Susan Jay:
Okay. Here we go. Let's get started. So, I'm Susan Eisenberg Jay, your Class of '71 Reunion co-chair, and on behalf of my co-chair extraordinaire, Allen Alter, and our outstanding reunion committee, and I see a lot of folks from our reunion committee on this call, I want to welcome everybody to the first event of our 50th class reunion, and it's pretty scary just saying that. We're thrilled to be able to present to you the first conversation with Professor Steve Whitfield about his recently published book, Learning On The Left, exclusively for our class. First, a few reminders. As we move into the winter months, reunion committee members and Brandeis liaisons, Ashley Freccia, who's right up there in the corner, and Alan Bertman, who's in the other corner, and Allen and myself will be reach out to all members of our class to discuss reunion details.
Susan Jay:
So, if you have any suggestions for any kind of discussion, events, workshops, whatever, please let us know and consider attending reunion in June in person. Wait, needless, we will be making arrangements for plan B virtual events to accommodate all health and safety protocols as the time permits. Now, I would like all of you to think about your 50th reunion gift. It is so important this year during such a difficult time financially for students and the university. Student scholarships and support are crucial this year. Some of you indicated, to me, five years ago that you were waiting for our 50th to make a meaningful gift to the university as a thank you for everything that Brandeis has meant in your lives and has enabled you to accomplish. Your 50th gift can be structured over two years and give you and our class gift credit for the full amount but you have two years to pay it out.
Susan Jay:
We suggest giving to the Brandeis fund, which meets the university's greatest need, but of course, you have the option to select the fund of your choice and if you have any questions about 50th reunion activities, programming, giving either contact me or Allen Alter or any member of our committee or our Brandeis staff. So, thank you all for showing up and joining us this evening, and now I'm going to turn things over to our moderator, David Bell, who's going to introduce Professor Whitfield. David, unmute yourself.
David Bell:
There we go. I'm unmuted now. Thank you very, very much. Appreciate your remarks and welcome to everybody. For some it's good afternoon, for some it's good evening and I understand there may be a few people for whom it's good morning. That is the next day to members of the class of '71 from all over the world who've registered for this event. So, before we begin the program, a few logistical notes on how we're going to proceed. This meeting will be recorded. So, our classmates who are unable to attend, and view the discussion at a later date. I think most of you have already done this, but please mute yourself when you are not speaking. If you would like to speak after Steve is finished presentation, I won't call it a formal presentation, but his presentation, what I'd like you to do is to use the chat feature to say, "I would like to speak." And that way, Ashley, who will be monitoring that will then call upon you once she gets that list of people who have to make comments.
David Bell:
The chat itself is not functioning during the program, so we won't be talking to each other during the program, but you can use it to alert Ashley to when you want to make your comments. We're going to get to as many questions as we can so I'd ask that you keep your comment or question relatively brief. We're going to conclude around 9:00 Eastern Time, although we'll probably leave this whole thing open longer for people to just visit with each other even after the program is completed. So, now let's talk about our speaker. If I was in his chair and detailed bio of Steve Whitfield and his many accomplishments, awards and accolades that would be an event in and of itself. So, I'll just share a few highlights, and then turn it over to him. Steve is a professor emeritus of American Studies at Brandeis. He was born in Houston, which gives him a point of commonality with me. Got his Bachelor's degree from Tulane, Master's from Yale and his PhD from Brandeis.
David Bell:
He actually took his PhD from '69 to '72. So, he overlapped with most of us who were there from '67 to '71. He taught at Brandeis for 44 years, an amazing tenure, and has recently retired. During those 44 years he had a couple of years when he took sabbaticals or visiting professorships in Jerusalem, Paris and Munich. He was the recipient of the Lewis D Brandeis Prize for Excellence in Teaching. He is the author of several books, I believe nine of them, including In Search of American Jewish Culture, A Death in the Delta, which is the first major book about Emmet Till, the story of the episode of which was normally considered the beginning of the civil rights movement in America, and of course tonight's book, Learning on the Left, which is the subject of this evening's program.Last year, a number of us, including Allen Alter and myself, had the great pleasure of traveling with Steve to Normandy on a Brandeis travel trip and those were the good old days when we could travel, of course. So, let me stop and introduce my good friend, and a true Brandeis treasure, Steve Whitfield.
Stephen Whitfield:
David, thank you so much. Susan, thank you so much for helping to orchestrate this along with David. David violated his promise that the introduction of me would be extremely brief, but I do appreciate, David you're very generous remarks, and I'm especially thrilled, actually honored, that the class of '71 has invited me to talk a little bit about the political history of Brandeis University with particular focus on the years in which you were there that is 1967 to '71. And it's especially fitting that yours is the first class that has invited me to try to present the themes of the book, to try to present something about the larger history of American politics with particular focus on the particular years that you were there. And I'd like to explain very briefly why that is, why the class of '71 is an especially apt and especially pertinent class with which to begin whatever interest there will be from other classes in the book Learning on the Left.
Stephen Whitfield:
Sorry. Yeah. The book has basically two themes or two claims. The first claim is that Brandeis has been distinctive. Let's say singular, maybe not unique, but certainly very unusual in the history of post war American higher education in the politicization with which the campus atmosphere, the role of the faculty, the ways by which Brandeis alumni have affected American politics. So, the claim is made and it stretches over about 500 pages that Brandeis has punched above its weight in terms of a kind of commitment to altering to shaping the American civic culture.And the second claim is that the way in which those political actions, political ideas, political writing have tended to express themselves have been on the left. A very, of course, elastic term that I'm hoping and expecting a number of you will make comments on, but that broadly speaking, whether you call it liberalism, whether you call it progressivism, that Brandeis has had an impact in terms of what its faculty have done, what its alumni have done in, broadly speaking, extending democratic rights and extending issue, extending civil liberties, civil rights, promoting internationalism.
Stephen Whitfield:
And these particular factors that help make up the definition of liberalism is something that I think starts in '48, and more or less can be extended 72 years later down to our own day. And the Class of '71, and now I have to unfortunately offer a kind of presentation, very brief one which you know about, in fact, more than I do, that the years from '67 to '71 were particularly fraught and important years in at least two ways that really were extraordinary in terms of the broader history of American politics, since the end of the Second World War. The most important of course and something that we all have memories of, and perhaps are haunted by is of course the extension, the escalation of the Vietnam War, which, beginning in '67, in very striking ways although it obviously had started earlier, had a kind of intensification in the kind of amplification that seems to be unstoppable, and seem to be relentless in ways that political action and opposition, in many ways seem very very difficult to be able to stop.
Stephen Whitfield:
So, what began in 1967 and ended in '71 with your graduation, was really a period of, as I understand it, of extraordinary frustration for those who saw the Vietnam War is something which was either immoral, or unjustifiable, or in some ways unwinnable. And the four years that you were there where it seems to be especially intense, especially emotional and especially difficult precisely as the escalation of the war seemed to go, basically without any way by which its remorselessness can somehow be stopped. The election of Richard Nixon in 1968 was of course an important Capstone in that particular relentlessness. So, if you're writing a book about the political history of Brandeis University, the years that you were undergraduates is especially, telling, precisely because the politicization of the campus as a result of the shadow of that war, I believe, and you can correct me on this, was something that really affected campus life in ways that were utterly inescapable, that would have been somewhat less true at the beginning of the 1960s.
Stephen Whitfield:
And of course with the end of the war officially four years after your graduation, in which that particular episode in American history American foreign policy would in fact come to an end. So, in that sense, the class of 1971 is, for better or for worse, an important instance and important example of the case that the book tries to make for the politicization of politics at Brandeis and for those who graduated from it, and often for those who served on its faculty, during that time. And of course, in that sense, the war also moved all sorts of people to the left. That is the very, very difficulty of stopping a war that have largely lost whatever cogency, whatever rationale that the difficulty of that was something that I believe you all live through during your four years. And then inevitably pushed all sorts of students, not only at Brandeis but elsewhere, pushed them further and further toward the left in their opposition to that war.
Stephen Whitfield:
The second important factor that it seems, to me, again serves as a particular kind of justification for making the class of '71 the most apt beginning for whatever claims the book makes has to do with the changes that took place in the civil rights movement. Those who came to Brandeis in the first half of the decade of the 1960s, I think, had every reason to believe that the extension of the ideals of racial equality for all of the difficulties, all the challenges, all the violations, all the opposition that this was a momentum that could vary, only with great difficulty, could be stopped. So, the early 1960s, in terms of civil rights activity in the American South, the promotion of voting rights, the belief that legislation could in fact make a difference in terms of the behavior of white Americans. This was something that was in all sorts of ways for American liberals, an object of faith, but by the time you had arrived and certainly by the end of the 1960s, there was every reason to doubt that faith, and to question whether the momentum that could be done early in the 1960s, whether that momentum toward greater democratization, toward greater racial equality could in fact be achieved.
Stephen Whitfield:
So, I believe it's fair to say that it was your fate to be undergraduates at a time in which that political faith, you might say that liberal faith, was in various ways, subject to serious question and doubt. The civil rights movement itself that offered such promise earlier in the decade, it achieved his greatest legislative successes in 1964 in 1965, that momentum toward legislation that would indeed break the back of Jim Crow and the various forms of white supremacy, that hope was clearly something that has fragmented, and in some ways, dissipated certainly, by the time you've graduated. And in that sense, there must have been, again, some realization that the life of politics that had begun earlier in the '60s was something that now was open to extraordinary, either doubt, or skepticism, or of course, even cynicism. So, in that way, it seems to me that what learning on the left is seeking to demonstrate, seeking to argue, the theses that I tried to present in the book offer the class of '71 a certain kind of test case for indeed the ways by which the life of politics.
Stephen Whitfield:
The life of the promotion of citizenship, in which those things now come increasingly into question and increasingly into either a fragmentation or what was to happen not long after you have graduated, in which the importance of politics and the history of Brandeis begins to recede. The book itself, basically stops with some important exceptions for all practical purposes in 1975, that is roughly four years after you graduated, in which, for various reasons that I don't myself claim fully to understand, in which much of American campus life becomes de politicized. And in which the distinctiveness of Brandeis, that began in 1948, shares much of that sense by which a liberal arts education, the way the faculty wish to operate in politics, the way alumni wish to operate in politics, that begins to become much less forceful and much less important. So, that's the case for it seems to me, the significance of what you experienced, what you underwent in your years at Brandeis.
Stephen Whitfield:
I'm here really to be part of that conversation and to learn from you in terms of your own comments, your own recollections, your own impressions, your own criticisms. So, thank you very much.
David Bell:
Okay. I'm going to lead off with a first question, and I hope my classmates will take over after that with questions. Ashley, do have a number of people who have indicated they want to speak?
Ashley Freccia:
I do have a few people. So, I just want to reiterate if you would like to speak, please type "I would like to speak" in the chat, and then when it is your turn, I'll call me and ask you to unmute yourself.
David Bell:
Okay, I will lead off by asking you a questions that I often wondered about as I read the book, which is, what were your rules of what you included? How did you make a judgment whether something was worthy of being in the book? And were there episodes, or people, or other kinds of things that didn't make it into the book that might have otherwise made it into the book if the book could have been an unlimited length? What were your criteria for inclusion?
Stephen Whitfield:
That's a terrific question, David. There was no overriding principle I don't believe. There were certain things that I think were, to me, fairly obvious. Let's start with faculty. Herbert Marcuza, who left Brandeis in 1965 was the only Brandeis faculty member, the only person who ever served on the Brandeis faculty who would be denounced by name, by the Vatican. So, he was denounced for what he allegedly promoted, he and the late Sigmund Freud, for promoting what came to be called the sexual revolution. So, any faculty member who was denounced by name by a pope seems, to me, worthy of inclusion. My brief colleague, Pauli Murray in the department of American Studies, for whom there is now a residential college name for her at Yale, a person who was declared by her church, the Episcopalian church, to be a saint. Saint being defined by the Episcopalian church as somebody who lives an exemplary life, not necessarily somebody who performed miracles. It seems to me that putting Pauli Murray in the book was obviously something that took no particular sort of judgment.
Stephen Whitfield:
The faculty members who were involved in the editing of major journals of the left, whether it be dissent... Lewis Coser, or partisan review being Philip Roth. They seem to be utterly essential. Faculty members who played an important role sometimes behind the scenes in politics, whether it be Larry Fuchs in American Studies, whether it be John Roche in the department of Politics, those special consultant to President Johnson. They obviously have to be included. So, as far as the students are concerned, that was in some ways a tougher call, but I named 1975, for example, as the likely cutoff point for the importance of politics, because in 1975, the graduating senior who became the single most widely syndicated political columnist on the planet, Thomas L Friedman of the New York Times, he graduated from Brandeis that year. The same year that Michael Sandel, who the book tries to present evidence for, is the single most popular teacher on the planet, Professor of Politics and Philosophy at Harvard. They obviously had to be included.
Stephen Whitfield:
So, those were cases in which it seemed to me, these were pretty easy calls. The most exceptional chapter in the book occurred while you were at Brandeis, which is the Ford Hall takeover of January of 1969 and that gets its own chapter, because it was the single most momentous political moment, in terms of the history of the Brandeis campus. And I tried to make the argument there in, in the book that the Ford Hall takeover was important because it demonstrated a remarkable kind of transformation in the very definition of liberalism itself, because the Ford Hall takeover, I tried to indicate, marked the end of a definition of liberalism that defines itself primarily in terms of promoting opportunity for individuals regardless of their race or any other collective factor to a liberalism that is very, very interested in people's race, religion, gender, et cetera, and that that is an extraordinary change in the very self characterization of liberal ideas that I believe was exposed in January of 1969.
David Bell:
Okay. So, why don't we turn it over to you for the next speaker.
Ashley Freccia:
Okay, great. So, our first question coming from Richard Liskov, and next up will be Susan Townsend. So, Richard, if you want to go ahead and unmute yourself and say your question or comment.
Richard:
Thank you, Ashley. Thank you, Professor Whitfield, and David and Susan for organizing this, and Allen too. My question, Professor, is this. When I was at Brandeis I could count on one hand the number of professors who were not considered way over on the left. John Roche was one, he was vilified when he came back to Brandeis after being in the White House. Milton Sachs was another. And so, my question is this. In your research, did you find any evidence that at any point between '48 and '75, there was any concern expressed by the faculty, by the administration, by Ed Sacher, by Morris Abrem, about the composition of the faculty and whether or not more balance politically should be sought?
Stephen Whitfield:
That's a terrific question.
Richard:
Thank you.
Stephen Whitfield:
There are sort of two parts of that question. One is that in my original conception of the book, I wanted to have a chapter on conservatives for the very point of some sort of balance, and some sort of effort to create some kind of contrapuntal tension within the book, but my problem was that the people who might be considered conservatives sometimes had radical origins. And in some cases, the people who might be considered on the right, including John Roche, who was my mentor and my friend when I was in graduate school, Roche always considered himself a liberal, and it was his belief that it was liberalism that had gone astray, not his particular version of it. Milton Sachs is a somewhat more complicated case. Milton Sachs, also in the Department of politics, considered himself as far as I know to the very end, to be a social democrat and not a conservative. There's a standard history of conservative intellectuals by Robert Nash, that does not have a single Brandeis faculty member on it. So, in that sense, I think it's very very hard to find Conservatives.
Stephen Whitfield:
I think it would be much easier to find faculty members who were apolitical, or at least did not see any particular relationship between their scholarship, or your teaching and your politics, but of course that was not the subject of the book, which is a self divine political history. The other issue which you raise is a very compelling one, and I would certainly agree with what I take to be the tenor or the undercurrent of your comment and question, and that is a really robust liberal arts education depends upon the clash of ideas and not a harmonization of those ideas. I can't, myself, judge the quality of undergraduate education under the circumstances that you've described. I'd love to learn more about it, but I think it's a fair point that, at least in terms of political activism, at least in terms of political ideas, I'm not aware of any actual conscious effort to ensure a greater political balance by having some more ballasted to the right, and one might legitimately argue that, that's an impoverishment of liberal arts education.
Richard:
Thank you.
Ashley Freccia:
Okay. So, next up is Susan Townsend, and after Susan it'll be Ian Lustick. So, Susan, you can go ahead and unmute yourself.
Susan Jay:
Thanks for that reminder. I have not gotten to obtain or read the book. So, some of these things, my comments may be totally in line with your analysis and some may not. I'm speaking for at least myself, and some of the people I knew, the use of the word liberal in relationship to us could be summed up by folk song at the time that was said, very sarcastically, "Love me, love me, love me. I'm a liberal." And I would contend that you could do a huge spectrum of the left, and have as much clash as you would ever want in education. I started learning that at Brandeis, and my education has continued in the 50 years since, about that. I was surprised you did not mention the assassination of Martin Luther King in our comments but I assume you did in your book. His funeral was on my first birthday way from home and was a huge part of my experience. Also, in line with my comment about liberals, there was a huge context for many of us that was anti capitalist, not just connected to the war.
Susan Jay:
And I noticed Mark Kaufman's here, pro service, and there were many models of that in my class, people got involved with the Walham community, et cetera. But I think that, not just SDS, but there were many people on the left that influenced the education that I actually got at Brandeis and has become part of my worldview. And the frustration, intensity, emotions and difficulties of our four years, I think were greatly amplified, you're right, by the war, but the promises made to the black students during Ford were not kept by your later you probably covered, that was huge. When I went for my interview at Brandeis before our class got there, Dow Chemical was there and someone from there being hung in effigy, and I'm not sure they were ever allowed back on campus while my class was there. I believe there's a new book coming out about Pauli Murray and the more I learned about her, the more important she becomes to me, and I am very, very glad I got to take a class with her at Brandeis.
Susan Jay:
And the question was asked about the faculty, and I wanted to comment that an insider informed me while they worked in the admissions office at Brandeis for undergraduates that there was an active change in admission policies so that, the class, the undergraduates would not be as, I would say, extraordinary as some of my classmates were, but certainly wouldn't be taking over buildings and taking over the campus as far as scheduling events and inspiring the high school students to leave school and march to Brandeis and to make us tell them what the hell we're on strike about. And I'm not sure if that march came to your awareness and or not, but I think it was significant. Again, at least to me. Also, I'm not sure if you had a chance to include, what felt like to me, was an invasion of the campus by the FBI after the attempts to fund the revolution, or whatever they were.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah. No, I appreciate your comments. I can only respond very briefly. Oddly enough, the the song that you mentioned, the beginning the title of Love Me, I'm a Liberal is actually mentioned in the book, because the song happens to refer to a professor of American Studies, namely Max Lerner, who was seemed to be a kind of iconic figure well outside the Brandeis campus of what liberalism contained. I would say that your comment is both appreciated and I think sound in that the liberalism that I suspect many of you started with in 1967 and earlier, was subjected to pressure from the left, and that liberalism itself, because of its evident failures to achieve the full realization of the dreams and the faith earlier in the decade that, that of course put tremendous pressure upon liberalism itself from the left that sought, clearly a more radical, perhaps a more dramatic realization of those particular ideals.
Stephen Whitfield:
So, insofar as you were making, those comments could be somehow summarized in terms of those changes in a more radical direction. I think that, that is indeed one of the key features, if I may suggest, to the four years that you were there. The book does of course mention the assassination of Martin Luther King, that agree with that, that that had of course in the shocks that were regenerated in terms of how his legacy could best be carried forward. I frankly don't know what you referring to at the end in terms of changes in admission policy. If indeed that was an aim, and I'm not in any way suggesting that it was, but if indeed it was such an aim, it's unlikely there would be a paper trail for that. Yeah.
Susan Jay:
I know, other people want to say something. I just I cannot, not mention the changes that were happening in the women's movement and gay rights which were huge for me and probably covered in your book. Thank you.
Stephen Whitfield:
Okay, thanks.
David Bell:
Let's keep going and let's try to keep our comments a little briefer, because other people that want to talk. Ashley?
Ian Lustick:
Thank you very much. My comment can be pretty brief, because Susan actually asked my question. I just want to push it a little farther, but before I do, I want to say that it wasn't a folk song, Love Me, I'm a Liberal. It was a Phil Ochs song, and Phil Ochs came and performed it at Brandeis while we were there, and I'll never forget, maybe many of you were there, the final song he played, The War is Over, which was an overwhelmingly emotional experience for many of us who were in the gym listening to him. But I also heard exactly what Susan did, and in my observations, I've been involved in college admissions at Dartmouth, at University of Pennsylvania, I know a little bit about how it works. I also believe, from what I've gleaned, that there was a decision after our class to move toward Camp Ramah type admissions. Now I don't want to say anything bad about Camp Ramah but there's a certain idea of conventional Jewish, middle class behavior that would take the edges off of what Brandeis was projecting itself as to many potential donors.
Ian Lustick:
And I believe you can see a very rapid change in the character of the campus following that decision and I was ask, I guess the answer is no, Professor Whitfield, whether you had focused on those changing admission policies.
Stephen Whitfield:
The simple answer is no, and I should probably state what I should have stated earlier, and that is the book is intended to be a political history, a peculiar angle perhaps. It's not in any way, an institutional history. It's not in any way in history of what names, or provosts, or even presidents have done with the notable exception of Maurice Abrams in, particularly in the 1969, and to some extent earlier at the beginning of Abrem/Sacher. The only thing and you probably know more about this than I do, the changes that you're saying might have been due to intentional admissions policy is something that I think can be shown more broadly outside of Brandeis. So, may I just ask since you know something about this, is there any way of accounting for the fact that other institutions, also and by the, Let's call it the mid 1970s, were also moving toward a kind of a de-politicization, a movement if you want to call it more toward the center or even more towards the right, that it seems to me can't, I don't think, can be explained by deliberate admissions policies.
Ian Lustick:
I wouldn't be surprised that Brandeis was on the edge of things. After all. the student strikes started at Brandeis, and other schools would feel the same impetus. I just have a feeling that the turn in the admissions office was sharper partly because the funding questions in font of Brandeis were so dire, and I don't think that they thought the kind of student they were generating of our class would be particularly strong donors in the future. I mean, I'm being very frank about what I think.
David Bell:
Ashley, next?
Ashley Freccia:
Okay. So, up now is Dan Rubin and after Dan will be Victoria Presser.
Dan Rubin:
Hi. I didn't read the book and listening to you and talking about it may give me a reason to. So, I entered it in 1965, and was gone from '66 to '68 in graduated in '71. So, as a student, I had a slightly longer window. I definitely entered as a naive liberal and I couldn't say that, although I was sometimes seen as farther left than I was, simply because I have been out of school for a couple of years, very minimal activity, I felt that I was more floating in a city that represented the times than creating waves. So, my question for you is, can you speak from your research to the layers of students? There clearly was an impression of deep radical activism at the time, but I knew from my experience, that it wasn't really. It probably was far from majority of students, who in meaningful ways were activists. I did things that didn't make me a political activist, and my sense is that there was an ecology of layers of what people really did. And then the external impression of Brandeis would have been more uniform than the reality.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah, that's a wonderful point, and you stated it at least as well as I might be able to, and that is, again, the book itself is about the political figures, whether faculty or alumni. It's not a study of the university, it's not a claim, it's not an examination of campus life. There are such books. Undoubtedly a book about that and Brandeis would be very valuable. So, I can't really respond with any sort of authority to what you're asking for in terms of the layers of student life except to note that I'm sure that you're correct that radical activists in that era were a clear minority at Brandeis as well as places like Berkeley and Ann Arbor and Madison. They gave a certain tenor to the campus and certainly to its reputation, but I'm sure that there were all sorts of people who were apolitical or only moderately interested in politics. And of those who were interested in politics, many of them remained liberal for all of their possible doubts about it.
Stephen Whitfield:
So, it seems to me your comments are very plausible that a complete portrait of campus life would obviously have to reckon with the degree to which all sorts of people, of students and of faculty were not notably political and not necessarily far on the left.
Ashley Freccia:
Okay, so Victoria Presser is up, and after Victoria will be Mark Kaufman.
Victoria Presser:
Also known as Vicky Free from back then. A particular Professor comes to mind who I understand would not have been included in this book. Not a political figure, not a national figure, not an influential figure, but someone who I believe was very influential for political activism on campus in our years, and that would have been Gordie Feldman. I'd love to hear your thoughts on Gordie. Sorry to be such a sassy, but I did do my homework, I did read most of the book and all the chapters assigned to us, Professor. Tales of Hoffman. Professor, what a terrible pun. Anyway, I would love to hear your thoughts on Gordie Feldman, and some other time when we have adult beverages we can talk more about our particular experiences and anecdotes. I'll remember one which is sometime during the Ford Hall takeover, a mother of one of the students in there came out dragged him out by the ear. Said, "This was not what I was sending you to college for." Anyway, that's it.
Stephen Whitfield:
Vicky, I do remember you even if you don't remember me.
Victoria Presser:
I remember you very well.
Stephen Whitfield:
Okay, and without going into details I seem to remember that you and I shared a bus ride together to an anti war demonstration in Washington.
Victoria Presser:
Was it to Washington? It might have been.
Stephen Whitfield:
I think so. Anyway, good seeing you.
Victoria Presser:
Good to see you too.
Stephen Whitfield:
The criticism of the occasional pun in the book is fair enough.
Victoria Presser:
I actually loved it.
Stephen Whitfield:
And Gordie was was very valuable to me because he really collected a lot of material. He gave to Archives and Special Collections at the Goldfarb Farber library of campus activism. And certainly, any comprehensive record of leftist faculty would have to include Gordie. He's not in the book however because perhaps in response to the earlier question by David Bill, I tried to deal with figures whom I consider to be national figures, and Gordie's virtues would not include that.
Victoria Presser:
Thank you.
Stephen Whitfield:
Excellent.
Ashley Freccia:
Okay, Mark Kaufman is up next, and after Mark, will be Ellen Shaffard.
Mark Kaufman:
Thanks. I'm going to ask you if you're comfortable taking a little bit of a walk away from the book itself, and comparing and contrasting the years, from '67 to '71 to the time of living now, because I think this is probably the greatest time of protest that we've had in this country since that time. And so, it's really more a personal perspective having studied that time, and having lived through this time, I'm not talking about current election. I mean, there's nothing to say about that, but if you have some perspective on the protests, and the anti-war movement, and the racial justice movement, then and currently, in terms of the Black Lives Matter, and the other protests, I'd be interested to hear it.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah, that's a really tough one. I think that the comparison is apt, or that the parallel is suitable at one level, and that is the sheer scale of the protests as you rightly noted and any number of commentators have claimed that the Black Lives Matter protests, ranging from 13 to 15 million to maybe as many as 26 million people would make it really the largest protest movement, I believe, in all of American history. So, we're living in a period of extraordinary dissidents, extraordinary protest that does echo, in some ways, certainly the scale and the intensity of the protests of the late 1960s and early '70s. Beyond that, which is very hard for me to wrap my head around, beyond that, as hard to see that there are very many exact parallels. At one level you might say that the expectations and the hopes of political activists in the early 1960s with regard to civil rights that, that has been an ongoing struggle and an ongoing challenge that our current moment is simply seeking to realize that more fully, the failures of the previous decades.
Stephen Whitfield:
So, at one level that is in fact the case. The difficulty often has to do, it seems to me, with the earlier protests relating to the hope that legislation might somehow remedy those defects in those in justices, and it's very, very difficult to imagine that, that is something that was going to happen in the current moment. That is the the various ways that I don't need to go into that make it very very difficult for progressive legislation to get passed, or to get approved as constitutional. It's a very, very big difference from, it seems to me, the late 60s and early 1970s. There are wars going on as we speak, of course, but they are wars that are being conducted by professional soldiers. Again, a very, very big difference from the threat that on over all sorts of men in their families in the mid 1960s and in the early 1970s. So, that it seems to me would be another important difference. Whether there is some continuity is not very clear.
Stephen Whitfield:
One can of course possibly argue that Angela Davis, class of '65, would be one personification of that continuity, but beyond that, it seems to me that whatever is going on at this moment is not really an evocation of what had happened in the late '60s and early '70s. It seems to me, the structural differences are much greater than I think the the lines of continuity in parallel. It's a great question though.
Mark Kaufman:
Thanks, I appreciate your perspective.
Ashley Freccia:
Okay, Ellen Shaffer is up now, and after Ellen will be Jason Summer.
Ellen Shaffer:
Oh, well this is great. I'm really barely, legitimately are in this conversation. I came as a freshman in 1967 and after going to Chicago convention and getting involved in the Brandeis Justice, I quit after midway in my sophomore year. I've graduated from lots of other places since then and Brandeis was the best, smartest, most stimulating, certainly most influential in my life. And very happy that the alumni association let's me show up at these things once in a while, although I was also late. So, you may have made the point that I'm about to make. I want to just say the discussion before that most of the campus was not in fact quite as engaged as it might have looked from the activity that made the newspapers I think is true having tried just after Ford Hall was taken over. Spent a lot of time going around, trying to get support from other students, and of course many were supportive, but a lot of people were trying to study and graduate, and there were plenty of people who felt quite a lot of pressure just to do that. I still stay in touch with some of my friends from the Brandeis Justice, which was the student newspaper.
Ellen Shaffer:
And the former editor who's still a good friend of mine, we go back and forth about the level of activity radical belief, and he'll say to me, "Well, I've seen statistics that only two and a half percent of the public in the 60 supported the anti-war activity." To which I say, "Well that's pretty good. If we had 5% just imagine what we could have done." But the other thing I'm curious about and wanted to ask you about, you mentioned, of course, Ford Hall. If you talked about the takeover of that... Was it Mailman by the draft resistor which happened a couple of months before Ford Hall, and I think was really, after the Democratic convention which was a big break, I think for a lot of people in terms of how we saw lines of political legitimacy to people who were going to go out and do something different from being in school. I think the take over of that building by the draft resister who then stayed in the Boston area was certainly pretty critical.
Ellen Shaffer:
So, I want to just know if you were just talking about faculty or if you were just looking at key moments, but I wanted to throw that in there.
Stephen Whitfield:
That's a good point. Again, it's something that was certainly part of Brandeis history but when it's in fact not included. The degree to which there were all sorts of acts of activism that could not be included because I was trying to deal often with particular students and faculty, for whom it was often difficult to shoehorn a particular incident. So, for example, there was considerable anti apartheid activism in the 1980s, but I don't refer to it all because I couldn't easily tie it into an alum or to a faculty member, but that's the way the book is structured and organized, primarily, but I appreciate the point that of course there were episodes that belong to the political history.
Ashley Freccia:
Okay we're at nearly 9:00, but we have several questions so in the queue. So, I think as long as it's okay with you, Steve, we'll go on a bit longer. Okay, great. So. up next is Jason summer. After Jason it will be Katherine Power.
Jason Sommer:
Okay, I'll try to be very brief. I see that that part of what I'm asking about, or commenting on is not really part of your book, but I was wondering whether you had any thoughts about class, social class in the way that it function with faculty and with students. I ask this because during the fourth hole incident I just happened to be in, and Mark will bale me out on the first and second floor North, a lot of the black students who were key in that incident were living. Henry, and Carlos, and George. Some of the TYP students, transitional year program students who later got in the building, and I found myself ferrying back and forth with messages first for one of my hall mates whose wife had some things to say, and wanted him to receive them. Anyhow, I also, with Arthur Edelstein, who is a lecturer, I don't know whether he figures in your book at all but myself and a group of other students went to Ford Hall against some private advice that I had gotten that there were people with guns in the building.
Jason Sommer:
We went to demand the clarification of the demands, and to make ourselves distinct, in some way, from the people who took over Griz Miche, or I think that's the pronunciation, who were unapologetically as we were basically in favor of an amnesty of some sort, but we wanted an explanation, and the demands were hard to puzzle out. So, lecturer Edelstein and a group of us went to Fort Hall and made our own demands. I thought that that was a function. I was raised in the Bronx, and there was something suburban about the liberalism, that I can see for myself as a liberal demonstrator against the war, was in a, forgive me, mime troop that did demonstrations. But it seemed to me that the behaviors, both of faculty and students were governed in some way by where they were raised. It seemed all, to me, terribly suburban, and I wanted some really direct answers about who wanted what, and whether a soft target Jewish University was being targeted. I guess there's a question in there somewhere.
Stephen Whitfield:
May I may I respond by asking you a question? I don't quite understand how suburban liberalism differs from... Kind of liberalism.
Jason Sommer:
My own relationship with some of the black students was I felt less artificial. I had gone to D Wood Clinton High School in the Bronx with mostly black and Puerto Rican, and when people wagged their finger at me and said, "400 years. 400 years." I said, "My father came in 1948 and we weren't slave owners. He was a slave." So, I just had a different relationship with what I apprehended around me, with people who I didn't think knew any black people, and in my own head I characterize them, in some ways, as suburban, I don't know, at the time.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah, I can only say, and this is fudging it a bit, Jason. I can only say that what you're describing is further evidence of the kind of fragmentation that I think had occurred by, let's say, certainly by January '69 on campus, and certainly, broadly speaking within American liberalism. It could be style, it could be self interest being somehow coming to the fore, but clearly, by the end of the '60s, whatever had been expressed in terms of the possibilities of a serious transformation of American society, had in various ways come into contact with other forces and other factors within that very movement. And as I say, you'll accuse me of fudging here. It's a complicated issue, but recollections, it seems to me, are consistent with that.
Jason Sommer:
Thanks.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah, thank you.
Ashley Freccia:
Okay, Katherine Power is up. After Katherine, will be Barry Elkin.
Katherine Power:
Hi Steve. Thanks for being here. I was, hi Vicky, I was struck really powerfully by the portion of your book that refers to period before we were all there and that were the years when Brandeis students at great risk, and during tremendous hardship, went to the south to work on voter registration and freedom schools. And I was picturing, okay, the place I arrived and the place I thought I was going to arrive, because I was a Catholic girl from working class family from the west. I had no idea what Jewish culture was. I didn't know what I was going toward, but I knew it was different from anything I'd ever seen in a way I wanted. And I couldn't name, all the things about that, that made it so, but as I was reading that portion of your book, I thought, I'm trying to quantify a zeitgeist at Brandeis that I walked into not knowing that it was there, but that came from those activities, and those values, that willingness to risk.
Katherine Power:
And I can say that I acted it out in some harebrained ways, but I also want to say, I feel like it's informed my whole life, and I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the Brandeis of the period when people were going to the south for civil rights work a few years before us, and the Brandeis that we all experienced.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yes, there's a chapter, as you know, Kathy, on the 1960s that describes that you're asking about, and what I tried to do is suggest in some ways that it works in both directions that is something about if you want to ascribe it to a Judaic commitment Tikkun olam, to notions of prophetic ideals of social justice did allow some people to take extraordinary risks, I mentioned Mandy Samstein, in particular, but also it worked in other directions as well. So, that the second national director of SNCC was Chuck McDew, who was an African American from Massillon Ohio. He converted to Judaism because of what he saw in the south in terms of there was a difference between Jews and others in the south, and that Brandeis also attracted Bob Zellner who was the first white field secretary, a Methodist in first white field secretary of SNCC and he also came to Brandeis.
Stephen Whitfield:
So, I would only add, Kathy that it works somehow reciprocally, that is two people who have not come from the sort of milieu that most Brandeis students came from in '60s, found something there within the Jewish sponsorship or the Jewish ethos that made it seemingly compatible with the commitments that they had made on behalf of social justice in the south. Again, the obvious caveat, of course, only a minority of Northern students went south. It was extraordinarily risky and extraordinarily dangerous, but there were seeing enough of them that it looked consistent with a very sort of Jewish culture that you mentioned.
David Bell:
Great. Next.
Ashley Freccia:
Okay. Barry Elkin is up. After Barry is Gerald Zerkin. Oh, Barry, you're muted.
Barry Elkin:
Yeah, I did. Okay, I'm good. Hi. Steve, I want to thank you very, very much for writing this book because your book is why I went to Brandeis. It was known to me by reading Max Lerner for years in the New York Post, and that was where I wanted to be. I think a lot of us came to Brandeis before the word "woke" was and I think a lot of us became woke while we were there. I think I want to really appreciate everyone who's here right now because contrary to the cynical Phil Ochs line, his definition of the liberal of 10 degrees to the left of center in good times, 10 degrees to the right of center if it affects us personally. I think many of us are still 10 degrees to the left of center, even though it's not necessarily affecting us personally, though, obviously globally it is affecting us personally. Other people move into what's different between us then what happened after 1975. The war was over, there was no draft, those sort of things changed drastically.
Barry Elkin:
But what kind of spirit, whether it's Tikkun olam, what kind of spirits still exists, say, in the faculty? Or has the faculty shifted along with the student populations over the years?
Stephen Whitfield:
Thanks, Barry. Are you referring to the faculty now?
Barry Elkin:
Yep.
Stephen Whitfield:
Okay. I'm going to have to dodge that to. I've been retired for four years.
Barry Elkin:
Okay.
Stephen Whitfield:
But my sense is, and this has been an ongoing phenomenon, I believe, is that the opportunities for sort of conspicuous activism that we associate with the 1960s in particular that, that conspicuous activism is much, much less common than and once been. I thought of trying to figure out, are there faculty members in the 20th century, who are comparable to the figures that I write about in the '50s and '60s? The only real exception is Anita Hill, and that pushes us, of course, in a very different direction from the first 25 years of the University. She is basically the figure who ends the book, but there are very, very few others who I think have a prominent role in American political life, because of their political views or their political activism. I won't comment as to whether that's good or bad, but that, I think, is the answer to your question.
Barry Elkin:
It is. Thank you.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yep.
Barry Elkin:
Oh. Can I add one thing to? Which I, too, had heard that admissions policies had changed, and there was a sort of a bad geographical pun that was being used at the time was that they wanted to eliminate students from The Bagels. That is the suburbs around the inner cities, and that's, that sort of suburban liberalism that Jason was referring to.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah, I think, if I may respectfully suggest an urban legend that has its origins in Harvard's admission policy, probably in the 50s, maybe even earlier when a Harvard admissions officer wanting diversity at Harvard after the quotas had been eliminated and a large minority of Harvard students were Jews. That admission admissions officer allegedly said that we have to go beyond getting students from around the donuts around our cities. And Henry Rossofski, who became a key administrative figure in Harvard, allegedly replied, "Those aren't donuts, those are bagels."
David Bell:
Do we have one more question?
Stephen Whitfield:
But excuse me, Mark, I just want to add here, may have just asked, how would one possibly investigate the reality of this view that if there was an explicit deliberate policy to change direction so that less politically active students would be admitted?
Mark Kaufman:
You could ask Putin get the data from the Russians.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah, I mean, it's not impossible but it's awfully difficult to demonstrate.
Ashley Freccia:
Okay. Gerald Zerkin you're up. After Gerald. I'll turn it back over to David Bell.
Gerald Zerkin:
Thank you, Steven for the book and everybody for their comments and it's great to see many people that I haven't seen in an awful long time. Let me say first that I bristle somewhat at the label of liberal. I don't think we consider ourselves, I certainly didn't, I can speak I think for Susan Townsend, I don't think we considered ourselves liberals. We consider ourselves radicals in other words, but I think liberals in the scope of the politics of Brandeis was like being a conservative in other places. So, anyhow, I have difficulty with the use of the term. Certainly there were many liberals there, but I don't think that, that describes the activists that were engaged in politics at Brandeis during this period. Let me follow up on on Ian's comment, and there have been more comments along that line, relative to the rapidity with which things changed. Louis Washerspring who was a fabulous Marxist Latin American politics professor who died way too young, not long after we left, invited me to dinner at her house.
Gerald Zerkin:
And it had to have been no later than '76 because I left Boston for the last time at '76. So, she had me come to dinner house when she had some of her students and the purpose of this was she wanted me to tell them about what Brandeis was like back in the day. I mean I'd only graduated like four years earlier, because her sense was that the political activism and commitment had drained out of the university already. And in the conversation with them, she was absolutely right. It was like I was talking a foreign language. They had no relationship to what had happened during the period when we were at Brandeis. So, yes, I don't know whether it was conscious or wasn't conscious. I don't know if there was a change in the population generally and so it was inevitable, but it was a different student body in short order. I also wanted to follow up on comments of a couple of people. Susan mentioned sort of the the economics that was a driving force. That it wasn't just about the war.
Gerald Zerkin:
Now, the radicalization experience for me at Brandeis was the sanctuary at Mailman Hall. And what went on at the sanctuary, and relatively few people attended that, and were involved in it, but in any event, to me it was an incredibly important experience and it was nonstop political theorizing. I mean, it went on basically 24 hours a day, and it wasn't about the war, although the sanctuary was focused on this soldier who had gone AWOL and providing him with sanctuary. In fact, to the extent the war was discussed as I remember, it was discussed as a function of capitalism, and the real discussions that took place were discussions about economics, and sort of what capitalism produces. So, that was indeed an incredibly important part of the movement, and the war was not just the only focus, and the only other comment I would make is in relation to, sort of, not everybody being sort of part of it. It strikes me that there's a little bit like asking a group of people our age how many of them were at Woodstock, and basically everybody claims to have been there, and they weren't.
Gerald Zerkin:
And I think that there's a lot of sort of "me tooing" of people being involved, and in fact it was a relatively, from my experience, a relatively small amount. And if you remember, so there was a meeting in Ford Hall in relation between whether or not we were going to go on strike and that was a huge auditorium, and it was packed, and there was a lot of dissent over whether or not we were going to do it. And I took the position, actually, as sort of the fog of the times from various things that I don't remember everything well, but I remember saying during that meeting, "I don't care what the vote is. I'm going on strike." And people did that. It was like you didn't have to have unanimity, you didn't have to have a majority of the people in Ford Hall, or the majority of students in order to go on strike. If you thought it was right to do, you did it, but there were a lot of people in that room, I have no idea what the percentage was, who were very much opposed to it. There were a lot of people who thought this was going to interfere with their going to medical school on time.
Gerald Zerkin:
If they didn't get to finish organic chemistry or whatever. So, yeah, it didn't involve everybody in radical politics by any means.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah, thanks for those comments. We'll have to save, obviously, for another occasion than tonight, if you don't like the term liberal or liberalism, what substitute terms would you wish to use, but I would just want to end briefly on on the note that it seems to me that when one looks at what happened to what you're describing in terms of the dissipation of political energy, it seems to be very hard to minimize the end of the war, starting of course even earlier when the end of the draft. That so much of what happened in Brandeis and elsewhere, seems to me, can be explained once the war began winding down in terms of the immediate threat of conscription, once the war ends four years, of course, after you had graduated, and the immediacy of the conflict and Indochina. The ways by which it's haunted virtually every young person's life in some way, that once that had vanished, that the arguments that you were making at the time with regard to what's wrong with capitalism, or what other forms of voluntary activity needed to be made, there put, it seems to me within a very, very different context.
Stephen Whitfield:
But I want to thank everybody for your extremely illuminating, and engaging, and very helpful, and constructive comments, and I turn it back over to David with my deepest gratitude.
David Bell:
Well thank you, Steve. I see a lot of applause here on the screen. This was enlightening. This was fun. This was a warm way to begin a reunion year and I'm very very excited to see all the faces on the screen. We hope that will translate to our being able to be together next year. I've been asked to have you take a look at the chat room on how to order the book for those of you who might not have already done that. That information is on the chat room. I'm going to turn it back over to Susan for a final goodbye. We are going to stay around for anybody that wants to just talk to each other, although we'll excuse Steve Brandeis official folks, but Ashley, have I forgotten anything?
Ashley Freccia:
No. I think you covered everything.
David Bell:
Okay. Susan, you get the final word and Allen, if you have anything to say, you're also the chairman of this reunion. So, if you want to say anything, please feel free to do so.
Allen Alter:
I'm just a guest at this event rather than an organizer. So, I'll leave it to Susan to finish up.
Susan Jay:
I just want to thank everybody for being here, for participating and I hope that you will continue to look for communication from us and that you're continue to stay involved throughout the rest of the time, preceding our expected reunion on campus in June. And the committee will be calling everybody to remind them. We'll stay in touch with everyone throughout the year, and right now, feel free to stay on and say hi to folks that you haven't said hello to in a very long time.
David Bell:
Thank you so much. Oh, we should all stay healthy and hopefully be able to get together. Thank you again, Steve.