CLASS OF 1953 WHO'S WHO & WHERE - The City College Fund

them. I gulped. What to say? Did I know? Maybe I drew unconsciously on the Socratic method ofteaching, or maybe I was just fumbling, but I asked a question: “Suppose we don’t get bombed out ofexistence, how will you feel afterward if you have to live with your decision?” They looked at eachother rather sheepishly and held hands, then turned to me, said “Thanks” and walked out. Next weekthe crisis was over, and I never asked. But I’ll never forget that moment.The next year, in November 1963, still located uptown, I was walking between classes from the newsouth campus to the old north campus when I passed some students at a car with the radio on. In shock,they were repeating, “He’s dead.” Within minutes we heard the gong of a huge bell sounding from thetower atop Shepard Hall. Buell Gallagher had mounted that long-unused staircase and was pulling thebell rope. We counted: forty-six rings for the forty-six years of life now cut short for President John F.Kennedy. That tolling remains glued in my memory!My experience at the downtown campus was also broadening. Uptown, students learned English literature;downtown they learned world literature, and I was able, for the first time, to employ what I hadstudied of Greek drama and Latin literature at Columbia. Later, I would introduce those courses atYork.1966-92: Work on my dissertation had gone slowly, as I had grabbed every extra opportunity to supportmy family, including ghost editing other dissertations and teaching part-time at schools like Berlitz,because my instructor’s salary at CCNY excluded paychecks during the summer. Moreover, my doctoraterequired passing tests in translation of French, German, and Latin. The French—after some solidreview of what I had learned in high school, had got me through my Masters. And now, I wished I hadcompleted the BA with Latin at City; but I studied it on my own and took a summer course in Cicero,and managed to pass it; then, drawing on some of the Yiddish I had studied with Max Weinreich atCity (studied so that Vera’s family couldn’t talk about me behind my back right in front of my eyes),and taking another extra course in German medieval literature (taught in German) to strengthen one ofmy doctoral areas of concentration, I passed the German test, translating Heinrich Heine.But all this had slowed me down, and I was writing a dissertation that should have included review ofmaterials buried in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. I could no more afford to go to England than to themoon. And sure enough, as I was nearing completion of a first draft, an English woman, wife of a barristerand bearing the title “Lady,” produced a book published by Oxford University Press that containedmy essential thesis, but was bolstered by those previously unpublished scraps from the Bodleian. InAmerican universities, we declared thesis topics well in advance and so, were safeguarded against suchcompetition by a central checking agency, but not against a non-university student working independentlyabroad. My thesis advisors asked, “What will you write instead?” I pulled out one section of thedissertation and examined its materials in greater detail. I launched an expansion of that towards dissertationlength. So as I approached reappointment in late 1964, I was warned that I probably wouldnot be reappointed for 1965. A new department administration had been voted in and they were likelyto go for well-published hot shots. Whatever was left of my earlier reputation among out-of-powersenior faculty at City had lost the glow of wunderkind and I acknowledged that I needed a new beginningelsewhere.The colleges of The College of the City of New York, which had included The City College of-, TheHunter College of-, The Brooklyn College of-, and The Queens College of-, were now combined andexpanded with community college campuses to become The City University of New York. I appliedfor and got a position at the suddenly expanding Queensborough Community College (so I was still inCUNY). After a year, I was invited to head the evening division of its Department of English. The followingyear, 1966, the president of QCC was named to head a new senior college, which would eventuallybe called York, and he invited me and a half dozen other QCC functionaries to join him. We