We did some things that actually turned out to be very helpful, and this may be information that's useful to you. Since the University had never thought of a co-op as we conceived it, there were no ground rules in those days, absolutely none. So we were in the beautiful position of taking initiatives and the University was the reactor, instead of the reverse. From the very beginning, after some discussion over the summer, when we decided not to have anybody on staff in terms of cleaning, cooking and so on, we negotiated right away with the University that we would have the house as whole pay. So for the first couple of years, we didn't pay any individual rent. We paid the rent the way fraternity houses used to be able to pay the rent, which was as a whole. Which allowed us to rent the physical facility and do a variety of things in it as long as they were legal. Which is why when you read some of those blurbs at least, taking the time to find, you see there were a number of activities we had.
We had-have any of you been to Whitman House? or any of those Cowell Cluster ones — you know you can open up the kitchen area, that is the dining room area, then they got this hallway and then the lounge area-what we did was we opened it up for dance, for little kids at a free school. So one of the initial things we wanted to do was cut down the ageism rampant in a University, where you never saw little kids, where you never saw old people, and so on, so we had it as a dance studio. And we had a variety of projects that we wanted to involve ourselves with.
One of the things that might be useful for you to think about is — because it became a problem right from the very beginning and I thought I'd chat a bit about it— is to figure out the difference between believing in something and being a theme house. And right from the very beginning we had to confront that with the University, is that Columbae was an experiment — an experiment in studying, living, and practicing on a number of approaches to nonviolence. It was not set up as a belief system that people had to buy into. Just like if you have an Italian House, you're not supposed to believe in Italians. You live there because you want to experiment, to live, and study that. So that's one of the things that's always confusing as Columbae got further away from its beginnings, is that people thought is was something you had to believe in, as compared to it being an opportunity to explore certain things that you could make your decision on over time. And it was really quite a different thing.
The other was that — you mentioned earlier about a culture — that Columbae was set up to be context in which certain things would have relevancy, where in other places the same things wouldn't have the same relevancy. So there are a hell of a lot of people around campus who speak Italian, and Italian's no big deal. But if you happen to have a house where people are studying Italian, speaking Italian, in that context makes it part of why it's a theme house. I would suggest that you all think about that. That is, rather than having silly little debates about pieces, try to remind yourselves — if it's real, it may not be real anymore, but if it is real — in a number of things you're talking to with the administration, have significance because of the context they're in, not abstractly. So that another place that has cooperative cooking may not have the same significance when you try to put it in the frame of reference of a social experiment called nonviolence in the various ways. So that some of the things you do, that people say, "Well shit, other people do that," well other people talk Italian, too. You know there are a lot of people who paint, a lot of people dance. But if you set up a house where you're trying to develop a culture where over a period of time there is some level of integration, then the particular events that in some other place is not so important, here develops importance. And given my discussion with you, I would reemphasize that you think about the various things that you're doing and have been doing for a long time.
Do you still have the washers and driers? Are they owned by the house still?
Jimmy Lee: The washer is but not the drier.
DJ: Not the drier. These were things that the University had never thought of before that we simply said we were going to do. We bought washers and driers. And they said, "Well, who owns it?" And we say, "As a community we own it." "Well, who takes it at the end of the year?" "Well we're going to leave it to the next people." "Oh why're you going to do that?" And we said because we understand even economically that we'll have all saved enough money so that nobody has to take it.
The other thing is that we were the first house — and I don't say this in a glowing fashion, I just simply say this as a fact — that negotiated with the University to simply buy things from the University stores the way any other institution within the University would. So we became part of a contracting relationship as an entity, so we bought from the Stores.
Scott Braun: What kinds of things, just to run the house?
DJ: Yeah, right. And the University facilitated us — he was a man who was .., one man had been in the Marines, and I don't know what Alan Cummings background was .. or maybe the Navy ... The two guys who ran that operation, who ran Stores and who ran Physical Facilities were both Army people, and they were always helpful to us, because we were the only house who did everything the way they wanted it done. That is we never had any problems with cleaning during holidays, people didn't break windows. We did all the things, and they got their rent on time, as a whole unit. Now, the experimental part was, that we wanted people to be able to have some flexibility of what they could afford to be part of the house. I mentioned to Lee that in those days we had fifty people in the house. And the only reason we left and took on this house is — you know the University spent something like either a quarter of a million or half a million dollars to move this across the street. This used to be a street, and Grove House used to be across the street, and they wanted to put it together. We moved here because we felt that running the experiment the way we were with fifty people was too many people. There was no other reason, that we could have stayed there. But we chose that the theme would have difficulty with that many who were making some of the transitions they were making. I just review that as a fact to you.
Now, I've spoken to a number I've known on campus just to get refreshed myself, and there are a number of people who were very friendly to the purposes of Columbae who are not clear that you are a theme house anymore, because they're not clear that you're with anything consciously. Now, the articles — I want to emphasize this, because the articles mislead to some extent as well — Columbae never perceived itself in the first four years that we were principally active, as doing something that wasn't doing something, which is the way the English talks about non-violence. I can't even begin to describe to you the number of world famous people who visited us the four years we started out. We became known internationally, we became part of various well known systems, and we brought one of the principle heirs to the Gramda movement in India, who had worked and lived with Gandhi for years, Dolce came to visit with us. We brought a number of people who were active in the world of what we call non-violence, and we all knew that in English, it was a terrible term, because Satyagraha and ahimsa and these terms that are used all represent a phenomenon — they are actually descriptive of a thing that you perceive when you're doing whatever it is you're doing. It is not a description of something you're not doing. And some of the articles about how Columbae started because we were offended by the violence on campus and we wanted to be ... that wasn't true. What was true was that students were stymied by not knowing what other things to do in relationship to that. We never ever opposed, actually, somebody else doing something else.
Well, now, some of the stories — and these are the stories that Norm Robinson will remember as well — is that, our initial infamy came when we decided that we would take on ROTC in what we thought would be a process of nonviolence. We would engage that group of men in a fashion that we thought, that is, a process that we thought would be nonviolent. So we used to go out to the field where they would practice in the morning, with breakfast, and offered breakfast. And over a period of time, people started having breakfast with us. And then we would invite people — and the reason we always had open meals is that we invited people to come and eat with us. And we invited people to see how we cook, and how we work together. And people would ask us about grinding grain, and we would explain to people that we ground the grain, to make the flour to make the bread, because we were at Stanford, where we needed that kind of activity to remind us of something that we wouldn't get within the context itself. So we tried to convey that given our priorities we were efficient, and that simply, other people didn't understand what it was we were trying to do. And my sense is, that one can all a theme house a theme house on campus here — separate from a co-op — if people agree that there is some kind of lineage you're trying to learn about, in what ever ways you're trying to learn about it, you see.
We met with Vietnamese women — there's been a lot of change in terms of the Women's Movement than when we first began Columbae — and we were dealing with people who weren't busy calling themselves anything. People didn't call themselves feminists or non-feminists on campus — that is the one's who came to visit us. Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian women wouldn't even know what the women on campus were talking about when they said, "Well are you a feminists?" "I don't know what I am but I can tell you what I do every day." And that helped a lot because we didn't have categories, we had substance. And it was a product of the historical times we were in. It wasn't anything that we did.
And so you have a much more difficult task. I've been trying to say that to Columbae each of your years when you start and you've invited me up to meet with your retreats. You shouldn't take it lightly that this is a very very different historical era, and therefore the context you find yourselves in is in many ways much more difficult. And therefore trying to figure out how to experiment is more difficult. But we did a number of things that lead the University to consider us a theme house. We did things like, we would have only one record player on a floor, to find out what it would mean to have to share a rare resource, if it became rare. We decided to have people overcrowd sleeping in a certain room and use the other rooms for study areas or yoga areas and so on, to see what that would be like. There was a lot of change. People always ask how we ended up with coed bathrooms. Well, the house talked about it and talked about it, and I was teaching seminars, and I got tired of all the talk one day in my class and so I brought finger paint, and I asked the class not to talk to the class, but they had to figure out how to paint what they wanted to talk about in class. So, we did a little bit of this, did a little bit of that, then somebody took their shirt off, and by the time it was finished there was paint on a lot of people. And when we were all finished, people walked in the bathrooms to wash the paint off, and all of a sudden somebody noticed that we were men and women washing the paint off in the bathroom. And all of a sudden everyone realized we had coed bathrooms. It wasn't any monumental decision, even though we had house meeting after house meeting figuring out how to do it, when we finally did something which led us to do something together, then all of a sudden it became coed, and then there was never any more discussion about it.
And then we had this discussion about guests who came. What were we going to do about guests, because they hadn't been a part of this, and how would we deal with that? And it was interesting that the house always took time when it became practical. Again that was the historical context we found ourselves in. We had more pressing things, in a certain way, that were visible to us. The world's no different, of course, than it was then, it's just that it doesn't have to be as visible. You're not going to get drafted, and you're not going to get raped right away, and something else is not going to happen, whereas in those days, police were running into dormitories and hitting men and women, and people were getting drafted, so it was a different context, so people, you know it was a different world, so things seemed more apparent than they do right now.
But the experimental part was an agreement, that was why we were a theme house and why we were somewhat contagious to other places. It's that people knew that if they wanted to try something, that the context of the house was an agreement that people could try certain things, even if you didn't agree you wanted to try it, it was a context to affirm other people trying things. And we had the same dilemmas — in that sense one of those articles is an accurate depiction — when Columbae participated in the closing down of all the draft boards in the Bay Area, a number of people knew they were going to feel guilty if they didn't participate, because they knew we'd all go to jail. And so we had to have long discussions about the nature of community, how, if we really were a community, we needed to keep certain things going as a base camp, for lack of any better term, while other things happened. So that people all needed to begin to find out where they were doing their fair share. When people understood where they were doing their fair share, then doing different things wasn't as important as knowing they were doing their fair share.
And it seems to me that one of the breakdowns I've watched in Columbae in the last few years is, there's no cohesion about fair share. That is, there is no perception that it doesn't really matter what you do as long as you have some feel that you've communicated to others, and it's making up some kind of whole that people are participating in. It seems that people feel they have to do the same thing, or they have to do in opposition to the same thing.
The other is that, from the very beginning, we were very concerned with aesthetics, very concerned with aesthetics. We thought we were in a culture where people were too linear, and that the fashion in which they did things was not given given enough time and nurturing. As an example, I told you, I always find it difficult to have a meeting and eat. We didn't do that at Columbae. We agreed that if we met we wouldn't eat. Because, the amount of presence it took — you know if we were really going to cook the food in what we considered to be an appropriate manner, we didn't want to talk and eat at the same time. So we did a variety of experiments — what it meant to have silent meals. What it meant to eat, but slowly, so that everyone would agree to be there and not run out. What would we do with guests, when we began to see that guests were somewhat awkward in some of our different experiments. What did it mean to eat with no utensils and just eat with our hands? You know, a variety of different things to experiment with some of the different approaches to life we could have. We put various physical things in different areas of the house to see what it was like.
The house really did change when we moved here. It was quite different. The people were a bit younger in terms of how they spent their time — I don't mean younger in age — but they were younger. There was much more sex. Sex started to change the house. Internally, we seemed in some kind of overt way, this house, maybe it was all repression that — you see, this had been
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