Stephen Joel Trachtenberg

Thank you. And I know I speak for all of us when I say it is a pleasure and honor to renew old friendships and rekindle wonderful memories of our coming together 49 years ago as Columbia celebrates its 250th year as an institution of higher learning.

A quarter millennium ago, under the name of King's College, with a mission that is still as fresh as it was in 1754—"The Instruction and Education of Youth in the Learned Languages and Liberal Arts and Sciences"—eight students enrolled in the first class of what would later become Columbia College. I realize we share three common bonds with that first class.

First, they were all men. Second, they all cherished this institution. And third, they are all still receiving fundraising solicitations from the alumni office.

Today, like many of you, I'm wearing a pair of bifocals—eyeglasses that give me the dual perspective that allows me to read my notes and view my classmates with equal clarity. But I am also wearing another set of bifocals, internal lenses that give me a dual perspective of recollection: one is a set of personal memories of the class of 1959. The other set of images are my observations of my older son's experiences at Columbia.

You see, since September of 1955, I have paid for the equivalent of 12 years of credit hours, fees, and dormitory rooms to Columbia.

Eight semesters were for my own undergraduate education.
Eight for my son Adam's undergraduate education as a member of the College class of 1997.
Another four more semesters for Adam's MBA degree, received from the business school in 2002.
And finally—well, nearly finally—I have put down four of the required six semesters of tuition for my son Ben's law degree, due, God willing, next May, in the spring of 2005.

So far, I've carried an umbrella to the first three commencement ceremonies, each time recalling the words of that old college adage "After soaking you for all this tuition, why not soak you for one more day!"

I've paid my Columbia dues, so to speak, and with those dues come the observations of half a century of university life. As you may recall, as an undergraduate, I was actively engaged in campus activities—on the staff of the Spectator, in my fraternity, Zeta Beta Tau, in the prelaw society, and as a member of the infamous Senior Society of Sachems, an organization I'm sworn to secrecy not to talk about!

I enjoyed college life so much that I figured out a way to remain on university campuses as an adult, first as a dean and vice president at Boston University, then as president at the University of Hartford, and for the past 16 years, at The George Washington University, where I am president and professor of public administration. Not that I'm counting, but that translates to nearly sixty commencement ceremonies, not including the one we shared in 1959.

The road from Manhattan's Morningside Heights to Washington's Foggy Bottom has been, contrary to what that nomenclature implies, an upward journey. Academia has been enormously challenging, intellectually engaging, though certainly, at times, stressful. My job continues to bring me more and more satisfaction as the years go along. And when I think of the reasons why and what it takes to serve successfully as an effective university administrator, I find that four traits are most critical:

The physical stamina to withstand the relentless 24/7 demands of the job.
An unfailing sense of humor to deal with faculty meetings, especially when the subjects at hand are teaching loads and faculty parking.
An ironic streak, especially when listening to students with no knowledge of history explaining how the world has come to this sorry state.
And most of all, a Columbia College education.

I was a history major at Columbia, the perfect, all-purpose course of study that prepared me to enter law school—general enough for a well-rounded fellow, specific enough for thoughtful conversation. Yet in later life I found that much more important to me than my major was the overall four-year broad-based liberal arts education I received at the College. For it was the rigor of Contemporary Civilization and the Humanities and other Core requirements that prepared me during my tenure as an academic administrator to converse easily with the chairs of physics, mathematics, anthropology, and economics; hire professors of foreign language, English, engineering, and business; and to sign off on grant applications for biological research, public policy initiatives, and art history programs.

Columbia's education gave me an appreciation for worlds old and new—for the classical Greeks and the modern Europeans, for the medieval Church and the contemporary arts, for scientific theory and political postulates, and most of all, for a respect for the infinite ways scholars and students learn about the world.

Since our days on campus, Columbia has broadened the Core in general and Contemporary Civilization in particular. Today, there are readings well beyond those written by "dead white males," included in the syllabus, more selections in "CC" and the humanities of non-Western literature . . . but the basic approach is the same: use primary texts, start as far back in history as you can, work your way to the modern age, and provide first-rate faculty to draw the meaning of life out of undergraduates through robust discussion.

Just as the curriculum has changed but still remains constant to the original vision and mission of the college, the transformation of the life of a Columbia College student over the past 45 years is a metaphor for the transformation of American society during that same period. My son Adam's experiences at Columbia are not his father's. We share an appreciation for the timeless values of Columbia, but there are many differences between our years on campus—political, sociological, cultural and scientific differences; different approaches to the organization of information, knowledge, and life patterns; different viewpoints that express the broad-brush changes in American society and the world order.

Let me cite some examples of what I mean. The words of the campus vocabulary have new meanings.

Diversity For someone who grew up in Brooklyn, diversity in 1959 meant a Republican from the Bronx. For my son, diversity meant three roommates, one from Bangladesh, another from Belarus, and the third from the other side of the world, Buffalo, New York.

For the class of 1959, travel usually meant the IRT with a change, perhaps, to the BMT if you were going home to Brighton Beach. Two-thirds of our classmates' families lived within fifty miles of campus. Today, the globalization of academia is profound. One hundred and fifty countries are represented on today's Columbia campus. Students are exposed to all sides of political discourse, they travel around the world almost as easily as we hopped on the subway, and they can read newspaper editorials electronically from the other side of globe with a click of the mouse.

Coeducation For a Columbia College man in the class of 1959, coeducation meant crossing Broadway to date someone at Barnard. I don't know how many members of our class married a Barnard "girl" (remember, no females who were not old enough to be our mothers were referred to as women in those days), but it is probably safe to say that at least 75 percent of our class dated a Barnard girl, eating and drinking at the West End Bar and the V&T Pizza Restaurant. If one was particularly adventurous, coeducation also included a weekend trip north to Skidmore, Smith, or Bennington. If time was of the essence, however, one ventured south to Hunter College.

For my son, coeducation meant a suite composed of nine single rooms of five females and four males, arranged in a two-story duplex, with a common room, a small galley kitchen and two miniscule bathrooms designed, I am convinced, by the same engineers who work for Boeing, for no one else could fit a shower, toilet and sink into such a small space.

Our 1959 class of all men has been reconfigured today to about fifty percent men and fifty percent women. And, along with changes in the student body, of course, the faculty has changed as well, both in terms of gender and color. As a result, Columbia's demographics are more complex, their admissions and hiring practices more egalitarian, and their educational conversation more robust.

Fittingly, some things have not changed. The football team, never a threat to win the Ivy League crown in our era, managed to lose 44 consecutive games in the 1980s, demonstrating that a school that boasts Jack Kerouac among its most famous undergraduate football players is not likely to be highlighted on ESPN's Sports Center.

But the gridiron is the exception. Look at the political events of this period and the effect on our campus from our time to today.

In 1959 the Iron Curtain was closing around Eastern Europe and our political enemies, led by the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, were clearly defined for us by the federal government and the mass media. Sympathizers to anything on the Left had worries about future job hires and possibly even admission to graduate school. The old quotas used for exclusion by religion were now expanded to include political litmus tests. The Army-McCarthy hearings had long tentacles that affected faculty and administrators on Morningside Heights.

But for the student body of the 1950s, by and large, the issues were not so much the tightening of the Iron Curtain around Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet tanks suppressing the Hungarian uprising in 1956, but rather the opening of employment doors in Lower and Midtown Manhattan. We were going out to graduate school or the job market at a time when scholarship and employment possibilities in the business and academic worlds were expanding, and the Red Scare was one more burden we had to overcome, along with academic credentials and religious and ethnic quotas.

Less than a decade after we graduated, Columbia experienced the wrenching years of the Vietnam War protests. Few of us can ever forget the siege on the steps of Low Library in the spring of 1968, the voice and words of Mark Rudd, and the closing down of the university for eight days from late April to early May.

The actions of the student-led demonstrations irrevocably altered the dialogue on campus, galvanizing faculty, administrators, and alumni. Ultimately, the events held that spring resulted in the resignation of Grayson Kirk, the rise of new alumni and faculty committees, and was the beginning of the end of the Columbia career of David Truman, the distinguished faculty member only recently appointed by President Grayson Kirk to serve as provost of the university.

Columbia was torn apart by the tripartite actions of the students, the administration, and the faculty, actions caused by the mixture of passion, politics, intransigence, and hubris. The ties between the infamous antiestablishment Weathermen and Columbia College are numerous: Mark Rudd was in the class of '69, though he was expelled from the college before graduation. Theodore Gold, class of '68, died in 1970 in the explosion of the bomb-making materials in the West 11th Street townhouse.

When Grayson Kirk accused Mark Rudd and his fellow demonstrators of being "nihilists," Rudd replied by quoting back lessons learned during his early days as a Columbia student: Rudd said,

Your cry of "nihilism" represents your inability to understand our positive values. If you were ever to go into a freshman CC class you would see that we are seeking a rational basis for society. We do have a vision of the way things could be: how the tremendous resources of our economy could be used to eliminate want, how people in other countries could be free from your domination, how a university could produce knowledge for progress, not waste, consumption and destruction. . . .These are positive values, but since they mean the destruction of your order, you call them "nihilism."

I spent those tumultuous years at Boston University, serving as a primary negotiator with that campus's student radicals. With tensions high and a ring of Boston Tactical Police surrounding the building, I was asked to come in and work out a settlement with student radicals who had occupied the student-union center for three days.

First, I was asked by the students to appear in front of the group with a paper bag over my head so that I would be unable to recognize (and perhaps later testify against) any of the protestors. I helpfully suggested that if this was a major issue, even it if took more paper bags, they could all cover their heads. After two hours, we agreed to talk face-to-face—the only civilized way I knew at the time to carry on reasonable discourse.

The next demand was that I end the war in Vietnam. I immediately agreed.

"Granted?" shouted the students, "You have no authority to end the war!" "Ah," I replied, "I must since you just asked me to do so!" I was inside with the students for almost 48 hours discussing authority and responsibility and who controls what on campus, in America, and in life in general. Wartime rhetoric had led to broad-based philosophical meanderings about the meaning of life. Once again, a Columbia education came to my rescue.

My son's era at Columbia had no Iron Curtain and no Vietnam. But from our school, he, like the rest of us, experienced the birth of domestic terrorism—a war on our soil, a war more insidious than anything we have known in decades. Adam was on campus on 9/11 as the smoke from Battery Park floated overhead. Within hours of the World Trade Center tragedy, Columbia University students, faculty, and staff were lined up for blocks outside St. Luke's Hospital waiting to donate blood. His business school classmates were numb with the thoughts that only recently many of them had exchanged their cubicles in the World Trade Center for study carrels on campus.

We don't know what profound effect 9/11 and the War on Terror will have on Columbia College, any more than we could have guessed what the Cold War would have meant in 1948, or Vietnam in 1965. But one constant during the last 45 years and throughout the history of Columbia is the outstanding cadre of teachers who have shared their wisdom with generations of students. In 1959 many were famous scholars whose names were known far beyond the gates of Morningside Heights: Lionel Trilling, Meyer Shapiro, I. I. Rabi, Jacques Barzan, Richard Hofstadter, Mark Van Doren, Robert Merton, Walter Metzger, David Truman, Henry Graff, Ernst Nagel, Charles Frankel, James Shenton, and so many others. And if I may be permitted a personal indulgence, I always thought that Bernard Wishy deserved tenure.

To remind you how serious and even daunting these professionals could seem, let me quote from the 1959 yearbook about James Shenton's course on the Civil War, History 91-92:

It is not an experience for the weak, the pulpy, the intellectually flabby. From September to May, a Darwinian selection is at work—laggards fall by the wayside, dilettantes are ruthlessly crushed.

It is a particular pleasure that the picture on the same page of the yearbook shows me sitting, hands folded, next to Shenton himself, a cigar between my fingers.

Yes, we benefited from the wisdom of these faculty members. But Columbia's educational experience could also be a burden. I am reminded of Dean Nick McKnight's remark to us during our first week as freshmen. He said, "Look around you. Somewhere, seated among you, is a future Nobel Prize winner." I don't know about you, but for years I carried the burden of that charge on my shoulders. Occasionally, as I shaved, I could see reflected before me the King of Sweden draping the medal around my neck. Time went by, and I began to realize that it was maybe not going to me after all. So you can imagine my relief when I read that our classmate, Roald Hoffmann, had won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1981. I wrote to congratulate him and thank him for taking a great weight off my mind.

A concluding story. Several years ago, the Emerson String Quartet played in my home when they were in residence at the University of Hartford. The dean of the music school introduced each member of the quartet to our guests and then he also introduced my son Adam, who at age 10 had recently begun to study the cello. The dean said, "And here is Adam Trachtenberg, great-grandson of the concertmaster and cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich." Adam looked stunned, as did his parents, for we have no family connection whatsoever to Rostropovich! But then the dean went on to say, "Rostropovich is the teacher of the Emerson Quartet cellist, David Finkel, and Finkel is the teacher of Lisa Prevanic, a graduate student at the university, who in turn is the teacher of Adam Trachtenberg. And that makes Adam Rostropovich's musical great-grandson."

Well, if I use that same analogy, then I am the great grandson of John Dewey, for I studied with . . . who studied with . . . who was a student of Dewey. And for that matter, we are all the sons, grandsons and great-grandsons of the great and near-great faculty members of Columbia. We are also the descendants of King's College, the legacy of the founding fathers of this university—John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, Alexander Hamilton; we are the students of Lionel Trilling, Mark Van Doren, and Meyer Shapiro, and we are the classmates of each other. Those ties of kinship bind us together, and to an obligation to further the intellectual tradition we share.

In his book, Captain Newman, M.D., Leo Rosten writes, "Most men debase 'the pursuit of happiness' by transforming it into a narcotic pursuit of 'fun.' But there are those sublimely cursed by discontent, and to them happiness comes only when they push their brains and hearts to the farthest reaches of which they are capable. Nothing is more rewarding than the effort a man makes to matter—to count, to stand for something, to have it make some difference that he lived at all. "

The class of 1959 matters; we have "pushed our brains and hearts to the farthest reaches." Our deeds undertaken on behalf of others are noteworthy. But equally important, are the relationships found here, in this room, about the men of Columbia College, and by extension, among our families and significant others. Each tie we have to this great school binds us closer together, and for me, nothing binds me more to Columbia than do the friendships I made 45 years ago, so many of which have lasted to this day. For only you, my college classmates, know me for what I truly am: a student Peter Pan who never wanted to grow up. From Morningside Heights to Foggy Bottom; from convocation to commencement; year after year, after year, after year, I've had my wish and it has been a joy.

T. S. Eliot has written, "We're all explorers, destined to continue our exploration 'until we arrive at the place where we began and know it for the first time.'" May you all live to be 120 and may the last voice you hear be mine.

Thank you.