LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Congratulations, '01!

It is with pleasure that I extend sincere best wishes to 2001's College graduating class. Its members are about to venture into a world quite different from the one that greeted me over half a century ago, and certainly, one that is markedly different from the one that faced my close family friend and mentor, Woolsey A. Shepard, when he graduated from the College in 1901. I find it rather awesome to contemplate how these two classes mark the beginning and the conclusion of the 20th century, probably the most turbulent yet innovative 100 years in recorded history.

Bernard Prudhomme '50
DULUTH, GA.

The Case for Dining Halls

Students lunch at Lerner

While flipping through this year's U.S. News and World Report survey of colleges in the guidance office of the high school where I teach, I scanned the alumni giving rates and thought of the letter by Joseph Brouillard '51 in the December 2000 issue of CCT, in which Brouillard contended that Columbia might see its low participation level (32 percent that year) rise if it encouraged nominal giving by current students with a program similar to the one used at his wife's alma mater, Mount Holyoke (52 percent).

However, peer institutions with high alumni giving rates (such as Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Princeton and Amherst, with participation ranging from 47 to 68 percent) employ only a Senior Class Gift program, as does Columbia. Yet each of these schools, Mount Holyoke included, has one critical thing, in addition to nearby athletic fields, that Columbia does not: a dining hall program.

The absence at Columbia of anything more than John Jay (which largely serves first years, the only students required to be on a meal plan) and à la carte venues at Lerner, Wien and Business undermines the sense of community necessary for institutional identification and loyalty. Particularly given the centrifugal force of New York, a dining hall system should be all the more important. Over and over, in this light, I have heard from former students of mine who have gone on to Columbia that they love the Core Curriculum, as I promised them they would, but find campus life impersonal.

The consequences of eating alone differ little, in fact, from those of what sociologist Robert Putnam has famously called "bowling alone" to describe the increasingly atomized nature of American life and resultant erosion of "social capital." The fundamental significance of a pronounced decline in league bowling, Putnam writes, "lies in the social interaction and even occasionally civic conversations over beer and pizza that solo bowlers forgo."

A dining hall system should facilitate such interaction and it shouldn't necessitate an unrealistic amount of space or defeat the purpose of kitchens in the dorms of upperclassmen. If upperclassmen were required to take only seven or so meals per week on a meal plan, a dining hall system would be sufficiently limited in scale to function as a complement to dorm kitchens and yet adequately large to generate a greater sense of community. While the creation of a dining hall system would no doubt cost a great deal, it should considerably enrich campus life and in the long run thus pay for itself and more through improved alumni giving.

Sam Abrams '89
NEW YORK

After All These Years

Bravo to your September 2000 issue. Photos of the classes of the 1930s show how vibrant we octogenarians became.

As a student in the fall of 1934, I was introduced to chemistry by Dr. Raymond Crist of Columbia's renowned chemistry department. He is 100 years young today and now teaches chemistry at Messiah College in Grantham, Pa. He worked with Nobel Laureates Harold Urey and Enrico Fermi at Columbia. All these men lived in our town, Leonia, N.J., as I grew up. Felix Vann of your 1930 photo also was a Leonian. It was Mrs. Vann, Felix's mother, a Democratic Committee woman in a sea of Republicans, who helped many Leonians get jobs in the Great Depression era.

John F. Crymble '38, '39E, '40E
SALEM, N.J.

Enough Said?

I can hardly say how disappointing it is to read your recent encomium to Prof. Edward Said (CCT, May 2001). This man has enthusiastically associated himself with rock-throwing anti-Israel factions, many of whom, of course, are terrorists. It stuns me that CCT continuously showers praise on this anti-Israel activist. It seems never to dawn on CCT that it's the alumni magazine of a university that is very largely Jewish in student and faculty population. It's not the alumni magazine of the American University in Beirut. Check it out. Edward Said is not associated with nice people, to put it mildly. He does not deserve your fawning adoration. And wake up generally. CCT is the only place at Columbia that labors under the delusion that it's the alumni magazine for a different kind of semites.

Ben Stein '66
BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF.

Editor's reply: Edward Said is a senior member of the Columbia faculty, one of only 11 to hold the rank of university professor. The article was not an encomium, but rather a digest of the many books and articles written by or about Said that have been published in the past year, and their scholarly impact.

Diversity of Opinion

I read Mr. Frischberg's letter (CCT, May 2001) with a mixture of incredulity and chagrin. Mr. Frischberg seems to equate an overwhelming electoral preference for Mr. Gore over Mr. Bush with being "...at a very selective Ivy League school in the most cosmopolitan city in the United States." What the purported correlation is supposed to be between these two facts is never discussed. Why this should be viewed as a positive is also not discussed. And why this one-sidedness is not reflective of a regrettable lack of political diversity is also not discussed.

This sort of complacency in the self-evident virtue of being out of step with the country as a whole is hardly what I would think of as a strength. To the extent that today's Columbians are tomorrow's leaders — as Mr. Frischberg implies — it seems self-evident that they should be made aware that there are other opinions in the country than those held by the vast majority of Columbians, and that these opinions are worthy of respect and engagement. Lacking this, Columbians risk descending into the trope attributed to Katherine Graham after the 1972 election: "I can't understand how Nixon could have won: no one I know voted for him."

I do not deny that it is unsurprising that there are differences between Columbians and the country as a whole. But I suggest that if the vast majority of Columbia students were to express an opinion, say, against the equality of the races or sexes, that Mr. Frischberg and his ilk would not be so quick as to trumpet the virtue of such an opinion.

David G.D. Hecht '79, SIA '80
ALEXANDRIA, VA.

A Team Player

Thank you for the wonderful picture and article that appeared in the magazine about our son (Michael Merley) and the basketball team (CCT, May 2001). We were so surprised and happy for Michael that he was featured. He's a quiet warrior and a real team player who has that undaunted determination and drive to contribute to the good of the team. We have been so proud of him.

We have to admit that we tried to convince him to quit during his junior year, so he could concentrate on his academics. We didn't understand what was happening. It was the first time he had been on any team and not started, or at least played major minutes. He listened to our practical reasons for freeing up his time and letting his body heal up, and then he said that he really liked the group of guys on the team and that he felt like he was making a contribution to the team by staying and working with everyone. And even if he only got to play a few minutes, it was still fun for him. He'd like to have more minutes, of course! But he said he could see ahead in his life, and he could see the time coming that he wouldn't be on a team anymore. And he just couldn't see quitting, no matter what!

Our pride grew when we saw him interact with those other players on the team. Their successes were his successes. And we accepted his decision to stay on, even not being the "star." So, yes, we are very proud of the young man our son has become. We are also very proud of his work at Columbia, in the classroom, laboratory and on the team.

Mrs. Vicki Merley P'01
MESA, ARIZ.

More Chess at Columbia

Eliot Hearst '53's letter (CCT, December 2000) on the great chess teams at Columbia in his time (1949-53) deserves a postscript. We were also pretty good a few years later.

My brother Robin '62 (who died of cancer in 1994) and I arrived in 1958 as high-school chess hotshots from New Jersey. We had been informally recruited by a former chess rival, Pete Sager '61. When Pete showed us the chess closet in John Jay, we were hooked!

That December we took a crack at the National Intercollegiate Team Championship. By then I had sort of earned first board, while Robin was offered fourth board. This offended him, so he refused to play, allowing Pete the pleasure of traveling by train to Cleveland and being part of our mild whipping by the big boys (the winning Univ. of Chicago, Harvard with Shelby Lyman, etc.). Robin's boycott was temporary, for he kept playing, then went to Omaha next summer and won the U.S. Junior Championship, to the surprise of just about everyone except himself. But it was no fluke, for he repeated his victory the next year and again in 1961, an unprecedented three straight titles.

His first title earned him a place in the big-time U.S. Championship that winter, where he was beaten by Bobby Fischer and by everyone else. With him thus occupied, I went off to Penn State for the U.S. Intercollegiate Individual Championship and managed to win that. Next we set our sights on the Team Championship (in those days the individual and team events were held in alternate years). We had another solid player, our captain Joe Rosenstein '61, but figured we needed one more to have a serious chance. Fortunately we were able to persuade Mike Valvo '64E that Columbia was the place for him. So in December 1960 we went down to Princeton and beat out a tough Univ. of Toronto team to win the team title.

Dr. Hearst's comment about hoping to challenge the fencing team brought a chuckle, for I was also a fencer at Columbia and afterward. You can say there are similarities between chess and fencing, and I did feel my competitive chess experiences helped me to become a fairly good fencer. A few fencers, particularly Jamie Melcher '61, who went on to be several-time national epee champion) were willing to take me on over the chessboard and then retaliate by sticking it to me in fencing practice. But no one from the chess team ever came over to the gym to try me with swords. In later years when I would fence in alumni meets, "Mr. Fencing" Irwin Bernstein '54, after introducing a host of past NCAA fencing champions, would introduce me with: "and fencing epee, the former national intercollegiate champion in CHESS!" This naturally created even more panic and confusion in the ranks of the impressionable youngsters on the team as they prepared to face all the distinguished "Rusty Blades."

As for chess, my cohort didn't have the sustained top-level results as other Columbia chess teams. This was partly due to some casualness toward our matches. At times Robin chose not to play, and at other times I chose to fence instead. I also did things like drink a quart of beer before one match to see if it would make my play more aggressive, and disappear during a game to play intramural basketball, returning to finish the game a few minutes before my flag fell. If I recall correctly, I won those two games, but another time we scheduled a match for Sunday morning to accommodate some team visiting New York for the weekend. This was not long after I had won my title, and soon after I had gone to bed. I should've stayed there, for I suffered the dual indignities of losing in a dozen moves and having the game published in a national chess magazine. Our lack of sustained winning was also because our age differences meant our title-winning team was together for only one year, 1960-61. However, in that one year, way back when John Kennedy took office, Columbia had the distinction of being the U. S. Intercollegiate Team Champion and having the U. S. Junior Champion (Robin) and the U. S. Intercollegiate Individual Champion (myself), a unique trifecta!

Leslie Ault '62
CLOSTER, N.J.