One of my most memorable experiences has to be the politics '68 conventions in the spring of '68. Harold Johnson offered essentially three courses, two of them were political science and one was economics. And each course related to the mock conventions that we were going to have at the end of spring term. There was a Republican convention and a Democratic convention and each person in the course was a delegate and had a vote and we were supposed to research our person, whoever we were and find out how wwe were supposed to vote and as closely as possible represent what would actually happen in Chicago and Miami in the summer. There were some exceptional people involved in that course, but I don't think it was just the people. It was a lot of planning and hard work that went into it and the fact that everybody had a role, everybody did something. Everyone had something they could do, whether it was making signs for a demonstration for a particular candidate or bargaining for votes or all the cliches of the smoke-filled room. But everyone took it seriously and humorously at the same time and it was very successful and a lot of fun.

In the Republican Convention, we nominated Rockefeller, with John Tower as his running-mate. The Democratic Convention nominated Hubert Humphrey, based on what students thought the real delegates would do. But most students personally preferred Bobby Kennedy.

By that summer, when the conventions actually took place, I really knew what was going on. But near the end of the term, when most students were writing a final paper for the course, Robert Kennedy was shot. Some students just quit writing their papers in the middle, figuring, "What difference does it make?" At about that same time, Martin Luther King was killed. It was hard to take.

Almost everybody was into T-groups for a while and almost everybody got upset. It was related to drugs and getting high and getting into yourself and getting out of yourself and getting other selves and meditating on your navel and your toenail. That passed also.

One of the best camping weekends was that one in winter when the ice was frozen and we went for walks late in the middle of the night on the ice. A bunch of T-groupy types got out on the lake and they were walking blindfold or some stupid thing like that and the ice broke and they almost fell in and it was kind of a mess. They all survived. I don't think anybody fell in. Not because they didn't try.

Sir Eric Ashby, who is a British educationalist -- somehow JMC got hold of him for two weeks and had a two week seminar. They picked 14 of the most vocal students, of which I was one, and we built the university -- designed the university -- which was fascinating. But that was in the hey-day. JMC's language program was written up in the Wall Street Journal as the best in the country. Which is probably why Sir Eric Ashby agreed to come. JMC was an experiment that seemed to have some potential.

The grill was really a filled place. People were always down there. That's where everyone came to meet. Everyone saw everyone there. I used to stake myself out there, looking for ______________ when I was on the lookout for him. Other times we'd just sit down there. The first thing that people did when they got up in the morning was dress and come sit down in the grill, read the paper, do the crossword puzzle, or whatever, and just wait for people.

East Lansing was dry! There wasn't a beer in East Lansing. It was 1970. Even if you were 21 it was dry; you had to go out to Paul Revere's, in that direction, and Brass Monkey in the other direction. The only thing we had was Spiro's, which was an old cafeteria. There was coffee and donuts and a cafeteria lunch. Oh, it was a different world. Classes, grill, TV, and sleep.

JMC professed a cross-cultural awareness theme which my impression is it's lost a lot of, but at the beginning it still had this at the top of its head and the brochures that came out seemed more interesting. Also there was the whole question about the lack of personality in large sized schools and yet the access to the resources of large schools. JMC was in some ways an attempt to either preserve the advantages of both or minimize the disadvantages of both, and that seemed to make sense to me.

We weren't anywhere near as worried about getting a job then as people are today, and with reason -- the job market is terrible! This wasn't a problem with us. Our problem was Nam. We had to worry about the draft. I personally wouldn't have gone to any war.