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Thursday, May 25, 2006 | Another World

YESTERDAY I shared a little about the history of Squire Student Union, which had been the heart of the University at Buffalo until it was closed in late 1981. The atmosphere of the building, the way the light poured in through the high windows everywhere, the fireplaces, and the way the space was organized to create both focus and flow, provided an environment where students were self-aware of being a community and a relevant part of the university.

Squire Hall (originally called Norton Union) replaced an older union (the old Norton Union, later called Harriman Hall) when the campus outgrew the original, and it was an architectural masterpiece, funded by a special private endowment (not the by state) and was designed to serve its purpose beautifully.

One of my favorite details of Squire was the blue tile archway that surrounded the enormous main doors at the two ends of the place. The central corridor through the building was a place thousands of people would walk through on the way to someplace else, just because they could. On the outside, at either end, the bands of royal blue (the school color) that surrounded the doors, were about six feet wide and rose high over the doors to just below the second story windows. About four or five different shades of blue tile were used in a mosaic, composed of one inch squares, with occasional white ones interspersed. When sunlight hit the face of the building, it would reflect a bluer-than-blue color that would vibrate out a peaceful, loving energy you could see glowing a mile away, inviting you nearer and then inviting you in. The union was open to the campus community and was the meeting point where student life and city life merged.

I never noticed how the bluer-than-blue effect was created with a mosaic until I had a piece of the edifice on my desk after it had been torn down.

When I first visited the campus when I was about 16, Squire was the impression the campus made on me. When I arrived as a first year student a year later, the union would exist for just one more semester. I've always regretted that I had not been at the university longer when there was a true home-space for student life, but visiting this past week, I realized how fortunate I was that I had experienced it at all. Having seen, felt and with the help of mentors, understood the role of the union, I could take a piece of that spirit with me into my own student organizing work and then on what I knew would be a long journey into the future.

For years, Generation, the magazine I founded and edited, was located next to Squire, and we slowly watched the building be torn apart and gutted for a new dental school facility.

Even though a new campus was being built out in Amherst, I had no desire at all to move the Generation offices out there. Besides the fact that we loved our space, it seemed a betrayal to remove the last really strong student organization from the old campus. I also knew we wouldn't get any decent space on the new campus, particularly since the administration refused to even plan for a new student union, despite the constant pressure that a group of us were exerting on them year after year. Instead, student organizations were being scattered around the new campus in a "non-centralized" arrangement. The term non-centralized was another word for "riot proof."

Memories of Squire were still fresh in the institutional memory. The centralized student union had become a kind of fortification against police during antiwar protests, particularly during the tumultuous spring of 1970 -- when students were shot at Kent State, Jackson State, and on our campus as well.

The short version of that story is that in April, Richard Nixon announced that he had secretly been bombing Cambodia, a neighbor of Vietnam. This revelation set off a wave of protests that led to nearly a third of campuses in the US being shut down early by their administrations; Buffalo was eventually shut down early and everyone sent home without academic penalty. In the midst of this, National Guardsmen opened fire on students at Kent State University, killing four, who happened to be pedestrians or photographers. The Kent State deaths, memorialized in the Neil Young song "Ohio," set off yet another wave of protests around the country.

You know the words. They go:

Tin soldiers and Nixons coming
We're finally on our own...

Next to my office in the basement of Harriman was a weird little room wedged into a corner, and somehow a collection of old copies of Buffalonian, the campus yearbook, had been dumped there when parts of Squire were moved. Among these were dozens of copies of the 1970 edition, which to this day remains one of my favorite printed works ever (and which I just put my hands on tonight -- I had it stashed at a friend's house in New Paltz, my current stop). The yearbook documents much of this history in photographs and long captions describing the scenes. The cover is a stylized image of Prometheus carrying his fire, brilliantly appropriate for the times.

In running a student organization on the campus in the 1980s, I was fully aware that I was the inheritor of a legacy. I knew that despite the times having changed and the campus, indeed, all campuses, being extremely quiet at that time, it was my responsibility to keep that flame alive and pass it on. Others had passed the flame to me, including Reg Gilbert, who I mentioned yesterday, as well as my American Studies professor Michael Frisch, who had spent hours showing me photographs and news cuttings he had saved, and explaining the politics of activism and citizen participation in the world.

Photos of Squire from that era look like a scene from a war, with police cars and ambulances parked outside, as well as a K-9 corps truck, and riot police standing next to the entrance. The words "Off Themis" are graffitied onto those gorgeous blue tiles -- a reference to an underwater military program that was being developed on the campus at the time.

In other photos, hundreds of city riot police are seen parading around like soldiers, with the campus described in the yearbook as an "armed camp." The decision to bring in city police, made by interim president Peter Regan, was a big one -- SUNY has a long tradition of only allowing its own [then unarmed] Public Safety officers on campus.

Student Association meetings, held in an enormous lounge or a gymnasium, were packed with participants, and the expressions on students' faces were determined and intense. There was not an inch of space to move. Students voted, on a "polity" basis (that is, everyone participates in the vote -- not just elected student reps) for a university-wide strike, and formed a peace patrol. The yearbook reports that three members of the peace patrol "were beaten by the police and others threatened by more radical factions of the university" and as a result, it was soon disbanded. Around this time, the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) was thrown off campus by the faculty as a protest against the war in Vietnam, and as a statement that the university would be used for peaceful purposes only. In another episode from that spring, 40 young professors took over the office of college president Peter Regan, protesting the police presence, and were arrested.

It is difficult to describe the sense of commitment, urgency and passion of the campus community. It is more difficult to understand the energy beneath it, pushing it upwards. But in the dedication to the yearbook, the editors summed it up well. The '70 edition is dedicated to Linda T. Hanley, who was editor of the campus newspaper, The Spectrum, and to Dorothy M. Haas, the student union director and a rather extraordinary member of the administration.

"Contemporary reality breeds an atmosphere for crisis," the dedication begins. "It is during these critical times that a whole society becomes a pressurized system of conflicting roles. American culture has, indeed, experienced the full impact of such moments.

"One manifestation of modern crisis is the campus riot. The Buffalo campus has crossed the threshold into this relatively new phenomenon. As a result, attention has been focused on the student media and the student union."

Referring to Linda Hanley's writing, it says: "It was when the administration's phantom-like authority made Hayes Hall [the admin building] nothing more than a facade, her controversial editorials gave an outraged student community a voice in the affairs of the university. These same editorials proved that today's student realizes that a university is an important instrument for social change; and that requests for change cannot be met with administrative belligerency. Negotiation can hardly be considered an unreasonable demand."

What they are saying here is that students, angry at the way the world was going, demanded a role in the governance of the entire university -- not, for example, what was served for lunch or what movies were shown. This participation they viewed as taking a role in the wider world, understanding that universities are institutions that have traditionally been influential in many societies around the world. They continue:

"The Spectrum's in-depth analysis and interpretation of the rapidly succeeding events gave an otherwise chaotic situation some kind of direction and coherence. It was this kind of scope that the paper possessed throughout the year...It is during times of crisis that social responsibility of individuals is increased. By placing emerging trends of the university into an understandable social context, Linda Hanley has displayed the new consciousness of the contemporary student. It is this consciousness that will, hopefully, regain the integrity and relevance of the university in America."

SO, READERS of Planet Waves: That was then. This is now. The planets have moved. The Uranus-Pluto conjunction is long gone (except in many of our natal charts). Squire Student Union may have been taken from students, plastered over till it was unrecognizable, and its blue edifice torn down and replaced with galvanized aluminum panels. Its enormous welcoming doors may have been blocked, its fireplaces torn down, and its marble floors replaced with synthetic tiles. Maybe there's a sterilization unit where the bowling alley used to be.

The University is an idea, not a campus or a building. It is the idea that we are free to think, to gather, to make inquiries, and to form communities that are based on learning, personal growth and exploration. We don't need to be spiritual, only to recognize that we are free to seek understanding, to express ourselves, and to take a role in the way our world is run, because it is our world, if we remember.

Or as Jude put it so eloquently yesterday in Political Waves, "Seriously -- if there's a pony in all of this horseshit, somebody better trot him out NOW!"

That pony...would be us.