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It’s not uncommon for politicians to exaggerate or even invent tales of military heroism, but this is a new one on me … a candidate concocting tales of campus protest derring-do.

In the spring of 1970 President Nixon launched an invasion of Cambodia, and campuses across the country erupted into protest. When National Guard troops shot and killed four students at Kent State on May 4, the protests grew bigger and angrier.

Enter Carl Paladino.

Paladino, now the Republican candidate for governor of New York, was a law student at Syracuse University that spring. In an interview published this week, he says that the campus erupted into “riots” after Kent State, with student demonstrators holding Chancellor John Corbally “hostage” in a locked-down building.

It was Paladino himself, he says, who freed Corbally. The Syracuse chief of police, Thomas Sardino, came up with the idea of offering to take the chancellor’s place, and asked the young law student to make it happen. So Paladino, he now says, negotiated with the radical activists, entering the building and asking them to “take the police commissioner and let the chancellor go home.” They agreed to the swap, and the stand-off was eventually resolved peacefully.

It’s a great story. Too bad it never happened.

Newspaper accounts from the time say nothing about any lockdown, and make no mention of any hostage situation. Corbally wasn’t in his office when the students took over the building, those accounts say, and he and Sardino entered together shortly thereafter. They stayed talking to the students for two hours, then left. Faculty and students who were involved in the protest tell similar stories now.

Corbally and Sardino are both now dead, but John Beach, who was the university’s lawyer during the protests, also remembers the situation as it was reported in the papers. He says he has no memory that the chancellor was “ever prevented or threatened to be prevented from getting out,” and that the police chief “befriended the students and stayed overnight” voluntarily.

As for Paladino, who now says he “didn’t like the war protesters … that whole hippie crowd,” nobody remembers him being involved in the protest at all.

Update | Paladino’s spokesperson is walking the story back a bit: “His involvement was on the margins … the way Carl remembers it, the chancellor was in a difficult situation that needed to be resolved.”

Read more:

When I was in fifth grade, I was part of something truly bizarre — a totally serious elementary school production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.

The play is a melancholic 19th century Russian drama about middle age, inappropriate infatuations, and the sacrifices and disappointments of aging. Because it was the seventies, writer Phillip Lopate decided that this would be a perfect project for a mixed-race group of urban public school kids to take on. And so we did, and it was weirdly amazing. (I played Vanya, the 47-year-old title character.)

One of the other kids who was involved with the play is now a documentary filmmaker, and she’s made a movie about the whole thing. (Trailer here.)

It’s called Chekhov for Children and it’s having its New York City premiere at Lincoln Center on the evening of Thursday, October 21. I’ll be participating in a panel discussion after the screening.

I haven’t seen the film yet, but it’s getting great press — the folks at the Telluride Film Festival called it “a moving, honest exploration of the nature of childhood, a loving paean to the Upper West Side of the late ’70s, and a celebration of the joyous possibilities of arts education” that “transcends simple nostalgia to explore deeper, more complex emotional terrain.”

If you make it to the event, be sure to flag me down and say hi.

Update | I’ll be discussing the movie with filmmaker Sasha Waters Freyer and writer Phillip Lopate on the Leonard Lopate show on WNYC radio at 12:40 pm on Monday, October 18 — the show starts at noon, and we’re scheduled to go on the air at about 12:40 pm.

If you’re in the New York area tune in (to AM 820 or 93.9 FM) then. If not, you can listen — and find out more — online.

First his campus rally tour, now this…

President Obama will be holding a televised youth town hall on October 14. The show will be aired live on MTV, BET, and CMT at 4 pm Eastern time. It’ll be presented without commercial interruptions, and last for an hour.

I just hope he drops the weirdly hectoring tone he’s been taking recently.

“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”

–Raymond Chandler, Farewell My Lovely

Phi Beta Cons, the higher education blog of the conservative National Review, has a story up about mixed-gender dorms at Yale.

The piece begins with a headline reference to “Adam and Eve and Steve,” and the weirdness continues from there — it mocks the “modern” administrators who have abandoned “the stuffy old mores of the past.” It notes darkly that the policy was supported “Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Cooperative — a student group that holds fast to the idea that gender is a social construct.” And so on.

Two particularly weird things about this piece:

First, all the emphasis on LGBT boogeymen. “Adam and Steve” may be a new (and skeery!) approach to civil marriage, but it’s the standard configuration of a college dorm room, no? The idea that co-habitatation across gender lines is a cornerstone of The Gay Agenda is a new one on me.

Second, there’s the article the piece links to. It portrays Yale’s mixed-gender dorm as governed by remarkably conservative rules — it’s only for seniors, it’s opt-in, it’s intended for people who already know each other and have chosen to live as a group, and it only allows mixed-gender combinations on the suite level, not in individual rooms — and describes its implementation as completely uneventful. Every single person quoted in the article agrees that the policy has been a total success with no downside whatsoever.