The Campus Mounds at Louisiana State University are not especially impressive looking: Just a couple of grassy hills about 20 feet high each.
We called them the Indian Mounds when I attended college there. Someone must have decided the word “Indian” was problematic in the Age of Sensitivity and so killed it in favor of the anodyne “Campus.”
Russell Means, the late Native American activist, once told me he did not consider “Indian” to be a slur or even a misnomer. According to him, Columbus called the folks he encountered in the New World “Indios,” not because he thought he had reached India, but because he viewed these natives as “En Dios”—people who were “In God.” I doubt this story, but haven’t tried to check it out because a part of me wishes it were true.
That LSU’s “Campus” mounds look like natural features rising from an otherwise flat terrain is the only thing making them visually noteworthy. Archaeologically, though, they are treasures, recognized as such now even more so than when I used to sit atop them drinking cheap wine. Their new importance is cemented by the fact that I wouldn’t be allowed to do that now; they’ve been made off-limits to everything: climbing, sitting, picnicking, studying, making out (there’s an old-timey phrase) or getting drunk on.
We didn’t know it back in the 1970s, but apparently we were partying on the oldest human structures in North America. Recent research indicates that the older of the mounds is around 11,000 years old. As an amateur history buff who once had physical contact with those very mounds, I find this exciting.
Now, I realize that to some people, those college years of mine—a half century ago!— might as well be 9000 BC. They were a different time, for sure. Today’s youngsters will never know the joy of swigging from a bottle of 79-cent Boone’s Farm apple wine on a soft Baton Rouge night while sitting in the grass of an Indian/Campus mound.
Boone’s Farm costs six bucks now, for one thing. I was surprised to discover that it’s even still around; I guess bad ideas don’t die easily. Even more surprising, Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill is still being made, too. The rumor when I was at LSU was that it contained formaldehyde that would make you go blind. Of course we also believed Paul was dead.
It was a great time to be alive and in college. Especially as the alternative for us guys was to be alive—though possibly not for long—slogging through a Vietnamese jungle.
College campuses in the early ‘70s saw the crumbling and final collapse of in loco parentis, the idea that college administrators should act as substitute mommies and daddies.
In truth we male students were already ungovernable; I remember watching from my freshman dorm window as an autumn cool snap, a momentous occasion in huggy (hellaciously muggy) BR, brought droves of guys into the street, some of whom promptly set a pine tree on fire.
Coeds (there’s another old-timey word) lived in a different world, one of housemothers, curfews and elegantly appointed parlors for entertaining male guests—under the wardens’ watchful eyes, of course. Protests led by the head of the Women Students Association (hi, Lila, wherever you are) wore away at such Victorian-style “protections.”
Curfews were the first to go, followed by the ban on men visiting women’s dorm rooms. LSU’s progressive minded male students were there every step of the way, allies in their sisters’ righteous struggle for freedom and equality on campus. It is 100 percent untrue that they were mainly interested in getting into their girlfriends’ pants, as students who opposed relaxing the rules charged.
Everyone knew that the real place to go for heavy action was not the dorms or the Indian Mounds, but the Mississippi River levee, a mile walk from campus. Built to its present size (as far as I can gather) in the late 1920s, it provided an endless stretch of grassy embankment up and down the river—plenty of room to get away from other people, including other amorous couples. It was also cloaked in darkness, the only lights being those of barges and tugs on the river.
One day some male acquaintances came around to inform me that they had invited some girls to meet them on the levee that night and that an orgy was in the offing. When no girls showed, we guys sat around drinking Boone’s Farm until the bottles were emptied, then dispersed to our respective sad habitations.
Worst. Orgy. Ever. (Not that I have that many to compare.)
My two most embarrassing intellectual errors occurred in college, by the way. One of them was my belief (a hope, really) that men and women are exactly alike except for anatomy. I believed that once old cultural strictures were stripped away and women became legally and socially liberated, their sexual adventurousness and readiness would match those of men.
It was only much later that I learned basic evolutionary psychology, which explains quite well why no females came to the “orgy” on the levee. I’m not saying no woman would ever voluntarily take part in one; there are female swingers, after all. But the bell curves of men’s and women’s sexual natures only somewhat overlap, even when unmediated by social conventions and role expectations.
My other major error at the time was falling for overpopulation hysteria. I read The Population Bomb and became an activist for Zero Population Growth, joining the publicity committee for the campus ZPG chapter. Paul Ehrlich was my hero, and I had a front-row seat when he spoke at LSU. His doom and gloom predictions turned out to be so spectacularly wrong that it’s a wonder to me he’s still out there pontificating on the subject, and that anyone still listens to him.
In retrospect, I should have paid more attention to my anthropology professor who mocked the “neo-Malthusians” and assured us that humanity was not in danger of population-driven collapse and global starvation, with people killing their neighbors, en masse, over food—at least not in today’s world.
Parenthetically, those nightmare scenarios are likelier, in my opinion, if the Net Zero carbon crowd ever succeeds in dismantling modern energy-driven economies. Poverty, with periodic famine, has been the default condition of most people who ever lived until the last century or two. Whatever their intention, the more extreme of today’s climate agitators would throw us back into a world where life for most was nasty, short and brutish.
Time changes everything, or rather, human beings acting within time change things—frequently for the worse but often for the better.
Time has always been a mystery to me, more so than sex and death, starting with the face that neither past nor future exists. The present, where everything happens, is a moving line between past and future, and a line has no width, mathematically speaking. So “where” in time, exactly, is stuff happening? “Where” in time do we exist?
The past may not exist but it leaves its traces. Its works are all around us as well as in us, even if we try to erase them or cover them up.
Reflecting on my personal timeline, it’s sobering to think that my days at LSU are now as distant from today, in terms of years, as the building of the Mississippi River levees was from when I last sat on those Indian mounds as a student. To my twenty-something self, the 1920s were distant history. And yet … both of my parents, one of whom is still living at this writing, the other having died just last year, were born in that decade.
The major part of the present LSU campus was built in the 1930s, on land that formerly was a plantation. I wonder that the plantation owner never flattened the mounds to make a level area for crops. It’s to the campus builders’ credit that they too kept them; perhaps old Huey Long, who as governor pushed the rapid build-out of the university, had some appreciation for the past.
Did slaves once sit upon those mounds, stealing a respite there before returning to work in the fields? I can picture them doing so, and not so long ago in the grand sweep of history; after all, Emancipation occurred slightly over a century before I entered college.
As for the people who built the mounds I find it harder to relate to them even in my imagination. Even with some universal language translator in hand, the differences in our respective mental universes might prove an insurmountable barrier to mutual understanding. The passage of time estranges us from everyone who lived before, even to the point of incomprehension of their lives if the temporal distance is great enough. Perhaps only archaeologists and some historians manage to escape such estrangement.
But temporal estrangement occurs on a more compressed scale, too, as between generations whose life spans overlap.
Sometimes too much is made of generational differences. There are many instances of old and young individuals having more in common with each other than they do with their own age cohorts. Nevertheless, there is something to the idea that a group of people coming of age together during certain big events, such as wars, depressions, political scandals and cultural upheavals, will be imprinted in a way that makes them distinct from groups preceding or following them.
We Baby Boomers freed ourselves from the stifling in loco parentis regime on campus. I’ve spent little time on college campuses in recent years, but if reports are to be trusted, the academy is now in the grip of a much more rigid, even totalitarian system of behavior and thought control — wokeness, for want of a better term. From the quaintness of dorm mothers policing public displays of affection, it seems we’ve “progressed” to an Orwellian campus environment where faculty and students constantly monitor one another for microaggressions and wrongthink. On second thought, forget wokeness—this is Maoism in full flower. (Perhaps the tide is turning, though: Over 100 Harvard professors form council in fight for free speech amid ‘crisis’.)
What would a Gen-Z’er think if transported back to my time at LSU? Though hardly a bastion of 60s/70s radicalism or a locus of intellectual ferment, we did have something called Free Speech Alley where anyone could speak on any subject, unfiltered. (“Alley” referred to the space between the campus bookstore and movie theater; the name was retained even after the event was moved to the front steps of the student union.)
Speakers I recall included student antiwar activists, campus feminists, poets reciting their latest verse, Christians giving their personal testimonies, and others.
The most notorious frequent speaker, though, was David Duke. A year ahead of me at LSU, he was already well on his way to developing the Klan themes he would later become known for; in college his persona was that of a neo-Nazi. I can’t remember many of the specifics of his Free Speech Alley rants, but my vague recollection is that he had a sort of replacement theory: Jews plotting to seize power by stirring up blacks to fight whites in a race war.
While writing this, I found a 1991 story from another student who was there at the same time, whose recollection matches my own. In Remembering the David Duke of Old, Vickie Silverboard writes, “As a Jew, I was so shaken by his wording that it remains indelibly etched in my brain 20 years later. … Many who listened shook their heads in disgust. Many, including myself, argued back.”
David Duke was not a nice guy, to put it mildly. There’s little doubt that had he the power, he would not have shown much tolerance to his chosen enemies. (The photo below was taken outside an event in New Orleans, but during the period when he was enrolled at LSU.)
Here’s the thing. No matter how vile we might have found Duke to be, or how much he triggered people, no one tried to physically cancel him. No mobs invaded Free Speech Alley with bullhorns to drown him out. No one demanded his ouster from the university.
We weren’t passive, though, not at all. Some people debated him; his most persistent critic was the campus head of the conservative group, Young Americans for Freedom, as I recall. Some researched his claims so as to be able to factually counter them. As he tended to show up every week to claim a spot, many devoted Alley-goers made note of when he was speaking and then absented themselves until he was finished.
The most aggressive action I personally witnessed was when a student grabbed a stack of NSWPP (National Socialist White People’s Party) newspapers from Duke’s hands and attempted to light it on fire. What sticks with me most is a professor stepping forward and telling the crowd that that was what the Nazis did and that we would be no better than Duke if we descended to that level.
I can’t imagine any campus today whose students, faculty and administrators would tolerate the existence of a free speech forum where even a David Duke could speak. Contrary to what you might have been told, hate speech is free speech, too, and—to recur to the late lamented classical liberal tradition—the antidote to bad ideas and words is better ideas and words.
Free Speech Alley was long ago and, in some metaphysical sense, far away. The idea of a raucous but nonviolent marketplace of ideas seems as dead as a dodo in 2023. The dominant impulse now is to crush speech with which one disagrees by any means possible. Many on both the left and right are guilty of such illiberal behavior. Worse even than the battling political rabble in this respect are the media, tech gatekeepers and government figures at all levels who act quickly to shut down any dissension from prevailing orthodoxy, even on such subjects, for instance, as the science surrounding vaccines.
All this, too, shall pass, which is some comfort.
When some future generation digs up the remnant mounds of our civilization, what will they know about the tribal conflicts that loom so large to us, that have so many at one another’s throats? They might well find them incomprehensible—especially if they themselves live in a freer, more tolerant and hence more peaceful world than we do.
Meanwhile, the beat goes on.
Permission is given to republish this article with these provisions: 1. You must credit me, R. Stephen Smith, as the author. 2. You must include a link back to this page or to my home page.
Got half-way through before having to run; good writing, imagery, feels. Printed rest to read on the trip I'm leaving on in a few mionutes.
If you are willing, I suggest the Bible for answering all the mysteries you mention in this article.
In the midst of the events and experiences you mentioned, you can find hope and peace through God’s plan for all of it, and plans for you, personally.🩷👍🏼