Joyce Antler:
Welcome and good evening, good afternoon, and good morning to the alumni, parents, Brandeis National Committee members, and friends around the world who have registered for this event. My name is Joyce Antler. I'm a professor emeritus of American studies at Brandeis and I'm a proud member of Brandeis Class of 1963. I'd like to thank first the co-sponsors of this program, the Brandeis University Press, the Brandeis Alumni Association, the Brandeis National Committee, the Brandeis Osher Lifelong Learning Institute which we call BOLLI, and the American Studies Program.
Joyce Antler:
One logistical note before we begin our conversation, there will be some time for Q&A at the conclusion of the program. Please use the Q&A feature at the bottom of your screen to submit your question. You can also share a memory of Brandeis if you'd like, and we'll try to get to as many questions as possible. Our two speakers tonight are extremely illustrious teachers and scholars and I'll have time to share only a few highlights of their distinguished intellectual biographies and then I'll turn the discussion over to them.
Joyce Antler:
First, is my colleague Steve Whitfield. Steve is the Max Richter Professor of American Civilization emeritus at Brandeis. He received his BA at Tulane, his master's at Yale, and his PhD at Brandeis in 1972. Fortunately for us, he stayed, teaching in the American studies department for some 43 years. His courses on individualism, the culture of the Cold War, journalism, Transatlantic crossings and many others were treasured staples of our program as was Steve himself. In 1993, Steve received the Louis D. Brandeis Prize for excellence in teaching at the university. In 2008, students honored him with the Brandeis Student Union Teaching Award.
Joyce Antler:
Steve also held numerous distinguished lectureships abroad. Steve has an outstanding publishing record as well, authoring nine highly acclaimed books, dozens of articles, including numerous pieces on Southern history and on American Jewish history. In addition to the book we're going to discuss tonight, Learning on the Left, his other books include A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till, Into the Dark: Hannah Arendt and Totalitarianism, American Space, Jewish Time, and In Search of American Jewish Culture.
Joyce Antler:
Julian Zelizer is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes Class of 1941 professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. Julian received his BA from Brandeis in 1991 and I remember him very well as an outstanding student of history as he was. He received his MA and PhD from John Hopkins University. Julian is the author and editor of 21 books on American political history including most recently published in July, Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party. I only have a minute to name a few of his other books, Taxing America: Wilbur D. Mills, Congress, and the State, 1945-1975, which won the Ellis Hawley Prize for best book on political history and the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the best book on Congress.
Joyce Antler:
And, another book is The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society, which also won the Hardeman Prize. Julian is a frequent media commentator and has published more than 900 op-eds, including his weekly column on CNN.com. He's not only prolific, but he's visionary and is widely recognized as one of the foremost pioneers in the revival of the new political history. We are delighted to have both Steve and Julian here tonight for a conversation about Steve's wonderful new book, Learning on the Left: Political Profiles of Brandeis University. I know we're in for a major treat, so let me now turn to Julian to start the conversation and welcome.
Julian Zelizer:
Thank you, thanks so much for that kind introduction and for having me as part of this. I don't think I have seen you, Joyce, since I took your class, many, many years ago now, but I remember-
Joyce Antler:
We were both very young.
Julian Zelizer:
Right, but I remember it well and it's really a privilege to talk about Steve's new book, which it's also terrific. Not only are you a great scholar, but you loomed large at the university and this book in particular, you found an interesting way to write the history of an institution which is not always easy. It really has great substance, great stories, and a great argument to tell about the importance of this university. Before jumping into this, my experience at Brandeis was tremendously important in my career.
Julian Zelizer:
There were many parts of being there that I remember well, but one of them was learning about the Liberal and Progressive tradition in American history. It was certainly integral still to the student culture and certainly to the curriculum. So, when you sent me this invitation, I couldn't resist, especially after having a chance to see the book, so thank you for having me. And, maybe we can just start for everyone with the basic question of why you decided to write the book, how this project came together.
Stephen Whitfield:
Thank you, Julian, and again, I'm grateful. I share that gratitude with Joyce and the sponsors that you're participating in this conversation. The book has a genesis, perhaps quite fittingly with a readings course that I have with Rachel Aboe of the class of 2004. I say it's fitting in part because the book itself is dedicated to the students whom I was very privileged and very lucky to be able to know and to meet and therefore, the book has its origin really in an independent study in which Rachel and I basically looked at printed works that dealt with Brandeis, how it was portrayed. It could be in a novel such as Alan Lelchuk's American Mischief, which is set in a campus west of Boston. The name of the campus in the novel is called Cardozo College and we looked at Abe Sachar's memoir A Host at Last, which is the most indispensable book I think on the early years of Brandeis University.
Stephen Whitfield:
We looked at a number of articles and in the aftermath of that course, I realized that there is a lot more material here that might be able to become available for something that was beyond the readings course itself, which was not particularly oriented toward politics, but I realized that if there's anything that could be said to be distinctive about Brandeis and there are other ways in which it can be considered, it's exactly what you refer to in your own opening remarks, Julian, which is to say it needed to be embedded within the Liberal tradition, its particular pluses and minuses, its particular changes and revisions over time, and I think that that is an angle that nobody had really considered and the hypothesis that I started with was that Brandeis in terms of its faculty and its alumni, whether they were activists, whether they were writers, whether they were thinkers, really played a very disproportionate role in American civic life. So, that was the impetus and that's the thesis of the book itself.
Julian Zelizer:
And, I want to move into some specific people who you write about, but I know many people watching know this, but I'll still ask it anyway, can you just briefly remind us of the origins of Brandeis University and what its founding mission was in the early decade or so?
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah, of course, it started as all the alumni know, it started in 1948, in the aftermath of the Second World War and the aftermath of the Holocaust, and it was designed in part as a place of refuge in an era in which antisemitism was in all sorts of ways taken for granted. It was designed as a place where faculty, including refugees from the Third Reich could have a place in academe, a place where students who were Jews, but who were ambitious, and able, and qualified, and promising might not be able to get places at the most prestigious and most competitive institutions of higher learning.
Stephen Whitfield:
So, it began in a sense as a resistance to the very forces of discrimination and prejudice against which liberalism was intended to oppose. So, its beginnings really are within the broader context, ideological context of the left or Progressivism more broadly, and it was intended really to be a rebuttal to all those barriers of discrimination and prejudice that existed primarily in academe in the 1940s and certainly much earlier.
Julian Zelizer:
Just to pick up on that, the relationship between antisemitism, especially in the aftermath of World War II, and an attachment or nurturing of Progressive ideas, was this an ... This is an important relationship, it's not always recognized, I think.
Stephen Whitfield:
In an odd way, I think it was taken for granted that if you thought that there was something about antisemitism that needed to be remedied and resisted, you were almost always going to be on the left. Antisemitism was then believed to be simply an expression of privilege of hierarchical or ancestral power and therefore, those who wished to oppose prejudice, not of course only confined to antisemitism where I would say almost always within broadly speaking, the Progressive or Liberal tradition, and it was basically taken for granted.
Stephen Whitfield:
The typical speakers who came to Brandeis, the typical commencement speakers were almost always Liberal Democrats, well into two decades later and it was something that was simply a common assumption that was related very much to the mission of the university itself.
Julian Zelizer:
So, this was something self-conscious with the administration? Was it we are not only a secular, Jewish university, but also one that will be committed to this set of political ideas? Is that the sense you got from the history?
Stephen Whitfield:
Well, it's tricky. I think Abram Sachar himself was not politically particularly well-defined. I think he was certainly, broadly speaking, Liberal, which came to students doing much of the form in the off-campus opposition to the violation of civil rights. He was certainly supportive and sympathetic, but I don't think he had a particularly pronounced political profile, but he was certainly, I would say, from what my understanding is, there may be alumni who disagree, he was certainly broadly sympathetic, sympathetic to those general aims.
Stephen Whitfield:
He was very much an admirer of Justice Brandeis, whom he met on a couple of occasions and in that sense I believe the atmosphere, the ethos, even if it was not rendered explicit, was certainly within that broadly speaking, that Liberal tradition.
Julian Zelizer:
And so, then you develop a book revolving around people at the university, and that's the structure, different personalities who were here. How did you choose and decide who to highlight and who shouldn't be highlighted? How did you put together the chapters of this book?
Stephen Whitfield:
That's a wonderful question because it allows me to say that it's not really, strictly speaking, an institutional history. I don't make any such claim. There's the need for an institutional history. It's basically about the politics of the people who taught here or were students here who then went on to important careers or perhaps they came to Brandeis having already established themselves in the case of the faculty, with such careers.
Stephen Whitfield:
So, the criterion broadly speaking, I would say, would be prominence and importance, so that to pick a couple of the obvious examples, Herbert Marcuse obviously has to be included in such a book. He was the most famous of the full time tenured faculty members in the first two decades. Near the end of his career, he left Brandeis in 1965. The only member of the Brandeis faculty ever to be denounced by name by the Vatican, by Pope Paul VI, so he clearly has to be in the book.
Stephen Whitfield:
His most celebrated student, Angela Davis of the class of 1965, obviously also has to be included in the book. Figures like Abbie Hoffman, figures like Irving Howe and Lewis Coser and Phillip Rahv, all of whom had careers associated with political life often before the formation of Brandeis or even before they came to Brandeis. They were obvious choices and I would say virtually anybody whose career could be easily tracked, and then there were thinkers. We're thinking particularly of people like Michael Walzer of the class of 1956, Michael Sandel of the class of 1975, who had truly distinguished careers in the field of political thought, political philosophy. Many of these choices it seems to me were obvious and wrote themselves into the book that I wrote.
Julian Zelizer:
And, Marcuse, for everyone, who was he and what was his story at Brandeis?
Stephen Whitfield:
Well, this was a remarkable story because he was basically unknown till he came to Brandeis. He was among the figures in the Frankfurt School, the School of Critical Theory, that sought to revive Marxism in the wake of the view that the labor movement had failed in its particular historical scenario and that other efforts had to be found in order to radically transform Western industrialized society. So, he was a key thinker in that, but he also drew upon Freudian theory, most famously in his 1955 book Eros and Civilization, in my view his best book, but then became famous for One-Dimensional Man in 1964, which made him an international figure, so that for example radical students in Rome would carry placards that said, Marx, Mao, Marcuse and there's been never a Brandeis faculty member full time that ever had that particular recognition.
Stephen Whitfield:
He leaves in 1965 to go to the University of California San Diego. His scholarly career's over by then and the radical movement itself was to crest only a few years later and then his own reputation would begin to sink, but he was certainly a very significant figure and by all evidence that I was researching, was also able to have a tremendous impact as a teacher and any number of students have testified to the sobriety, the dignity, and the intellectual power that he was able to convey.
Julian Zelizer:
Another figure who looms large in the book is Eleanor Roosevelt.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yes.
Julian Zelizer:
Tell us about her time-
Stephen Whitfield:
Eleanor Roosevelt probably deserves to be credited for putting Brandeis University on the map in the way that nobody else did. The first woman to serve on the Brandeis Board of Trustees, the most admired woman in the world in the final years of her life, according to the Gallup poll, somebody who had a genuine appreciation for the mission at Brandeis in terms of its liberalism. She was of course, while first lady, and then after her husband's death, was an iconic figure in the Democratic Party and in the fate of American liberalism.
Stephen Whitfield:
So, she bestowed her unmatched prestige on the university, delivers a commencement address very early in the career of the university, and with Larry Fuchs, a colleague of mine and a colleague of Joyce Antler's, teaches a course on international organization and law for three years at the university and really in virtually every imaginable way that she was called upon as a teacher, as a trustee, as somebody who could help President Sachar raise money. She was an utterly indispensable figure and crucial really to the early history of the university.
Julian Zelizer:
For someone do you think like Abbie Hoffman, who's one of the ... For undergraduates, at least when I was there, he was one of the coolest alumni to have, do you sense that he was shaped by his time there, or was he somewhat on the left who happened to go to Brandeis? What's the relation-
Stephen Whitfield:
It's a curious case. The section of the book that I write about Abbie Hoffman seeks to make the case that he was one of the rare products of the 1960s in the radical movement who basically maintained in a remarkably steadfast way his own particular convictions and his own particular values. When he was at Brandeis, he was not particularly political and he loved Brandeis actually for academic reasons. The faculty he thought was absolutely phenomenal. He was very much cherished the three M's, that is Marcuse, the psychologist Abraham Maslow, and the historian Frank Manuel and Abbie Hoffman's autobiography which is called Soon to be a Major Motion Picture, pays a wonderfully glowing tribute to his undergraduate experience basically on academic terms before he later turns into the political figure that he became.
Julian Zelizer:
And, Angela Davis, who you mentioned, what was her experience at Brandeis?
Stephen Whitfield:
Well, that's again a curious ... That's a curious one. I paired Hoffman and Davis today as homegrown radicals. Davis, although she came from a left-wing background in Birmingham, was not particularly political as I understand it during her years at Brandeis. She graduated in 1965. I should add here a little bit parenthetically, Julian, as I know you noticed it, I kept myself entirely out of the book, although I've learned certain things from faculty members and from former students that I think shaped some of the interpretations and Murray Sachs whose field was French literature told me that Angela Davis was the best student in French literature whom he ever knew.
Stephen Whitfield:
So, her career was, in that sense, something that was post-Brandeis in terms of her own move toward the Black Panthers, toward the Communist Party, all of that is after Brandeis itself, but when she spoke at the Brandeis campus, she returned here about four years ago, she did pay tribute to what she learned at Brandeis.
Julian Zelizer:
And, is there a figure that you wrote about who stood out to you as someone maybe you didn't know as much about, or you hadn't treated as seriously just in your knowledge that as a result of writing the book really now is a more important player?
Stephen Whitfield:
That's a great question because the world Learning in the title is also a hint as to how much the author learned and it's one of the things I think that's wonderful about historical research is that you don't know where it's going to go, you don't know what discoveries you will make. So, in the case of a philosopher named Jean Van Heijenoort, whom I had never heard of when I began to work on this book about eight years ago, this was probably the biggest revelation because he had the remarkable pre-Brandeis career of Trotskyism and of being Trotsky's bodyguard, Trotsky's amanuensis.
Stephen Whitfield:
In other words, Trotsky relied on him for correspondence during the years in which Trotsky was in exile in France and Norway and Mexico. In other words, I make the claim in the book that Van Heijenoort was probably closer to Trotsky for the years of his exile than anyone other than Trotsky's own wife, and it's one of the sad moments, whatever you think about Trotsky's politics, that Van Heijenoort was not present when a Stalinist assassin came into Trotsky's office outside of Mexico City and murdered him.
Stephen Whitfield:
Van Heijenoort always said that had he been there he would have spotted the fake accent and would have prevented the assassination. So, he had an amazingly interesting and very dangerous career within the Trotskyist movement and then afterwards and with the eclipse of the prestige of Marxism, converted himself into an important figure in the field of mathematical logic and that is what he taught at Brandeis and it was fascinating for me to discover that particular career.
Stephen Whitfield:
Again, one of the reasons why the book seeks to make the claim that Brandeis was really unusual in a way that one cannot imagine any other college or university being.
Julian Zelizer:
And, for those of us who study liberalism in the left, we know it's not a unified movement. There's tons of tensions. It's evolved over time, such as in the 60s, how does it change at Brandeis? Do you see those points of tension? Do you see an evolution that happens in what it means to be of the left?
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah, this is a question to which I know that I will not be able to give justice to, but the claim in the book and the claim that can only be argued forcefully in a different kind of setting would basically be this, that liberalism in 1948, when the university was founded, was based upon the principle that you have to judge people only as individuals and you should not judge them really by any other criterion, but their own personal gifts, their own personal promise, and in the book, particularly in the second chapter, I try to lay out why that version of liberalism was so important because when you look at the ways in which talented and promising Jewish academics were recommended for jobs or for graduate school, often the recommenders in order to do the candidates a favor, would say, "Well, this candidate is Jewish, but he does not have the traits that you associate with the Jewish people."
Stephen Whitfield:
Evidently negative traits, so when you looked at the letters of recommendation, for example, for Abe Maslow in psychology or for Cyrus Gordon in Mediterranean studies, the point was that although they are Jews, they're not like other Jews. They don't have those particular disagreeable traits, and therefore judged them as individuals. So, that's the context under which liberalism makes that claim. Brandeis, of course, insists that there will be no criterion other than individual merit in order to judge candidates for admission or for hiring on the faculty.
Stephen Whitfield:
That is, we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender, et cetera. So, that was the definition of liberalism basically until the 1960s when things changed. At Brandeis, the change takes place with the takeover by black students of Ford Hall in January of 1969 with among other claims that particularly that black faculty should be hired to teach black studies, that scholarships should be given specifically to black students, and that is the moment in which liberalism itself is forced to readjust to the notion that people are not only individuals, but that they are also associated with collectivity. They are also associated with either ancestral groups or other kinds of groups, which is part of their identity, part of their sensibility, part of their being.
Stephen Whitfield:
And therefore, liberalism ever since then, ever since the end of the 1960s has to adjust and to revise itself to take account of the claims that people are not only individuals and that their talents, but also the discrimination that they may have faced, the barriers that they might have had to transcend, these should also be taken into account in judging candidates for admission or in judging candidates for employment and that's really the story it seems to me is I've tried to suggest it. That's the story of the way in which liberalism itself becomes altered in the course of the 72 years that Brandeis has been in existence.
Julian Zelizer:
What kind of impact ... And, I'm cognizant of time for questions, but I was there in the late 80s and 90s and I remember certainly in the student body there was a much more vocal presence of Conservative students who were coming of age in the Reagan revolution. I assume that's expanded since then. How has that affected Liberal ideas, and Liberal faculty, and the culture that you've described? How did that impact it as we've seen in other parts of the country?
Stephen Whitfield:
That's a tough one to answer, but I would think in broad terms, the striking thing it seems to be in the early years, well before you got there, would be that there were very few Conservatives, very few Republicans, but the book shows ... Just to look at it, the microscopic level, the book shows the way in which the left also turned to extremism and turned to violence, and unfortunately, some Brandeis students were very much involved in that, depicted in the book, and that inevitably and quite rightly, produced a reaction, a revulsion and inevitably produced, it seems to me, a turn to the right.
Stephen Whitfield:
So, that the story of America, and American politics, which of course you know much better and more authoritatively than I do, is really a turn in which that becomes a way of reshaping the very contours of American politics. Brandeis was inevitably to be affected by that and I think the tendency, and you can judge them in the light of your own experience, the tendency would be maybe less that students turned to the right as they may become increasingly apolitical. So, I don't think there was a notably, emphatic Conservatism near the end of the 20th century, so much as there was an important Conservative component, but there's also something in which students are interested in other things besides the politics that I think generated so much excitement in the early years.
Julian Zelizer:
And, do you think the left, this tradition of the left certainly with the faculty of the university and visiting scholars, is the relationship between that and the educational content, have those values infused the education in any way?
Stephen Whitfield:
I think there are possibly two answers to that. One would be my own private complaint for many, many of the years that I taught at Brandeis that I wished there had been a lot of serious, sophisticated Conservative students or at least some, to generate argument, to generate discussion, and if need be, simply to strengthen the Liberal position in class discussions and interpretations, and there were never very many such Conservative students whom I ever encountered or had a chance to know.
Stephen Whitfield:
The broader issue I think was more important in the early decades. I think the Progressive tradition, the Liberal tradition was resisting against the culture of the Cold War, resisting against much of the Conservatism of the Eisenhower years, of the threat of McCarthyism of course posed, so therefore Liberal values and radical values by social Democrats like Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, that that kind of teaching or that kind of ideological orientation represented a power and a tension against some of the dominant conventions of American political life. It doesn't have quite the same panache when liberalism itself becomes a dominant feature in the 1960s and as you wrote in The Fierce Urgency of Now in which there's a certain moment in which the influenced Liberal hegemony becomes genuinely a transformative moment.
Stephen Whitfield:
On those occasions it's better to have an educational resistance rather than simply a conformism. So, in that way, I think the ideal educational environment is some kind of resistance. If the larger political tradition is one of Conservatism, it's better to have a Liberal engagement and so on, and I would say vice versa, but I think Brandeis, even in the years in which it became more apolitical, I think Brandeis was still a place in which that kind of tension could be found.
Julian Zelizer:
Everyone should get this book by the way, and I say this to people who are not from Brandeis, but if you went there and you're connected to the university, it's really just a wonderful way to understand the institution without it being an institutional history. It's quite good and it's a good read, but in the end, is the tradition of the left at Brandeis, is it different than what we would find at Berkeley or Michigan or other universities who also have a strong tradition? Is there something distinct, do you think, about the left at Brandeis?
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah, I've tried to wrestle with that in the course of the books since the argument depends so heavily upon the singularity of Brandeis University. Certainly even in the 1950s you could find important pockets of that kind of radicalism at Ann Arbor, at Madison, at Berkeley, presumably at City College. Brandeis was different because it was a private institution that sought to compete in some ways at least with a more established private liberal arts colleges in New England, which in places like Yale, Dartmouth, I would say also Princeton, often the students in that era tended to be Republican.
Stephen Whitfield:
So in that sense, Brandeis was different and then beginning in the 1960s, I think under the impact of the Vietnam War then other colleges and universities in a sense caught up with Brandeis, so that now Brandeis politically, I'm not arguing any other way, but that politically Brandeis doesn't differentiate itself all that strikingly from other sorts of particularly liberal arts colleges and many of the state universities.
Stephen Whitfield:
So, in that sense, the political singularity I think is different, but I can only recall that in terms of the sense that there was always at least a kind of political energy or a heightened political consciousness I can only note what ex-president Sachar used to say when he would meet former students and he would claim that he'd be able to guess what class they had graduated from on the basis of what they were protesting against when they were undergraduates. So, there's at least that sense of some kind of dissatisfaction, some rumble of political discontent that I think long characterized the university.
Julian Zelizer:
I think when I visited the university as a prospective student, I believe it was that visit where the first thing I remember were the protest against apartheid in South Africa.
Stephen Whitfield:
Sure.
Julian Zelizer:
The protestors in the front ... That was literally my first introduction and that experience continues. Let me ask, and maybe we can conclude with this before we move for questions, we are in a moment in American history now where there is an energy on the left. New voices in the left, whether it's the Black Lives Matter movement, which has flourished throughout the country, whether it's the Progressive coalition in Congress such as AOC or the Sanders campaign, will Brandeis continue now, do you think, to be a home for that tradition or is this a period we've moved beyond?
Stephen Whitfield:
I'm tempted to answer that as Joyce introduced me that I'm a historian and not a prophet.
Julian Zelizer:
I use that one all the time.
Stephen Whitfield:
Julian, I'd rather fudge that if you don't mind, but before we turn it over to Sharon, I'd like to turn the tables on you since this is a conversation and just ask you as a final question, given the degree to which Brandeis is mostly associated with outsiders, with people who didn't exercise legislative power, there's only one person who ever became a congressman, Stephen Solarz, given the extent to which these were people who were outside looking in, seeking to change the system, and that your scholarship has basically been about insiders, executive branch, legislative branch, do you have any thoughts about the way in which those sorts of outsiders really altered the trajectory of what was going on inside the beltway in ways that can be identified?
Julian Zelizer:
Absolutely, and this is something over the course of my career I've been more interested in and in some ways I think it dates back to some of my education at Brandeis. The book on the Great Society is really a lot about the impact the civil rights movement had on shaking a status quo that didn't want to deal with civil rights or wanted to punt and wait on dealing with civil rights legislation and movement activists who were seen as quite radical and certainly outside politics were able ultimately to put enough pressure on the system to produce legislation in the mid-60s.
Julian Zelizer:
I'm right now writing a book that I'm finishing about Abraham Joshua Heschel, a rabbi who in the 60s became a civil rights activist, an anti-war activist, and it's been fascinating to see how he and a group of fellow preachers in the late 60s were part of an anti-war movement that didn't end the war right away, but certainly changed the tenor and the temperature of Washington as the 60s progressed, and the war which started as something that was very popular, by the late 60s is not, and you could see how even a rabbi, a Jewish theological seminary, and I'm the son of a rabbi, so I can say that, could have an impact.
Julian Zelizer:
So, I believe activists matter and I believe intellectually too. I do think the intellectuals who were part of the left had the ear of the mainstream Liberal establishment. Often it's tension, but that tension often produced movement in certain directions on issues like climate change or race relations. I think the left has been extraordinarily important in the mainstream liberal tradition and in Washington DC.
Stephen Whitfield:
That's a nice affirmative note to turn it over the Sharon. Thanks, Julian.
Julian Zelizer:
Hey, a pleasure.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you, Steve, thank you, Julian. There are many questions in the Q&A, so we'll get to as many of them as we can. The first one, can you address labels of Progressive and Liberal insomuch as these are now being couched as quote, socialist, as a dirty word in today's polarized climate? Can you elucidate in the context of modern progressive ideals and is there hope that these are in fact quote, American ideals?
Stephen Whitfield:
Is that directed at me?
Sharon Rosenberg:
Whichever one of you would like to take that one.
Stephen Whitfield:
I'll take it very quickly. At least within the confines of the book called Learning on the Left, it's basically about liberalism, which is defined broadly speaking within the immediate historical context of the 1940s and beyond as a commitment to civil rights, a commitment to civil liberties, a commitment to international organizations such as the United Nations, often an effort to limit the power of corporations, often an expression of support and sympathy for the labor movement. That is what liberalism generally meant in the era of let's say the first roughly two decades of Brandeis University, which also included on its faculty and in its student body, people who were to the left associated with social democracy or socialism and they had no hesitation about using that word, often with the qualification of course that it meant social democracy not Bolshevism, not Communism, not Trotskyism, later, not Maoism and so on.
Stephen Whitfield:
So, if you allow the broader term left to include both radicalism and liberalism, it seems to me it's fairly clear it becomes a bit more muddled over issues of foreign policy, but I think that in historical context it's generally something in which particular political figures can be identified in terms of whether they are Liberal, which I use as basically a synonym for Progressive or whether they can be defined as social Democrats. So, in the immediate context when you look at actual political figures and political thinkers, it's not that difficult to identify people who satisfy those definitions.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you. This question's about antisemitism and you mentioned that those fighting antisemitism in the early days of Brandeis were mostly Liberals. I'm curious what you think of antisemitism in 2020. It seems to come from both right and left and many prominent Democrats have gotten in trouble for antisemitic remarks. Does this represent a shift in antisemitism?
Stephen Whitfield:
My quick answer would be yes. It's one of the complications I think of 21st century politics that antisemitism as historically understood, as primarily an expression of either a rancid kind of bigotry or simply as the defense of privilege, both associated with either the right or the resentment of groups that felt on the outside that certainly in recent decades there has been clearly a left antisemitism. Often I think, and this is a much more complicated subject than can we do justice to here, often associated with attitudes towards the state of Israel and that leftist attitudes toward Israel, especially in recent decades have indeed often spilled over into something that can be easily identified as antisemitism.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you. We have a question from a member of the class of 1952.
Stephen Whitfield:
Uh-oh.
Sharon Rosenberg:
She has not had a chance to read your book yet, but she would like to ask about what you wrote about Max Lerner and she noted, "Max Lerner taught me so much and influenced my effectiveness as a political operative. At age 88, I am still a precinct committee member."
Stephen Whitfield:
Terrific, there is a whole section on Max Lerner. I think now is the time for me to admit, especially with Joyce Antler here, is that the book has a certain pronounced American studies bias. It includes Pauli Murray, it includes Max Lerner, it includes Larry Fuchs and all three of them were in American studies and Max Lerner was a dominant figure in Brandeis University. In the early years, he was a remarkable talent scout. It was he who brought people like Lewis Coser and Phillip Rieff to Brandeis University.
Stephen Whitfield:
He did not care particularly about formal credentials. He was a person of extraordinary wide range and versatility. The sort of teacher, the sort of lecturer who was able and perhaps the member of the class of '52 can confirm this, who even when speaking to a room of 200 students, each of those students would feel that he or she was being addressed directly by Max Lerner. His career at Brandeis was the most important academic part of his life. He retired in effect in the early 1970s from Brandeis having basically taught the last three years half time and his record at Brandeis was in some ways unmatched while at the same time having an important career in journalism as a columnist for the New York Post and in syndication.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Great, thank you. A question about Albert Einstein. How does your book discuss Einstein's involvement in Brandeis although he disassociated himself from Brandeis before its actual founding?
Stephen Whitfield:
Einstein plays an important role. Brandeis relied upon not only the extraordinary prestige of Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1950s, but in the 1940s upon Albert Einstein, the world's most famous scientist who was well-aware of antisemitism having come from Germany, struck by the degree to which there was an academic antisemitism in the US. It was very, very supportive of Brandeis University at the very, very beginning and then it got very, very touchy because Einstein was a man of the left who felt that Brandeis was already at the beginning, beginning to move in a direction of a certain degree of complacency.
Stephen Whitfield:
The fuller can be found, I believe, in my book as well as in a number of other books, including books about Einstein, but his breakup with the university was abrupt, complete. He refused to even consider accepting an honorary degree, wanted nothing further to do with the university, but he was indeed with the founders at the very beginning.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Great, thank you. Brandeis has often been labeled a quote, radical university. Would you agree with that label, and do you think that label has helped or hurt the university?
Stephen Whitfield:
The second part is easy, it has certainly hurt. The first part is I would say untrue. We have certainly produced radicals and we have certainly produced figures who were even associated with violence. We have four former students who made the FBI Most Wanted list or its equivalent, all of whom incidentally were women, but they are unrepresentative of the university as I tried to suggest earlier in our conversation with Julian, which is to say broadly speaking is endowed with a Liberal ethos that can feel pressure from the left, pressure from radicalism, but except in perhaps the height of the anti-war movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I think it would be very hard to discern that radicalism was itself the dominant political trait.
Julian Zelizer:
If I could jump in on that, and there was an earlier question about socialism as a label for the left, and it's a form of political rhetoric that's often used to dismiss a lot of what the left is or Liberal ideas even when it's not socialist. I think you can think of that with that characterization of Brandeis. This university as Steve has talked about, has a tradition of mainstream liberalism like Eleanor Roosevelt. It has a tradition of leftist politics and it has a tradition of faculty who are not part of this.
Julian Zelizer:
You're highlighting those faculty, but there's a wide range, but at some level it's natural. This is a university created with not just outsiders, but the perception that it would be a home to those who are not allowed elsewhere. So, it's natural that you will nurture a culture and a faculty that at some level perceive those values. That's different than radical. Even the late 60s, you could argue the radicals were the ones conducting the war, rather than the ones protesting it.
Julian Zelizer:
And so, I think I tend to shy away from using that label. I think that the university has a much richer tradition than that and the tradition of the left isn't always the tradition of the radical as it's probably thought of.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Great, thank you. There's a couple of questions in here about Lewis Coser and asking for more information.
Stephen Whitfield:
Lewis Coser was a professor of sociology at Brandeis. The first sociologist whom Brandeis hired, a refugee from Nazi Germany who in 1954 with his friend Irving Howe founded the journal of social Democratic thought called Dissent which is now the longest running, the most enduring journal of social Democratic thought or at least Democratic radical thought in the English speaking world. It's been around ever since 1954 and Coser and Howe got the idea while they were at Brandeis. The wanted to figure out, given the eclipse of the Marxist tradition, they wanted to figure out what is still viable in the definition of Democratic socialism that could be defined largely in terms of the kinds of comrades that one wants to have in fights in behalf of social justice, fights in behalf of the labor movement, fights in behalf of civil rights, and civil liberties, especially during the era of McCarthyism, so Coser played an important role in the department of sociology, an important role in American intellectual and political life with his friend Irving Howe.
Stephen Whitfield:
And, Coser also nourished and encouraged and supported Michael Walzer when he was still an undergraduate. Walzer would later become a co-editor of Dissent Magazine itself. In that sense, Coser was among the key figures in the early years of Brandeis, had various sorts of conflicts with President Sachar. Coser's most famous book was his first called The Function of Social Conflict, and in a sense he embodied that in many of his struggles with the Brandeis administration.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you. Question from a member of the class of '97. He says, "Listening to Professor Whitfield, one of my favorite professors, brought me right back to my days at Brandeis. I credit Brandeis with my passion for engaging in political and advocacy campaigns and I'm a proud liberal activist. My question, are you seeing any similarities between the 1960s on campus with the current political climate on campus?"
Stephen Whitfield:
I'm going to have to duck that, although I appreciate the praise. I'm glad you're still an activist and an idealist. I've been retired since December of 2016 from teaching. I don't really feel qualified to comment now, I'm sorry.
Julian Zelizer:
I'm going to jump in. I'm not from Brandeis. I taught there now, but I do think there's some comparison to be made. I think certainly at Princeton there's a lot of students who are raising some, not just questions about, is the university too Conservative or not, but challenging assumptions we have, questions about how buildings or programs should be named, raising questions about the nature of the faculty and the curriculum and asking student-based questions, a leftist critique of the culture that students are engaged in and that was an important part of the 60s.
Julian Zelizer:
It wasn't simply the anti-war movement, and it wasn't simply civil rights, it was also what should the university look like, and I think there's a lot of that going on right now in the country. It often makes older faculty uncomfortable and that's probably a good thing because that means the students are actually raising the kinds of questions that we as faculty ask them to do. So, I think there's some interesting comparisons, even if the issues, some of them, are different. Obviously others, including racial justice, are now sweeping universities as they did in the 60s.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you. Another question, was the administration and board of trustees self-conscious about fostering the activism and scholarship that you write about, and if so, what steps did the leadership take to bring about this agenda?
Stephen Whitfield:
That's a great question. It's also very difficult to answer because we're talking here about decade after decade in which the composition of the administration, the composition of the board of trustees was always undergoing change and alteration. You'd have to look at things that were much more specific. The tricky part here, although it's a wonderful question, is that the book that I wrote is very specific in wanting to deal only with the political life of the university, but not even specifically of the university so much as the people who had careers off campus. It's an extracurricular work rather than something that looks at campus issues as such, but even within that warning, I would say it would depend.
Stephen Whitfield:
A trustee like Eleanor Roosevelt when she spoke and gave the first commencement address to a graduating class with the 1952, she was obviously advocating a life of which she called adventure which would have been political idealism and political activism. Brandeis University had on its board of trustees somebody like Hubert Humphrey who at least in his early career in domestic politics was an extraordinary force for civil rights and for human rights.
Stephen Whitfield:
Stephen Solarz was on the board of trustees, a genuinely committed congressman who had much to do with the opposition and the overthrow of tyranny in places like the Philippines, so it's very, very hard to say. You'd have to look also at particular administrations. I mentioned that Sachar was broadly speaking, I would say, as I understand it, I can be corrected here, broadly speaking sympathetic to at least off campus activities, broadly speaking that we were aiming at promotion of social justice.
Stephen Whitfield:
The first president who was to really make social justice an explicit part of the Brandeis mission was Jehuda Reinharz, to whom I'm personally very, very indebted to his own support for this book. That's relatively late in the career of Brandeis University, but I think that Jehuda was expressing something that at least was implicit in much of the support, much of the encouragement that the administration broadly gave.
Stephen Whitfield:
Certainly in the 1960s, and I have a chapter about the civil rights movement in the 1960s in the South, certainly this was something that for which there was as close to universal support, faculty, students, administration as one could imagine in the struggle against Jim Crow and against white supremacy in the South and I think increasingly even with the Vietnam War, although there would have been differences. The president who succeeded Dr. Sachar, that is Morris Abram was personally and politically against the war in Vietnam and that was something that was very important in terms of the particular moment in which he served as president.
Stephen Whitfield:
So, I'm sure that exceptions could be found. I'm sure there would have to be modifications to this generalization, but I think the broader support for social justice is something for which there was at least tremendous implicit support by the administration and by the trustees.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Great, thank you. We're just coming up on nine o'clock on the East Coast, and we got a whole lot more questions, so thank you, Stephen, Julian, for agreeing to stick around for a bit longer. Another question, what surprised you as you researched and wrote the book? Did it take you somewhere you did not expect to go, especially in how you view political positioning?
Stephen Whitfield:
Wonderful question, that's the great joy of research is that you discover things that you couldn't imagine were there that there will always be curiosities, there will always be oddities and surprises. If there aren't such surprises, you're probably not looking in the right places. As I mentioned before, the case of Jean Van Heijenoort was probably the biggest surprise to me. The other figure of whom I knew nothing before embarking on this was somebody whom FBI director Robert Mueller wanted to have captured or killed on the spot and that is somebody who got her master's degree and her doctorate from Brandeis in neuroscience, Aafia Siddiqui, who is now in a federal prison in Texas probably for the rest of her life, and she was somebody who was an embodiment of Islamic terrorism and fundamentalism.
Stephen Whitfield:
I didn't know that she existed, I didn't know that she'd gone to Brandeis as a graduate student, a very successful one I should add, until I started the book, and then there were just all the sort of little surprises that I feel is among the fun features about history. Just again, I'll give one small example because I've also been very much interested in the Pentagon Papers case, 1971, and the defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, not only leaked it to The New York Times and Washington Post, but also showed it to the Independent Weekly in Boston, which employed Arnie Reisman of the class of 1964 and Arnie Reisman was actually able to see sections of the Pentagon Papers and I use that as an example in the book of basically the eclipse of authority in the 1960s that ex-president Johnson and President Nixon were able to read the Pentagon Papers only after Arnie Reisman did and that seems to me a remarkable phenomenon.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Great, thank you. Well, there is of course pride in Brandeis being the first and only Jewish-sponsored, non-sectarian university. There's a certain self-criticism and self-ridicule that we make about the Jewishness of Brandeis that may be part of our cultural personality. With the rise in Black Lives Matter and Kamala Harris' candidacy, we're hearing so much more about historically black colleges and universities and pride in having attended one. Do you see Brandeis as serving the role for Jews as historically black colleges and universities do for the black community? How do you see the Jewish Liberal values of Brandeis being celebrated by the Jewish community?
Stephen Whitfield:
Julian, do you want to start that one?
Julian Zelizer:
Yeah, look, I would say these two very different experiences, and I would be cautious to compare these as equivalent and obviously the history of racial injustice and inequality runs very, very deep in our country and continues through this day whereas the history of antisemitism has a different dynamic and trajectory. I do think though, when I was here at Brandeis during the debate over pork and shellfish being introduced into the dining hall. It raised the question, what does it mean by the 1980s and 90s to be a university with this character?
Julian Zelizer:
I think this Liberal tradition as it came out of Jewish culture, Jewish theology, it's an important tradition. It's not the only tradition. There's a lot of very conservative Jews, but it is a tradition that has lost some of its place in American history and I think the value of a book like this and the value of remembering that that tradition took form here in an intellectual space, it is important in terms of how the university is distinct.
Julian Zelizer:
Obviously, American Jews, even with renewed antisemitism still live with pretty good conditions in this day and age and don't face the same kind of discrimination, nor do they still need the same kind of institutional base that you have certainly in other communities. That said, I think there's ways to talk about what this university contributes to American society and still does and this Liberal tradition is very important, I think, in American Judaism and this is a university that it's emphasis on this at some level and it's a great thing about Brandeis.
Julian Zelizer:
Even a Conservative can appreciate this, and it helps fill out, what does it mean to be a secular Jewish university in the post-World War II period as antisemitism fades to some extent, this is one answer.
Stephen Whitfield:
I would only add to that that perhaps the most striking difference is that Brandeis from the beginning wanted to be a place for everybody. Of course, it primarily attracted Jews who were fearful of not being accepted elsewhere, but from the beginning there was the sense that this was a place that everybody could be at home, where there was not supposed to be any racial discrimination and not just the absence of antisemitism, whereas the historically black colleges and universities, and I taught at one of them for two years before entering at Brandeis in graduate school, they had an entirely different function, very different mission.
Stephen Whitfield:
It wasn't particularly to promote pluralism, not to promote diversity, but really to be a place where virtually only blacks would be able to attend, and which increasingly interest in black studies, black history would become possible, but without any sense that it was intended to be inclusive in a way that Brandeis University has sought to be.
Julian Zelizer:
Let me add one last thing. I think in terms of the Brandeis part, in my estimation, one of the great things about the Jewish tradition is its encouragement of fierce intellectual debate about everything and anyone who is a little bit religious has been exposed to this. Even the most holiest of text is constantly parsed and reinterpreted and I think after reading Steve's book, it's not simply a history of the left at Brandeis, but how the institution nurtured space for even those on the left who were outside the mainstream, encouraged students to be exposed to these ideas, encouraged them to debate.
Julian Zelizer:
It wasn't simply, here's the ideas of the left, but listen, debate, analyze, digest, and I think in many ways, that's how it's a very Jewish culture at Brandeis. That was my experience and it's another really good contribution of the university that I hope continues.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you, I think we have time for two more questions. So this one, can you please talk a bit more about Pauli Murray and impact on Brandeis?
Stephen Whitfield:
Yes, Pauli Murray had among the most extraordinary careers of anybody that is described in the book. She was from Durham, North Carolina. She was only part black, she was part white, part Native American. Her sexual identity was ambiguous for much of her life. She always felt to be an outsider, but always felt as she remarked in her motto, "Whenever somebody tries to keep me out, I want to enlarge the circle that will include me in." Very gifted as an attorney, did an important compilation of Jim Crow laws that Thurgood Marshall relied on and had multiple copies in his office at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Stephen Whitfield:
Her first full time academic job, and it turned out to be her only full time academic job was at Brandeis beginning in 1968. She left in 1973 and having earned three law degrees, having been a founder of the National Organization for Women, having been deeply involved in the feminist movement, as well as in the anti-racist movement, and then around the time that she left Brandeis, she decided to become an Episcopalian priest, which was in the first graduating class for the priesthood that included women and posthumously, the Episcopalian church declared her to be a saint.
Stephen Whitfield:
To the best of my knowledge, she's the only Brandeis faculty member that has ever been declared to be a saint. The Episcopalian church defines sainthood in terms of an exemplary life, rather than divine intervention, and a dormitory at Yale is now named in her memory. So, she's had a remarkable posthumous career and reputation that is fully deserved and it's a shame that she's no longer alive to acknowledge the recognition that she's been given in several biographies, there's a new one that has recently come out.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you, and our final question, you mentioned that you made a conscious decision not to write yourself into the book, but if you had, where would you fit in?
Stephen Whitfield:
Well, I was very close to two faculty members, John Roach, who directed my dissertation in the department of history, and Larry Fuchs who was my colleague and closest friend in the department of American studies and the account given in the book of John Roach's career and of Larry Fuch's career I think are colored implicitly by many conversations with both gentlemen, but I didn't feel since my relationship to many of these people was minimal or non-existent, erratic or brief, I didn't feel there was any particular purpose in injecting myself.
Stephen Whitfield:
The ideal would be for me as a writer is if nobody can have any idea in reading the book whether I knew any of these people and it's basically a way of saying the book is really about Brandeis. I mentioned in the acknowledgements it's a thank you note to Brandeis and that it's a way of really paying tribute to the kind of education that I personally got, the kind of education that I have myself learned from students, and the ways in which the university continues to be a very, very important feature of American higher education.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Great, thank you very much, Steve, and thank you, Julian. I think this could've easily gone on for another couple of hours. There's so much to talk about, and thanks to everyone for joining us tonight. We will be sharing a recording of this in approximately a week, and in the meantime, if you'd like to purchase a copy of the book, you can go to the Brandeis University Press website which is brandeis.edu/press. We hope to see you at other upcoming events. Continue to check your email, look at our website, and social media. Thank you again for joining us and to our fellow Brandeisians in the western states along the West Coast, we're thinking of you and stay safe. From those of us on the East Coast, have a good night.
Stephen Whitfield:
Thank you.