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Shortly after the second massive police raid at Morningside Heights, David Shapiro, 21, walked into the office of the Columbia College dean, ripped up his new Phi Beta Kappa certificate, and said: ";I'm ashamed of this university." A self-styled "fellow traveler" of the S.D.S., Shapiro is also a poet who writes of the need for tenderness and love in life and insists that "wonderful things can still happen in this country."
The son of a Newark physician, he played violin under Leopold Stokowski at 16, had his first book of poems (January) published as a college freshman; he has written a play, a short novel and an opera, this spring won the university's prestigious Kellett fellowship for graduate study. Shapiro's Jewish grandfather emigrated from Russia to avoid both the draft and the pogroms; David says that if his draft board calls him, he might leave the country rather than serve.
Shapiro believes that U.S. society tries to put people into one-dimensional motivational grooves. "We've all been brought up on Tootle, the children's tale in which baby locomotives are told to stay on the tracks no matter what; don't go off to look at the buttercups, don't take short cuts to race with the stallions. The struggle is for each man to live up to his own conscience, even if it is under continual pressure to go to sleep. The whole world is being divided into those that are participating in the waking up and those that would massage and tranquilize."
To adults who criticize the tactics students employed at Columbia, Shapiro asks: "What are the techniques that the liberals are suggesting? I don't hear them in a time of crisis. I think one thing that youth has on its side is a feeling of crisis. Most of the intellectuals in this country have abdicated their critical role or are being sentimentalists. Robert Lowell may march on the Pentagon, but then he goes off to tea parties. This is sentimentalism. How can you use your ends to justify your means? Well, as my philosophy teacher used to say, what else can you possibly use to justify your means? There's nothing else."
The trouble with Columbia, Shapiro claims, is that "instead of [being] a place where creativity was admired, it was a place where clarity and discursiveness were admired. It was a place that stilled your voice. I felt I was in a prison in which the bars only receded, never dissolved. I could almost physically feel it, here in this university with its iron gates keeping the community out." But since the demonstrations, he says, "I have a new kind of faith in myself. It's like going from death to life. I'm becoming more alive. I'm able to be more tender toward people I love."