(The author, a sophomore at Columbia, was advised by his legal counsel to use a pseudonym. This article will be continued tomorrow.)

Columbia used to be called King's College. They changed the name in 1783 because they wanted to be patriotic and Columbia means America. This week we've been finding out what America means.

Every morning now when I wake up I have to run through the whole thing in my mind. I have to do that because I wake up in a familiar place that isn't what it was. I wake up and I see blue coats and brass buttons all over the campus. ("Brass buttons, blue coat, can't catch a nanny goat" goes the Harlem nursery rhyme.) I start to go off the campus but then remember to turn and walk two blocks uptown to get to the only open gate. There I squeeze through the three-foot "out" opening in the police barricade, and I feel for my wallet to be sure I've got the two I.D.'s necessary to get back into my college. I stare at the cops. They stare back and see a red armband and long hair and they perhaps tap their nightsticks on the barricade. They're looking at a radical leftist.

I wasn't always a radical leftist. Although not altogether straight, I'm not a hair person either, and ten days ago I was writing letters to Kokomo, Indiana, for Senator McCarthy; my principal association with the left was that I rowed port on crew. But then I got involved in this movement and one thing led to another. I am not a leader, you understand. But leaders cannot seize and occupy buildings. It takes great numbers of people to do that. I am one of those great numbers. This article is the chronicle of a single revolutionary digit.

MONDAY, APRIL 22 -- A mimeograph has appeared around the campus charging SDS with using coercion to gain its political ends. SDS is for free speech for itself only, it is charged. SDS physically threatens the administration. SDS breaks rules with impunity while we (undefined) are subject to dismissal for tossing a paper airplane out a dorm window. Aren't you TIRED, TIRED, TIRED of this? Will Mark Rudd be our next Dean? Do something about it. Come to the SDS rally tomorrow and be prepared. At first anonymous, the leaflet reappears in a second edition signed Students for a Free Campus. The jocks have done it again. As with last spring's anti-Marine demonstrations, threats of violence from the right will bring hundreds of the usually moderate to the SDS ranks just to align themselves against jock violence. I personally plan to be there, but I'm not up tight about it. At the boat house, a guy says he's for the jock position. Don't get me wrong, I say, I'm not against beating up on a few pukes, I just don't think you should stoop to their level by mimeographing stuff. We both go out and kill ourselves trying to row a boat faster than eight students from MIT will be able to.

TUESDAY, APRIL 23 -- Noon. At the sundial are 500 people ready to follow Mark Rudd (whom they don't particularly like because he always refers to President Kirk as "that shit-head"), into the Low Library administration building to conduct a demonstration against IDA and the gym and test Kirk's anti--indoor demonstration edict. There are around 100 counter-demonstrators. They are what Trustee Arthur Hays Sulzberger's newspaper refers to as "burly white youths" or "students of considerable athletic attainment"--jocks. Various deans and other father surrogates separate the two factions. Low Library is locked. For lack of a better place to go we head for the site of the gym in Morningside Park, chanting Gym Crow must go. I do not chant because I don't like chanting.

I have been noncommittal to vaguely against the gym, but now I see the site for the first time. There is excavation cutting across the whole park. It's really ugly. And there's a chain link fence all around the hole. I don't like fences anyway so I am one of the first to jump on it and tear it down. Enter the NYPD. One of them grabs the fence gate and tries to shut it. Some demonstrators grab him. I yell let that cop go, partly because I feel sorry for the cop and partly because I know that the nightsticks will start to flagellate on our heads, which indeed they do. One of my friends goes down and I pull him out. He's on adrenalin now and tries to get back at the cops but I hold him, because I hit a cop at Whitehall and I wished I hadn't very shortly thereafter. After the usual hassle order is restored and the cops let Rudd mount a dirt pile to address us. As soon as he starts to talk he is drowned out by jack hammers but at the request of the police they are turned off. Rudd suggests we go back to the sundial and join with 300 demonstrators there, but we know that he couldn't possibly know whether there are 300 demonstrators there and we don't want to leave. He persists and we defer.

Like Pavlov's Dog

Back at the sundial there is a large crowd. It's clear we've got something going. An offer comes from Vice President Truman to talk with us in McMillan Theatre but Rudd, after some indecision, refuses. It seems we have the initiative and Truman just wants to get us in some room and bullshit 'til we all go back to sleep. Someone suggests we go sit down for awhile in Hamilton, the main college classroom building, and we go there. Sitting down turns to sitting in, although we do not block classes. Rudd asks, "Is this a demonstration?" "Yes!" we answer, all together. "Is it indoors?" "Yes!"

An immediate demand is the release of the one student arrested at the park, Fred Wilson, who might as well be named John Everyman, because nobody knows him. To reciprocate for Fred's detention Dean Coleman is held hostage.

At four o'clock like Pavlov's dog I go to crew, assuring a long-hair at the door that I'll be back. At practice, it is pointed out to me that the crew does not have as many wasps as it should have according to the population percentage of wasps in the nation, so don't I think that crew should be shut down? I answer no, I don't think crew should be shut down.

Back at school at eight I prepare to spend the night at Hamilton. My friend Rock is there. We decide that we are absolutely bound to meet some girls or at least boys since there are 300 of them in the lobby. Every ten minutes he yells to me, "Hey, did you make any friends yet?" I say no each time, and he says that he hasn't either but that he's bound to soon.

I go upstairs to reconnoiter and there is none other than Peter Behr of Linda LeClair fame chalking on the wall, "'Up against the wall, motherfucker,' from a poem by Leroi Jones." I get some chalk and write "I am sorry about defacing the walls, but babies are being burned and men are dying and this university is at fault quite directly." Also I draw some SANE symbols and then at 2:30 a.m. go to sleep.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24 -- 5:30 a.m. Someone just won't stop yelling that we've got to get up, that we're leaving, that the blacks have asked us to leave. I get up and leave. The column of evicted whites shuffles over to Low Library. A guy in front rams a wooden sign through the security office side doors and about 200 of us rush in. Another 150 hang around outside because the breaking glass was such a bad sound. They become the first "sundial people." Inside we rush up to Kirk's office and someone breaks the lock. I am not at all enthusiastic about this and suggest that perhaps we ought to break up all the Ming Dynasty art that's on display while we're at it. A kid turns on me and says in a really ugly way that the exit is right over there. I reply that I am staying, but that I am not a sheep and he is.

Rudd calls us all together. He looks very strained. He elicits promises from the Spectator reporters in the crowd not to report what he is about to say. Then he says that the blacks told us to leave Hamilton because they do not feel that we are willing to make the sacrifices they are willing to make. He says that they have carbines and grenades and that they're not leaving. I think that's really quite amazing.