Fred Kessler:
Welcome and thank you to the members of the Classes of 1965 and 1975 who are joining us for this event. It's exciting to have a multi-class event and it's great to see all of you. I am Fred Kessler, a member of the Class of 1975, and Brandeis parent to Matthew, Class of 2010. I serve as a member of the Alumni Association Board of Directors and along with Laurie Udel, I am co-chair of the Class of 1975's 45th reunion. This is the opening event for the postponed reunions of both of our classes, and a busy schedule where virtual activities has been planned for reunion weekend in June. Registration is now open and we hope to see you again in June. Before we begin tonight's program, a few logistical notes. This event is being recorded, so our classmates who were unable to attend may view the discussion at a later date.
Fred Kessler:
Please mute yourself when you are not speaking, if you would like to speak, please use the chat feature at the bottom of your screen and write I would like to speak to identify yourself. When it is your turn to speak Sharon Rosenberg from the office of alumni relations and the class of 2000, we'll call on you to unmute yourself and ask your question and share your comment. We will get to as many questions as possible. And now to introduce Steve Whitfield, if I were to share a detailed bio of professor Whitfield and his many accomplishments awards and accolades, that would take a great deal of time and it would take away from his presentation and your questions and comments, so I will just share a few highlights and then turn it over to him. Steve Whitfield is professor emeritus of American studies at Brandeis University, he's also a Brandeis alumnus having received his PhD at the university in 1972.
Fred Kessler:
Steve taught at Brandeis for more than 40 years before his retirement and he is recipient of the Louis D. Brandeis prize for excellence in teaching. He also served as a visiting professor in Jerusalem, Paris and Munich. He has authored eight other books, including In Search of American Jewish Culture. If you have not yet purchased your copy of Learning on the Left, I highly recommend that you do and I make that recommendation as a very satisfied customer. In the chat you will find a link to purchase the book through Brandeis University Press, and a 20% discount code. The focus of our event tonight, will be our time at Brandeis as discussed in Learning on the Left. After Steve speaks about why that period was so significant, he welcomes our interactive feedback with our perspectives on his analysis. We are thrilled to welcome Steve for this event, and I will now turn it over to Steve.
Stephen Whitfield:
Thank you Fred very very much for that wonderful introduction and I much appreciate really the opportunity to be here in this probe on this Zoom program to talk about the history of Brandeis University, to express my gratitude for all the things that it did for me as Fred notice first as a graduate student and then as a teacher. The book to which Fred referred Learning on the Left, is dedicated to the students whom I have been privileged to try to teach and certainly to get to know, and the book I believe can be read and interpreted as a thank you note to those students and of course to the university itself. I'm grateful to be here in what is I gather a virtual alumni weekend, since everybody here from the classes of 65 and 75 as I think had some experience with the peculiarities of the Brandeis calendar when because of the Jewish holidays there are things like Brandeis Mondays, which are on Wednesday and Brandeis Thursday which are in the Gregorian calendar, on Tuesday it can't be too bizarre that this is also an alumni weekend event. And what I'd like to do as Fred mentioned is to try to put the events of that you presumably live through that I have researched in the 1960s and 1970s in some sort of historical context, to provide some sort of analysis as to what I take to be something of the meaning of the lives that you lead and I hope appreciate and also to make sure that this is an opportunity in which there will be plenty of time for your own comments, your own reactions, your own reminiscences and impressions, and perhaps correcting and revising things that I'm now about to say.
Stephen Whitfield:
The book itself was written in the belief that there is something truly singular about the university that you all attended and graduated from. I realized that for admissions purposes, that every institution of higher learning claims in some way to be distinctive, claims in some way that young people should be attending that university or that college and none other, but I do think that a pretty compelling case could be made that Brandeis really really is distinctive. Of course the first claim in some ways is the most influential claim, was made by the founding president of the university Abram L. Sachar, who became... served as president for the first two decades and then became chancellor and then became chancellery meritus, and his argument expressed in many forums and expressed also in his memoir A Host at Last, basically tried to see Brandeis University as in the line of the colleges and eventually the universities with which we would like to have competed in terms of academic excellence, that is the colleges that were founded in New England in the 17th and 18th centuries, which were founded of course by Protestant denominations. And in that sense, president Sachar wanted to see Brandeis as a kind of gift to the American Jewish community to American higher education in the same way that the Congregationalists, the Presbyterians, Episcopalians and other groups created universities, colleges, and then universities of their own.
Stephen Whitfield:
But the cark that I take is somewhat different, in fact really quite different, in part because as everybody knows Jews are not only a religious group and Brandeis has never been a religious seminary has never trained rabbis or any other clergy, and because Jews are an ethnic group as well as a religious group, or you might want to say an ethnic group in which many people within it do not practice Judaism. There's another way by which I think the history of the university might be understood, and that is in terms of its political impact. That is the particular ways that Brandeis prove to be distinctive, because of sorts of faculty and the sorts of alumni that Brandeis itself attracted and that is whether as activists, whether as writers, whether as thinkers, Brandeis really played an unusual role in in all sorts of ways, a remarkable and conspicuous role in American in public life itself.
Stephen Whitfield:
So that in the era let's say in which you all were students, that is roughly the first quarter of a century of the existence of Brandeis, from let's say 1948 until the early to mid 1970s. Brandeis really was unusual and particularly that would have been true in the 1950s when the degree to which Brandeis tilted Left in its faculty and in the ethos and the attitudes of its students, really was something unusual in an era and a decade that is stereotypically and in all sorts of ways accurately as characterized by a political attitudes by a certain degree of passivity even of course in the era of McCarthyism a certain degree of fear and of political anxiety. So that in the 1950s and into let's say the early 1960s, and I hesitate here because about two dozen of you are graduates of the class of 65, so I'm drawing here upon research rather than direct knowledge.
Stephen Whitfield:
It's fair to say that Brandeis most resembled only a tiny handful of institutions of higher learning that had that sort of political tilt and political orientation that is not just liberalism, but also radicalism. So places like the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, University of Wisconsin at Madison, University of California at Berkeley, perhaps the City College, City University, these were the only places in that era the early years of Brandeis, the earliest decade or close to two decades, in which one could say that there was something here that was a very strong orientation itself towards the Left, and perhaps in some ways the extreme Left. And the way to account for it, and this is one of the ways that is examined through I believe research in the book, is basically that the sorts of students who came in the early years were themselves generally the majority who came from Jewish homes, in which their parents or perhaps their grandparents were immigrants. These were homes often a very modest circumstances in terms of socioeconomic status, homes that were sympathetic to the labor movement and to labor unions, homes that also in all sorts of ways we're if not directly cosmopolitan at least were efforts to repudiate parochialism and narrowness, support for the United Nations, things like that. These are the definitions... these are among the attributes of liberalism of those early decades and that is a kind of faith that a commitment to civil rights and the commitment to civil liberties would in fact make America a more just society and that is the sort of political orientation, political ideology of the Left the book seeks to describe in focusing primarily on the early years, but is it does so because of the distinctiveness of the university is in fact more in its early years, that is I would say more or less up to the mid 1970s in political terms that would be afterwards and in no way seeking to disparage the sorts of education that Brandeis students got after the mid 1970s.
Stephen Whitfield:
I know that some of you are parents of Brandeis students from a later era, in no way wishing to claim that Brandeis was able to offer subsequent generations a less valuable education than in the early years. But I do wish to make the claim that in terms of distinctiveness, in terms of what made Brandeis unusual, what made Brandeis in a sense worth looking at from a political perspective, is really those early years. And those early years then create a kind of asymmetry to the book itself, which focuses overwhelmingly on those early that roughly let's call it the first quarter of a century of the history of the university rather than the subsequent years. Although the book does bring itself down to the present, including for example, Anita Hill currently a member of the Brandeis faculty, but it is a focus on the years in which that was something that was indeed significant.
Stephen Whitfield:
And the overall theme of the book is a kind of examination of liberalism itself. That is what makes it different from president Sachar's book A Host at Last, that is what makes it different from if there were ever an official history of the university, which Learning on the Left is not. The university very much needs a full-scale scholarly history, it does not exist somebody really should write it, but that's not what Learning on the Left is about. It comes with no endorsement from the administration, it comes with no effort to establish a kind of general account of the more than seven decades of its existence, but it does seek to look at the sorts of people who were attracted to the university, those sorts of people whether as faculty members or students and then alumni gave the political profiles so forceful, so intense and in various ways so leftist a prospective. Some of it clearly stems from the effort to establish the university as a refuge from prejudice and from anti-Semitism in particular. And in my own research on the early faculty, I was struck at the degree to which virtually every member of the faculty whom I examined that left a paper trail, everybody who was of Jewish background had some incident some episode that revealed discrimination of failure to get a fellowship or the failure to get a job presumably because of Jewish identity. And in that sense, it was striking that the university would then establish itself as a refuge for people to be ensured that they would not in any way be discriminated against on the basis of their religion or their ethnicity. And in the very year that the university was founded in 1948, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts also try to ensure that there would be no discrimination on that basis in terms of admissions policies that indeed Brandeis which started out coeducationally and therefore had an advantage competitively with Ivy League institutions in particular, it mentioned other words that no student would presumably be denied admission to Brandeis who was otherwise qualified on the basis of ancestry.
Stephen Whitfield:
So that automatically then attracted people whether they be students or whether they be faculty who were very very much aware of the pervasiveness of prejudice, the... let's call it the ubiquity of various forms of discrimination in the 1940s and 1950s, and that therefore their sensitivity to that may well have made them all the more likely to find an institution like Brandeis to be appealing. And that suggests also what was, let's say the liberal faith of the university itself when it was founded and that is a liberalism that was committed to the notion of let's say, a common humanity, the sense that if the barriers of prejudice and discrimination could be transcended and could be abolished, then people would basically turn out to be more or less the same in terms of what they could achieve, what they could aspire to, what they would be able to enjoy.
Stephen Whitfield:
So the liberal faith of the 1940s was above all a faith in individual opportunity if artificial impediments could indeed be eliminated. So the liberal faith was then one that sought to recognize personal aspiration, personal achievement, individual promise, and seek therefore and rewarding that either through admissions, through a rigorous liberal arts curriculum and through employment on the faculty, it was in other words a way by which that faith could be vindicated that indeed people would ultimately turn out the same if those barriers could indeed be overthrown. So that was the liberalism that I believe animated many of the students, many of the faculty were all aware that of course many people then or now are not particularly political, and there's no particular reason that they can't at least be acknowledged as also strongly a part of Brandeis as an institution.
Stephen Whitfield:
And the book itself is therefore also weighted very heavily against the sciences and to some extent the arts, focusing on those people who were basically largely in the social sciences and humanities rather than in the natural and physical sciences, but within that framework within the peculiar angle from which I did the research and wrote the book, one could say that there was still something very very striking about the way in which that liberal faith would be made operational. And that was the faith in judging people on the basis of individual attributes, that was the faith that I believe was the dominant faith at least the dominant political faith until the spring, late spring of 1968. And with the assassination of Martin Luther King, there was of course extraordinary shock throughout the United States and all sorts of ways. And one of the ways by which that shock was registered wasn't in the aftermath of Dr. King's assassination.
Stephen Whitfield:
African-American students demanded an acceleration of opportunities for black students and potentially for black faculty and among their demands was that scholarships which had previously been given I have to assume on the basis of individual promise and individual need consistent in other words with the liberalism of the 1940s, 1950s, and into the 1960s. The black students demanded the 10 scholarships be set aside for African-American applicants. And when president Sachar agreed to that demand, either because it was long overdue or whether he sought campus peace or for whatever reason, at that particular moment one might say that the liberal faith then was to undergo a collision with a different kind of set of beliefs. And in January, 1969 with the takeover of Ford Hall, which no longer exists by about five dozen African-American students demanding a African and Afro-American studies department with a black chairperson and with students having significant input in how the faculty for that department was to be selected and with a series of other demands and the... The Book itself devotes an entire chapter to the Ford Hall takeover, the only chapter in the book that is dealing with an actual episode or incident political incident on campus, where at that particular moment, the liberal faith of the 1940s and 1950s clearly had come to an end. The takeover ended peacefully after 11 days, but clearly what was accepted then by president Abram and by his successors is a different
Stephen Whitfield:
kind of liberalism that is no longer judgment on the basis of one's own personal qualities, whether in the past or the future, but you are now also to be judged by collective attributes. You are now to be judged also on the basis of your race or your ethnicity or your gender and other qualities. Other collectivities would then come into being, of course, as well. But in that change, which I believe can be dated pretty precisely to 1968-69, that is not long before the class of '75 was to come to Brandeis. One could say that a different kind of liberal faith was to become compelling.
Stephen Whitfield:
The story of Brandeis University then becomes something very different, and it's the story that we are all now living in. And of course, not just Brandeis University, but virtually all institutions of higher learning. And that is to figure out how to reconcile the effort to honor and to reward personal aspiration and achievement, while at the same time ensuring that there is diversity, that there is pluralism. There are enough differences among the students and faculty to ensure that there is a lively and dynamic learning environment. By coming to know other people and other attitudes and other experiences. This was something that was not the case with the first, let's say, roughly two decades of the history of the university. But now, of course, is an extraordinary challenge that the university itself faces. So that's the overall argument of the book itself.
Stephen Whitfield:
The mystery for which I'm going to soon solicit your own opinions, if you wish to express them, is really the issue of how Brandeis then became less differentiated politically in the years after, let's say, the 1960s than it had been before. So if you graduated in 1965, my sense is that you were attending a university that was pretty unusual in the intensity and in the force of the convictions that politics and civic life matter. Again, I'm well aware that many students did not have those views. Many of them were themselves apolitical with other sorts of interests. But Brandeis was peculiar, I believe, like only a small number of other institutions up to roughly the mid-1960s, in the degree to which there was a very pronounced political profile. And that that political profile tilted very, very strongly and in a very pronounced fashion to the left.
Stephen Whitfield:
And then probably under the direct impact of the Vietnam War, also under the impact of the civil rights movement, both its extraordinary successes and its frustrating failures. And with other efforts, the fight against poverty, for example, and increasingly the sense of other serious systematic problems within American society. Other institutions, in a sense, caught up with Brandeis in an increasing awareness and sensitivity to the limitations and the injustices of American society itself. So as other institutions came increasingly to resemble where Brandeis had long been, then of course, what made Brandeis conspicuous and unusual, that inevitably was to disappear.
Stephen Whitfield:
By the time we get to, let's say, the graduating class of 1975, which had already begun to experience a blowback through resistance to the accesses and extremes of the 1960s with the the election, although was an extremely narrow election, of Richard Nixon in 1968 and an overwhelming triumphant reelection in 1972, clearly, much of America was moving away from the social and political criticisms that had been expressed in the middle and the late 1960s, certainly. And in the direction either of a movement to the right, or more likely, a movement toward a certain political passivity. So that by the time you get to the mid 1970s, I think, the story that I try to tell is largely over. And it's over not just at Brandeis, but it's also over in many, many of the institutions of higher learning that had themselves turned to the left in opposition to the Vietnam War, in support of racial justice, and so on.
Stephen Whitfield:
So the story more or less ends with the class of 1975, if I may say so, in the degree to which now Brandeis resembles other institutions in the softening, the moderation, of political attitudes. The degree to which Brandeis, I believe down to 2021, has remained an institution of a liberal ethos, remained an institution that offers important critical perspectives on American society, but without the particular vigor and vibrancy that I try to convey and to evoke in most of the chapters of the book that deal with the ways by which Brandeis itself was so unusual.
Stephen Whitfield:
So maybe I should stop here to give you all plenty of time to dispute what I'm saying, or to correct or revise in some ways. Above all, I want to learn from you in terms of your own recollections, your own sense of your own experiences, perhaps in light of the overall framework that I tried to present. So I don't know. Sharon, am I looking at you now?
Sharon Rosenberg:
Yes, yes. Thank you, Steve. Just a reminder for anyone who has a question or would like to share a comment, just drop a note in the chat saying I have a question, I have a comment, and we'll get to as many as we can. With two screens, it's a little hard to see raised hands, so it's better if you just type in the chat if you have a question. So first question, Geri Mund, would you like to unmute yourself and ask your question?
Geri Mund:
Yes. So what did you find was the impact of the assassination of President Kennedy, when my class were juniors? I know it had a lot of personal impact. And at that time, I became actually non-political because I figured that being political and finding an important political figure that really meant something to you just meant that they were going to be destroyed. And of course, that followed later on with Robert Kennedy, with Martin Luther King, and so on and so forth. But I don't know what you found with other people.
Stephen Whitfield:
Geri, it's a great, great question. And quite frankly, it never occurred to me to investigate it. Maybe I should have. I graduated from Tulane in 1964, and it certainly had an extraordinary impact on me, as it did to everybody who was there, who was alive then, and who was close to adulthood and beyond certainly remembers where he or she was. But I didn't investigate that in any particular way, I have to admit.
Stephen Whitfield:
The only thing I can suggest here is that the particular context, I believe, for Brandeis was the overwhelming interest and commitment in the civil rights movement, with a number of Brandeis students going South, with the number of Brandeis students supporting them through boycotts and so on, about which President Kennedy was, of course, in various ways very ambivalent. That seems to me was a more characteristic feature of the political lives of students in the early 1960s. And I don't know offhand of anything in particular that suggested Brandeis was affected in some unusual way by the assassination itself, but it's something that I could easily look into. And of course, the justice would be one obvious place to get a sense of that from November and December of 1963. But thank you for that comment and question.
Sharon Rosenberg:
So we're going to go Beri, then Jackie, then Jose, then Richard.
Beri Gilfix:
[silence]
Sharon Rosenberg:
Beri, I think you're still muted. We can't hear you clearly.
Beri Gilfix:
[silence]
Sharon Rosenberg:
We can see that you're unmuted but can't hear you clearly. It might be something with the connection. Do you want to type the question in the chat? I'm happy to... We'll try coming back to you. I just want to note, Beri's comment was, I agree with the word intensity as describing what it was like in the early 1960s. Why don't we go to Jackie?
Jackie Bassan:
Thank you very much. I'm Class of '75. And first time I've heard you speak, Professor. Very, very interesting and very clear. My question to you is, you brought out so clearly the stark difference between the liberalism of the '60s, '70s, and now. And there was a big difference. And my family, my orientation was that older one, the individualistic that was so important, especially coming out of Judaism, that we not be judged as Jews because we're all different within Judaism.
Jackie Bassan:
I wonder, do you see a tension? Is there a tension now on the campus? Is there a tension within the Jews you meet between that old and new? Is it recognized that the older one that was so individualistic is so different than the one now that we fought against being looked at as the whole group? Because as a Jew, I have Jewish friends, of course, that are just so different in the way we look at things. We have things in common, yes, but there's that big difference. We're almost like different political parties. So what's your thought on that, the tension at the campus between professors, maybe, and students, or within Jews you know? Thank you.
Stephen Whitfield:
Thank you, Jackie. I can only answer by having to tell you that I have to fudge part of my answer because Fred described me accurately as an emeritus. So I retired in December of 2016. I claim no knowledge, certainly no direct knowledge, of the campus now. But I could try to answer the question more broadly in the following way. And that is that the older kind of liberalism that you were describing, that is, the liberalism that centers upon individuality, that liberalism has not disappeared. But it is always since, let's say since the 1970s, it is always something that is to be reconciled with the sense that we are not only abstracted persons. We always have some historical, social, familial context, which helps shape who we are.
Stephen Whitfield:
That was one of the key insights, I think, of the 1960s, certainly in terms of the discrimination against African Americans, and increasingly against women and gays and so on. And that is the sense that, much as we would like to be judged only as individuals, life doesn't seem to work that way. And therefore, the efforts to establish a more just society requires a recognition that there are systemic ways by which groups may be suffering, and that the individuals in those groups need to be acknowledged as members of groups in terms of what they seek to accomplish.
Stephen Whitfield:
So I would say that is the great challenge that not just liberalism, but I think any political system seeks to harmonize. And that is, we certainly do not want to disparage individuality. We certainly don't want to demean anyone because of who he or she is on the basis of their own attributes and what they have accomplished in life. But the liberalism that we've been living with since the 1970s is basically a liberalism that acknowledges the historical fact of impediments that are often very, very difficult to overcome and that must be reconciled.
Stephen Whitfield:
I wouldn't want to claim that Judaism in itself is something that comes down hard on one of those or the other. The famous Hillel statement, of course, also refers to both a way of confronting injustice, and at the same time, acknowledging one's own particular rights within whatever system. And that Judaism probably doesn't come down hard on either the individuality or the collectivity. You can find it in Judaism in both directions. But I prefer to leave it as something that is something that has to be struggled with without coming to any firm resolution. Thank you.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Beri, would you like to try again? We'll see if your sound is clearer.
Beri Gilfix:
[silence]
Sharon Rosenberg:
So we're going to go Jose, Richard, Melanie, and then Betty. So Jose.
Jose Perez:
Hi. I really enjoyed the discussion. As a graduate of the Class of '75, I was one of the beneficiaries of the takeover at Fort Hall because I came right after that. I was also here as an Upward Bound student. But what I would like you to comment on is the impact that Brandeis students had moving forward. For example, because of the folks I connected at Brandeis, Ed Zacker, Joe Warren, different folks, I wound up as soon as I graduated dealing with desegregating the public schools in Boston, and then got involved politics. But then also, as I moved along in terms of Democratic party, I realized there were people like Steve Coyle, who was at Brandeis running all the housing programs, Ricardo Molette at the Kellogg Foundation, and folks like that.
Jose Perez:
And we were taught it was just in the classroom, because you sit around and talk to a guy Ed Zacker and Norm Levine, Ralph Norman and those folks, we were taught to always stand up for social justice. We were also taught to always challenge wrong. And also, we were taught to be strong supporters of the state of Israel, which we are to this day as minority students, as terms of all of the exchanges, and to respect that.
Jose Perez:
Can you talk more about that was the effect, but I don't think Brandeis... I came back to campus and then I'll shut up. After Charlottesville, and I started yelling about, hey, we got to do something. They weren't talking about the Puerto Rican will not replace us. They were talking about the Jews will not replace us. And we have a responsibility as a university to take that on. I was told I was too political. And I said, "God, this is dangerous what's going on in this country." But we were taught to react, and I spent my adult life doing that. So I was wondering, can you comment on the effect all those people had in terms of creating people like me?
Stephen Whitfield:
Jose, I'm tempted to answer by saying, read a book called Learning on the Left.
Jose Perez:
I am going to.
Stephen Whitfield:
Because what you're asking is really what I try to convey, and that is the really peculiar circumstances under which both faculty and students, I hope always within an appropriate classroom context, I hope always within an appropriate teacher student context, felt that they were part of a common experience that if the old is unjust, that something must be done to correct it. And that is something that I think really marked the university. It's why I think you were also saying that so many students and so many faculty found that unified purpose, quite apart from whatever value of learning in a non-political, non-civic context. And I would like to believe, just speaking personally, that that is, in various ways and in different circumstances and with all sorts of variations, I'd like to believe that that is something that is continuous with the history of the university itself. But I thank you for your comments.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thanks. Richard.
Richard Weisberg:
Well, thank you so much.
Stephen Whitfield:
Hi, Richard.
Richard Weisberg:
How are you doing? I very much look forward to Learning on the Left. It's a great project. I didn't know that you were trying it out, but it's fantastic. If I had to retitle it, I would call it Acting on the Left because a lot of what the students, between the years anyway '61 and '65 that I was there, a lot of what we did was acting on the left. We were influenced by professors, very much so, but we were influenced by each other and we were influenced by external events.
Richard Weisberg:
And if I could just gently disagree with you, I think as to Brandeis itself, the turning point really came during those years, not in '68 in particular. The radicalization of the university really ended when the president of the university decided to ratchet down the university's radical history. And there were several discrete events. Perhaps most importantly, there was the Marcuse event, which is covered in the justice. I was the co-editor of the Justice. By the way, for those who are interested, it's available online. During the years '63 to '65. Herbert Marcuse cites us in his papers for editorials that we wrote opposing essentially the university's dismissal of Marcuse. It was a huge event at the university. There were others during our years there proceeded that. There was the Cuban Missile Crisis where already on campus, we were taking a very different view than the administration took when we said, for example... I'm saying we. When many took the position of Viva Fidel, Kennedy to hell...
Richard Weisberg:
We had radical pastures that on a very trivial level, also had to do with parietal rules, which were very important to us and which set us against the university. Our sense was as Class of 65'ers or a number of us, certainly the paper, the Brandeis justice, as sense was that the university was ready to bid goodbye to its radical past for a variety of reasons. It didn't have to await 68 where in a very excellent way it adopted, what I think you've accurately called, more important and different policies in some ways, liberal policies based on that very turbulent year.
Richard Weisberg:
So I think the turning point, at least from the point of view of a few of us, was during our years there. We had a radical polemic going on with the university administration based on a series of events, some very important, the lost of Herbet Marcusa, who wanted to stay at the university, but whom the president of the university got rid of in those days, you could do that.
Richard Weisberg:
Unsuccessfully explaining to students why the university was tossing away, really its most distinguished figure. One must also remember in closing that Angela Davis was one of our classmates and later became radicalized by more cruiser. She wasn't really, during her years at Brandeis, she was a French major like I was. I asked her once, ''Angela, please, could you write about the experience of being a black person at Brandeis?'' And she said, ''Richard, I'm only interested in French literature'', but a year later under more cruises to delayed, she became, or the trajectory began of what she is now. Anyway, I'm fascinated to look at what you have written and thank you so much.
Stephen Whitfield:
Thank you. You don't remember, but I'm sure. But you spoke once at least. Maybe did you come to the campus to speak about Ponder V about the dues, French dues?
Richard Weisberg:
Yeah, I've been back a couple of times. Thank you for remembering.
Stephen Whitfield:
I heard that lecture. The two incidents that you're describing that is the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which led to the departure of a professor of anthropology and her husband and the 1965 departure of Marcus Sal, one thing in common, which the book tries to diagnose. And that is the role of president Sachar. It's a complicated story in terms of what he could do, what he felt he could do in an era that in which his power was in some ways pretty considerable, but I would want to say slightly and defensive of those two incidents, which I believe were the two biggest incidents involving academic freedom and, in the history of the university, his concerns were the very thing that you were describing.
Stephen Whitfield:
And that is, the campus was moving left under the pressures of changes in American politics. This was something that was no longer a matter of discussion, no matter longer of debate or only of justice editorials. This was, as you were saying at the beginning, this was a matter of action. And this is something that campuses throughout the United States in the 1960s had to deal with that they were not prepared for.
Richard Weisberg:
Thank you.
Stephen Whitfield:
I appreciate those comments.
Richard Weisberg:
I appreciate your book. I'm going to look it.
Stephen Whitfield:
Thank you.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you. Melanie.
Melanie Cohem:
Hello, professor, friends of longstanding and new friends. I had a different experience. I went to Brandeis because it was of its reputation for fine academics. I love Brandeis with all my heart and still do today. But it's interesting. I was not involved in the sixties in the radical movement, but I was clearly aware of it. In that, I discovered that the whole world was moving around me to the right. And so there became more to the left and what happened to me after Brandeis, as a result of my experience at Brandeis, was that I am much more and became much more of an activist and involved in politics and race relations.
Melanie Cohem:
Afterwards, as a result of my experience there, it was interesting your discussion of Richard and professor of Angela Davis. We were friends there and I would describe her at Brandeis as an uncle, Tom. She was in an academic, she was there, Bobby socks, plaid, pleated skirts the whole bit. And she became radicalized as you explained by Marcus Sal when after he left and she followed him out to California. That's when she became radicalized and moved into the directions that she did. I guess in a way I did too. Anyway, it was a great experience. I was happy to be there.
Stephen Whitfield:
Thank you. I have to report that there's a chapter in the book, the deals both with Angela Davis and with Abbie Hoffman and Abbie Hoffman, class of 59 was also somebody at the time who was not particularly political. So it's one of the oddities that Brandeis for all of its leftist or radical reputation produces, two of the most famous radicals of the second half of the 20th century, neither of whom was radical at Brandeis or even particularly political at Brandeis, an odd paradox.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you. Betty. Betty, you're still muted. There is.
Betty Harris:
I'm an academic and I'm used to teaching. So I don't deal with muting. I rarely have to leave myself. I was a member of the class of 1975 and came to Brandeis with a sort of different history, having been from the south and active in the civil rights movement. I was very aware of Angela Davis is metamorphosis, I guess you'd say, because I grew up in Georgia and Alabama. And of course, when she relocated to California, I was well aware of the trial with the Soledad Brothers and all of those issues. But I think a lot of young Southern black women modeled themselves after Angela Davis and having been involved in the civil rights movement in SCLC during the mid '60s, I did come to Brandeis hoping for greater involvement in activism.
Betty Harris:
I do think that there was a gradual downturn in activism that I encountered when I came to Brandeis, when I would mention Angela Davis and some of the other people, I would be told that the administration was embarrassed by them. And that Brandeis had changed its recruiting strategies to the New York suburbs, as opposed to the inner city, because of the kinds of activism that unfolded during the period before my arrival.
Betty Harris:
And I would say that there was also some erasure of the history of Brandeis students being recruited to work on, work with operation scope during the summer of 1965, when Hosea Williams recruited students to come, mostly white students from all over the country to come and join in and do voter registration in anticipation of the voting rights act passing in the early summer. But it passed in the late summer. And I attended the 50th anniversary of operation scope because I, as a child interacted with, and my father was a leader of the SCLC activism in our area. So that was when I discovered that Brandeis was involved and that there are documents at the library, which I was never aware of.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah. I appreciate that comment. The other unusual thing about Brandeis I'm only compliment Betty. What you were saying is that the second chairperson of SNICK, Chuck MCDU came to Brandeis as a graduate student, the first white field secretary of SNICK, Bob Zellner came to Brandeis as a graduate student, two key figures in the history of the student nonviolent coordinating committee, who were friends and colleagues and fellow activists, did come to Brandeis. And I try to tell their stories as well, breaking the rule that I prefer it to deal only with undergraduates, but they were such significant figures in the history of the civil rights movement that I felt their connection to the university really had to be highlighted. But you're also mentioning something else that I think I would want to perhaps underscore and agree with.
Stephen Whitfield:
And that is, the reputation of the university was sometimes in excess of what its actual commitments were. I believe that's sort of what you were saying that you were somewhat disappointed or were disappointed. That is, I think by the time you had arrived, the reputation was in excess of what attitudes and activism really were. And, as I tried to mention earlier, this was part of a broader phenomenon. It's not as though the students had given up their convictions and be broadly speaking in behalf of racial justice, but that somehow there had been a blunting of the activism that was so characteristic of the previous decade. That was simply a broader phenomenon. And perhaps, until our own era in the 21st century, that was something that lasted, I think for several decades. By the way, where in Georgia?
Betty Harris:
My family lived in Crockford Ville. My father was the principal of the high school and my mother a teacher. They were fired along with four other teachers and SCLC came in to help organize demonstrations and scope. People were sent in to help with voter registration, but I was involved as a 12 year old and in that process.
Stephen Whitfield:
Wow, terrific. And Hosea Williams, who was from Savannah. Right?
Betty Harris:
Yes.
Stephen Whitfield:
We're from Savannah. Anyway, thank you. Sharon, any other questions?
Sharon Rosenberg:
Yes. Joel. Joel, are you able to unmute yourself? Okay. Joel actually noted a comment in the chat. So I'll just read it.
Stephen Whitfield:
Okay.
Sharon Rosenberg:
I mean, you said there is a continuing tension between the two versions of liberalism. My limited understanding of the university in recent decades is that the earlier version has lost out examples, professor Henley and INRC Alley.
Stephen Whitfield:
I'm not sure I would want to comment on either of those particular cases, but I certainly believe that Joel, your assessment is correct, which is to say the individual emphasis on the liberalism that emerged in the aftermath of the new deal, that barriers to opportunity had to be overcome, and that those barriers were artificial. That is result of the elimination of those barriers either through legal action or through mass action or through public education, that faith was in various ways to be frustrated. And then the newer version, as I suggested, was to emerge in Brandeis as an example of a kind of mark of how that change was to take place. But I certainly agree that the earlier version has receded, but it is certainly not disappeared.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Okay. And then before we go to Geri, I just want to, that Barry also dropped a comment in the chat and said, ''I agree with Richie that the university regarded our activism as an embarrassment, not something to be proud of.'' Geri.
Geri Mund:
Who? Me?
Sharon Rosenberg:
Yes. I thought you put another comment in the chat. So, I didn't know if you wanted us to share that aloud with the group or not.
Geri Mund:
Okay. No, I was just saying that Angela Davis, Barbara Zoloft, who's on this call and myself, all played on the women's basketball team. And freshman year Angela was on that team. She was, by the way, the tallest member of that team. Thank God. And she was not political. Her hair was not anything like an Afro. It was with no curl at all in it and so on and so forth. So things did change with her and various. My freshman roommate and Melanie was across the hall. So it's nice to see everybody here.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Great. Then Barbara and then Sandra. Barbara, would you like to unmute? I saw you put a comment in the chat. So we just didn't know if you wanted to share that with the group.
Barbara Zoloth:
No, it's okay.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Okay. Sandra.
Sondra Kaplan:
As my comment said, I came from a segregated Dallas High School background. I never felt that I was in the class of 75 with several of us on here in the first week back with one of our other attendees tonight, we all remember marching on Raytheon. We felt like, I think all of us at the university was very supportive of us, doing protests and doing activism for every cause of liberal thought and action. And whether it was civil rights, farm workers rights, feminist rights. I remember doing the first take back the night anti-rape protests. I think we just protested so many liberal causes.
Sondra Kaplan:
I never felt they were unsupportive of us. They gave us a whole floor of Ford Hall to do activist productions with materials and with going out to the community. And we had, I think it was TV, but it was activism. We were speakers, we'd go out into the communities. And that particular protest, that was about saving Soviet jury in the communities and bringing immigrants here. I never felt unsupported by the university in the '70s years. And I felt like I was radicalized. I came from a very, like I said, segregated Southern place in my life.
Stephen Whitfield:
Thanks for that comment.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Josh, I saw you dropped a note and then chat. If there's anything you'd like to share. No, you're good. Okay. Beth or Debbie?
Beth Cohen:
Well, I agree with Sandra and it also the university helped radicalize me because, I came from a more conservative family. Actually after, was it the Susan Sacks? The bank robbery murder? I'm not sure who that was. My father had always told me...
Jose Perez:
Thank you, pale.
Beth Cohen:
Okay. My father always told me he wanted me to go to Brandeis. And after that happened, he said, ''Well, maybe you shouldn't apply anymore.'' That made me want to go more. I do remember. I have a funny story about the Raytheon March. I ended up speaking with the Bullhorn because some of the students wanted to get arrested and block the street. So I was a freshmen at Brandeis, had no idea really much what was going on. But next to me was this woman who wanted to get arrested and gave me the Bullhorn and said, ''You take over.'' I have no idea what I said, but I thought it was quite funny.
Stephen Whitfield:
Don't tell your father.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Okay. Debbie, Jonathan, Laurie. Any other question? Anyone else would like to share anything, or ask any questions? Michael.
Michael Furber Kalafatas:
Thank you. I have a comment and a question. The comment is for this group, all of whom are celebrating Brandeis reunions. It is a great plug for Steve's book. One of the wonderful, special qualities of the book is that it's not just narrative history. There are deep dives into profiles of faculty, alumni, students that give you a strong connection to the Brandeis that you remember. And I found that extremely appealing. The question I have for Steve is, as a number of you know, I worked in the office of admissions from 1967 until I retired in 2002. When I began working in the office of admissions, I had occasion to go to faculty meetings. Usually they were held up in Olin Saying, and they were pretty wild occasions in that time, right? Political battles. I. Milton Sacks against Jerry Cohen. It was pretty much a street fight with a passage of time.
Michael Furber Kalafatas:
I saw that Eber way. One of the qualities to the feistiness was I felt that the faculty deeply care about Brandeis. Brandeis was their first concern and their academic field second. I came across the decades to feel that flipped, that faculty came to identify more so with their academic field and their colleagues across the country and around the world and less so with the institution. Their first passion was their academic field as against a passion for Brandeis, what it stood for. It's fate, what should be happening there. And I was wondering, Steve, if you have any agreement with that perception and if so, why that came to be?
Stephen Whitfield:
Great question, Michael. I agree with you completely in your description of what happened. But at the risk of running into the problem of romanticizing an earlier era, which is a tricky thing to do, certainly I do not want to in any way claim that the later decades, certainly in which you and I were very much a part, is anything now to be dismissed as somehow less valuable or less wonderful. But I think the basic thing that you're describing is true. And when you mentioned the faculty meetings and often how robust and disputatious they were, the first person I thought of is exactly the person you mentioned, which is "I'm Milton Sacks from the Department of Politics." And Milton Sacks was like a number of the people who were mentioned in the book as they came to academic life from political organizing, from political parties. He had been an early Trotskyist, he was a democratic socialist, a number of the people who were among the most disputatious had come from often very, very significant political attachments and commitments and experiences.
Stephen Whitfield:
Whereas inevitably, the faculty was to change at Brandeis and elsewhere in which people didn't come from the Great Depression and its political and economic struggles, did not come from homes in which there was... And misery. And therefore they tend to have more sedate and more conventional academic lives. So you're right in describing what happened. And my explanation would really be simply the generational divide from people who were basically born into middle-class homes with middle-class security and comfort, did not feel that they had to join radical parties in which disputatiousness was often very central in order to get ahead in life. And that's what happened at Brandeis and with characteristic I believe of virtually any place. It's very unusual, for example from the 1970s or 1980s on to have any faculty member who had ever come out of the labor movement, anybody who'd ever been involved in labor organizing, but there was a colleague of mine who had done that in the 1940s and early fifties, who had done it in other departments.
Stephen Whitfield:
And so therefore I think that that is part of the explanation. The other part is that Brandeis inevitably would cease to inspire the kind of faith and passion that the early years were able to inculcate. So in the early decades, it seems to me it was more likely to be an adventure with the outcome uncertain, with a certain precariousness about it. And that people came there often as faculty or students out of a very special desire to do something really, really different academically. But after 1975, if something that is going to be simply less powerful as an incentive to teach at Brandeis or to be a student at Brandeis while still I insist providing a wonderful, wonderful education, but with the institutional loyalties, therefore, as you were describing, shifting from an unusual pioneering institution to one's own disciplinary and departmental allegiances. Does that make sense?
Michael Furber Kalafatas:
Thank you.
Herbert Teitelbaum:
Darren, may I say a few words?
Sharon Rosenberg:
Absolutely.
Herbert Teitelbaum:
First, let me say that Brandeis was transformative for me and I am indebted to the university. I didn't come from a middle-class home. I came from the hood. I grew up in Brownsville and then Coney Island. So Brandeis was a real shock to me and I wasn't political while I was at Brandeis. But in my first year of law school, I joined something called the Washington Civil Rights Research Council, which turned me around. One of the things I think we need to mention is that after 1965, affirmative action became a hot button issue in the Jewish community and it divided the Jewish community but a lot of the organized Jewish community was opposed to affirmative action. And it put the organized Jewish community, for example, the American Jewish committee on one side and the civil rights movement on the other side, several of the neocons were Jewish.
Herbert Teitelbaum:
I didn't see an organization at Brandeis while I was there an organization that was devoted to supporting civil rights. And maybe I just didn't see it. I think you're quite right professor that Brandeis students were very liberal, but I didn't see a lot of activism supporting the civil rights movement. I didn't see a lot of students going down Selma, but maybe that's because I didn't see it.
Herbert Teitelbaum:
Around the time that we got out of Brandeis, there was some radical stuff happening at other universities. Mark Rudd had taken over Columbia University. Other such Mark Rudds were doing that elsewhere. I don't know if that ever happened at Brandeis. Somebody said that there was a demonstration our year, an opposition to parietal hours. And I remember dealing with Steve Mora and I was the demonstrator. I thought parietal ours were terrible, but that's the only demonstration that I know of while I was there. And Jose, I represented the Latino community intervening in the Boston desegregation case.
Jose Perez:
I spend a lot of time with Judge Garrity and Joe Warren and Paul Parks in the court. I ran the educational opportunity center right out of Brandeis, which I used to get all the kids whenever they ran them out of the schools. All the African-American kids would wind up at the YWCA. And I ran the program there. Other thing is I got an old story, Joe Warren was working for Mike Dukakis. Brandon was the director of the upward bound program. Mike Dukakis gave him a roll of dimes and a state card to call the governor if they needed the national guard. And I remember sitting at a meeting, Joe Warren was trying to tell the governor if they went to the right, was that big? What made them think we would get to the phone booth? They finally gave him a car with a phone in it so he can call the national guard. That was my first job after graduating was working with Joe and doing those kinds of things in terms of reintegrating the Boston public schools.
Richard Weisberg:
I just wanted to throw in that for the class of 65, yes, there were active demonstrations about parietal rules, but we also had pretty big demonstrations about Catherine Goff Avely and the Cuban Missile Crisis. She was dismissed pretty much on the spot as opposing the Kennedy administration's view of the Cuban Missile Crisis. And there were a substantial number of students who protested against that. This is for the class of 65 and then as to Marcuse , there were really huge responses involving Fort Hall. Fort Hall also has an element of our experience relating to the dismissal of Herbert Marcuse, which had obviously radical implications in every sense for the turning point of the university.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah, I would only want to add that and I'm probably should have stated this earlier, even though I had said before that probably a majority of students were apolitical, or if they were political, not particularly intensely political, or if they were political, they weren't necessarily engaged in a lot of activity, that I think it's true of any collectivity. It's usually a minority, sometimes a small minority, a small minority of Southern Blacks, a small minority of African-Americans throughout the United States were involved in civil rights and other sorts of activity. So you're right Herbert, if you didn't see them because they were in fact, very few of them, but some of them did go South. And what I was trying to get at is that there were enough of them who I believe made something of a difference that it seemed to me it's worth seeking to acknowledge and to analyze.
Sharon Rosenberg:
And Ted just notes, he says, I unfortunately have no microphone or camera. So I'll read his comment slash question for you. I agree that Brandeis was less radical than I expected it to be from 1971 to 1975. I think the big reason was there was no longer fear of being drafted and sent to Vietnam. The earlier fear of going to Vietnam was a huge impetus to the radicalism of the mid to late 1960s. Comments please.
Stephen Whitfield:
Okay. Ted is, I think certainly right about that. And that is when President Nixon basically eliminated conscription the anti-war movement lost much, much of its momentum. That was part of the intention maybe was the major intention. And that certainly, I appreciate Ted your noting that also made an extraordinary difference. As did the end of the war itself. I mean, the war was also a festering sore on the body politic. But certainly eliminating the draft was a stroke of political genius on President Nixon's part.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thanks. We have time for one more question. Betty.
Stephen Whitfield:
Nobody seems to ever want to unmute themselves.
Betty Harris:
Okay, sorry. I wasn't dismissing activism between 1971 and 1975, but around the time of our withdrawal from Vietnam, Noam Chomsky came to campus. There were demonstrations about a variety of things, and he came and did a teach in during that period. And that was my senior year. And I remember it well, so there were demonstrations throughout, but I think I expected more having started out young. I expected more to be taking place at Brandeis rather than a downturn. And another thing I want to mention here, since someone mentioned affirmative action, and this is what I encountered. I graduated from Brandeis, worked for a year and went to graduate school at Brown. And I think it was 1978 when the Bakke ruling occurred.
Stephen Whitfield:
That's right.
Betty Harris:
And certainly what I felt I was experiencing was a downturn in opportunities leveling of the playing field.
Betty Harris:
So I'm saying all of that was taking place during the time. I can't demarcate graduating from Brandeis and this happened but this downturn was occurring, I think probably after King's death of dealing with human rights issues in general. I work in Southern Africa and now I am increasingly viewing a lot that happens in the U.S. in human rights terms, that the U.S. is a major human rights violator and that we do have to refocus our international lenses on this country to deal with those issues again.
Stephen Whitfield:
That's a nice note to end on, that it's not just a campus, it's not just Waltham, it's not even just the United States. It's a broader international contest, that context that needs to be analyzed and diagnosed. Thank you. And thank you everybody.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you very much. And I will now turn it over to Steve Mora
Steven Mora:
My role is to just make some program notes really for our class, but listening to all the comments and particularly struck, of course, by Stephen, his marvelous book and perceptives, especially of our times in the early sixties. And my memory as the 17 year old boy from the Midwest coming to this incredible place and being exposed to Herbert Marcuse and Professor Sacks, and maybe less radical people like John Roche and others. It was just like, I landed on this incredible planet that made me happy. But two things that I remember specifically, personally was, are rather standing with Vick Hausner and David Goldman in 19, whatever the Cuban missile crisis was, 62 and standing there with them and sort of being part of, but a very minor part of Kathleen Goff, leading a pretty major demonstration, as I recall it at Brandeis.
Steven Mora:
And the Shibboleth I remember at that march was Cuba C maybe it was Castro C I think it was Cuba C Kennedy. No, and it was quite radical for its time. And that's interesting to hear my old friends, Herb and Richie talk about it. And then one kind of more humorous note, which is that Richie mentioned the parietal rules and as trivial as it was, it was part of the radical most of the school on the one hand versus Abe Sachar on the other. And I remember, cause I was involved in student government then, I went to three meetings of the Brandeis women's committee, one in Boston, one in New York and one in Chicago. And unfortunately I was punching way above my weight class to try to argue against Abe Sachar. And I don't think I made any headway with any of those three Brandeis women's committees and explaining to them why the students were right about how limiting and old fashioned the Brandeis parietal rules were at that time I was at least capable of discussing
Richard Weisberg:
You did good Steve, you did good.
Steven Mora:
At least there was something I had enough mental power to talk about, but I don't think I made a whole lot of headway But let me make a few comments again, Steven, just thanks for your perspectives about our era in the early sixties. And I want to thank everybody who participated today and came along. I do want to thank a couple of people, Barb McCarthy and Susan Wolf from the Brandeis administrations who put all these things together for all the reunion classes. Of course, I'm most familiar with ours, 1965. And I want to thank them. I want to also say thanks to the committee of which I'm just a member for our class, which included Melanie, Bob Lehrman and Joan and Michael Kalafatas and Denny Lou, Danny Smith, and Sandy Lou Cotsen, who without we wouldn't have been able to do anything without them.
Steven Mora:
We do have things coming up. The yearbook for our class and I assume for 75 also will be shipped out shortly. We have another event of this type on June 8th, probably at seven o'clock Eastern time, six o'clock Central time, which is going to be an interesting thing about the perspectives of today's admissions departments, what the school is looking for, what is coming to Brandeis and how it compares with some other eras and there'll be chat rooms and an opportunity for everybody to talk to each other at that event. And of course, reunion the 11th to the 13th with alumni college. And there'll be a lot of terrific events.
Steven Mora:
I also want to thank my class for tremendous job where we're doing and making contributions to the school, financial contributions. It's pretty remarkable for a class as small and old as we are. And there's still time until June 30th to make further contributions. One comment that chokes me up a little bit before I send it back to Sharon, I think we should at least acknowledge the members of our class that have passed away since our last reunion. And I'm sorry, I have one personal note about it because my three-year roommate and tourist and longest friend Bill Moody passed away last year, believe it or not from Agent Orange poisoning from his two years in the Navy in Vietnam. So we could just take a couple of seconds to think about all of them.
Steven Mora:
Beyond that, I think I've covered everything I'm supposed to cover. We're going to go into chat rooms now, and Sharon's going to take over for any of you would like to continue talking to each other in those chat rooms. Thanks, Steve.
Stephen Whitfield:
Thank you. Thank you.