-windowed main floor. One day I had seen a student whom I had gotten to know at Catholic functions on the campus dangling his legs from the open window of the chief executive's office and enjoying a huge presidential cigar.

But that morning the jocularity had ended. At about 2 a.m. during the night, President Kirk, against much advice, called the New York Police Department to raid the campus and retake Low Memorial Library. A large number of faculty members--many of them distinguished, some of them quite elderly and revered--set up a human chain around the building, hoping to protect the students peacefully and dissuade the police from their attack. They failed. Far from respecting the distinguished faculty members, the police shocked onlookers with their rough treatment of them, injuring at least one elderly professor. The police went on to take control of the building, injuring students in their way and enraging everyone else.

When I walked into the university, still very detached from it all, there was blood on the campus, which was crowded with as many police as students. I was disturbed by the intensity of the students' anger and hatred, directed especially towards the police, and their irrational, threatening rhetoric. As a Christian and particularly as a priest, I felt I had to try to mediate a situation that was lurching towards disaster, but first I had to find out what it was all about.

The problem had begun essentially as an issue of social justice. The east edge of the Morningside Heights campus was bordered by a cliff that separated it from Harlem, the main area for New York's mainly powerless black population. At the foot of the cliff was a long, narrow strip of land, Morningside Park, one of the few parks in the whole Harlem area. Columbia, a rich and powerful university, led by its businessman president, exploited its connections in city council and elsewhere and acquired land from this narrow strip, cutting it almost in two. The university wanted the land to build a ten-storey gymnasium, which would not be open to its Harlem neighbors.

After initial protests, the university agreed to let Harlem residents use the bottom floor. This was not enough for the protestors, many of them Columbia undergraduates. In response, President Kirk had a chain-link fence built around the construction site to keep protestors at a distance while shovels, bulldozers and trucks roared.

When students tore down part of the fence, the infuriated Kirk had them arrested by the city police. That was decisive. In retaliation, the students started taking over--the cool word was "liberating"--campus buildings, culminating with Low Memorial Library. The students' level of organization, thanks to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and its youthful Columbia leader, Mark Rudd, took the administration off guard.

The crisis was at a standstill that morning after the police bust. The "strike," as the revolution was usually called, was run by a parliament-like legislature called the "Strike Steering Committee" on which SDS had most of the seats. To maintain its position of strength in negotiations with the administration and police, SDS had to close all the buildings on campus that had not been taken over. To do this, it needed the graduate students--a majority at Columbia--to maintain the picket lines.

Graduate students met each morning during the crisis to discuss options, consider proposals and make recommendations. After further discussions and proposals, strategies for dealing with the threatening crisis were worked out. And these were ultimately successful.

In exchange for our support of the strike, the graduate students' organization was given about 50 per cent of the seats on the Strike Steering Committee. This meant that we were able to moderate strike legislation, defeating proposals that were dangerous to persons or threatening to libraries and other property. We kept up these moderating strategies until this 1968 chapter of student unrest was dissipated by the anticlimax of the ending of the school year in May.

Working in this struggle, I could spend whole days in often stressful meetings. Because I was a delegate for the art history students, I met with them in the mornings. Then in the afternoons I would be at meetings with delegates from all the departments. As an alternate delegate to the Strike Steering Committee, I sometimes had to go to that evening meeting so that our vote could be counted.

In addition to the toll in time and energy, everyone involved in this revolution took risks. The first of the risks for me was that I would lose standing in the art history department. I was reminded of this almost daily as a professor from the department went around to picket lines, listing names to report to our department head, who had insisted that in the art history department it would always be "business as usual."

The other risk was more serious: the Jesuits might withdraw their support for my religion and art studies if they didn't interpret my involvement in the "strike" as I had. Skeptical as he was, the good provincial superior, Fr. MacDougall, listened to my detailed account. Then, in a statement that revealed his distaste for the whole thing but left me free to continue my studies, he said carefully, as though weighing each syllable, "Well, I don't think you have done anything wrong."

Relieved I was, but too exhausted to rejoice. Especially when I thought of all the papers that I had to postpone because of this involvement, which I then saw and still see as both religious and political.

GRAYSON KIRK RESIGNED AS PRESIDENT OF COLUMBIA soon after the crisis. The gym that started it all never got built. It was replaced by the Dodge Fitness Center, a series of facilities under the existing campus that required no new land. And although the narrow strip of Morningside Park has been improved by the city--baseball and soccer fields have been added to the north and south--the hole dug by Columbia near the centre of the park has not yet been put right. The university negotiated an end to its lease of the land in the early 1980s and, according to a Columbia spokesperson, repairing the damage is now the responsibility of New York City.

The crisis of the gymnasium in Morningside Park made Columbia an arena where important 1960s issues--the injustices of racism and worsening poverty, impassioned opposition to the ideologies that prolonged the Vietnam war, the idealism and heady energies of the arriving baby boomers--came into violent contact with the arrogance, the intransigence and what I see as the blind selfishness of rich, powerful and long-established interests. The hole dug in Morningside Park in 1968 by Columbia University is a wound that still speaks with sad eloquence of the ongoing divisions in our North American society.

Peter Larisey SJ is an art historian and an associate editor of Compass. He teaches about art and religion at Regis College in Toronto.