August 19, 2014--Googling Oneself

A guilty pleasure that I confess to is occasionally googling myself. All right, checking at least once a month.

I rationalize this act of vanity as one way to see if my Web-presence has been contaminated by hackers. Actually, it's really to see how many times I am listed on Google (OK, how many pages it takes to list all my listings) and to check if anything interesting has been said about me via the Internet. All right, to see anything that's been added during the past month.

And also, less frequently (3 or 4 times a year), I check my virtual presence in the New York Times database. As a digital subscriber I am able to find any mention of me back to 1883, not the year of my birth announcement.

Being mentioned in the Times is a big deal to me. Read what I say about the NYT just to the right of this below my now out-of-date picture. The thing about my father and me and how the Times every morning was one of the few ways in which we communicated with each other. Etc.

Killing time Saturday morning I checked in with the New York Times. There were my occasional published letters to the editor and a quote or two from the days when I was responsible for education grant-making at the Ford Foundation.

But for some reason, via the TimesMachine, I thought to look up reports from early 1969 when I was a young administrator at Queens College, during the time when a coalition of black and Puerto Rican students occupied the campus, demanding that administrators of the SEEK program, a special admissions and scholarship program for minority students, who were white (virtually all of us were) be fired and replaced by people of color.

In many ways I agreed with the demands, feeling, though, that I was an exception and should be the one white administrator to be retained since . . . . well, you know. I was that young and naive.

I seemed to remember that I was mentioned in at least one of the articles covering the months of events that eventually led to violence. And sure enough, on January 14, 1969, I indeed was. In an article about SEEK students invading the office of the director and in a symbolic act (at least at the time I thought it was symbolic), since the president and deans were was not agreeing to the students' demand that the SEEK director be fired, they moved all his office furniture and telephones out into the street.

I recall being there at the time and acting heroically, trying to talk them out of doing this and urging the students to seek to negotiate peacefully with the dean of the college to whom the SEEK program director reported. I even offered to help.

But, according to the Times, my behavior was a little more--how shall I put this--ambiguous.

Quoting--

When the intruders arrived and swarmed into the office, Steven Zwerling, assistant director, escorted three women assistants outside, foresaking any attempt to thwart the invasion. He noted that the demonstrators carefully avoided harming anyone in the office or even touching them.

As an old English major I did a little textual analysis--

Intruders first arrived, then swarmed, and after that morphed into invaders and eventually demonstrators. I failed to thwart the invasion, forsaking any attempt, but did step up to escort to safety three damsels in distress. Though, according to my New York Times, it appears that was unnecessary since, as I apparently told the reporter, no one was harmed much less touched.

Well, at least they spelled my name correctly.

And, yes, the director resigned a month later. A few weeks after that he was replaced by a black professor of psychology, and shortly thereafter I and all the other white administrators were fired.