At the 20th reunion of my Emory class, friend and classmate Sonny Carter told me that I was the most conservative person he met at freshman camp August 1965. His ironic observation illustrates the chaos, change and Borgesian circularity of the times.

Sonny was a hero — all-American and pioneering professional soccer player, cardiologist, pilot, astronaut. After graduation, I led anti-war protests and civil rights demonstrations and was discharged from the military for my beliefs, discovered psychedelic sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, worked in factories, and then organized for an international labor union for 22 years.

During the fall of 1965, freshman year, campus leaders organized “Affirmation: Vietnam” with Bob Hope and entertainment for Atlanta’s new sports stadium; a torrential downpour on the February 1966 event resulted in the expected 50,000 crowd being less than 20,000.

The Free Speech Movement started in Berkeley in 1964. Yet this energy, plus opposition to Vietnam and the kaleidoscope of a Woodstock generation took five years to come to Emoryland and the Southeast.

So while the majority of our class followed the old ways of professionalism, many moved to a different beat flashing across the scene, speeded by the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, the lunatic Democratic convention and the 1968 elections.

By senior year, students had done something new: electing a graduate student, who had refused the draft, to be president of Student Government Association (SGA). When military intelligence and yours truly came to loggerheads a year after graduation, the breaking point was the woman hired as secretary for SGA. She had done some paid work for the Wheel and had just campaigned as the Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president. While I had no relationship with her organization, I had (horrors!) known her.

During my time with the Wheel and even before, editorial direction was often guided by the idea, “What is Good for Emory” — a takeoff on the Atlanta hype “A City Too Busy to Hate” and “The Next Great International City.” On campus, fraternities thought administrators and student leaders were targeting them for extinction, even though the great majority of these “leaders” were also past and present fraternity leaders.

A giant controversy was the story in Time Magazine on “The Death of God.” It focused on the writings of a professor at Emory, erstwhile Methodist school. He was just one of the inspiring profs whom those of us majoring in humanities enjoyed as we examined what it meant to be a human being.

Even when graduates pursued clear professionalism, their approaches often had very different ideological approaches, even if these approaches were simply defined by their political party being Democrat or Republican or the contrast between liberal and conservative in views of government. This is a different split than the fundamental split of the counterculture wave. My predecessor as editor was assistant attorney general in the Carter administration; one of my columnists on the Wheel (resident “conservative”) was an assistant attorney general for Reagan handling wire-taps.

And my co-editor at the Wheel, more impassioned than me on Vietnam and other “liberal” issues during our tenure, worked as a lawyer to defend Georgia Power when I organized against their rate gouging and other practices in the early ’70s.

Now I collect and curate international contemporary art, practice Tibetan Buddhism, run marathons and scuba dive around the world (the Galapagos in November) — one never knows.