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Freshman Week Hosting: Opening a Door
Stan Crock, Alum
Columbia College 1972
School of Law 1977


At the start of my senior year, my Freshman Week host duties mainly involved meeting each night with several dozen fresh-faced denizens of an upper floor of Carman Hall. At 11:30 p.m. they were tired, and I had to figure out how to keep their attention. The solution: not stand-up comedy but sit-down, on-the-carpet humor. I regaled them with stories about Columbia, Barnard, New York, how Broadway was in fact the widest street in the world, at least when it came to meeting Barnard women. (Back in 1971, Columbia wasn't co-ed.)

Observing my nightly improvised routine was a stranger, the resident-hall counselor on the floor, a grad student at Teachers College named John Kullberg. In December, I ran into him on Broadway, and he asked me what I planned to do after graduation. I told him I wanted to go to journalism school. He asked if I had contemplated law. I said I had--and rejected it. He replied that he had just been appointed director of admissions at Columbia Law School and invited me to come to his office to talk. I told him that if I did go to law school, I certainly didn't want to be in New York.

At that point, it was not clear to me whether I was sick of school in general, Columbia in particular, New York, or myself--or some combination. But I went to see him. He was quite encouraging--based solely on my comedy, as far as I could tell. As I left his office, I realized that a few months before, I had switched my goal from law to journalism, and if I changed my mind again and didn't apply to law school, I would be out in the cold. So I applied--and got in. John wrote a nice note on the form letter welcoming me.

But I went to journalism school anyway. I couldn't see devoting myself to three years of hard book learning at that juncture. I wanted something more hands on, and journalism was it.

After getting my degree at Northwestern, I worked for AP briefly in Chicago, then covered the courts for the Palm Beach (Fla.) Post. And I got intrigued by the law again. I decided that to find out what really was going on in the courtroom, I needed to go to law school. I wrote John and asked what I needed to do to reapply. He said I just needed to write a letter explaining what I had done in the interim and request that my file be reactivated.

I got in a second time--again with a nice note on the form letter from that former residential hall counselor. I decided I wouldn't get a third chance, so went. Neither John nor I could have anticipated the angst that decision would create for him and me.

I decided to keep my hand in journalism by writing for the law school newspaper. One of my first assignments was to interview Prof. Louis Lusky, who had just come out with a book about the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, the previous semester, the paper had been critical of a book Lusky's daughter had written. So when I entered his office, he was in high dudgeon, asking me why I chose to associate with the hoodlums on the paper. I explained that I intended to return to journalism. He got even angrier. He thought I was occupying a slot that could have gone to a more worthy applicant who intended to practice law.

He then checked my application to see if I had misrepresented my intentions. That would have given him an angle to get me thrown out. It turns out that in my first application my senior year, I had not filled in the box asking what I intended to do with my legal education. I didn't intend to get a legal education, so I had no answer to it. When I reapplied, I said in the letter I intended to return to journalism. When I reviewed the file, that sentence was underlined, presumably by Lusky's red pencil.

When Lusky realized he couldn't go after me, he went after Kullberg for accepting me. He tried to convince the faculty that controversial applicants like me who said they did not intend to practice should not be admitted, a resolution that was voted down overwhelmingly on the grounds that it would encourage applicants to lie. So was his fallback resolution: that the admissions committee had the discretion to delay action on such controversial applicants. How do I know all this? I'm a reporter and I had good sources.

If only this were the end of the saga. Later I heard an incredible story about Lusky. A guy a year ahead of me was a typical student, one who sat in the back and spoke only when called upon. But Lusky was such a provocative and interesting teacher that he energized this student. The student actually raised his hand to participate. But Lusky was a bit of a curmudgeon--if that wasn't already clear--and ripped into the student whenever he said something. Lusky did it one time too many, and the student quietly closed his book and left the classroom.

Lusky decided to hold the student in contempt of class. Novel, I thought. He appointed someone to represent the student, while the rest of the class would be an advisory jury. Lusky would be judge and prosecutor. At the next class, after the trial, the advisory jury voted to acquit. Lusky said the students obviously knew nothing about contempt law and issued a judgment notwithstanding the verdict of guilty, but imposed no penalty.

This was too good a tale for me to pass up. After I nailed down the facts from quite reluctant students in the class--a clearly necessary use of anonymous sources--I went to Lusky for comment. You could imagine the look on his face when I walked into his office, and how he turned from crimson to ashen when I started asking questions. He cut me off by asking how much space I had for the story. I told him maybe 10 inches. He said New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis couldn't do the story justice in that short a space, so there was no way I could. That was the totality of his comment. I put it in the story.

After the piece came out, Lusky bumped into the editor of the paper. He said with evident surprise that the story was accurate and fair--but Stan Crock had no business being in the law school.

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