Speranza
By courtesy of J
Some were at Yale, in and around the programs in Directed Studies, Scholar of the
House, American Studies and History; living in Farnam, Berkeley, Silliman; as
undergraduate, graduate student, teaching assistant, and finally instructor,
most of the time from 1953 to 1963.
Some have stayed in touch since.
Some have been
active, in my fashion, in alumni affairs, with the perhaps utopian goal of
bringing Yale down.
We don’t think the place can be reformed, and we see very
little place for it in the vastly expanded system of public higher education
that this increasingly backwards country desperately needs. I enjoy visiting
Yale and lecturing there now and then (invited by indwelling subversives).
We
re-visit the sites of my various past crimes, eat bagel with cream cheese and
other organic foods in the Berkeley College dining room (after checking the menu
on the Web in advance), and we stay in touch with what people at Yale are saying
and thinking – in particular, people at Philosophy and my
friends and allies, the marvelous scholar-activists in the teaching assistants
union, Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO: www.geso.org), as
well as the members of the nascent chapter of the struggling-to-be-reborn
Students for a Democratic Society.
So what you are reading is part history and
part memoir.
Some were at Yale (BA Yale College 1957, PhD 1963), right smack between
the two Bushes, who were ’48 and ‘68.
Some classmates feel a shock of recognition
when they look at W’s transcript and see how many courses they had in common
with him.
Bushes and Bushies contributed to making Yale a poisonous presence on
the national and international scene.
This was the period that produced, along
with a few virtuous exceptions, many evil-doers, e.g.: Porter Goss ‘60 (CIA
Director), John Negroponte ’60 (National Intelligence Director), Richard Posner
‘59 (free market judge), Richard Gilder ‘54 (founder of right-wing Manhattan
Institute), my student Benno Schmidt ‘63, privateer of schools, warrior against
CUNY as Chair of its Board of Trustees, Joe Lieberman ’64 (Bush’s American
poodle), and earlier, McGeorge Bundy ’40 of Vietnam fame, and James Jesus
Angleton ’41 (OSS-CIA)
The barbarities of undergraduate culture at the time
helped to prepare these people to commit barbaric acts on a world scale later on
in adult life.
The culture honoured heavy drinking and public vomiting and
urinating – long before the homeless picked up these virtuous behaviours from
Yalies.
During this period, W’s fraternity, DKE – he was President -- held an
annual “Pig Night.”
New Haven girls – “townies,” as they were called -- were
invited to the fraternity for a dance.
At mid night, the announcement was made.
They had been selected for ugliness, “pigs.”
Homophobia was rampant, and women
were barred from Yale College, Mory’s, Linonian and Brothers Library (like
Harvard’s Lamont), and "The Elizabethan Club" (get that, a club without women
named after somebody named “Elizabeth”!).
And the Whiffenpoofs, the leading Yale
singing group, sang:
’Twas a cold winter’s evening
the guests were all
leaving
O’Leary was closing the bar
when he turned and he said to the lady in
red
get out, you can’t stay where you are.
She shed a sad tear in her bucket
of beer
as she thought of the cold night ahead
when a gentleman dapper stepped
out of the crapper
And these are the words that he said
Her mother never told
her
about the ways of college men
& how they come and go, mostly go
now age
has taken her beau-who--who-ty
& sin has left its sad scar
so remember your
mothers and sisters, boys
& let her sleep under the bar.’
ANOTHER:
Your Daddy is
a Yale Man
we may be married soon
there’s no room for rent
so we may pitch a
tent
in the backyard of Mory’s Saloon
the home is where the heart is
so
we’re thinkin’ of leasin’
a Quonset on Neeson
to do daddy while mommy does
Yale
----
As an undergraduate some were part of a small and embattled social and
political group, which clustered, generally dateless, around the John Dewey
Society, the Yale chapter of the Student League for Industrial Democracy (which
later became, through twists, turns and schisms, Students for a Democratic
Society.)
Some were pretty much what passed for a Left in the hostile atmosphere
on campus in those days, although there was also a Young Peoples Socialist
League (YPSL).
A disproportionate number of us from JDS have stuck with it:
Founding Father Andre Schiffrin, who went on to head Pantheon Books, published a
distinguished list, and was fired and founded New Press; Paul Chevigny, later an
Attica lawyer and staff lawyer at the New York Civil Liberties Union, now
creative litigator on behalf of New Yorkers’ fundamental right to dance; Joel
Kovel, reformed psychiatrist, writer and activist, Green Party candidate for
Senator from New York State; Jonny Weiss (’60), later head of Legal Services for
the Elderly in New York City; Roy Jackson and Paul Asselin, both now sadly dead;
and me, Left historian, writer and activist.
Some resisted the resounding silence
of our generation as well as we could, bringing in Left speakers on such topics
as “The Politics of Oil” (Robert Engler). Outside of the somewhat stolid and
Fabian confines of JDS, some of us ridiculed Yale traditions in every way that
we could: I brought women into the Elizabethan Club at times when they were not
permitted, and wrote to the Yale Daily News in favor of admission of women to
Yale. We inaugurated a new “tradition” with a marble contest on the steps of
Sterling Memorial Library– which brought a hostile response from Calvin Trillin
in the Yale Daily News: “Who Put Marbles in Schiffrin’s Head?” We hassled the
secret societies, toting down from Weir Hall into Skull and Bones’s backyard
live chickens labeled with the names of Bones members, and on Tap Day Schiffrin,
so admirably, refused them all from inside a Berkeley toilet stall. I was hurled
to the ground by a dark-suited Bonesman while observing the Tap Day procession
of prominentoes and “Patriarchs” into Bones – and I learned a lesson in law
enforcement and power when the campus cop who saw this urged me to “Go along,
Sonny.” We named one of the frat boys in our entry in Berkeley
“What’s-the-Score?” in imitation of his continual cry, and Paul Asselin was
regularly beaten by these upstairs jock/frat neighbors.We did obscene
pre-political things, ridiculing the “shoe” culture of the day, in my case
dressing up very Fenn –Feinstein, but then revealing myself, to Whiffenpoof-like
groups and in the Elizabethan Club, to be Nelson Algren’s character, Raincoat
the Perfect Lover. We were a little beat: Roy Jackson was the first person I
knew who could recite Ginsberg’s “Howl.” And we were early fans of Elvis, who we
thought was named “Aldous.” Paul Chevigny and I spent the summer of 1957
literally on the road, hitch-hiking across the country and ending up in North
Beach just as Kerouac’s book was coming out.We had a few faculty friends and
allies: Charles Blitzer of Political Science, Paul Weiss of Philosophy. Bob
Herbert of History of Art, Bob Bone of American Studies. Later, William Sloane
Coffin became chaplain, preached “set our hearts on fire” to an aghast audience
at the 1963 Commencement on the Old Campus, and took me to jail with him, his
wife, Richard Sewall of the English department, and 200 clergymen including the
Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church in a July 4, 1963 civil rights protest
at Gwyn Oaks amusement park outside Baltimore, in the jurisdiction of Spiro
Agnew.
I’ve never told publicly the story about how I came to leave Yale
prematurely. It was January of 1963, and Norman Pollack was delivering the last
lecture of the first semester in the US History Survey in
Sterling-Sheffield-Strathcona, perhaps Yale’s largest lecture hall. Concluding
the semester neatly and on time, Norman stood on the stage and said, “and then
one April night in 1865, with the cares of office heavy on his shoulders,
Lincoln went to Ford’s Theatre, when suddenly….” This was my cue: I rose up in
the balcony, fired off my Ruger starter pistol, and cried out – you know what’s
coming -- “Sic Semper Tyrannis.” Six hundred Yalies’ heads jerked back, forming
a wave that swept through the auditorium -- as if it were Yale Bowl now, in the
time of waves. Norman squashed the ketchup pellet under his jacket, and fell to
the floor. It was the end of the semester; it was the beginning of the Sixties
in New Haven. Although this imaginative pedagogy happened before the Kennedy
Assassination, which re-introduced assassination as a somber part of the
culture, the History Department was not happy with it. Ed Morgan called me in.
Before this, I had begun, albeit in a still primitive and stupid way, to
understand that I might be rubbing the Department the wrong way. I had urged Ed
to tell me if he heard any bad talk about me. Now, he had indeed heard such
talk. “Alright, what happened?” I knew I was in trouble, but couldn’t tell the
story without laughing. It emerged that George Wilson Pierson, chair of the
History Department -- and owner of a blue tuxedo which he wore at Yale “Smokers”
(now they are called receptions) at annual meetings of the American Historical
Association -- had found this to be conduct unbecoming a member of the Yale
faculty. I had offended against the genteel code, and it was even worse that I
had done this together with Norman Pollack, who, as we will see, our senior
colleagues had begun to detest. Shortly thereafter, I found my name scribbled in
by some mysterious force on a list posted on a Hall of Graduate Studies bulletin
board for a specific time slot for what turned out to be a nice job interview
with the wonderful Carl Schorske, who was then at Berkeley, looking for a
Colonial Historian focused in the seventeenth century. But I was squarely in the
Revolutionary period. So fate would prevent me from showing up for the Free
Speech Movement. Instead, on Secret Society Tap Day I got the call that would
start me on my way to the University of Chicago -- passed off via the Mafia-like
patronage system, in perhaps the same way that Hotchkiss ejectees were
immediately admitted to Choate -- to right-wing hysteric Daniel Boorstin, and
thus I was set up for my next more overtly political firing three years later.
Talk about frying pans and fires! But that’s a story for another time. The
“assassination” was a comical event, and I have neither regrets nor bad feeling
about it, although it did mean that I left Yale and therefore became separated
from my nude posture photos.
It was a pre-political beatnik-like preview of what
would come to be called “guerilla theatre,” or the kind of thing that would get
you a Great Teacher Award later in the sixties (“Man, he really brings the text
to life!”) But, comical as it was, it was to be the beginning of an exit parade
of radical historians, a kind of New Haven death march, which lacked only some
New Orleans-style trumpeter and a couple of bobbing blue parasols. In those Cold
War years, Yale cooperated with the FBI, giving on-campus space to the agency.
That courageous liberal, Yale President Charles Seymour, stood up to the Red
Scare, saying “There will be no witch hunts at Yale,” since “There will be no
witches at Yale. We do not intend to hire Communists!” Huh? This is courage?
Similarly, Harvard’s President James Conant said that so far as he knew, there
were no Communists there, but if there were, “I hope the Government will ferret
them out and prosecute them” (Lemisch, On Active Service in War and Peace:
Politics and Ideology in the American Historical Profession [1975], p. 50). At
the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins said, “The faculty number
1000; none of its members is engaged in subversive activities” (ibid.). An often
uttered A. Whitney Griswold era homily, “men of good will may disagree and yet
remain friends” encouraged me until I later discovered the invisible corollary:
if you really disagreed, you were not a man of good will, and they would smash
you. It was a dreadful time, the Dark Ages, a time when the institution endorsed
bigotry of every kind: anti-semitism, anti-Catholicism, racism, nativism,
homophobia, sexism, class contempt. As Geoffrey Kabaservice has shown in The
Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal
Establishment (2004), A. Whitney Griswold’s oft-stated ideal of Yalies as
“well-rounded men” was in fact a motto of exclusion, in each of its three words.
Some of us who were not, by Yale’s definition, well-rounded; nor, for that
matter, men (like my wife, Naomi Weisstein, then at Bronx High School of
Science, and on her way to Wellesley), sensed this exclusive underside at the
time, and it has been forcefully underlined by fine scholarship by Geoffrey
Kabaservice, Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admissions at
Harvard, Yale and Princeton (2005), and Dan Oren,Joining the Club (1986, 2001).
We see in George W. Bush the reductio ad absurdum of the era’s well-rounded man:
Andover, DKE, Skull and Bones, football, baseball, basketball and rugby, and a
classic gentleman’s C. I majored in American Studies as an undergraduate and got
my doctorate in it in 1963. American Studies at Yale had been founded with clear
ideological purposes. The American literature canon as then defined was watched
over by an actual CIA man, Norman Holmes Pearson. The syllabus for Pearson’s
American Studies 59a literature course, which W. took in the fall of 1966, oozed
love of male authority, sexual mystique, etc. Pearson was to be one of a number
of CIA-connected faculty who taught me. Yale Historian Robin Winks has described
the ties between Yale faculty and the CIA in his Cloak and Gown: Soldiers in the
Secret War, 1939-1961 (1987). (Some of you may have had the recent misfortune of
sitting through two hours and thirty-seven leaden minutes of the 2006 film, “The
Good Shepherd,” which attempts (without filming in New Haven) to show the
connections among Skull and Bones, OSS and CIA. In this version, the full corps
of Whiffenpoofs are always singing in the Tomb, amidst the naked mud wrestling
and male consciousness-lowering.). In my years at Yale, when we needed to know
the forms of citation, we turned to Sherman Kent, Writing History (1941); it
was, as the CIA describes it, “a ‘bible’ for a generation of undergraduates
charged with completing a competent term paper.” It was only years later that I
learned that Kent had worked for the Research and Analysis Branch of the World
War II Office of Strategic Services and from 1950-67 full time for CIA.
The
CIA’s official biography of Kent says that Writing History was “meant for
college students but contains many of the themes that he would later develop for
[intelligence] analysts”; it’s my understanding that the book we used for term
papers was also used by CIA analysts. The History Department was overseen by
George Wilson Pierson – he of the blue tuxedo – anti-semitic, anti-Catholic,
nativist. As Thorstein Veblen gazed down quizzically from the picture frame on
the wall in the Hall of Graduate Studies -- now there’s also a portrait of C.
Vann Woodward, wearing a severely moiré-patterned jacket -- Pierson conducted
the once-a-year full-Department ceremonial “meeting,” even including humble TA’s
such as myself. The anti-Catholicism that was deep in Protestant Yale (at least
as deep as anti-semitism) came out when he reported uncomfortably that the Cuban
Revolution had caught the Department with its pants down, without a historian in
that area, and so they had been forced to turn – here there was a palpable
grimace – “to a Catholic college in Bridgeport” (Fairfield University?) for a
temporary fill-in. What could be worse, both Catholic and from lower-class
Bridgeport? On another occasion, as Peter Novick tells us in That Noble Dream:
The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (1988),
Pierson expressed doubt that the children of immigrants (and of optometrists,
like myself?) could understand American history. And when I left Yale for a
masters year at Columbia (1957-58), Leonard W. Labaree, History Professor and
Editor of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, wrote on my behalf to Columbia
Colonial Historian Richard B. Morris, who Labaree described to me as “an
energetic little man, of your same religious background.” Funding for the
Franklin project and the other papers of American leaders had been justified by
the American Historical Association as a weapon in the Cold War, as stated
forthrightly by AHA Executive Director Boyd C. Shafer, who saw such papers as
missiles in the War (Lemisch, “The American Revolution Bicentennial and the
Papers of Great White Men: A Preliminary Critique of Current Documentary
Publication Programs and Some Alternative Proposals,” American Historical
Association Newsletter, IX (November 1971). “In those dark ages,” I later wrote,
“academic thought contained much bigotry haughtily presented as political
neutrality: contempt for the lower classes, racism, antiradicalism, fancy
reactionary theories, and a worship of strong men” (In Search of Early America
[Williamsburg, Va. 1993], 137). The curriculum and scholarly output in those
years was loaded, heavily ideological, corrupted by Cold War and anti-democratic
values. The notion of class was under attack, with Charles Beard as a stand-in
for Marx, particularly in the writing and teaching of my mentor, Edmund Morgan,
who participated in the wave of conservative Beard debunkings of those years. An
Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913, 1935) was not in tune with
the Great American Celebration of the time. America was and always had been
classless – we were all middle class -- and was marked by consensus. (Morgan
handed me a reprint of a Commentary article to this effect by his pal Daniel
Boorstin.) Historians (as well as publishers) were gulled by Robert E. Brown’s
wretched tracts on the Constitution and on “Middle-Class Democracy” as if they
were scholarship. In Morgan’s view of the Revolutionary period, drunken mobs of
sailors rioted without reason, manipulated by their betters. Radicals in all
periods were denigrated as pointless or insane, going up against an otherwise
happy consensus: true believers, guilt-driven Abolitionists.
The survey course
presented such deeply political messages as a -- shall we say -- fair and
balanced account of slavery by Yale holy David Potter offering equal time to
testimony by slaves who looked back on slavery days as happy times -- Herbert
Aptheker’s American Negro Slave Revolts (1943) was missing from the graduate
curriculum – or sometimes mentioned, accompanied by hysterical warnings against
the Dangers of Communism -- and white supremacist Ulrich Phillips’s presence was
still strong at Yale. The pendulum between management and labor in contemporary
America was alleged to have shifted to the point where labor was too powerful,
and thus what Harvey Swados would correctly label “The Myth of the Happy Worker”
(The Nation, August 17, 1957) dominated. There was what I called in 1975 “a
tremendous condescension in attitudes toward popular judgment and democracy”
(Lemisch, On Active Service in War and Peace, 135). Nobody in New Haven had yet
heard of the work of the British Marxists (as late as 1965 the senior British
Historian at the University of Chicago responded to my mention by saying “Edward
Who?”) and the field in general remained defended for many years against such
alien stuff. The American people could not be trusted in the area of foreign
policy (Yale’s Gabriel Almond, The Anerican People and Foreign Policy), and a
strong presidency was necessary; according to Sam “Wave-the-Flag” Bemis, the
only thing Jefferson ever got right was the Louisiana Purchase. McCarthyism was
seen as the latest outburst from below of anti-intellectual populism.
And John
Blum wrote, in the midst of the war in Vietnam, that his The Promise of America
(1967) reflected his"endeavor to rejoice, to describe those patterns that
disclose – even for the impatient, perhaps especially for them – the nobility
and the power, the mission and the magnificence of the United States." As
student and then as researcher and teacher, I tried to present alternatives to
this abysmal swamp, and my efforts were rewarded with disapproval from senior
colleagues, laying the groundwork for my eviction from Yale after the Lincoln
caper. I began to study the American Revolution from the bottom up in an
atmosphere that was indifferent and sometimes hostile to my approach. I went
searching for Jack Tar in the scholarly darkness in those years before the
sixties became The Sixties. Looking in particular at seamen’s role in the Stamp
Act Riots and in opposition to impressment, I came to see a certain rationality
in the Revolutionary crowd, just as George Rude, E.P. Thompson and Eric
Hobsabawm were finding in their work. Nobody in New Haven had yet heard that a
“mob” might in fact be simply a “crowd,” and thus there was not yet
sophisticated discussion about how a mob might in fact be a mob, despite Marxist
contempt (Lemisch, “Communication: The ‘Mob’ versus the ‘Crowd’: The British
Marxists and Early American History…” William and Mary Quarterly, January 1999).
Edmund and Helen Morgan's The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (1953)
incited what was to be my dissertation with remarks like “Merchants, lawyers,
and plantation owners directed the show from behind the scenes" (181) and "How…
did the Sons of Liberty rouse these people to fury and, more important, how did
they control that fury once they had aroused it?" (187) This encapsulates an
entire theory of radicalism which has no notion of agency from the bottom up:
weak in evidentiary base, it’s anti-radical theology. Having had a fine
scholarship job on The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, I worked my way through the
enormous amount of documentation there. I looked at Franklin’s social attitudes
in a critical way that produced horror in the Franklin Factory. “I didn’t know
you had such a scunner on Franklin,” said Editor Leonard Labaree, using a
Scottish term I had never heard. My critical book-length Scholar of the House
paper is still banned on the second floor of Sterling Memorial Library. (Later I
criticized the American celebrationist avoidance of social history and the
preference for the history of “Great White Men”; Lemisch, “The American
Revolution Bicentennial and the Papers of Great White Men,” AHA Newsletter,
1971). To counter the propagandistic notions of happy workers and pendulums
swinging in the direction of too much labor power, I borrowed from CBS a copy of
Edward R. Murrow’s “Harvest of Shame” for showing to my sections of the survey
course. In the purple ditto of the day, I provided my classes with narratives
from other than the happy slaves who populated the course reader.
This
precipitated the anger of historian (and later Acting Yale President) Howard
Lamar – who headed the course -- and it was seen as a kind of lese-majeste
towards David Potter, who had put together the course readings. This conflict
set the stage for my premature exit after the Lincoln assassination. When I shot
Lincoln, I was a TA – or as Yale, with its talent for obfuscation and disdain
for the realities of course staffing, called us, an “assistant-in-instruction.”
Within four years, the Yale History Department was to divest itself of three
Left Americanists. (A fuller account of the narrow limits of dissent at Yale at
that time would include a gay firing in History of Art [Martin Duberman, Cures:
A Gay Man’s Odyssey (1991), 43; conversation with author, December 2006], and
the 1961 buying out of the tenure of Buckleyite Political Science Professor
Wilmoore Kendall. Anyone trying to make sense of the latter will run into
stories of drinking, “sexual indiscretions,” etc., but there remain questions as
to just what was cause and what was pretext. Perhaps this broadens our
discussion by suggesting that Yale punishes deviance from the political
mainstream, though it does so more frequently when the deviance is to the left.)
My co-conspirator in the Lincoln assassination was Norman Pollack. In highly
crafted landmark articles, he offered data that revealed the inaccuracy and bias
of anti-Populist historians Oscar Handlin (Harvard) and Richard Hofstadter
(Columbia) and pioneered in rehabilitating the Populists, taking them out of H
& H’s hostile grip. Pollack’s Populist Response to Industrial America (1961)
deserves to be thought of as the first work of New Left history. (Many of its
central themes were later supported by Michael Paul Rogin’s magnificent The
Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (1967). With Pollack’s arrival
at Yale in 1962, a new breeze blew, redolent of Harvard Square in the time of
Joan Baez, from whence he came wearing a blue work shirt – at the time a serious
lifestyle deviation for a member of the Yale faculty, where today they wear fine
French Blue shirts, like workers in the Metro. With Pollack came the soft Marx
of the 1844 Philosophical Manuscripts. Yale’s tolerance for Norman’s critiques
of Hofstadter and Handlin was limited, and soon, he, too, was toast, on his way
out. He had gotten into public tangles at professional meetings, and it is hard
not to see elements of anti-semitism in the perception of his argumentative
manner both face-to-face and at the podium as another violation of the
gentlemanly code.
And Norman had further tainted himself by introducing a Yale
talk by Communist Herbert Aptheker. A year after I left Yale, I provided what
turned out to be a kind of understated orientation to Staughton Lynd, who was
about to fill the slot for Yale radical activist Colonial Historian. We didn’t
know what horrors and hypocrisy lay ahead. By the time Staughton was denied
tenure, because of his anti-Viet Nam war activism, including a trip to Hanoi
with Tom Hayden and Herbert Aptheker, it was totally clear that there was a
pattern of hostility to Leftists in the Yale History Department. This pattern
continued in 1975-76 with Vann Woodward’s incredible vendetta – to the
embarrassment of some of his colleagues -- his campaign to keep Communist
historian Herbert Aptheker from teaching a one semester course on his friend and
co-worker W.E.B. DuBois (Aptheker was DuBois’s literary executor) in a
student-initiated Davenport College seminar program (Davenport had been George
Bush’s college a few years earlier) which was so unofficial as to include a
course by Howard Cosell – the Yale equivalent of what Lenny Bruce used to call
non-scheduled airlines. In the same program, Howard Cosell taught “Big Time
Sports and Contemporary America.” (Lemisch, “If Howard Cosell Can Teach at Yale,
Why Can’t Herbert Aptheker?” Newsletter of the Radical Historians Caucus, May
1976). In his rage, Woodward treated this one-semester
once-a-week-train-from-New-York gig as if it were a tenured appointment to the
Yale College faculty, and fought against the appointment although it originated
in Political Science. The appointment worked its way through the process and
reached the pro forma stage of the Board of Permanent Officers, where, according
to the chair of the Political Science Department, there was a “massive attack on
a minor appointment.” In an unprecedented move, Woodward brought with him to the
BPO ten members of the History Department. The result was the first College
seminar appointment ever rejected at this level. To justify his stand, Woodward
wrote a letter to the Yale Daily News (February 2, 1976) which is a classic of
snotty expression by this supposed gentleman scholar, written on the arrogant
assumption that Aptheker was merely a humble applicant for a job: … [Aptheker’s]
writings did not measure up… A great many negative decisions are made every
term. Hundreds of people apply to teach at Yale and only a handful are
appointed. Neither the time nor the taste for debate with the candidates over
their scholarly qualifications, such as Mr. Aptheker proposes, really exists.
Neither the applications nor the reasons for the decisions regarding them are
normally made public. It is to be hoped that this unfortunate exception to the
rule will not become a precedent. It might discourage people from applying. The
more applications from teachers and students we get the better we like it. We
like to think that many more want to come here than we accept. It gives us a
greater range of choice… [For] applicants… there are other good colleges
available, even some good community colleges.
As I commented in 1976, one of the
risks involved in achieving the power and deference which have come to Woodward
is that no one will tell you when you have done something awful. (Nonetheless,
several of Woodward’s colleagues voiced to me their otherwise silent
embarrassment over Woodward’s behavior in regard to Aptheker.) Woodward, like
Hofstadter, was a liberal who moved rightwards in reaction to the sixties. I
worked to have the Organization of American Historians investigate Yale, and the
membership found Yale’s conduct so blatant that they voted to investigate. Yale
stonewalled, but the pattern of hostility to leftists had been revealed in,
among other places, the front page of the New York Times. And what of Yale
today? Admissions policies have changed radically, although it should be noted
that that took place in the context of the enormous social changes brought about
by the movements of the sixties. I said that Yale could not be reformed. Has the
institution changed? Are Yale’s Dark Ages over? I don’t think so. As we have
noted, Yale is a major polluter of the national and international scene. At
home, the institution (and its chief investment officer David Swensen) do their
best to bust GESO, and then History Department Chair Jon Butler spoke against
GESO at the last Washington business meeting of the American Historical
Association. In some ways, the fifties are back at Yale: Political Scientist Ted
Marmor urges surrender to the right on healthcare issues by parading again that
hoary fifties Yale homily, “politics is the art of the possible” – as if there
had never been the Sixties, when even Yale academics stopped saying it for a
while. One Yale classmate treated me at a recent AHA meeting to an
alcohol-fueled rant on why his son hadn’t been admitted to Yale: he said, with
hostility to me, that Yale has been taken over by Jews and leftists. A leading
class liberal, another Americanist, tried to get me to stop posting critical
views of Yale on the class listserv on grounds that I could be more effective if
I followed the advice of another classmate who remained anonymous and was
characterized as “not of the old guard… thinks of himself as firmly on the
left.” This anonymous guy felt that my critical tone about Bush would make
people angry. The Yale Alumni Magazine grows lyrical about Yale’s role in
developing aerial warfare – another great Yale contribution to civilization:
“Flight to Glory,” September-October 2003. This was written in a Snoopy-vs.-
the-Red-Baron tone, as if there had not later been Dresden, Hiroshima, London,
Hanoi, Baghdad, and so on. In a shameful recent episode, Maya Lin was called in
to head off the candidacy for the Yale Corporation of a black pro-union New
Haven minister and graduate of the Divinity School. In a seeming abandonment of
professional ethics, Archives and Manuscripts colludes with the History
Department to grant Department member Gaddis Smith privileged access to archival
material concerning Staughton Lynd’s firing while barring historian Carl Mirra.
A new cabal, a kind of Woodward-Morgan-Blum redivivus, occupies the History
Department, consisting of Paul Kennedy, John Lewis Gaddis, and Donald Kagan. In
a notorious recent instance, they rejected an appointment of Juan Cole. The
non-hiring of the University of Michigan Middle East expert was partly the
result of opposition within the History Department by Kagan and Gaddis, which
killed the appointment at a higher level (Senior Appointment Committee), as had
been done with the Aptheker appointment. (Real Clear Politics, August 3, 2006:
www.realclearpolitics.com) What is Yale for? It doesn’t boast anymore that it
graduates, as Kingman Brewster put it in 1967, “1,000 male leaders.” Its aim now
is to produce male, female, multi-racial, LGBT and other leaders.
But consider
the kind of leaders that Yale has produced, endless cohorts of people who
struggle to maintain a slightly bandaged version of the status quo and to
preserve the power of dominant elites in a broad spectrum of human activities,
including scholarship, business, the arts, and government. Yale’s existence and
values obstruct the development of the expanded and egalitarian system of public
higher education that we need. Perhaps, like the equally anachronistic prep
schools (Lemisch, “Hotchkiss in the Fifties: Myths and Realities,” History News
Network, November 29, 2004), units like a miniaturized Yale may have a role as
places of experimentation, free of both government and corporate control, as
yardsticks by which to measure public and corporate-free higher education.
Meantime, who does this country owe more to, Yale or CCNY?
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
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