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Finance CommitteeNovember 11, 2009 To Be Rather Than to Seem is reaching toward a new dimension: time. First I web-searched to verify street names and other details. For this one I Googled both Brian B. and Neil S., both of whom I recall very vividly though I hadn't thought about either of them in a long, long time. (Both of them are lawyers, and have apparently done pretty well for themselves.) Evoke the scene and the people come back . . . Then, as you'll read below, I Googled another name -- and turned up a very interesting story. Will To Be Rather Than to Seem become a reconnecting with things, and persons, past? Maybe. I'm thinking the words that will be the epigraph of Coming Around if I ever get to write it: "To go again where you have gone: Increase. To go backwards: Danger. Better to come round." (From Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home [1985]) Who knows. Who ever knows? Grab hold of a rope, sure you've got the end or beginning of something, and nearly always you'll eventually find yourself entangled in a vast web in which every strand leads to a branching. Sometimes your part of the web is heaving and thrashing so vigorously that you're sure you have a tiger by the tail. How to tell which end is up when you're not sure if it's your head in the clouds or your feet? Pretty soon you stop trying. You can let go, or you can hang on. If you're curious, or young, or foolish, or not overly encumbered, you probably go with the tiger. Organizing against the war in Southeast Asia led in so many directions, no one could follow them all without breaking like a wave on the beach, spreading thin before being swallowed by the sand or falling back into the sea. At Georgetown University, organizing against the war included searching out and exposing the hand-in-glove relationship between the university and the "war machine." These were not hard to find. Members of the Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and Arabic departments had offices on the third floor of the D.C. Transit building, just across Prospect Street from the foreign service and language schools. Everyone knew that these departments received substantial funding from the Defense Department -- the Arabic and Chinese departments in particular didn't attract nearly enough students, grad or undergrad, to make them self-supporting -- and to make it worse the notorious International Police Academy, which trained the paramilitary cops for various despicable dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere, was housed on the second floor. The university was also less than friendly to teach-ins about the war, or to the junior faculty who participated in them. What did this say about its commitment to "academic freedom"? As students, we were young and relatively unencumbered by the need to continually balance the moral obligation to speak out against the real-world necessity of earning a living. We were free to ask why why why and to demand an accountability that our elders considered preposterous, if not impossible. The university was part of the war machine, and here we were in the belly of the beast. We could demonstrate against the war, we could educate ourselves and others; what else? The Jesuits, which is to say the university administration, were forever reminding us dissenters that we had no legitimate standing: no one had elected us, so we couldn't claim to represent anybody. The undergraduate student body had a unicameral legislature, the student senate, and its members were duly elected, at least one from each undergraduate school and several at large. Getting involved in student government was clearly good strategy. In the spring of 1970, I think it was, the academic activists, anti-warriors, and assorted radicals mustered a formidable ticket, headed by Roger Cochetti for president and Nancy Kent for vice-president. I was the candidate for senator from the School of Languages and Linguistics. I was about as unrepresentative of the SLL student body as anyone on campus -- most undergraduate ferment in those days was rooted in the College and the School of Foreign Service, and so were most of my friends and colleagues -- but since "Ling-Lang" was a notorious hotbed of apathy I ran unopposed. Most of the slate swept into office, and Georgetown's student government ceased to be the exclusive province of Joe Hoya, the local sobriquet for Joe College, and his sister Jo. Like its namesake on Capitol Hill, our senate had committees, and every senator was assigned to one. The Judiciary Committee was the sexiest. The undergraduate branch of the university's judicial system, the Judiciary Committee in effect tried cases and heard appeals, and when the transgressions had political overtones -- as they often did in those days -- members got to give eloquent speeches on Important Issues. They got quoted in the student papers, the mainstream Hoya and the conservative Georgetown Voice (whose editor in chief back then was a nephew of William F. Buckley Jr.). When a large audience was expected, the committee met in Gaston Hall, the university's gloriously ornate 750-seat auditorium that occupied one end of Healy Hall's third and fourth floors. Of course I longed to be on the Judiciary Committee, even though I was a frumpy freshman and not much of an orator. I fantasized giving an impassioned speech from the stage then watching the entire audience rise as one to go storm whatever barricade I had pointed them at. Here fate took me by the hand, in the person of Brian B., the chairman of the Finance Committee. Brian was a veteran student politico, a smart guy, and the boyfriend of Maria, who lived down the hall from me and was among the intrepid band of female freshmen who had integrated the all-male College. Brian wanted me on the Finance Committee. The what? Did I know anyone on the Finance Committee, or even what it did? It certainly wasn't sexy. But being recruited was a heady experience for a girl who was usually the last picked to dance and in the bottom half for any athletic activity. Besides, Brian was cool. I listened to Brian's pitch. Judiciary Committee committee members might get all the glory, Brian said, but Judiciary was basically a debating society. The Student Senate's only real power lay in the approximately $300,000 in student activity fees that it got to allocate to various student organizations. How did the senate make its decisions about where the money went? It followed the recommendations of the Finance Committee. I was sold. I participated in hearings, helped prepare the annual budget, checked the prices in budget requests against the going prices at area stores -- a ream of paper went for two bucks in those days, and any organization that allowed more was told to shop a little harder -- and hung around the Student Activities Office in a semi-official capacity. In 1971, the student activities director, Robert J. Dixon, was caught embezzling student activities money. It was Neil S., the student government's student comptroller -- who looked like a classic hair-gone-wild hippie and had both a sharp mind and an irreverent sense of humor -- who helped expose the deed. Suddenly being on the Finance Committee was at least a little bit sexy: the perp was caught because we and the comptroller took our responsibilities seriously.
When I transferred to Penn, I was so burned out on extracurricular mayhem that I vowed to focus on academics and nothing but till I graduated. This resolve lasted less than a month. The undergraduate Activities Council was interviewing for its finance committee, which performed the same function as the one I'd belonged to at Georgetown. I got the job, and with it a ready-made circle of co-workers and friends, including, as before, the student activities director and his staff (none of whom turned out to be thieves, however). At both schools I was usually the only woman on the finance committee, and often the only liberal arts type. I'd been good at math, all kinds of math, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, as long as I studied them in high school. History and language had my heart, so I never took calculus, but I liked -- and was never intimidated by -- numbers. Or details: the kid who was nicknamed Walking Encyclopedia in fifth grade was a Trivial Pursuit queen before Trivial Pursuit was invented. My experience on the student finance committees of two colleges helped meld that part of me with the part that was passionately committed to grand concepts like justice and freedom and creativity. When those grand concepts come adrift from their practical roots and foundations, they don't make much headway. Fighting for justice, freedom, and creativity, it turned out, had a lot to do with having the money to buy office supplies. Being a radical politico on the finance committee was sometimes difficult. When my activist colleagues were sure that their budget request had been cut for political reasons, I sometimes had to explain: "No, it had nothing to do with your politics or your proposal. You submitted a sloppy budget, and we cut the slop out."
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