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I was a music student at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana from 1970 to 1973. Those were the climactic years of the Viet Nam War protests.
I was in a few of those protests myself, including one full-fledged riot in which we destroyed a whole block of stores. In that situation I learned the rule of crowds: one does what the rabble does, whatever one's civilized notions might be apart from it.
One of the courses I took in the spring of 1972 was a Philosophy of Music (or some such catch-all title) taught by Charles Hamm. This dashingly handsome musicology professor was (in)famous for his unorthodox views (it was whispered about that he had a graduate student writing his doctoral dissertation on - gasp! - the Beatles.)
There was only one requirement for this course: we had to turn in ten one-page papers by the end of the term. These could be on any topic under the sun (i.e., they were not necessarily confined to music.) The title of my first paper was 'Is The American Dream All Wet?' (As I recall, that was the best part of that paper!)
One bright sunny spring day there was a teach-in (or was it a teach-out?) held in the quadrangle. There a score or more errant professors were holding one-time alternative classes (on the subjects they really wanted to teach full time?)
To my surprise, I heard that Charles Hamm was still holding our class indoors as usual. I was seized with the righteous indignation of an antiwar zealot.
So I acquired a blank mimeograph master (this was before the days of xerox machines) and wrote an inflammatory broadside addressed to my fellow students in the class. In this missive I exhorted them to rise up en masse from their cozy seats in the lecture hall there and boycott that class.
I ran off 100 copies. Then I stood at the entrance to the lecture hall and handed them to the students as they walked in. Finally, I inscribed my name on one such purple sheet, marched down the steps, and put it on Professor Hamm's desk as one of my ten papers. And then I walked back up the steps and out of the building.
Out on the quadrangle my composition teacher Herbert Brun was teaching an alternative class called 'War Words'. This involved what Herbert urged us to do all the time: examine language. So by the end of that class, we found that the word 'war' was being used as a verb, rather than a modifier. It was an imperative: 'War words (not people)!'
By the way - I received an 'A' on that little papera.
Ah yes, that was the era to be 'in' school!
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