The first time my writing in the college newspaper got me in hot water, I wasn’t prepared for the heat. Early in my freshman year (1965) at Union College, on deadline at the Concordiensis, the editor discovered we were short of copy and asked me to write a letter to the editor “about anything, but try to make it funny.” I wrote a sarcastic tribute to my overcrowded, no-frills dorm, North College, where the “lounge, located on the front steps, provides a superb meeting place,” “three are placed in a room meant for two with only one closet to provide a workshop for cooperation,” and “there are no screens on the windows so moths and other creatures may be observed at close hand.”
In case someone didn’t get the joke, I closed the letter with “But don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. After all, it’s ethnic.” On the folk music scene, ethnic meant authentic. Mississippi John Hurt and Doc Boggs were ethnic; The Kingston Trio and The Brothers Four were not. Mere effort could not make someone ethnic (except perhaps for Pete Seeger). The Smothers Brothers recognized this by naming an album Think Ethnic! We all got the joke.
The next day on the cafeteria line I overheard students quoting my letter and laughing. I had arrived. Back in North College, I received a message to see the Dean of Students. When I entered his office, the newspaper was opened to my letter.
“I hope you appreciate the humor,” I said nervously.
“No, I do not, and neither does the president.”
The president? “I wasn’t really complaining about the dorm; see, it says that at the end.”
“That’s exactly why you’re here. The last sentence. We take charges of anti-Semitism very seriously.”
Anti-Semitism?
The Dean went on to show me a chart of students in my dorm, pointing out all the non-Jewish sounding names. “We resent very much that you would accuse us of using an old, rundown building as an ethnic dorm.”
I tried to explain the folk connotation of ethnic, but he went on to tell me that I might not have been accepted had they not kept North College open. I almost asked why they would award a full scholarship to someone near the bottom of the list, but I didn’t want to further alienate the two most powerful administrators in my first semester.
(Incidentally, when fraternity rushing started, one of the houses focused on my section of North College. Everyone got at least one dinner invitation, except for me and the other Jews.)
By my junior year I had established myself as a campus activist, and was no longer worried about alienating administrators. Still, I had no idea I would enrage almost the entire college community with a heartfelt, moralistic piece of writing, which appeared Tuesday, April 30, 1968 on page three of the Concordiensis under the headline “Dutchman, Rape, Point to Needed Change.” The invitation to trouble began with the first sentence:
Union’s insensitivity stood out at the showing of Dutchman like an erection in the gym shower.
About that lead: After I had typed “insensitivity stood out last night…”, my inner editor said, “Tell insensitivity to sit down, because it doesn’t have a leg to stand on.” Then the simile offered itself, and I took it. I chuckled, figuring I’d remove it later, but I wound up leaving it in to lighten the tone of what had become a heavy piece. (Clearly, I hadn’t learned the ethnic lesson.) In the first section, I discussed a showing of the movie Dutchman:
“At every flash of thigh or suggestion of carnal activities, the ejaculations of laughter drowned out the next ten lines of dialogue….Behind the movie’s sexual façade was apparent the rotten core of the American illness…. but most of the Union men didn’t look this far for they were satisfied with the sexual façade.”
I segued to the aftermath of a rape that had been reported on campus:
The Scene: A dorm after the news has gotten around that a girl has just been raped on campus. Three students sit upset and bewildered that such a thing could have happened. They talk of the brutality and the inhumanity of it….Then the fragmented sounds from outside, that had only been half listened to before, solidify and permeate the consciousness of the three. And they realize that the guys are chanting: “Rape, rape, rape…” Over and over in a savage litany to the night….
“A girl, raped? All right! All right!”
“Hope a Union man did it.”
“Hey, did you do it? All right! All right!”
“Finally some action here.”
I closed this true vignette with a zinger:
Maybe a Union man didn’t rape that girl, but, man, most of them are probably only sorry that they didn’t get a chance to watch.
Unfair? Probably. But I was pissed, and I hoped it would cause readers to imagine the humanity behind these inhumane chants. I shifted to pontificating mode, referring to the ongoing debate about whether the all-male Union should become coeducational.
So, why is it like this and what do we do? For one thing....get girls here quick. Only when girls become part of the everyday environment will they be accepted and treated as people to whom you must relate fully, and not just as things.
Maybe then Union men will learn that the breasts are on the girl, and not that incidentally there is a girl attached to the breasts. And maybe they’ll learn that sex is much better when it is part of a full relationship.
The final section concerned the recent liberalization of Union’s “social rules.” For the first time, female visitors would be permitted in the dorms—but with a 2 a.m. curfew. To many students, this was liberating; I thought it would exacerbate bad attitudes:
“Screw ‘em and leave ‘em” [is] not only condoned by the social rules, [it is] legislated by them.
The time: 1:45 a.m. It is your third date with a girl. You are in your room. You have just had intercourse. She feels ambivalent and insecure and wants to hold on to you, talk to you. The alarm rings. You tell her to get dressed, it’s curfew time. You take her back to Skidmore and you both spend the night alone.
I thought perhaps the piece would cause a few ripples, but I was not prepared for the tsunami that followed. I took the bus down to the City on Wednesday to go to a concert, not knowing that the All College Council (a new governing body comprising administrators, faculty, and students) would take up the issue that evening. When I returned to Schenectady on Friday, Concordiensis’s banner headline revealed that the Council had voted to censure the editor for “editorial poor taste,” labeling my article “a slander of the whole College community.” The English Department professor who taught the only course in creative writing warned that “never again will indiscretions of this nature be tolerated.” The Dean of Faculty “expressed the concern that the college community outside the confines of the campus, the alumni and trustees, would be heartily distressed,” and, if no action were taken, pressure “would be severe.”
The editor was asked to apologize, and “if the situation repeats itself, further steps, such as the editor’s resignation, would be in order.” The student body president voted for the censure, though he stated he was “neither a Puritan nor an ultramoralist.” There was only one vote again the censure, from the editor of the school yearbook, who said, “The article’s defense need not sink to the level of defending freedom of speech, for….no matter how crude and obscene it appears to some, it cannot be accused of lying.” There was no comment from me because “Ziegler had departed for home earlier Wednesday afternoon.”
(Incidentally, at the same meeting, the All College Council voted not to recognize the Black Alliance but “emphasized the commitment of the white community to blacks.”)
Things got even more beguiling with the letters to the editor. Here are three, in their entirety.
Ziegler—just who do you think you are?
With less imagery and rhetoric Alan Ziegler might be able to write an article worthy of printing.
In the annals of journalism, Mr. Ziegler’s article stands out “like an erection in the gym shower."
Not all the letters were negative. An English professor, Sam Ullmann, pointed out that the Puritan was me. Some excerpts:
Mrs. Grundy has resurrected and is alive and well at Union College….For the first time in memory, a campus publication has printed an article in bad taste, not only likely to offend the fair sex but to make a manly man bite his mustachios in anger….Mr. Ziegler’s allegedly pornographic polemic was, in fact, merely a pungent piece of Puritanism….[The ACC objects] not to the bad taste of the students but to the bad taste of the editor for allowing his paper to call such behavior to the attention to its members….What made the offence still worse was that instead of using the usual embalming fluid of conventional journalism, Ziegler chose to vent his spleen in the style of a Norman Mailer. Inept abuse is tolerable, but metaphor menaces and must be shunned. Fie!”
(I have carried the phrase inept abuse is tolerable, but metaphor menaces and must be shunned with me ever since, quoting it in discussions about “voice” in writing.)
The editor didn’t apologize, and he was not asked to resign. I heard that some psychology students took my article to a senior citizens center to test the premise that it would “offend the little old ladies” of Schenectady (I don’t know if they used height and weight as criteria for selecting their sample). The ladies’ response—as reported to me—was a collective “right on!”
A couple of weeks later, the Concordiensis included a comic strip of me as a tiny Don Quixote, visiting the College president to demand that the school’s slogan be changed from Sous les lois de Minerve nous devenons tous frères (Under the laws of Minerva we all become brothers) to Entre les jambes de Minerve nous devenons tous frères (“Between the legs of Minerva we all become brothers”).
The following year, my words (and action) would get me into more trouble—including an arrest (with Sam Ullmann showing support by attending the trial)—but that’s for another story (upcoming in this space). For now, I will fast forward a few years, to one of my first published poems:
Now, I was one of the two people hurt because two other people (one of whom was my girlfriend) had sex, but I gave equal time to the unfaithful and placed it in The Village Voice. I got a phone call from a friend of my girlfriend’s, who said the words I’d always longed to hear: “I read your poem in The Voice.”
I expected her to praise my open-mindedness, but she went on: “And so did my boyfriend, who used it as the opportunity to tell me he was screwing someone else and, after reading your poem, he no longer feels guilty about it. Thanks a lot, troublemaker.”
Keep 'em coming, AZ. Can't tell you how much I'm enjoying these.
Posted by: jim c | December 08, 2014 at 11:14 AM
Alan Ziegler--
Are you the same Alan Ziegler who came into my 7th grade classroom at Wagner Junior High School in 1976 and started me on a lifetime of loving poetry and writing? I think I still have a poem I wrote in that workshop, and we even had a book of poems that you printed up and put together us, probably on a "rexograph" machine.
I teach freshman writing at NYU now. Can I get you to come and teach a class? Or can I at least treat you to a cup of coffee?
---Rina Rich
Posted by: [email protected] | December 08, 2014 at 11:48 AM
Rina,
Indeed I am the same (though perhaps the intervening 38 years have changed me a bit), and I remember you and your work! I still have the Wagner book. Let's follow up by email: [email protected].
Posted by: Alan Ziegler | December 08, 2014 at 12:22 PM
jim c,
This means so much to me, and pieces will keep coming!
Posted by: Alan Ziegler | December 08, 2014 at 12:23 PM