When I was on staff for the campus newspaper at San Diego State in the early and mid-1980s, there was a struggle for the soul of the Left between those who believed in an ever inquisitive intellectual life and those who preferred a top-down political approach.
As one of the few conservatives on staff, I was welcomed, accepted and ultimately befriended by one wing — and targeted by the other.
It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out which was which.
While I’d written for the school paper in high school, at SDSU I’d gravitated toward the ROTC program — Reserve Officer Training Corps. My mother’s father and older brother had both served in the Air Force, and her younger brother in the Army in Vietnam. I liked the appeal to selflessness, of serving a nation that has given my family so many opportunities and freedoms.
Spring semester of my freshman year, the Daily Aztec ran a three-part series about the dangers of having a military presence on campus — somehow managing to avoid interviewing a single ROTC cadet or instructor. Sitting in the Air Force ROTC ready room (basically a place to hang out and do homework between classes), the senior cadet decided one of us would go apply for a job on staff at the Aztec for the next year.
I drew short straw. (Seriously. We drew straws.)
Toward the end of the semester, the Aztec ran ads announcing it was accepting applications for reporters for the next year.
I chose a Tuesday — uniform day — to go pick up an application, just to make a point.
When I walked into the Aztec offices in my Air Force uniform, I heard someone ask out loud, “Oh my God, is he armed?”
Only with my wits. (So, in a word, no, I was not armed.)
The middle of summer break, I received a call to report to a meeting of prospective new reporters. I was given two assignments, and a deadline.
After the back-to-school issue ran with both my articles, I was offered a paid staff position.
That offer — and my acceptance — set me on a path for my career.
I was a general assignment reporter, meaning I covered whatever subjects my editors assigned me; I didn’t have a regular beat. I interviewed a poet giving a reading on campus, the new dean of engineering, covered an event at the International Cottage, and the installation of the new central air conditioning plant.
While I thought I had been doing pretty well, at the end of that fall semester, I was told I was being let go. That I had proved a disappointment.
I asked if there was anything specific I was deficient in. “No,” I was told. I just didn’t fit in.
While bummed, I was still anticipating an officer’s commission from the Air Force, so it didn’t really affect me too deeply.
Still, when a new city (news) editor was named for the spring semester, I was elated when this new editor, Jeff, called and asked if I was willing to come back and work under him.
While a bit embarrassed about being let go, I respected Jeff to the point I had no real hesitation in accepting his offer.
That spring, I took my official military physical at the old Navy Hospital in San Diego’s Balboa Park.
While my eyesight was (and is) corrected to 20/20 with glasses, my near-sightedness exceeded Department of Defense standards by a significant factor. The CO of our detachment called me in and said he would be unable to offer me a commission after all.
That meant my former career path was closed — and suddenly writing for a living looked pretty good.
The Aztec newsroom replaced the AFROTC ready room as my new home away from home between classes. I found myself getting better assignments, and was soon also contributing to the weekly arts section. Late in the year, Russell, the opinion page editor, asked if I wanted to write a regular column — he said the page was too monolithic in outlook and could use a little philosophical diversity. (Russell was immediately bombarded with demands that he rescind the offer — but he stuck to his guns. I didn’t realize at that time just what fortitude he displayed in my defense.)
After we put the next day’s paper to bed around 10 p.m. or so, we often repaired over to a condo Jeff rented with one of the photographers and couple other students across the freeway from campus. They had given this nondescript apartment the sardonic name of The Bucko Palace. (I have no idea what it means, although I’m fairly certain beer was involved in the naming.) As a frequent guest to this abode, I learned how much the neighbors hated this particular unit. During late-night, if not all-night, bull sessions and music listening sessions, San Diego P.D. may have been as regular a visitor as I was, following up on the neighbors calling in noise complaints.
While the music — either live by a band built around the upright piano in the living room, or records played on a fairly substantial stereo system — would have annoyed anyone not there enjoying it, it was the deep conversations I learned to relish.
I was usually outnumbered — often the only voice on one side of the debate that night — but it never became personal. Nobody ever said I was an idiot or stupid — they would marshal facts to counter my conclusions, and force me to dig even deeper.
Or concede I was wrong.
It was at the Bucko Palace as much as in any of my classes that I learned to love a vigorous intellectual debate among friends, learned what it meant to question one’s assumptions, to read as broadly as possible, to actually listen to others rather than the typical modern habit of simply waiting for them to stop talking so you can jump in.
I treasured those nights — even when I paid the price in class the next morning.
My third year on staff, I was tapped to be the opinion page editor by the incoming senior editors — mostly because I’d been the assistant opinion editor the year before, and that had been the way things worked on all the desks: news, sports, arts, opinion. You served a year as apprentice to the section editor, then you got to move up.
They clearly were not comfortable with a Reagan-leaning op-ed editor writing a college paper’s editorials. Still, I recognized that the paper overall was strongly left-leaning, and accepted my losing votes on the five-person editorial board with the good grace the situation demanded.
Our policy had always been that we ran every signed letter to the editor that came in from on campus — student, faculty, or staff. There had been a deeply divisive shooting in San Diego that year in which a young black man grabbed a police officer’s gun during a struggle and shot him with it.
One letter that came in referred to the young man as “vicious.” A bit harsh given the circumstances, but, again, we ran all letters unless they were clearly libelous or anonymous. Heck, a year or two earlier we’d made a big deal out of running a submission from local Klan leader Tom Metzger — who had no connection to campus.
So I was a bit surprised when I was called into a meeting with the editor in chief and managing editor the day the letter ran and told I was being suspended for running a racist letter.
I was told that there were clear “unwritten” rules about certain topics, and I’d broken that.
When this decision was shared with the rest of the staff, the Bucko Palace crowd was, I think, more angry than I was. They were furious — and somehow, one of them got word to the university administration, and a day or two later I was called back in by the editor in chief and managing editor and told that, in fact, it turned out they did not have the authority to suspend me after all — but that I was being watched for any missteps moving forward.
At the end of that semester, I resigned as opinion page editor, and moved back to a news reporter’s slot for my last few months of college — reporting to one of the Bucko Palace denizens who felt my suspension was a breach of everything the Left stood for.
I think I was always more or less disposed to a free speech point of view, but certainly that brush with the first wave of cancel culture ingrained in me the utter injustice of punishing someone for breaching a rule that was either poorly defined or made up on the spot.
And yet, it never taught me to hate the Left — how could it when some of my most vociferous defenders (and dearest friends) were clearly leftist in political and cultural outlook? More authentically so than those who sought to punish me, as a point of fact.
This is why my defense of free speech has never devolved into partisanship. (Plus, while conservative, I’ve never been much for the Republican Party — I was always more into the P.J. O’Rourke school of conservatism. It was O’Rourke who wrote in the 1980s that being conservative doesn’t mean you can’t put the 15-inch woofer floor speakers on the roof of your house and blast Big Audio Dynamite for the neighbors to enjoy at 2 a.m. Amen, brother, and rest in peace.)
Stark honesty forces me to recognize that at present, the most censorious impulses generate from the left side of the aisle. But then again, many leftists observe the same thing — and bemoan it, wondering whatever happened to a movement they cherish. (One hopes that when the pendulum swings, as it certainly will, that today’s crop of young conservatives remembers what it felt like to be targeted for censorship — and decide to engage rather than retaliate. I’m hopeful, but not overly so.)
This past spring, we had a reunion of that 1980s’ Daily Aztec staff. Most of us are in our 60s now, and even the young’ns are in their mid to late 50s. The years have softened the edges of our assuredness as surely as they have our midsections (well, except for Jeff, who showed up wearing his vintage Daily Aztec staff polo shirt; apparently, his didn’t shrink like mine). You can’t get to this point in life without having been proven wrong often enough to make you realize sometimes the other person’s point of view may have just a touch of validity to it.
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