Elle Getz:
We are so thrilled for tonight's program with Professor Steve Whitfield. I want to welcome everyone to tonight's event. Just a quick note that we're recording tonight's program for folks who are unable to join us. I'm going to begin with a very brief introduction of Steve. I know everybody knows Steve, but I'm going to do my very best to share a brief intro so we have plenty of time for him to share with us this evening.
Elle Getz:
So as we all know, Professor Whitfield holds the Max Richter Chair in American Civilization. He received his bachelor's degree from Tulane University, a Master's from Yale University, and a doctorate in the history of American civilization from Brandeis University. He has been awarded multiple Fulbright Visiting professorships, has won numerous esteemed teaching awards, and is the author of eight books. His newest book, Learning on the Left, chronicles the impact of Brandeis University on American progressive thought, from 1948 to the present day, describing the ways that Brandeis faculty and alumni made a difference as thinkers.
Elle Getz:
Whoops, I think reviewing Barbara Miller screen will stop that participants sharing. Here we go. Thank you, though, Barbara. So, just going back describing ways Brandeis faculty and alumni made a difference as thinkers, writers and activists. The political lives of these renditions exemplify the larger story of the American experiment in self government, and the elusive pursuit of social justice.
Elle Getz:
And before I welcome Professor Whitfield, I have a few brief housekeeping items. So, thank you all. We ask you to stay muted and thank you for joining us this evening. Professor Whitfield will open for Q&A, and we ask you to use the Raise Hand feature for our Q&A discussion. I'll be monitoring that as we go along but if you prefer to type in a comment, a question or a memory of the politics during your time at Brandeis, please feel free to add that to the chat board. We will address as many questions as we can during the Q&A and I'll be monitoring that chat. And I just wanted to say before we begin, it's an honor to be hosting this event with you, Professor Whitfield. I know my parents were very fond students of yours when they were at Brandeis and your class was one of their very favorites. So, as Elle Getz, class of 2013, I welcome you and please join me in welcoming Professor Whitfield.
Stephen Whitfield:
Okay, thank you very much, Elle, for that very gracious introduction and that very, very warm welcome. I have to say that I am utterly floored by the sheer number of alumni who are attending this particular program. I take it to be an extraordinary tribute to the storm of the century that I gather is afflicting the New York area at this moment. It's certainly storming here in the Boston area. And I just feel that I also have to say, and I know I speak for all of us that how our hearts go out to the people of Texas at Wells during this particular moment of crisis.
Stephen Whitfield:
Anyway, I want to thank everybody for joining us this evening and for giving me a chance to talk about the book that I worked on for approximately eight years that was officially published in September. And tonight, I take it to be really an opportunity not only for me to lay out the argument of the book itself but because there will not be a formal moderator for tonight's program and it will simply be my making a presentation. The aim here is to give alumni a chance after my formal remarks, to give you a chance to really talk about your own experience as a Brandeis, whether they are in any way consistent with what I will be trying to lay out as the argument of the book, whether I got things wrong, whether things need to be revised, things that might be omitted. I'm extremely eager to get your reactions and to really have a dialogue with you.
Stephen Whitfield:
The origins of the book are a little bit distant, really the beginning of the 21st century, when a member of the class of 2004, Rachel Abo, and I did a one-on-one independent study in American Studies, because I had noticed, and Rachel was happy to go along, with a number of books and articles often written by Brandeis alumni or by Brandeis faculty members or former Brandeis faculty members about the university itself, that is whatever virtues, whatever power the university had it attracted interest of writers.
Stephen Whitfield:
And it was only in the course of doing that course with Rachel, that I realized that what we were reading could be considerably expanded. And that, in particular, the political contours of the university, of its atmosphere, of its faculty, of its students and of those who went on after graduation to play important roles in American politics, that this was basically a story that nobody had ever tried to tell. And so, I assigned myself the task of basically trying to tell it. I tried to make clear in the opening pages of the book that it is not in any way a history of Brandeis University itself.
Stephen Whitfield:
Such a book very much needs to be written. The closest to it is the founding president Abram Sachar, his book, A Host at Last but that stops only after the first two decades and, of course, inevitably, has the perspective of a university president and not a sort of larger, perhaps more disinterested framework that I tried to establish. So, the book itself occupies a kind of peculiar niche, in that it's not really a history of the university. I don't really go very much in any detail into its administration, its presidents, its Dean's.
Stephen Whitfield:
There's very, very little in there about campus life itself. But instead, sort of odd confluence that there were people who came to Brandeis with strong political convictions, on the faculty and some of them stayed and some of them left. There were students who came to the university, and perhaps they were influenced by those faculty or by their fellow students. And then, as I tried to demonstrate, they went on to have important careers as political activists, as political theorists and as political writers. The only thing they have in common, and you could maybe argue that that's perhaps a difficulty of the organization and the format of the book, the only thing they have in common is that at some time they were at Brandeis. So, in a book that starts in 1948, and goes into the 21st century, is often dealing with a cast of characters who did not know one another. Some of those characters were at Brandeis only for a fairly brief time.
Stephen Whitfield:
One of the vulnerabilities, I think, that the book can be subjected to is that it's very difficult in some cases to assert that being at Brandeis, either as faculty members or as students, was in any way necessarily decisive. It would be very hard to argue in a number of cases that Brandeis was distinctive and singular in the impact that it might have had on students or even on faculty. So, that's sort of the challenge that I was willing to accept in terms of trying to tell this story.
Stephen Whitfield:
The story also is asymmetrical and I'm confident that we have Almasy here this evening, who stretch from virtually the beginning to virtually the end but the book is top heavy in roughly the first quarter of a century, that is, from 1948, when the university was founded until the early 1970s. The bulk of the book deals with students who attended the University during those years, or faculty who taught during those years. And that is part of the distinctive claim that the book seeks to establish. And that is that Brandeis was really, really unusual, really, really peculiar from the end of the 1940s until the beginning of the 1970s roughly and that's why I'm extremely eager to hear comments from you in the gallery as to whether that top heavy character is in any way justified.
Stephen Whitfield:
But the argument is basically that if you're looking at what makes Brandeis unusual, it's really more the first 25 years, then the subsequent history of the university now going on in seven decades. It is not in any way to suggest that anybody's education after 1975 was in any way deficient or impoverished. I'm confident that Brandeis maintained important standards of academic excellence throughout its history. But if you're looking at it from the peculiar lens that I sought to work from, it's really that the political life of the university really, really was unusual.
Stephen Whitfield:
And to explain that, one has to inevitably start with a baseline of 1948. And that is, as I tried to argue at some length in the second chapter, that it can only be explained in terms of the motives of the founders, only can be explained in terms of the atmosphere of the late 1940s. And that is it is in explicable without knowing something about the impact of academic anti-Semitism. The sense that in my own research, I discovered that virtually every member of the Brandeis faculty whose career I sought to examine had some kind of experience with discrimination in graduate school, discrimination in trying to get a job in the academy, in some cases trying to get a job even outside the Academy and then finding at Brandeis that there would be a refuge from that sort of bigotry and that sort of prejudice.
Stephen Whitfield:
So, Brandeis, and I don't need to belabor the point to you in the gallery. Brandeis is really understandable as an effort to both challenge anti-Semitism and to serve as a refuge against it, to be a kind of rebuttal against the discrimination that was commonplace in the academy and other features of American life in the 20th century and at the same time, of course, to be a place in which Jews and others who face discrimination might find in fact, a very secure, sort of resting spot.
Stephen Whitfield:
And if that is the case, then the leftism that is the theme of my book, the leftism is therefore, it seems to me explainable. And that is, anti-Semitism was basically in the 1940s a phenomenon of the right, that is a phenomenon of the bastions of privilege, whether it be the Ivy League that imposed quotas and imposed discrimination upon Jewish applicants for admission, as well as Jewish faculty members. That the broader areas of American life are also understood. Corporate America perhaps in particular in all sorts of ways. These were the places where Jews in the 1930s, the 1920s, the 1940s all had, in so many cases, found it very, very difficult to gain traction.
Stephen Whitfield:
So, if you were going to be an undergraduate in the late 1940s and in the 1950s, if you are going to secure a place on the Brandeis faculty in those early years, your experiences of not getting the opportunities that might be available to others, that would be denied to you, those seem to all come from the right, from conservatism, from traditional areas that were often sources of discrimination. So, it would not be in that sense surprising that Brandeis students and Brandeis faculty would tilt and sometimes tilt very heavily to the left. It was the right that was seen to be the barriers to the achievement of opportunity. It was the right that would be seen as limitations upon one's talent and one's ambition and one's aspirations.
Stephen Whitfield:
And so, therefore, the early years are above all the years of the left at Brandeis, even as in other places, particularly the sorts of institutions that Brandeis fancied itself as seeking to compete with, namely, the Ivy League, these were places in which the students very heavily in the 1940s, the 1950s, were themselves the products of privilege. So that when campus polls were taken, and I give examples from Yale and other examples could be taken from Princeton and Dartmouth, it skewed admittedly a little bit toward the most conservative, the Ivy League institutions in making this claim. These were places where the students were overwhelmingly Republicans, in so far as we know anything about their political convictions. And in that sense, and many of them had come as students from private schools, from prestigious private schools in many, many cases.
Stephen Whitfield:
That gave Brandeis, it seems to me, it's genuine distinctiveness. So, if one is trying to establish a claim as to why bother to write a book about this particular university as opposed to Brigham Young or Texas Christian University or UCLA or Bob Jones University, what is there about Brandeis that is really, really peculiar, really something that justifies a single book on the subject. It is, it seems to me, that particular political orientation, and particularly in roughly really the first quarter of a century.
Stephen Whitfield:
But there's something broader at work, which it seems to me is very important for me to emphasize because it gets lost a little bit later in the history of American politics and that is if you were a Liberal in the 1940s and certainly well into the 1950s, your liberalism, your commitment to opposing discrimination and prejudice was not merely confined to let's say, we want our ethnic group to have its interests advanced. To be a Liberal meant that you were committed to championing the rights and the interests of other minorities as well and if you did not do that your liberalism itself was very much in question.
Stephen Whitfield:
So, one of the curious things about the liberalism of the 1940s and '50s, the liberalism that spawned Brandeis University, is that it had a kind of universal claim. Universal is probably a little bit overstated here but the argument that I tried to present and that I believe is justified in looking at liberalism in that era, is that ethnic groups, religious groups and minorities were held to be culturally and in other ways indistinguishable and that you to be a Liberal in the 1940s and the 1950s, meant at a certain level not to make any important claims for the distinctiveness, let's say, of Jewish cultural life, not to make any important claims for the distinctiveness of African American cultural life, not to make any important distinctions about other minorities. That is, there was a certain sense of reciprocity.
Stephen Whitfield:
And if you look, and I know that many of you do know the origins of the musical that was first put on Broadway in 1957 and then made into a movie 1961, in which the music was done by a Brandeis member of the Department of Music, namely Leonard Bernstein, the origins of West Side Story, were in conflicts between Polish Jews and Polish Catholics. That was the original idea and then it was felt this was not going to work on the Broadway stage. Let's instead make it with the sharks and Jeff's with gang warfare between white ethnics and the newer Puerto Rican immigrants in New York.
Stephen Whitfield:
Now, to me, that is the epitomy of what liberalism entailed. And that is there was something reciprocal about what it meant to be a member of minority group. It meant, in other words, that the particularities, the peculiarities of that group were basically to be rendered homogenous and that could be switched for basically any other minority group. And it also meant that if you were to eliminate discrimination, if you were to accept people not in the basis of their ethnicity, or their religion, or their gender, that basically people would turn out to be fundamentally the same. With the same ambitions, the same drives, the same ideals. That, of course, would not survive the 1960s. But that's a very different story.
Stephen Whitfield:
But it was basically the dream, the vision at the outset, that while there would always be a place for people who were discriminated against elsewhere, it was not something that had to be necessarily tied to Jewish ethnic interests as such. And that gave, again, the political profile of the university in its early years in its commitment to opposing racial discrimination, in the ease with which women, by the testimony of any number, that women often felt a place that they were not being denigrated or stigmatized at Brandeis. Of course, in the early years of Brandeis, it had an advantage for women because many of the Ivy League schools were themselves segregated and separated by gender.
Stephen Whitfield:
So, that's part of what it seems to me is very, very unusual about the history of Brandeis. And I, of course, also have to address the other peculiarity, which is not the subject of the book, but it was nevertheless striking and that of course, is its Jewish antecedents, its Jewish auspices and that is not in any way disconnected with the political profile itself because, and here I beg to differ with President Sachar, who made the claim from the early years that what the Jewish community was doing was simply what the religious communities of Puritan New England had done in establishing their religious seminaries, most famously in our own state in the case of Harvard, and that what Brandeis was to represent was simply the final or at least the latest extension of the desire of different religious groups in America to encourage and to strengthen intellectual life in the Republic by supporting institutions of higher learning.
Stephen Whitfield:
That was certainly true for the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians, who established some of the great New England seminaries that became universities. But of course, the peculiarity of the Jews is they are not only a religious group, but also an ethnic group. And what it made Brandeis different from the early centuries of the religious seminaries, it became colleges and universities is, of course, that Brandeis was resolutely secular and Brandeis has never trained, never ordained rabbis. Again, obviously, unlike the early years of the Ivy League institutions and its secularism was, again, another way by which, which in a sense reinforced the political profile of the university itself.
Stephen Whitfield:
Anyway, that's the broader outline of what I sought to do in terms of making the claim that Brandeis was really especially distinctive in its early years. And then what I sought to do was show how that was manifest in the various ways by which faculty joined the university, the ways in which their books and sometimes articles reflected that particular tilt toward the left, the way Brandeis faculty members and eventually Brandeis alumni contributed to liberal thought, to radical thought, over the course of the first few decades, how that was itself significant.
Stephen Whitfield:
I can't tell you how much pleasure I derived from doing the research. One of the, I think, great benefits of being able to do research is that whatever you expect is going to turn out often very different from what you had envisioned. And in my case, and I'll just mention this as one small example, to learn about people, some of whom I knew and some of whom I've never heard of when I began the research, and as Elle has in a sense indicated, I've been at Brandeis for... Well, taught for 44 years and three years before that as a grad student. So, I felt I knew quite a bit in terms of the way my life has been entwined with the institution but it was fascinating to me to learn about so many people that I knew little about, in some cases whose identities I didn't know.
Stephen Whitfield:
I'll just give you one small example in the hope that it may be a slight enticement to buy the book that Elle is going to, again, show at the end of this program, and that is the person I'd never heard of named John Heijenoort, who remarkably enough was a bodyguard and a secretary to Leon Trotsky. He eventually taught in the Department of Philosophy at Brandeis, not political theory, not political philosophy, but mathematical logic. But he had a remarkably colorful and indeed dangerous career, which I tried to outline in partly out of the pleasure of my own discovery of his rather remarkable life. That of course, is I know many, many of you know, Trotsky in exile was subject to targeting by the Stalinist secret police, the NKVD and several of Trotsky's bodyguards were killed by the Stalinist secret police. Van Heijenoort managed to survive but he had been out of Mexico City when the assassin actually gained access to Trotsky's office and was able to murder him. And John Van Heijenoort said that if he'd been there that day, he would have spotted the false accent, the fake accent and perhaps might have prevented the assassination.
Stephen Whitfield:
While John Heijenoort was there, he also had an affair with a painter who became the most famous female painter in the history of the world, namely Frida Kahlo. Trotsky had an affair with Frida Kahlo as well at around the same time. And then Van Heijenoort basically abandoned politics. It was too bloody, it was too dangerous and he ends up with again, a rather remarkable career teaching mathematical logic at Brandeis.
Stephen Whitfield:
Anyway, that's perhaps the most unusual, the most colorful, but the broader claim that the book seeks to make is that within the marrow of American liberalism, and particularly in the 1960s, within the extremes of American radicalism, some of which was violent, that one could find Brandeis alums and Brandeis faculty members and that then by roughly the mid 1970s, the distinctiveness of Brandeis politically begins to vanish. And there are any number of explanations for this, but from the perspective of the book, that is the framework that I tried to establish, Brandeis increasingly resembles other institutions of higher learning with which we sought to compete.
Stephen Whitfield:
So, the claim for Brandeis, and is always an issue for any institution of higher learning, what is the distinctive niche that will attract students, that will attract faculty, that will, in a sense, serve as a rationale for why it exists. And basically, the challenge that Brandeis has faced is, in my opinion, not anymore a political challenge as such because Brandeis shares and in fact preceded the liberalism of basically liberal arts colleges more or less throughout the United States, and that the political profile of the university is not particularly different from, as far as I know, most other institutions with which Brandeis seeks to compete. So, the challenge in that sense is in an era when everybody is in favor of diversity, everybody accepts the logic and the value of multiculturalism, what was once distinctive about Brandeis faces then a kind of challenge that it's up to the administration, the faculty, the staff, the students to try to, in that sense, figure out.
Stephen Whitfield:
And the final point that I would wish to make, the broader claim that the book seeks to promote is that the story of Brandeis can be told within the broader context of American liberalism so that the liberalism of 1948 was to undergo extraordinary pressure after about the first two decades. The liberalism of 1948, the liberalism of the founders, was basically that if you eliminate the barriers to discrimination, everybody will have a chance to succeed, everybody will be able to in effect by seizing opportunity, everybody will be able to realize his or her ambitions, only if you eliminate those particular barriers. So, the claim now was what you are expected to be judged as an individual. If you eliminate discrimination, then each person can achieve whatever he or she wants to achieve on the basis of talent and ambition.
Stephen Whitfield:
But by the end of the 1960s, that is to give way to a different definition of liberalism. And that is you are not to be judged as an individual or you are not to be judged perhaps primarily as an individual but we are also interested in what kind of group, what kind of collectivity to which you belong. So, the key moment and it's the only chapter in the book that deals with a single incident on campus and that is the Ford Hall takeover, January 1969, in which African American students basically posed a direct challenge to liberalism by saying that their black identity made a difference in their lives that is very, very different from what their individual talents or aims might have been. And liberalism and broadly speaking, the American society had to reckon with the ways in which people are different, because of their backgrounds, racial, ethnic, and so on. So, Brandeis' story is entwined with the changes that have taken place in American liberalism and cannot really be separated from that. Anyway, I appreciate everybody's patience and Elle you're going to take over from here.
Elle Getz:
Sure, thank you so much, Professor Whitfield. That was wonderful. And I echo my peer, Dave Bender's comment here about just this has been such an interesting conversation and it's been amazing to look at the chat going on while you've been speaking with people's memories of professors and their experience. So, thank you so much for sharing this with us and congratulations on your newest book. I'll continue to send the information about where people can purchase Professor Whitfield's book and then I'll follow up as well after the program with that information. I see there are some hands that are raising. We asked, and David we'll turn to you first, but for others who have questions... The questions are coming. So, we'll start with you, David and then Jose is on deck. And I think David, I'm going to ask to unmute you real quick. I think there should be... Do you see the button to unmute yourself? Oh, there you go.
David Sachar:
Yeah, in my career I'm not often mute. So. Professor Whitfield, you've done just such an amazing job of unearthing such great research. But even you may be a bit too young to have personal memories of some of the Brandeis' contributions in the very early 1950s that I have some recollections of as a Sachar's youngest. And I remember in 1956, the pride he'd walk in approving the board's appointment of Felix Browder to the mathematics department. Felix Browder, of course, was the Russian born son of Earl Browder, the president of the American Communist Party. And it was so important to him, just in the shadow of McCarthyism, to make that kind of public stand.
David Sachar:
In fact, my personal memories go back even earlier to 1952, to the first graduating class, when Gus Rhenus, who became of course, a very famous political economist, was the first valedictorian and he gave a very gloomy outlook on American political life at that time. He was very depressed by what he saw going on with the right wing, whom he referred to as "the lunatic fringe." And when he used that phrase, the audience gasped. They were astonished that he would get up in person and refer to the Republican Conservative movement as "the lunatic fringe." When he finished the commencement speaker, Eleanor Roosevelt, threw away her prepared remarks and gave her address as a direct response to Gus, decrying the sense of fatalism and doom and all the rest, and urging him and the class to political activism.
David Sachar:
My final personal story jumps forward a few decades to that time of occupation of the hall and a very great discontent among the African American students who came into my dad's office with demand and they demanded that he establish a Martin Luther King professorship-
Stephen Whitfield:
No, it's scholarship.
David Sachar:
Scholarship.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah, scholarship.
David Sachar:
For under represented students. And dad said, "No, you can't have one scholarship." And they said, "Why not?" He said, "That's not enough. We need 10 scholarships." They then went on the road and raised in Bowman for 10 Martin Luther King scholarship. So, I'm very proud of your work in spotlighting the liberal and democratic political traditions that Brandeis championed from its very beginning.
Stephen Whitfield:
Thank you, David. I'm very greatly relieved that your recollections and your impressions are at least consistent with my read.
David Sachar:
Absolutely.
Stephen Whitfield:
I didn't necessarily get anything wrong. But of course, it is entirely correct that Felix Browder as a mathematician, posed no political threat whatsoever but there was still a concern because the university was still young, that to have the son of the former chairman of the Communist Party of the United States of America on the faculty in an era in which McCarthyism was rampant was itself an extraordinarily courageous decision. And one of the mysteries, if I can just build ever so slightly on your remarks, one of the mysteries, of course, is that Brandeis was basically spared the menace of McCarthyism and certainly from McCarthy himself. And this probably, and this is something that is only a matter of conjecture, probably it was the case that Senator Joseph R. McCarthy did not go after Brandeis as he went after most famously Harvard University, precisely because he did not want to give the impression of anti-Semitism.
Stephen Whitfield:
This is maybe a little bit debatable, the most recent book, by the most recent biography of McCarthy by Larry Tye. Tye's McCarthy to anti-Semitism, which in my view is overstated. It's interesting that Brandeis was basically protected, I should say, not only by the courage of your father, but also by the degree to which it's possible that Brandeis was left alone precisely really for that reason. As far as the Martin Luther King scholarships, again, your recollection is exactly right, based upon my research, but it allows me to say this is again a turning point in the in the fate of liberalism because what Dr. Sachar agreed to do, and what his predecessor Maurice Abram agreed to do-
David Sachar:
His successor.
Stephen Whitfield:
He assigned scholarships, not on the basis of individual merit or promise but that those 10 scholarships would be confined to African American applicants. So, this was the turning point. Please, nobody ask me whether that was a good idea or a bad idea. That's not within my jurisdiction. But it is truly important historically, that President Sachar and then President Abram agreed, not on the basis of individual merit but on the basis of race, to set aside a certain number of scholarships. And that, of course, is part of the larger question of the vicissitudes of American liberalism and progressivism.
David Sachar:
For sure. Thank you.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah.
Elle Getz:
Thank you, David. Great to see you again and I'm proud to know as an alum that we still have MLK scholars today, which Ading Wang just alluded to as well, on the chat. Jose over to you.
Jose Perez:
Hi, I enjoyed your discussion because I graduated class of '75 with your book to mind because it was the politics of the faculty connected a lot of us students to get involved in politics ourselves. For example, from there then, I got involved with Mike Dukakis. I was his economic policy advisor. I ran Oregon for Gore... but the students wound up doing it. I think that's missed in terms of it. Now I go back to Brandeis and it's little too conservative for me in terms of the faculty, because the faculty used to take an interest in us. And when we were interested in politics, the faculty that was political connected us, and I was wondering, what your thinking in that area is, because I know some... I can tell you some of who the people are.
Stephen Whitfield:
Now you're talking back, particularly in the in the early '70s when you were there?
Jose Perez:
Well, in the early '70s. I graduated, but the result of that is, for example, a lot of us turned out to be leaders, particularly in liberal courses or in the Democratic Party. I'm with the Farm Workers Union. I've been the leader of Latino Leadership Alliance, Fernando Torres Hill, and the result of that was the connection and the guidance and the counseling we got from the faculty at Brandeis, the liberal faculty.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah.
Jose Perez:
In your book, you're talking about what some of the folks who were there before, but if anybody looked up the result of the students in the training that we got?
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah, I can only answer that very briefly, Jose, and I don't think I can do it justice. But I would say that a couple of things happen. One is what happens to any institution, probably very, very few exceptions, which is a process that we call it routinization, where Max Weber's notion of charisma is replaced by the political lives of bureaucrats, upper right of someone and so on. It's inevitable that is the the energy of give founding generation or two cannot be sustained one generation later or two generations later. So, part of it is that Brandeis is subject to the same sociological laws as other places but I think the broader phenomenon which I alluded to very briefly, that occurred after you had graduated is that American political life itself became a kind of repudiation of what we think of as the 1960s.
Stephen Whitfield:
Its particular excesses and perhaps its particular achievements were then if not directly repudiated, then certainly distance was established with what the '60s at its most fervent visions and dreams was seeking to achieve. And that, again, could not be sustained either. So, what you're describing after, let's say 1975, broadly speaking, is a broader phenomenon. It's part of the republican hegemony that occurred, most strikingly, of course, with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. And sustained in a number of ways, down to our own time, if not necessarily republicanism and certainly conservatism in a number of institutional ways. So, Brandeis could not have continued, let's say, to define itself primarily in terms of collision with the larger forces. Its particular dynamism simply could not be sustained. But it's a great sort of historical question that you raised, Elle?
Elle Getz:
Yes, before I turn it over to Charles Klein, there's one follow up question to the MLK scholars and that was, was post Ford Hall the first time race and or diversity was used as a basis for awarding a scholarship? Was that an innovation in higher, excuse me, in American higher education or was it just the first time it was done at Brandeis to our knowledge?
Stephen Whitfield:
I don't know the answer. That was in 1968. This strikes me as maybe a little bit late to be the first in American higher education. I don't really know the answer to that.
Elle Getz:
Okay, thank you.
Stephen Whitfield:
It's a wonderful question but my guess, strictly speaking, is there must have been some precedent, maybe in an urban university. San Francisco State, for example, University of the District of Columbia. Probably there, it would have happened before Brandeis.
Elle Getz:
Okay, thank you.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah, Charles Klein.
Elle Getz:
I'm going to try to unmute you, Charles.
Charles Klein:
Are we good?
Elle Getz:
Perfect.
Charles Klein:
Good to be with everyone this evening and great to hear your talk, Steve. I remember when you were telling me about the book about two or three years ago when we sat in Delhi on Long Island, and I look forward to receiving it.
Stephen Whitfield:
Thank you.
Charles Klein:
It's great.
Stephen Whitfield:
I think you had a Reuben that day.
Charles Klein:
Yeah. No, I went straight corned beef but-
Stephen Whitfield:
It's good seeing you.
Charles Klein:
It's great. I think as I look back, there were a few things I want to say. First of all, when I applied to Brandeis and I applied in '69, graduated in '73 and that's when I met you, Steve, back in '72 when you were in graduate system, the one of the classes in MSF. That was a statement about my values. I applied to other schools, but they weren't this statement about who I was and what was important to me. Brandeis was a statement about who I was, what was important to me and it was my way of saying that this is who I am, not so much in terms of my Jewish personality but in terms of the liberal positioning of Brandeis and its faculty.
Charles Klein:
When I read your book, and I loved reading it, it reminded me of who I was back then and that I thank you for, because it reminded me about myself back in the '60s and the early '70s and it reminded me of my value system. It reminded me of what animated me and I loved being reminded about that and hopefully reclaiming it in this chapter of life.
Charles Klein:
But what I'll say to everybody is this. I wear a hat with a B on it, okay? It's a Brandeis hat, just as big. And everywhere I go, people say, "Oh, is that Brooklyn?" And I say, "No, that's not Brooklyn, even though I was born in Brooklyn, spent the few years of my life in Brooklyn, it's my school." And "What school is that?" "It's Brandeis." Because to this day, when I wear that hat, it's intended to say something about me. It's about the choice I made, about the influences that I was affected by and about the life choices I made. So, that B that I wear, very much in line with what you said about the first 25 years of Brandeis, it's my way of saying at this stage of my life, this is who I've always been. This school is part of my identity that I never want to erase. So, I thank you for bringing that all back to me.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah, thank you, Charles for that eloquent statement. And I have that sense also that at least when you were there, it was a sense in which, if you're making a kind of statement, a kind of evocation of the right to be dissident. However, that's going to be defined in any particular context and I appreciate that.
Charles Klein:
Great to see you. Great to see you.
Stephen Whitfield:
Same here.
Elle Getz:
Right, turning it over to Susan Zinder, class of 1983. I think it just muted again, Susan. Let's try to unmute you once more.
Susan Zinder:
There we go.
Elle Getz:
There you go, perfect.
Susan Zinder:
Professor Whitfield, I was listening to you before and I was particularly struck by what you were saying is Brandeis being founded kind of in response to the anti-Semitism and conservatism of the '40s and it was really kind of a challenge to the anti-Semitism and rebuttal and a refuge and then it kind of moves on to this multicultural liberalism. And it struck me that that's really kind of like... The first part struck me as if Brandeis had kind of been founded as a Jewish HBCU. That we were going to be Jews here and we were going to have a refuge and we were going to have our politics.
Susan Zinder:
And yet as it's evolved, it's kind have moved away from that it sounds. But then that's also consistent with the increasing assimilation and the increasing intermarriage within the Jewish community. And now a lot of us were shocked that anybody who was Jewish could support Trump, but he did have some Jewish supporters. And so, kind of the movement of some Jews, I guess, away from liberalism into more conservative politics. And I was wondering if any of those parallels struck you?
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah, you sort of raised about two different questions but I certainly share your general sense of what happened. I think what I didn't have a chance to say in the early presentation, that your comment reminds me of is that a kind of historical joke was played on Brandeis, because in the very era in which Brandeis was being founded, the last barriers of anti-Semitism in academic life were to be dismantled. So, the rationale that you just mentioned, that warrants the existence of Brandeis, was already beginning to disappear as the university was getting underway.
Stephen Whitfield:
So therefore, is there some other kind of rationale, when anti-Semitism was heavily, heavily stigmatized and which only, let's say, the more freakish or precincts of academic life would permit or harbor anti-Semitism. What sort of basis is there for which Brandeis in that sense might be said to exist? And that, it seems to me, is one of the great, let's call it ideological challenges that Brandeis has faced, I would say, ever since then and obviously there's no chance this evening to talk about the various decisions that were made along those lines and policies. But your comment really presents that challenge.
Stephen Whitfield:
From what I can tell about the Jewish vote, which you alluded to at the very end is that broadly speaking, Jews are 20 to 25% more Liberal over time than the American population. That is, the Jewish vote for Democratic candidates for the presidency is usually in the range of about 70% to 75%. That's a huge, huge figure, as a proportion of a population in which Jews are overwhelmingly ensconced in the upper middle class. And the only significant break from that is really among not particularly the Orthodox is the ultra-Orthodox, who are overwhelmingly illiberal or even anti-liberal, more likely to support Republican candidates, including the incumbent in 2020.
Stephen Whitfield:
But if you ignore the fact that the ultra-Orthodox now tend to vote, basically the way white evangelicals vote, which is to say to give about 80% of their votes to Republican candidates, it seems to me the Jewish propensity for liberalism is not particularly different from what it was in the late 1940s. Now, that's a debatable argument, debatable claim, but I think it's fair to say that it's really the ultra-Orthodox and to some extent the Orthodox that are divergent from the Jewish communal commitment to liberalism.
Elle Getz:
We have a question from Linda Siller.
Linda Siller:
I graduated with Jack Abramoff. So, we've always had them.
Stephen Whitfield:
Hi, Linda.
Linda Siller:
Hi.
Stephen Whitfield:
Great seeing you.
Linda Siller:
Nice to see you. I miss you. I graduated in '81. My mother graduated in '54 and I remember my grandmother reading in the papers in the '60s of everything that was going on campus. My grandmother, she was horrified and she said to my mother, "Would you ever let Linda go to Brandeis?" And my mother said, "If she wants to." And something that Jose said reminded me of something I had totally forgotten about. Some point between '77 and '81, I guess, the country was going to reinstate the draft in the Selective Service and all of us who are Brandeis who grew up with this, this is what Brandeis was like, "Oh my god. There's something we can protest against."
Linda Siller:
And we were this scraggly group of kids. We stormed. I don't remember if we... I just seem to remember it being wrapped, but it could have been any building. And everybody was so excited that there was something to protest and all of a sudden we were protesting the draft. We were nuking the whales. We were whaling the nukes. It just dissolved into this, we finally have something to protest against. This is why we're at Brandeis. I remember thinking, this is ridiculous and I quietly erased my name from whatever I signed up and snuck away. But yeah, that fervor wasn't sustained because, like you said, the country wasn't sustaining it.
Stephen Whitfield:
Right, yes. Yeah, Linda, that's also confirming in a sense what Charlie Klein also said as well, that to enroll at Brandeis was to have a certain assertion of the right to protest. And President Sachar always used to say when he would meet with alumni, he would ask them, "Tell me what you protested against and I will tell you what class you were in."
Linda Siller:
Exactly.
Stephen Whitfield:
David Sachar would probably confirm your father was pretty good at that.
David Sachar:
Absolutely.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah. Thank you, Linda.
David Sachar:
It's great to see.
Elle Getz:
Professor Whitfield has graciously offered to stay on for a few more minutes and I know there are a few more questions left. So, I'd like to turn it over to Sydna Wenick.
Sydna Wenick:
Hi, I'm Sydna.
Speaker 10:
Class of 2025.
Sydna Wenick:
Yeah, no, I know. I put that in check. Yeah, I'll be going to Brandeis in the fall. I'll be the class of 2025 and I was wondering... I thought your book was very interesting. I thought this whole lecture very interesting. And thank you for giving it and for writing the book.
Stephen Whitfield:
There's gotta be a 'but' here.
Sydna Wenick:
No, I had a question.
Stephen Whitfield:
Okay.
Sydna Wenick:
I was wondering, sort of how you distinguish between leftism and liberalism as ideologies broadly, but also specifically at Brandeis and how you think that has sort of affected the politics of the student body?
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah, terrific question that I won't be able to answer satisfactorily. I don't want to say that liberalism and leftism are in any way synonymous. What I would prefer to say is that leftism includes both liberalism, sometimes called progressivism, and radicalism, that is to be on the left. That is, let's say, left of center is to be committed to both liberalism and radicalism, in which the differences would often circle around opposition to capitalism.
Stephen Whitfield:
But broadly speaking, leftism, to me, means a commitment to protecting the rights of minorities, commitment to full freedom of expression. It would mean a certain internationalism that is a kind of opposition to the form of patriotism that takes the form of chauvinism and or nativism. Historically, it meant commitment to the rights of labor of the working class and of labor unions beginning with the 1930s to the welfare state. So, the argument, it seems to me and I'm sloughing over a number of key distinctions, but radicalism and liberalism, in that sense differ in terms of the depth of the commitment, perhaps the pace and the tempo of the commitment.
Stephen Whitfield:
Leftism, as I've defined, it could mean both liberal and radical and it would depend upon the particular historical context. So, what I was trying to suggest is liberalism itself is historically conditioned. And that what it meant to be a Liberal in the 1940s that is committed to judging people on the basis of their own personal attributes came to be shifted by the 1970s in the realization that people's personal attributes are often tied up into their collective identities, whether as women or as African Americans or any number of groups and that their opportunities in American society are not merely a function of their individual characteristics, but of how they are judged by others in terms of their collective attributes. So, it seems to me something that liberalism and in fact, radicalism underwent over the course of the seven decades that Brandeis existed.
Sydna Wenick:
Thank you.
Elle Getz:
Thanks, Professor Whitfield.
Stephen Whitfield:
Thank you.
Elle Getz:
So, I know we have time for a couple of more questions. I'll turn it over to Patricia Caesar and then there's one question from Eric Parker that I'll share after Patricia. So, I'm going to try to unmute you, Patricia. There you go.
Patricia Caesar:
Hi, everyone. Thank you, Steven, so much for writing this book and I apologize that you can barely see me. There's nowhere in my entire apartment that we have found that you can actually see whoever it is talking. So, I apologize. Steven, I cannot thank you enough for writing this book. I was at Brandeis from 1963 to 1967 and for any bit, I have a few classmates here also on the Zoom. And while I knew that there, Maslow, other people who were... Faith Matuszak who are famous, I didn't realize that some of the people I studied with had such an importance in the building of liberalism, leftist policies and practices and I almost feel embarrassed now that I had no idea until 2020 that I knew at all that this was the case, because when you're at that age, at least back then, you had no idea of what was going on.
Patricia Caesar:
Some idea of who taught you And I believe I feel so blessed to have been at Brandeis during that time, because I had an extraordinary education. I actually studied with Lewis Coser and I was in a sense of the Gordie Feldman and Coser teaching assistant when I was an undergraduate and I actually did an index in a book for Lewis Coser, with the book he was writing at that time and I did research for him. He was doing the project and it came across the thought of leaving the rest of Canada. And I had no idea how extraordinary that was, because I only went to Brandeis. We thought that was possible.
Patricia Caesar:
The other thing I'd like to say is that I and two other my classmates, one of whom is on this Zoom, went to a private girls school that was very Christian. None of us got into the seven sister schools that we applied to, because the quota system was so rampant back then. And we all ended up at Brandeis and I think we are so lucky and happy that we did. So thank you. Thank you.
Stephen Whitfield:
Thanks, Patricia. Professor Coser probably didn't mention to you that when he delivered a scholarly paper at the American Sociological Association meeting, I think it was in Chicago, the FBI attended his session to hear what he was saying about Marxism.
Patricia Caesar:
What year was it? Do you know when that was?
Stephen Whitfield:
That was, I think a teeny little bit after you graduated.
Patricia Caesar:
Okay, yeah.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah.
Patricia Caesar:
I didn't-
Stephen Whitfield:
Somewhere around then.
Patricia Caesar:
Yeah.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah, and a final question and thank you, everybody, yeah.
Elle Getz:
So, final question from Eric Parker. How prevalent has conservatism and Trumpism at Brandeis been in the past few years? When he was there in the late 1980s and 1990s, we had a student bring Meir Kahane to speak at Usdan, which was very controversial because of the security that he needed.
Stephen Whitfield:
I'm sorry. I don't quite understand the question.
Elle Getz:
Oh, I think he was wondering how prevalent maybe conservatism has been.
Stephen Whitfield:
Conservatism-
Elle Getz:
For the past few years.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah, in what period? I didn't quite catch that.
Elle Getz:
I think just most recently, but when he was there in the 1980s through '90s, he says it was very controversial.
Stephen Whitfield:
Oh, okay. I'm not sure that I'm qualified to answer that particular question. I think a movement toward conservatism isn't necessarily the same thing as a movement toward being apolitical or perhaps not particularly involved in politics. My impression, and it's strictly an impression, is that conservatism as a particular political stance or ideology, that is defined as a deep respect, if not reverence for tradition, a respect for the various civic institutions that can be separable from the state and the individual, church and so on. My impression is that that definition of conservatism is and has always been rather weak at Brandeis. And what you were mentioning in the '80s, and I think has been true since then, is simply that politics plays a less conspicuous part in the lives of undergraduates, and my guess is also in the lives of various faculty members.
Stephen Whitfield:
Again, I remind everybody that the book that I've written is very peculiar in giant sectors of the university in terms of the curriculum, particularly the sciences, particularly the arts with a few exceptions are uncovered in the book. So, it's a particular kind of angle and, of course, it does not include the huge numbers of students and many faculty for whom politics is simply not a particularly important or pertinent part of their lives.
Elle Getz:
Thanks again. Well, I know that we're out of time. I've included Professor Whitfield's email in the chat because he's graciously offered to answer your questions directly.
Stephen Whitfield:
Right, happy to.
Elle Getz:
And we'll make sure we follow up again with the link to purchase his new book. So, thank you all so much for joining us this evening. Thank you again, Professor Whitfield and congratulations.
Stephen Whitfield:
Thank you.
Elle Getz:
It's been a pleasure to hear you speak tonight. Thank you, everybody.
Stephen Whitfield:
Thanks.
Elle Getz:
Have a great evening.