Volume 3 - Issue 1

Volume three, number one I September 28, 1969

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Some may come and some may go; we shall surely pass.

So they finally did it. And just when we were desperately groveling to muster up our last pathetic hopes that they wouldn't.

But humans aren't like cows; when they are sucked on and sucked on they will not continue to give milk to a stainless steel calf. We .finally shrivelled as our last morsel of dread, the milk of human existentialism, escaped the atmosphere with the Apollo 11 this summer, and as a sapped nation tried with such masturbatory anxiety to excite jtself, it didn't for a moment realize that it was trying to celebrate its own death, drowned in a sea of homogenized boredom.

The current college generation was suckled on Kennedy idealism and when the tit was ripped away so suddenly we precociously reached the confident puberty of New Left radicalism. We thought we lost our virginity at the Pentagon when the blood flowed. But when it flowed again at Chicago we realized just how sick our elders were. Ah, Realization, you elusive goddess, what good are you?

Their disease is contagious, so we lie here, Robin Hoods all, about to sink into our .final coma, when we dimly perceive that the leach attached to our arm is not ridding us of harmful humors but drawing out our last drops of life.

Death in life, yes, that is the stuff of our desperation. We are being tech nologized right out of life and are working so hard not to notice it; we are working so hard not to realize that our children m ay never have the chance to taste existence; the ship is sinking and all we do is gather on the bow to sing Londonderry Air. This summer I experimented with being apolitical. After deciding that the world was so far out of its mind there was no saving it, I thought if one could only sh~pe his life into a healthy and happy exiStence, that would be an incredible accomplishment in itself.

But the cruel war is still raging. Not to join one side is to join another. Amidst today's mess there are two SDS groups, both claiming to be the true SDS and both more intent on destroying each ~tber than in fighting the evils that brought them into existence.

We students gave up on the war in Vietnam because after a few earnest attempts it bored us. Ah me, what a luxury. And now we have to·dig into our guts to transcend the numbing of the mass media and realize that,indeed, the war goes on.

When a national party, the Black: Panthers, is being destroyed by ·political repression, this infighting among student activists is just so much childish snobbery.

There are a whole lot of people who can't simply shave their beards, cut their hair, and apply to business school.

I strongly hope that no occupation of any university building takes place this year. I hope no violent disruption of the University occurs. Liberal rhetoric aside, for all its faults and abuses, the university does exist as one of society's few critics, and before we give up on reason we bad better damn well realize that in this country stupidity has the monopoly on power.

If I were a CIA agent I would try to encourage the student left to take over a building, for the facists of the right are chomping at the bit-and their game is in quite a different league. Besides, from an esthetic view, occuping a building, after it has been done so many times in so

many places, could exist only as a parody of itself.

So what is the purpose of all this selfrighteous rambling? Well, when a few of us, who were deadened by the creative bankruptcy of the extracurricular monolliths at Yale, got together a couple years ago to start a new magazine, we wanted to succeed as writers, artists and thinkers.

We were drowned in success so quickly we didn't realize we had lost sight of land.

We became an established power around Yale so quickly, that we forgot that the very reason we came into existence was to constantly criticize power. Many of us were so flattered at the invitation of national magazines to write for them, that we unknowingly sacrificed not a little integrity in the process. It was a painful lesson, still embarassing, but we have learned.

We are starting off this year with an elated sense of purpose: to lend some meaning to the term Yale community.

There will be no one New J ourna/ viewwe hope to exist as a vehicle for any member of the community to express an intelligent idea.

If you have something to say, please get in touch. This year we are looking for hard-hitting reportage, thoughtful reviews of the arts and politics-as well as fiction, poetry, top photography and cartooning.

While the vast majority of the magazine is free-lance contribution, if you would like to join a staff of people who like to edit as well as write, contribute artistically to a magazine that has won more national awards for graphic design than any other in its class, or run the business of the most widely read and controversial publication at Yale, please call us at any time. (We never have a competition, for we feel it cramps our anarchic style.)

The very existence of this magazine expresses a basic affirmation of the need for intelligent discussion among the members of this community. Our criticism, though strong, stems from the belief that it is the most positive contribution we can make at this time. Last year we wanted to be known as writers and artists.

This year please call us anything but thatlike flies to wanton boys, you can kill us for your sport, but please don't then go and pin our wings to a display board.

We may well fail but in such an existentially draining world, even the thought of failure is invigorating.

Volume three, number one September 28, 1969 Editor: Jonathan Lear Executive Editor: Herman Hong Managing Editor: Lawrence Lasker Business Manager: Steve Thomas

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Art Director: Nicki Kalish

Associate Editor: Paul Goldberger Advertising Manager: Robert Kirkman Copy Editors: Nancy Vickers Craig Slutz.ker Contributing Editors: Susan Braudy Mopsy Strange Kennedy Michael Lerner LeoRibuffo Walter Wagoner Staff: Richard Caples, Charles Draper, James Hinson, Stuart K lawans, Joanne Lawless, Manuel Perez, Barbara Rich, Scott Simpson.

THIRD CLASS NON-PROFIT PERMIT: Thjrd Class Non-Profit postage PAID in New Haven, Conn. The New Journal is published

by Tbe New Journal at Yale, Inc. 3432 Yale Station, New Haven, Conn. 06520, and is printed at The Carl Purington Rollins Printing.Office of the Yale University Press in New Haven. Published bi-weekly during the academic year and distributed by qualified controlled circulation to the Yale Community.

For all others, subscriptions are $7.50 per year ($4.50 for students) and newstand copies

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The New Journal © copyright 1969 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., a non-profit corporation.

Call: 776-9989-at anytime.

Letters welcome. Unsolicited manuscripts should be accompanied by a stamped, selfaddressed envelope. Opinions expressed in articles are not necessarily those of The New Journal.

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Credits: Alberto Lau: pages 12, 13 David March: pages 10, 11

Jonathan Lear

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Contents 3 Abortions at Yale

by Jonat.h an Lear 5 Notes on a New History

by Robert Jay Lifton 10 1969: A Space Lunacy

by David Quammen 12 City Planning: Anatomy of a Fuck-up

by Lawrence Lasker and James Rosenzweig

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On Getting an Abortion at Yale

by Jonathan Lear

I was first hit with the whole idea of abortion a few years ago when I was exorcizing some last shreds of Kennedy idealism and bourgeois guilt as a VISTA worker in Harlem. One of the nights, which were usually dominated by lonely introspection and brooding about what the hell I was doing there, was interrupted by a teenage girl who lived a few floors below me in the tenement. Her hands worked over the little strands of hair and the creases in' her dress which concern only those who are upset about something and self-conscious. She related a long detailed story the gist of which dealt with a girl friend who had broken up with a boy some time ago and had proceeded to miss her next period and was now three days late for the second, and knew she was pregnant. So why tell me?

Well, this girl was a secretary downtown, a relatively high paying job, and wanted to know if I knew a reputable white doctor who she could be sure would perform a good operation. I didn't-and spent the rest of the night feeling that if I could have ever been of any use, I had just blown it.

The next night a screaming ambulance pulled up in front of my tenement and I saw the girl I had talked to the night before wheeled out on a stretcher. The gossipy tidbit passed up and down the street. By the next afternoon, in the same breath as the numbers of the horses that had won the races, I heard that the girl's mother was in the middle of giving her an abortion with a knitting needle when she pierced some artery and the blood gushed.

And gushed. Even in Harlem there are blood banks and antibiotics, so the girl lived, but she will never give birth to a child. So it goes. .

While no one has ever accused the sex laws of being sane, and while any conception of the number of deaths and permanent damage done by illegal abortions would boggle and sicken the mind, abortions are done at Yale-and they are done legally.

Paula came to Yale last year, after graduating from a top women's college, and got a job with a professor to give herself time to think over whether she really wanted to go on to graduate school.

She started dating a graduate student in that department and through some sort of birth control slip-up soon found herself quite pregnant. Her boyfriend felt betrayed and trapped and wouldn't have anything to do with her.

There are times to be alone, but this was not one of them. Paula paced hysterically up and down her room for a few days, afraid to speak to anyone, and finally flipped through the yellow pages and on sheer intuition selected a private gynecologist who she hoped would be sympathetic. He was.

"After the tests showed that I was pregnant," said Paula, "he asked me what I intended to do. I was so embarassed and upset about the whole thing and was kind of falling apart, so he said, 'Ok, bow much money do you have,' and I didn't have any. That was going to be quite a hassle.

He explained that there were a whole lot of different ways to have a good abortion, going to 1apan or London or going to Maryland and saying you were a resident; apparently Maryland is very lenient.

And then he said there was no way it could be done in Connecticut, unless we could get two psychiatrists to write that my mental health was so gravely

threatened that there was a strong chance I would commit suicide. Apparently abortions were being performed at Yale-New Haven Hospital, but you could tell that if I could afford any other legal way, it would have been much easier."

There was no other way. Paula was near broke and couldn't afford long trips, so the gynecologist made appointments for her to see two psychiatrists known to be sympathetic, and to see a prominent obstetrician at Yale.

"I bad heard that if I was going to get my abortion I would have to make the shrinks think I was about to kill myself,'' said Paula. "But that was no problem.

The minute I would walk into their office I would somehow become hysterical, and I wasn't putting it on. ''The first shrink I saw was very nice and saw that I really was in deep depres-sion, and he thought it was imperative that I have an abortion. The other shrink tried to argue and tell me that I could force the boy to marry me and told me I was being very self-destructive. I just sort of fell apart. I felt like a complete tramp; I don't know how he did it. He had the attitude: 'Well, I suppose I'll write the letter for you, but I'm really doing you a favor.' And that was probably the worst part of the whole business, because he made me feel that while I might get away with something legally I was doing something that was profoundly wrong."

The psychiatrists did write the letters, though, and Paula received a call a week later saying a hospital review board had gone over her case, and a legal abortion would be performed. Paula entered the hospital five days later, on a Friday, and was back in her apartment on Sundaypregnant no longer.

"The doctor who performed the operation was so great, so fatherly,'' says Paula.

"I remember once we were walking down the corridor and he put his arm around me and said, 'Just hold yourself together, that's all I ask. Just hold yourself together.' ''The whole operation was a real nothing. I never felt any pain afterwards, except minor cramps the next day. But, wow, did I have mental hang ups about it.

I went through a long period of thinking I was a murderess, which I don't think is common. It just seemed like the culmination of a bad dream, or almost like a punishment for being a bad girl. And it took me a whole year to get over that, to learn that the whole value system just wasn't functional, to accept the fact that I, too, was a sexual human being and had to learn to act sensibly, and that it was sheer stupidity that got me into this, but that there was no reason to feel guilty about it for the rest of my life."

Paula paid forty dollars a shot for each psychiatrist, hospital costs amounted to three hundred dollars, and the doctor performing the operation didn't charge her, for be felt she couldn't afford it.

The Yale Medical School, that colossus to the south, is a series of low-flying formidable buildings, standing stolidly as a Great Wall, protecting the civilized world of the University and downtown shopping center from the barbarian hordes of the ghettoes. It is also one of the few Yale institutions that provide valuable services for the entire New Haven community. Abortions from good underground sources have long been handy for society's upper classes;

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and the insanity of another culture's sexual mores has zeroed in on the lower classes who cannot afford the one thousand dollars needed for a stint in London or J apan or the seven hundred dollars going ra te for top illicit abortions in New York C ity. One of the more important aspects of the Yale-New Haven Hospital's healthier abortion attitude is that it provides that needed commodity to those who cannot a fford more expensive routes.

In Connecticut, legal abortion can be performed for three reasons: if the mother's physical or mental health is in grave danger, if the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest or if the baby will be born with serious congenital defects. This is no new or enlightened law; it has been on the books since 1861 and has rarely been used. One look at another commun ity shows why. In Hartford, for example, there are three major hospitals, Needless to say, C atholic-run St. Francis simply n ever performs legal abortions. H artford H ospital, the largest and most modern, run by those same forces which guide the large insurance companies and banks, discourages them incredibly. The third hospital, Mt. Sinai, run by the Jewish community, is paranoid about being known as the abortion mill.

So it takes a large institution which decides in its guts to be enlightened to perform legal abortions-and Yale-New Haven is just that.

Dr. C larence Davis, a paternal looking man with straight white hair shooting forward to the top of the forehead , outlining a friendly fleshy face, is an obstetrician at the Yale-New Haven Hospital and chairman of the Connecticut Abortion Legal Reform Association. " More and more people are beginning to simpJy demand their rights and eleven states have enacted more progressive legislation," said Davis, explaining why the number of legal abortions is rising across the country. " In this hospital, thank God, we have an intelligent, forthright attitude."

Another prominent New Haven physician who, while not directly related to the Hospital, helps women to obtain safe abortions said, " I personally feel that no woman should be forced to have a child she does not want-single, married or in any other category. I think a lot of physicians take this attitude now. My feeling is that there is enough unhappiness and unrest in life, and that a child has a much better chance of living a normal healthy life, psychiatrically and otherwise, if he's loved. If he is not loved his chances of becoming a useful citizen are very markedly decreased."

With the plethora of birth-control information , pills and devices that abound, one would think there would be very few unwanted pregnancies, but that isn't true.

"Single girls, particularly, get in a situation where they have intercourse without any type of contraception, thinking they're not at the time of the cycle where they're likely to get pregnant. Some of them are just plain stupid. Some of them get pregnant, I'm sure, to punish themselves, or their parents-and not infrequently their parents-not consciously of course, but psychologically. Then they get tremendous guilt complexes about all this and frequently do not tell their parents.

"I also run across the situation where the girl is exposed to pregnancy, (has coitus or coitus is attempted) and she stops menstruating and is not pregnant.

I've had two of these in the last three months, and it's totally psychological," said the private physician who wishes to remain anonymous.

Reasons for unwanted pregnancy divide along socio-economic lines. Girls who become pregnant to punish their parents are from middle and upper class families, while the few pregnancies resulting from ignorance of birth control procedure are in the lower class. In general, abortion is a luxury of the.affiuent, like the Holy Writs of Assistance, with women of lesser means often dying from hemorrhaging or infection due to illicit abortions done by untrained people with total ignorance of aseptic techniques. YaleN ew Haven Hospital has led a morally constipated state in providing expert legal abortions for women of all economic backgrounds.

Three operating procedures are used by the hospital. If the pregnancy is less than ten weeks, a normal scraping of the uterine wall is performed. After ten weeks of pregnancy, hypertonic saline solution is injected into the uterus, inducing labor.

In women of middle age, when requested and deemed all right, a sterilization is also performed, and the uterus is simply removed.

While the legal abortion is the safest and least traumatic means of terminating pregnancy, it is still acknowleged to be one hell of a psychologically painful event- and in many cases the men take an active part in comforting the patient.

"Frequently the man is there, whether the couple is married or not," he said.

"The difficult thing is when the relationship is not a very serious one, where marriage isn't seriously contemplated.

The minute a man learns that his partner is pregnant, he's long gone. And it's a terribly hard thing psychologically for the girl, for she is almost always deeply emotionally involved, or sh e wouldn't be h aving intercourse . There are promiscuous girls, sure, but they aren't the ones that get pregnant. It's the girl who's in love and starry-eyed that gets herself in trouble. " And there are some girls who get pregnant to try and catch a man. That's the worst way in the world. When a girl gets pregnant to solidify a relationship, the relationship is doomed," said the physician.

At least legal means of abortions do exist. That any anti-abortion laws at all still exist as part of a criminal code of law, is a comment on society which some might call male-chauvinistic; others

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Notes on a New History

by Robert Jay Lifton

Is history a collection of facts? Or is it a sense of perspective? In the article that follows, Robert Jay Lifton, Professor of Psychiatry at Yale Medical School, opts strongly for the latter. He offers several arguments to support the theory that it is a different perspective on history-a "New History"-that is at the base of today's student movement.

Robert Jay Lifton is the author of Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, winner of the National Book Award.

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What is a New History? And why do the young seek one? I raise these questions to introduce the idea of a particular New History-Ours-and to suggest certain ways in which we can begin to understand it. . Let us define a New History as a radical and widely-shared regeneration of the forms of human culture-biological, experiential, institutional, technological, esthetic and interpretive. The newness of these cultural forms derives not from their spontaneous generation, but from extensions and transformations of what already exists; that which is most genuinely revolutionary makes psychological use of the past for its plunge into the future. Of special importance is the reassertion of the symbolic sense of immortality which man requires as he struggles to perpetuate himself biologically and communally, through his works, in his tie to nature, and through transcendent forms of psychic experience.

But the shapers of a New Historypolitical revolutionaries, revolutionary thinkers, extreme holocausts, and technological breakthrough-also express the death of the Old. This has been true of the American, French, Russian and Chinese revolutions; the ideas of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud; the mutilations of the two world wars; and, most pertinent to us, the technological revolution which produced Auschwitz and Hiroshima, as well as the post-modern automated and electronic society. Each of these has been associated with "the end of an era," with the devitalization, or symbolic death, of forms and images defining the world view and life-patterns of large numbers of people over long periods of time.

Great events and new ideas can cause, reflect or symbolize historical shifts. The combination of Nazi genocide and the American atomic bombings of two J apanese cities terminated man's sense of limits concerning his self-destructive potential, and thereby inaugurated an era in which he is devoid of assurance of living on eternally-as a species. It bas taken almost twenty-five years for formulations of the significance of these events to begin to emerge-formulations which cannot be separated from the tecbnologi~al developments of this same quartercentury, or from the increasing sense of a universal world-society that has accompanied them.

The New History, then, is built upon the ultimate paradox of two competing and closely related images: that of the extinction of history by technology and that of man's evolving awareness of himself as a single species. It may be more correct to speak of just one image, extraordinarily divided. And whatever the difficulties in evaluating the human consequences of this image, psychologists and historians who ignore it cease to relate themselves to contemporary experience.

The celebrated 1962 "Port Huron Statement" of the Students for a Democratic Society, which is still something of

a manifesto for the American New Left, contains the assertion: "Our work is guided by the sense that we m ay be the last generation in the experiment with living." I think we should take this serious~ ly, just as many of us took seriously Albert Camus' declaration that, in contrast with every generation's tendency to see itself as "charged with remaking the world," his own had a task "perhaps even greater, for it consists in keeping the world from destroying itself. In seeking new beginnings men are now haunted by an image of the end of everything.

Do the young feel this most strongly?

They themselves often say just the opposite. When I discuss Hiroshima with students, they are likely to point to a disparity between my (and Camus') specific concern about nuclear weapons and the feeling of their generation that these weapons are just another among the horrors of the world bequeathed to them. Our two "histories" contrast significantly: my (over forty) generation's shocked "survival" of Hirsoshima and continuing need to differentiate the pre-Hiroshima world we knew from the world of nuclear weapons in which we now live; their (under twenty-five) generation's experience of growing up in a world in which

numbing and of altering the world which has imposed it upon them.

All perceptions of threatening historical developments must occur through what Ernst Cassirer called the '.' symbolic net" -that special area of psychic-creation characteristic of man, the only creature who "instead of dealing with . .. things themselves ... constantly conserves ... with himself." In these internal (and often unconscious) dialogues, anxieties about technological annihilation merge with various perceptions of more symbolic forms of death. That is, Hiroshima and Auschwitz become inwardly associated with the worldwide sense of profound historical dislocation: with the disintegration of formerly vital and nourishing symbols resolving around family, religion, principles of community and the life cycle in general; and with the inability of the massive and impersonal post-modem institutions (of government, education and finance) to replace psychologically that which has been lost. They become associated also ¡with the confusions of the knowledge-revolution, and the unprecedented dissemination of half-knowledge through media whose psychological impact h as barely begun to be discerned.

There is a very real sense in which the

nuclear weapons have always been part of the landscape. This gradual adaptation, as opposed to original shock, is of great importance. Man is psychologically flexible enough to come to terms with almost anything, so long as it is presented to him as an ordained elem~nt of his environment.

But such adaptation is achieved at a price, and achieved only partially at that.

The inner knowledge on the part of the young that their world has always been capable of exterminating itself creates an undercurrent of anxiety against which they must constantly d efend themselvesanxiety related not so much to death itself as to a fundamental terror of premature death and unfulfilled life, and to high uncertainty about all forms of human continuity. Their frequent insistence that nuclear weapons are "nothing special" is their form of emotional desensitization, or what I call psychic numbing (as opposed to other forms called forth by their elders). But the young must do a great deal of continuous psychological work to maintain their nuclear "cool." And this in turn may make them unusually responsive to possibilities of breaking out of such

world itself has become a "total environment-it closed psychic chamber with continuous reverberations, bouncing about chaotically and dangerously. The symbolic death perceived then is this combination of formlessness and totality, of the inadequacy of existing forms and imprisonment within them.

The young are struck by the fact that most of mankind simply goes about its business as if these extreme dislocations did not exist-as if there were no such thing as ultimate technological violence or existence rendered absurd. The war in Vietnam did not create these murderous incongruities, but it does epitomize them and it consumes the American youth in them. No wonder then that in their "conversations with themselves" so many of the young seem to be asking: How can we bring the world-and ourselves- back to life?

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Students ot revolution and rebellion have recognized the close relationship of both to death symbolism and to visions of transcending death by achieving an eternal historical imprint. And Albert

Camus describes insurrection, in its exalted and tragic forms, as "a prolonged protest against death, a violent accusation against the universal death, a violent accusation against the universal death p enalty," and as "the desire for immortality and for clarity." But Camus also stressed the rebel's "appeal to the essence of being," his quest "not ... for life, but for reasons for living." And this brings us to an aU-important question concerning mental participation in revolution: what is the place of ideology, and of images and ideas, and of the self in relationship to all three? . Men have always pursued immortalizing visions. Most of the revolutionary ideologies of the past two centuries have provided elaborate blueprints for individual and collective immortalityspecifications of ultimate cause and ultimate effect, theological in tone and scientific in claim. When present-day revolutionaries reject these Cartesian litanies they are taking seriously some of the important psychological and historical insights of the last few decades. For they are rejecting an oppressive ideological totalism-with its demand for control of all communication within a milieu, its imposed guilt and cult of purity and confession, its loading of the language and its principles of doctrine over person. This rejection, at its best, represents a quest by the young for a new kind of revolutionone perhaps no less enduring in historical impact, but devoid of the claim to omniscience and of the catastrophic chain of human manipulations stemming from that claim.

Possibly the anti-ideological stance of today's young will tum out to be a transitory phenomenon, a version of the euphoric denial of dogma that so frequently appears during the early moments of revolution, only to be overcome by absolutist doctrine and suffocating organization in the name of revolutionary discipline. Yet there is reason for believing that the present antipathy to ideology is something more, that it is an expression of a powerful contemporary style.

The shift we are witnessing from fixed, allencompassing forms of ideology to more fluid ideological fragments approaches Camus' inspiring vision of continuously de-congealing rebellion, as opposed to dogmatically congealed, ali-or-none revolution. I would also see it as an expression of contemporary, or what I call "protean," psychological style-post-Freudian and post-modem, characterized by interminable exploration and flux, and by relatively easy shifts in identification and belief.

Protean man as rebel then seeks to remain open while in the midst of rebellion, to the extraordinarily rich, confusing, liberating and threatening array of contemporary historical possibilities.

His specific talent for fluidity greatly enhances his tactical leverage. For instance, Daniel Cohn-Bendit. the leader of the French student uprisings of May, 1968, in an interesting dialogue with JeanPaul Sartre, insisted that the classical Marxist-Leninist principle of the omniscient revolutionary vanguard (the working class, as represented by the Communist Party) be replaced with "a much simpler and more honorable one: the theory of an active minority acting, you might say, as a permanent ferment. pushing forward without trying to control events." Cohn-Bendit went on to characterize this process as "uncontrollable spontaniety." He rejected as "the wrong

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6 I The New 1ournall September 28, 1969 •)

solution" an alternate approach (urged upon him by many among the Old Left) of formulating an attainable program and drawing up realizable demands. In the same spirit are the warnings of Tom Hayden, a key figure in the American New Left, to his S.O.S. colleagues and followers, against "fixed leaders;" and his insistence upon "participatory democracy." So widespread has this approach been that the American New Left has been characterized as more a process than a program.

I would suggest that the general principle of "uncontrollable spontaniety" represents a meeting-ground between tactic and deeper psychological inclination. The underlying inclination consists precisely of the protean style of multiple identificatio..:'ls, shifting beliefs and constant search for new combinations. Whatever its pitfalls, this style of revolutionary behavior is an attempt on the part of the young to mobilize the fluidity of the twentieth century as a weapon against what they perceive to be two kinds of stagnation: the old, unresponsive institutions (universities, governments, families) and newlyemerging but fixed technological visions (people "programmed" by computers in a "technetronic society"). A central feature of this attempt is the stress upon the communal spirit and the creation of actual new communities. And here too we observe an alternation between conservative images of stable and intimate group ties and images of transforming society itself in order to make such ties more possible than is now the case.

The process, and the underlying pyschological tendencies, moreover, seem to be universal. Observing the nearly simultaneous uprisings in America, France, Japan, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Mexico, South Africa, Czechoslovakia, Chile, Yugoslavia and Spain, one can view them all as parts of a large single tendency, occurring within a single world-wide human and technical system. Here the planet's instant communications network is of enormous importance, as is the process of psychological contagion. One need not deny the great differences in, say, Czech students rebelling against Stalinism, Spanish students against Falangism, and American, French and Italian students against the Vietnam War, the consumer society, and academic injustices, to recognize the striking congruence in these rebellions. In every case the young seek active involvement in the institutional decisions governing their lives, new alternatives to consuming and being consumed, and liberated styles of individual and community existence. Unspecific and ephemeral as these goals may seem, they are clearly expressions of a quest for historical rebirth, for re-attachment to the Great Chain of Being, for re-assert ion of symbolic immortality.

The French example is again revealing (thought not unique), especially in its extraordinary flowering of graffiti. Here one must take note of the prominence of the genre-of the informal slogan-on-thewall virtually replacing formal revolutionary doctrine, no less than the content. But one is struck by the stress of many of the slogans, sometimes to the point of intentional absurdity, upon enlarging the individual life space, on saying yes to more and no to less. Characteristic were "Think of your desires as realities," "Prohibiting is forbidden" (a play on words in which the ubiquitous "Defense d'afficher" is converted to "Defense d'interdire"), and, of course, the two most famous: "lmag-

ination in power" and "Imagination is revolution." Sartre was referring to the overall spirit of these graffiti, but perhaps most to the revolutionary ~cts themselves, when he commented (in the same dialogue mentioned before) : "I would like to describe what you have done as extending the field of possibilities."

Precisely such "extending of the fields of possibilities" is at the heart of the world-wide youth rebellion-for hippies no less than political radicals-and at the heart of the protean insistence upon continuous psychic re-creation of the self.

Around this image of unlimited extension and perpetual re-creation, as projected into a dimly imagined future, the young seek to create a new mode of revolutionary immortality.

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Of enormous importance for these rebellions is another basic component of the protean style, the spirit of mockery.

While young rebels are by no means immune from the most pedantic and humorless discourse, they come alive to others and themselves only when giving way to -or seizing upon-their very strong inclination toward mockery. The mocking political rebel merges with the hippie and with a variety of exponents of pop culture . to "put on"-that is mislead or deceive by ineans of some form of mockery or absurdity-his uncomprehending cohorts, his elders, or anyone in authority. In dress, hair and general social and sexual style, the mocking rebel is not only "extending the field of possibilities," but making telling commentary-teasing, ironic, contemptuous--on the absurd folkways of "the others." The mockery can be gentle and even loving, or it can be bitter and provocative in the extreme.

be precisely the opposite, a training ground for und~rmining social institutions, as Spender suggests, and as the young rebels themselves attest by the extent to which they are campus products. In most cases the university is a great many things in between. It provides for students four years of crucial personal transition-a rite de passage from relatively unformed adolescence to a relatively formed adulthood.

And the fact that many are likely to move through continuing protean explorations during the post-university years renders especially important whatever initial adult "formation" the university makes possible.

For these reasons, and because both groups are there, the university is the logical place for the rebeflious young to confront their ostensible mentors, and thereby both define themselves and make a statement about society at large.

The statement they make bas to do not only with social inequities and outmoded institutions, but with the general historical dislocations of everyone. And in this sense the target of the young is not so much the university, or the older generation, as the

with many variations, at any other university throughout the world. Universities everywhere share a central position in the susceptibility to new currents, and tend also to present students with very real grievances; the global communications network provides not only the necessary contagion but instant instruction in the art of university rebellion. Specific actions and reactions then give way to a general historical process.

We learn more about the university in the midst of militant social disorder by turning to the greatest of recent national upheavals, the Chinese Cultural Revolution. More than is generally realized, universities were the focus of much that took place during that extraordinary movement.

Not only were they a major source of Red Guard activists but within them .a series of public denunciations of senior professors and administrators by students and young faculty members preceded-and in a sense set off-the Cultural Revolution as a whole.

These denunciations originated at Peking University, which was the scene of many such upheavals both before the Cornmu-

continuing commitment of both to the discredited past. But the university provides unique opportunities for the young to reverse the father-son mentorship-and, moreover, to do so in action. The reversal may be confused and temporary, with student and teacher moving back and forth between leadership and followership, but in the process the young can assert their advanced position in the shaping of what is to come. Though the "generation gap" seems at times to be increasing beyond redemption, there is also a sense in which the gap narrows as the young engage their elders as they never have before, and the university becomes a place of unprecedented intellectual and emotional contact between the generations. And what happens at one university can be repeated,

nist victory in China and during the subsequent campaigns of "thought reform" that have become a trademark of the Chinese Communist regime. The Cultural Revolution was the most extreme of these campaigns and contrasted with more recent student rebellions elsewhere in one very important respect: the young were called forth by their elders (Mao and the Maoists) to fight the latter's old revolutionary battles, and to combat the newly threatening impurities associated with revisionism. But from the beginning there was probably a considerable amount of self-assertion and spontaniety among Red Guard leaders and followers. And over the course of the Cultural Revolution, overzealous Red Guard groups became more and more difficult for anyone to control,

4

There has been much discussion about young rebels' selection of the university as a primary target for recent upheavals.

Many distinguished commentators (David Riesman, Christopher Lasch, Steven Spender, Herbert Marcuse, Lionel Trilling and Noam Chomsky, among others) have cautioned students about the dangers of confusing the vulnerable centers of learning they attack (and for periods of time "bring down,") with society at large.

Spender put the matter eloquently when he said that, "however much the university needs a revolution, and the society needs a revolution, it would be disastrous ... not to keep the two revolutions apart." He went on to point out, as have others also, that the university is "an arsenal from which [student-rebels] can draw the arms from which they can change society"; and that, "To say, 'I won't have a university until society has a revolution' is as though Karl Marx were to say 'I won't go to the reading room of the British Museum until it has a revolution.' " Yet wise as these cautionary thoughts undoubtedly are, one also has to consider the ways in which the university's special symbolic significance makes it all too logical (if unfortunate) a target for would-be revolutionaries.

What makes universities unique is the extent to which, within them, the prevailing concepts of a society are at the same time presented, imposed, examined and criticized. The university is indeed a training ground for available occupational slots in society, as young rebels are quick to point out; it can at its worst approach a technical instrument in the hands of the military-industrial complex. But it can also

., \

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71 The New Journal! September 28, 1969

r

especially as they split into contending fac~ tions, each claiming to be the most authentically revolutionary and Maoist. And during the summer of 1968, reports of jousts, fights and pitched battles among them also taking place at Peking University, revealed how within two years that institution had shifted in its function from provider of the spark of the Cultural Revolution toreceptacle for its ashes. Significantly, members of the Red Guard were then demoted to the status of "intellectuals" whorequired the tutelage of workers and especially peasants (and the control of the Army). But Peking and other universities continued to preoccupy the regime as places in need of fundamental reform.

Indeed the remolding of educational institutions bas been greatly stressed over the course of the Cultural Revolution.

And the extraordinary step of closing all schools throughout China for more than a year was both a means of mobilizing students for militant political struggles beyond the campuses and revamping (however chaotically) the nation's educational process. I have elsewhere described the

Cultural Revolution as a quest for symbolic immortality, a means of eternalizing Mao's revolutionary works in the face of his anticipated biological death and the feared "death of the revolution." The university was perceived throughout as both an arena of fearful dangers (revisionist ideas), and as what might be called an immortalizing agent (for the promulgation at the highest cultural levels of the most complete Maoist thought).

In its own fashion, the Cultural Revolution was a response to the New History, which in China's case includes not only Russian and Eastern European revisionism but early manifestations of proteanism. Chinese universities, however, have been forced to flee from contemporary confusions into what is most simp I~ and

pure in that country's Old Revolutionary History; this is in contrast to the more open-ended plunge into a threatening but more open-ended future being taken by universities throughout the rest of the world. Yet these issues are far from decided. Universities everywhere, China included, are likely to experience powerful pressures from the young for "restructuring." While this hardly guarantees equivalent restructuring of national governments, it may well be a prelude to fundamental changes in almost every aspect of human experience.

5

One can hardly speak of definitive conclusions about something just beginning.

Nor would I claim a position of omniscient detachment from the events of the New History-! have in no way been immune from the combinations of feelings about them I have described for my generation of Left-intellectuals, and have here and there contributed to dialogues on them. But having earlier in this essay affirmed the significance of the New

History, I wish now to suggest some of its pitfalls and then, finally, present-day potentialities for avoiding them.

From the standpoint of the young, these pitfalls are related to what is best called romantic totalism. I refer to a postCartesian absolutism, to a new quest for old feelings. Its controlling image, at whatever level of consciousness, is that of replacing history with experience.

This is, to a considerable extent, the romanticism of the "youth movement."

I have heard a number of thoughtful European-born intellectuals tell, with some anxiety, bow the tone and atmosphere now emanating from young American rebels is reminiscent of that of the German youth movement of the late Weimar Republic (and the Hitler Youth

into which it was so readily converted).

What they find common to both is a cult of feeling and a disdain for restraint and reason. While. I would emphasize the difference between the two groups much more than any similarities, there is a current in contemporary youth movements that is more Nietzschean than MarxistLeninist. It consists of a¡stress upon what I call experiential transcendence, upon the cultivation of states of feeling so intense and so absorbing that time and death cease to exist. (Drugs are of great importance here but only as part of a general quest.) The pattern becomes totalistic when it begins to tamper with history to the extent of victimizing opponents in order to reinforce these feelings; a danger signal is the absolute denial of the principle of historical continuity.

The replacement of history with experience-with totally liberated feeling-is by no means a new idea and has long found expression in classical forms of mysticism and ecstasy. But it has reappeared with considerable force in the present-day drug revolution, and in the writings of a number of articulate contemporary spokesmen such as Norman 0. Brown.

This general focus upon the transcendent psychic experience would seem to be related to impairments in other modes of symbolic immortality. That is, the modern decline of theological concepts of immortality on the one hand and the threat posed by present weapons (nuclear, bacterial and chemical) to man's biological and cultural continuity on the other, have radically undermined symbolism of death and transcendence. In the absence of intact images of biological and cultural immortality, man's anxiety about both his death and his manner of life is profoundly intensified. One response to thiS anxiety, and simultaneous quest for new forms, isthe unique contemporary blending of experiential transcendence with social and political revolution.

We have already noted that political revolution has its own transformationist myth of making all things new. When this combines with the experiential myth (of eliminating time and death) two extreme positions can result. One of these is the condemnation and negation of an entire historical tradition: the attempt by some of the young to sever totally their relationship to the West by means of an impossibly absolute identity replacement, whether the new identity is that of the Oriental mystic or that of the Asian or African victim of colonialism or slavery. And a second consequence of this dismissal of history can be the emergence of a single criterion of judgment: what feels revolutionary is good, what does not feel revolutionary is counterrevolutionary.

A related equally romantic pitfall might be called "generational totalism."

The problem is not so much the slogan, "Don't trust anyone over thirty," as the unconscious assumption that can be behind it: that "youth power" knows no limits because youth equals immortality.

To be sure, it is part of being young to believe that one will never die, that such things only happen to other people, old people. But this conviction ordinarily lives side-by-side with a realization-at first preconscious, but over the years increasingly a matter of awareness-that life is, after all, finite. And a more symbolic sense of immortality, through works and connections outlasting one's individual life span, takes hold and permits one to

depend a little less upon the fantasy that one will live forever.

Under extreme histori~al conditions, however, certain groups-in this case, youth groups-feel the need to cling to the omnipotence provided by a more literal image of immortality, which they in tum contrast with the death-tainted lines of others. When this happens we encounter a version of the victimizing process: the young "victimize" the old (or older) by equating age with individual or historical "exhaustion" and death; and the "victim," under duress, may indeed feel himself to be "as if dead," and collude in his victimization. Conversely, the older generation has its need to victimize, sometimes (but not always) in the form of counterattack, and may feel compelled to view every innovative action of the young as destructive or "deadly." Indeed the larger significance and greatest potential danger of what we call the "generation gap" reside in these questions of broken historical connection and impaired sense of immortality.

The recent slogan of French students, "The young make love, the old make obscene gestures," is patronizing rather than totalistic, and its mocking blend of truth and absurdity permits a chuckle all around. But when the same students refer to older critics as "people who do not exist," or when young American radicals label everyone and everything either "relevant" ("revolutionary") or "irrelevant" ("counterrevolutionary") on the basis of whether or not the person, idea or event is consistent or inconsistent with their own point of view-then we are dealing with something more potentially malignant, with the drawing of sharp lines between people and nonpeople.

Perhaps the ultimate expression of generational totalism was that of an early group of Russian revolutionaries who advocated the suppression and even annihilation of everyone over the age of twentyfive because they were felt to be too contaminated with the Old History of that time to be able to absorb the correct principles of the New. I have heard no recent political suggestions of this kind; but there have certainly been indications (aside from the Hollywood version of youth suppressing age in the film "Wild in the Streets") that young raaicals at times have felt a similar impulse; and that some of their antagonists in the older generations have felt a related urge to eliminate or incarcerate everyone under twenty-five.

I have stressed the promiscuous use of the word "relevant." Beyond its dictionary meanings, its Latin origin, relevare, to raise up, is suggestive of its current meaning. What is considered relevant is that which "raises up" a particular version of the New History-whether that of the young rebels or of the slightly older technocrats (such as Zbigniew Brzezinski) who are also fond of the word. Correspondingly, everything else must be "put down"-not only criticized and defeated but denied existence.

Such existential negation is of course an old story: one need only recall Trotsky's famous reference to the "dustbin of history." But the young, paradoxically, call it forth in relation to the very images and fragments we spoke of before as protean alternatives to totalism. An example is the all-encompassing image of the Establishment: taken over from British rebels, it has come to mean everything from the American (or Russian, or just about any other) poltical and bureaucratic

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leadership, to American businessmen (from influencial tycoons to salaried executives to storekeepers), to university administrators (whether reactionary or liberal presidents or simple organization men), and even to many of the student and youth leaders who are themselves very much at odds with people in these other categories. And just as Establishment becomes a devil-image, so do other terms-such as (in different ways) "confrontation" and "youth"-become godimages. It is true that these god-images and devil-images can illuminate many situations, as did such analogous OldLeft expressions as "the proletarian standpoint," "the exploiting classes," and "bourgeois remnants," these last three in association with a more structured ideology. What is at issue, however, is the degree to which a particular image is given a transcendent status and is then uncritically applied to the most complex situations in a way that makes it the start and finish of any ethical judgment or conceptual analysis.

This image-focused totalism enters into the ultimate romanticization, that of death and immortality. While the sense of immortality-of unending historical continuity-is central to ordinary psychological experience, romantic totalism tends to confuse death with immortality, and even to equate them. Here onerecalls Robespierre's famous dictum, "Death is the beginning of immortality," which Hannah Arendt has called "the briefest and most grandiose definition . . . (of) the specifically modem emphasis on politics, evidenced in the revolutions."

Robespierre's phrase still resonates for us, partly because it captures an elusive truth about individual death as a rite de passage for the community, a transition between a man's biological life and the continuing life of his works. But within the phrase there also lurks the romantic temptation to court death in the service of immortalityto view dying, and in some cases even killing, as the only true avenues to immortality.

The great majority of today's radical young embrace no such imagery-they are, in fact, intent upon exploring the fullest possibilities of life. But some can at times be prone to a glorification of lifeand-death gestures and to aU-or-none "revolutionary tactics," even in petty disputes hardly worthy of these cosmic images. In such situations their sense of mockery, and especially self-mockery, deserts them. For these and the related sense of absurdity can, at least at their most creative, deflate claims to omniscience and provide a contemporary equivalent to the classical mode of tragedy. Like tragedy, mockery conveys man's sense of limitation before death and before the natural universe, but it does so now in a world divested of more "straight" ways to cope with mortality. Those young rebels who reject this dimension and insist upon unwavering militant rectitude move toward romanticized death and the more destructive quests for immortality.

6 It is the very openness of the young that may help them to avoid definitive commitments to self-defeating patterns.

They need not be bound by the excesses of either Cartesian rationalism or the contemporary cult of experience which feeds romantic totalism. Indeed, though the latter is a response to and ostensibly a replacement for the former, there is a

sense in which both are one-dimensional mirror-images of each other. Today's young have available for their formulations of self and world the great twentiethcentury insights which liberate man from the senseless exclusions of the opposition between emphasis on "experience" and on the " rational." I refer to the principles of symbolic thought, as expressed in the work of such people as Cassirer and Langer, and of Frued and Erikson. One can never know the exact effect of great insights upon the historical process, but it is quite possible that, with the decline of the total ideologies of the Old History, ideas as such will become more important than ever in the shaping of the New. Having available an unprecedented variety of ideas and images, the young are likely to attempt more than did previous generations and perhaps make more mistakes, but also to show greater capacity to extricate themselves from a particular course and revise tactics, beliefs and styles-all in the service of contributing to embryonic social forms.

These forms are likely to be highly fluid, but need not by any means consist exclusively of shape-shifting. Rather, they can come to combine flux with elements of connectedness and consistency, and to do so in new ways and with new kinds of equilibria. Any New History worthy of that name not only pits itself against, but draws actively upon, the Old. Only through such continuity can the young bring a measure of sure-footedness to their continuous movement. And to draw upon the Old History means to look both ways: to deepen the collective awareness of Auschwitz and Hiroshima and what they signify, and at the same time to carve out a future that remains open rather than bound by absolute assumptions about a "technetronic society" or by equally absolute polarities of "revolution" and "counterrevolution."

It is possible (though hardly guaranteed) that man's two most desperately pressing problems-nuclear weapons and world population-may contribute to the overcoming of total ism and psychism. I have written elsewhere of the pattern of "nuclearism," the deification of nuclear weapons and a false dependency upon them for the attainment of political and social goals. This "nuclearism" tends to go hand-in-hand with a specific form of psych ism, the calling forth of various psychological and political constructs in order to deny the technological destructiveness of these weapons. Nuclear illusions have been rampant in both America and China. There are impressive parallels between certain Pentagon nuclear policies (grotesquely expressed in the John Foster Dulles doctrine of "massive retaliation") on the one hand, and the joyous Chinese embrace of nuclear weapons as further confirmation of the Maoist view of world revolution on the other. Similarly, Pentagon (and early Herman Kahn) projections of the ease of recovery from nuclear attack-of what I have called the nuclear afterlife--bear some resemblance to the Maoist view of the weapons as not only " paper tigers" but even as a potential source of a more beautiful socialist order rising from the nuclear ashes. Now I think that young rebels, with their frequent combination of ftexibility and inclusiveness, are capable of understanding these matters. They have yet to confront the issues fully, but have begun to show inclinations toward denouncing nuclearism and nuclear psych ism as they occur

91 The New Journal I September 28, 1969

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not only in this country but among the other great powers. Insights about nuclear weapons are of the utmost importance to the younger generation-for preventing nuclear war and for creating social forms which take into account man's radically changed relationship to his world because of tlie potentially terminal revolution associated with these weapons.

To the problem of world population, young rebels are capable of bringing a pragmatism which recognizes both the imperative of technical programs on behalf of control and the bankruptcy of an exclusively technical approach. Looking once more at China, we find that a country with one of the world's greatest population problems has approached the matter of control ambivalently and insufficiently -mainly because of a Maoist form of .psychism which insisted that there could never be too many workers in a truly socialist-revolutionary state. Yet this position has been modified, and there is much to suggest that the inevitable Chinese confrontation with the actualities of population has in itself been a factor in undermining more general (and widely disastrous) patterns of psychism. Young radicals elsewhere are capable of the same lessons-about population, about Maoist contradictions and post-Maoist possibilities, and about psych ism per se.

Are these not formidable problems for youngsters somewhere between their late teens and mid-twenties? They are indeed.

As the young approach the ultimate dilemmas that so baffle their elders, they seem to be poised between the ignorance of inexperience and the wisdom of a direct relationship to the New History. Similarly, in terms of the life cycle, they bring both the dangers of zealous youthful self-surrender to forms they do not understand and the invigorating energy of those just discovering both self and history-energy so desperately needed for an historical foray into the unknown.

As for the "older generation"-tbose middle-aged Left-intellectuals-the problem is a little different. For them (us) one of the great struggles is to retain (or achieve) protean openness to the possibilities latent in the New History and to respond to that noble slogan of the F rench students, "Imagination in power."

But at the same time this generation does well to be its age, to call upon the experience specific to the lives of those who comprise it. It must tread the tenuous path of neither feeding upon its formative sons nor rejecting their capacity for innovative historical imagination. This is much more difficult than it may seem, because it requires that those now in their forties and fifties come to terms with the extremely painful history they have known, neither to deny that history nor to be blindly bound by it. However shunted aside by the young they may feel, there is special need for their own more seasoned, if now historically vulnerable, imaginations.

For both young and old intelJectualstogether with society at large-are threatened by a violent reaction to the New History, by a restorationist impulse often centered in the lower middle classes but not confined to any c lass or country.

This impulse includes an urge to eliminate troublesome young rebels along with their liberal-radical "fathers," and toreturn to a mythical past in which all was harmonious and no such disturbers of the historical peace existed. For what is too often forgotten by the educated of all ages, preoccu pied as they are with their

own historical dislocations, is the extent to which such dislocations in others produce the very opposite kind of ideological inclination-in this case a compensatory, strongly anti-protean embrace of the simple purities of the Old History-personal rectitude, law and order, rampant militarism, and narrow rationalism.

If man is to be successful in creating the New History that he must create in order to have any history at all, then the formative fathers and sons I have spoken of must pool their resources and succeed together. Should this not happen, the failure too will be shared-whether in the form of stagnation and suffering or of shared annihilation. Like most other things in our world, the issue remains open. There is nothing absolute or inevitable about the New History-except perhaps the need to bring it into being. 9

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1969: a space lunacy by dn ld quammen /fo:'

The American Moon landing was a pretty big fat deal. Everyone knew that. If you hadn't known that, someone would have told you. Ute paid Norman Mailer millions to write a book about what he thought of it. The New York Times Magazine ran an article by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. making fun of the idea and Implying that Isaac Asimov was the only space scientist around with any brains or integrity. Following It in the magazine was an article by Isaac Asimov, describing the landing as the most significant scientific enterprise of all time. Department stores in Japan sold plastic models of the ship which the three Americans wou ld fly to the Moon. T he largest newspaper in Yugoslavia offered $800 as a prize to anyone who could predict th& words which the first American to walk on the Moon would say. Esquire had the same Idea and printed what 52 famous people, from Vladimir Nabokov to Hubert Humphrey, thought the first American Moon-walker-talker should say. In Colombia the government asked television set makers to install T.V.'s in the main squares of all Colombian towns and in the windows of most stores so that the people could follow the progress of the !light. Even the Russians knew perfectly well about 1t. They weren' t saying anything though. They stayed off to themselves, sulking in their vodka.

in Wilmington, Vermont, the Brattleboro Reformer, which does have a rather lax column policy, looked up at me from the wire stand at the end of the cosmetics aisle and, in a three inch high black-lettered headline straight across the page said this: REDS LAUNCH MOON-SHIP.

It meant the Russians. It meant that they had sneaked off to their own launch pad, in the midst of all the international whoop-de-doo, and had gotten a ship of their own on Its way to the Moon. Our Moon.

I pulled the Brattlebor o Reformer o ut of the rack and read the article.

It was an unmanned Soviet space vehicle called Luna 15 with a lunar destination, T ass, the official Soviet news agency, had announced. That was all they had announced. It was believed by some American space officials that the vehicle may have been on Its way to a soft-landing on lunar turf, the article said. It was further believed, this time by a man named Sir Bernard lovell of London, who is apparently the closest thing to a " space official" that England can claim, that "the Soviet spacecraft would attempt to land on the Moon and bring back samples of Its surface." Before the Americans, get It? Sir Bernard said there was "every indication" that that was what the Reds' ship was up to.

It meant, the Brattleboro Reformer thought, and said so, that the Russians were involved in a LAST DITCH EFFORT TO STEAL SPACE SHOW.

It was a very big fat deal indeed, let me tell you.

But it wasn't just the Americans who had made it that to be snotty. Everyone had. H. G. Wells had, and he was English. Jules Verne had, and he was French.

The Moon-goers were to blast off on Wedr.esday f rom Cape Kennedy, the usual place. By Sunday evenin g everything was ready, including the television sets in Colombia. Thousands of people had already gat.h ered in the take-off area, Launching Pad 39-A, to watt.

On Tuesday the New York Times printed large pictures of the three men on the front page and reported that at a news conference they had said they were 'Confident of Success.' Or, at least, they were still willing to go. ' In Last Appearance Before Trip, They Disclaim Fear,' the Times said .

On Wednesday the Times showed a picture of l~ndon Johnson and his wife shaking hands with an A1r Force general. The headline stretching across ~r.ee of the Times' columns (and the Times is very ftnlcky about the Integrity of those columns) said: THREE APOLLO ASTRONAUTS POISED TO SET OUT TODAY ON MOON LANDING MISSION just in case anyone hadn't

already heard.

That was Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday. But !he funny thing was that on Monday, when I walked mto Parmelee and Howe's Drug and Hardware Store David Quammen, a senior In Calhoun is a scholar of the hou se working on a screenplay of William Faulkner's Absalom , Absalom.

In other words, those Russians were down, but they weren' t out.

It meant to Sir Bernard that there was no international cooperation in space, a fact which he found " sad and regrettable." Si r Bernard a l so said that if international collaboration didn't develop, say, in the next ten years, "a very serious si tuation might arise, both scientifically and politically."

I left the Parmelee and Howe Drug and Hardware Store with a smug and ironic impression that the Russians were doing a very silly thing. And that this incident, coupled with a long and conspicous record of past silliness, demonstrated to my satisfaction, if not all the world's, that, in the case of the Soviet Union, we were dealing with what was sim ply a downright silly nation.

I meant more so than most On Wednesday morning at 9:28a.m. the countdown was at 4-minutes-19-seconds-and-counting. That was the point at which I turned on the radio, while I was waiting for my Cheerios to get soggy. At T-mlnus-45seco nds-and-counting I dropped a slice of cinnamon bread into the toaster and pushed it down, with the setting on light. I listened to the countdown with a blase but glassy-eyed recognizance of the frontiers of my responsibility. At T-minus-zero-and-Biastoff my cinnamon toast sprung up. I laughed at the coincidence, and three eager, clear-eyed Americans headed for the Moon.

On Thursday afternoon it was hot and humid, so I sat on the sleeping porch, listened to interm ittent distant rumblings of thunder and read Wednesday's New York Times. It's the one with the three-column headline that wasn't bad news and the pictu re of President Johnson and even Mrs. Johnson. I looked carefully all over the front page but couldn' t find anything about the Soviet-launched attempt to steal the space show. The Times wasn't having any of it.

They weren't letting themselves be a party to the theft. The Times is a serious and plenty smart operation and not prone to concerning themselves with silly and faddish vagaries such as the Soviet Union 's rockets to the Moon. So I read the articles on Apollo 11.

The big day found me eating Sunday brunch with Walter Cronkite. The ship had already come to ground when I tuned in, at a place called Landing Site Two, in the Sea of Tranquil ity, a plain near the crater Moltke, which is on the right side of t he Moon as seen from here, Cronkite was explaining. Only Armstrong and Aldrin were in the funny little vehicle that had been taken, like a sma ll m otorboat, to the landing spot. Collins had been left behind up above, going around in circles by himself.

But t he two American Moon-walkers hadn't stepped out. They hadn't started without m e. They

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~

were sitting there, in their two custom comfortcushioned body chairs, on the Moon, looking out the window. Trading a lot of very jargony mformation with the man at M.C. Throwing in a poetic flourish occasionally.

And then one of them held the portable live color T.V. camera up to the window, pointed it out, and let me, all of us, look.

At the surface of the Moon.

Ooooooooooh.

It looked like a great plain of green cheese that had turned grey and crumbly from age and exposure and had been hit by a lot of meteors and asteroids.

It looked about like the fold-out photographs I had seen in Life, only closer. And the colors weren't quite as clear. ¡ "Get on with the show," I said out loud after having been shown the surface of the Moon for a straight twenty minutes. I had finished the last syrupy waffle of my brunch, had listened patiently to a crackling radio catechatation full of in-talk about radar sitings and rnagnometer readings between Module and Control and I was getting bored. "Is this all?" I demanded, turning my back to carry away the tray table. At this apogee, crucial for me (and, I was sure, for probably a good third or so of that 150-millionAmerican audience that was tuned in at that point), the entire Apollo program was slumping to a perigee where it seemed just about the right time to go out and visit the john.

C'mon! I hounded Moon-ward. Let's get on with the real show. The walking-around stuff. The pokingour-noses-around-behind craters stuff. The first big fat man-talking-Moon-words-back-to-little-old-earthears stuff. Get out of that space ship, you phonies.

Shuffle, shuffle. Stomp stomp stomp. Hoot hoot.

And then down the gang plank, television camera now blazing gloriously away in living lunar olive-grey color, go the two clear-eyed courageous, athletic, American family boys and good father type~, onto the Sea of Tranquility, the never-touched-by-foot- . before surface gravel of the long-espied lunar turf, where the tungsten-wrapped magnet-foot of Mr. Neil Armstrong, Moon-walker, is trod into contact with same and releases radio-fast earthward to two billion listening people-ears the first lunar sound of crunch.

1drank off the last grainy drops of that coffee and set the cup down quickly w ith a clank on the floor, pushed it right away from me, out of the way, moving face-forward elbows on knees.

"The words!" I reminded. " The man-first Moonwords," I practically had to holler to them. "Speech!" ... Son-of-a-bitch. Those crazy, loony-What's that, Neil? Where ...

And a long, sweeping lunarscape pan right, whoops, object, stop, focus in, two objects, zoom in, focus in, clear shot of Commander Neil, some forty yards off across the Sea, shiny spacesuit posing small beside large object, further zoom and focus, large module object of a parked-not-far-off Luna 15, C.C.C.P. and unmistakable old familiar hammer-andsickle trademark clearly lettered on its side. That's what we saw-at least I did-when the show really got started. And not for long either, boy. That and one other thing: a sign, billboard-like, opened automatic from the side of Luna, presented. outward to easy all-eye view on a ten-foot square iron panel in yellow day-glo paint, in English, professionally lettered, you bet: AMERICAN IMPERIALIST COLONIALIST AGGRANDIZEMENT AND AGGRESSION CONTINUES THROUGHOUT THE WORLD AND UNIVERSE.

Hoooooboy. Fade to black. Back to M.C. work room, I mean, what's going on? Smile workers, don't look so shook, keep calm, for the fol~s at home. I don't know, what? No. Walter doesn't know either.

Huh? Cut to commercial.

"Hey, M.C., what do we do?" " ... Dismantle it ... " " ... What? Listen, put the computer on, will you.

I don't ..." " ... Proceed, over ... This is official, verified, Neil, over ..." " ... But isn't that against international law? ..." " ... Ordinarily, yes. But they did it first. They profaned the Moon. Proceed, over ..."

It seemed, at least to me, to be as Sir Bernard Lovell had predicted, "a very serious situation, both scientifically and politically."

"Rrrroger M.C." So at 1 :19 p.m., Sunday afternoon, I turned off the Moon show, three hours earlier than I had expected, and went out to lie in the sun. Because at 1 :10 p.m.

(E.D.T.), July 20, with Buz the ex-cameraman standing at his right shoulder holding a box of space wrenches, Mr. Commander Neil (Jack) Armstrong gave a stiff counter-clockwise turn to the third bolt from the left on the bottom of the first unmanned Soviet space-sign, and Luna 15, rather ferociously, exceeding deviously, blew itself, him, Buz, and most of that corner of the Sea of Tranquility, up, in my face.

A thirty-minute short subject tape came on all the stations then, which Mission Control had quickly dug out, about the adventures of American spacemen, their accomplishments and their unbroken line of spiritual tradition back to Daniel Boone. It was narrated by John Glenn. Songs by the Kingston Trio.

I had seen it before. 9

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121 The New Journal! September 28, 1969

City Planning: Anatomy of a Fuck-up

by Lawrence Lasker and James Rosenzweig

Tunnard: a most important experience Last spring, for probably the first time in Yale's history, a group of students and teachers began to succeed in working together to determine the course of their learning, their teaching and their lives.

They failed. What destroyed them was their inability to deal with the Yale administration, a bureaucracy so blinded by the trivia of style and reputation that it cannot see a meaning in life beyond the perpetuation of its own dreary existence.

Last spring's effort by a united city planning department to enroll a significant number of black students into its program was effectively discouraged late in May when the administration of Kingman Brewster fired the department's chairman, fired the art and architecture school's assistant dean, promised to fire two more department faculty members, threatened students with the denial of degrees, and, in a word, castrated the entire department. What follows is a rather depressing account of what happens when you do not play by the rules of the Yale Game. Nothing, however, is revealed.

When Christopher Tunnard returned from his sabbatical last December to assume the chairmanship of the city planning Department, he found that things were quite different from when be had left. In the space of a year, the city planners-and even, it seemed, the promise of planning cities as a life's work-had acquired a new purpose. The liberal eyes of the liberal press were turning their focus upon the human destruction done in American cities, and they saw the city as the nation's most pressing internal problem. The press began to look for help to city planners, the bulk of whom bad concentrated their efforts upon such atrocities as Ed Logue's "renewal" of New Raven's Oak Street ghetto into a shopping magnet for suburbanites. (In fact Maurice Rodeval, who started city planning at Yale, had a hand in initiating this affair.) Enlightened planners, who despaired of ever getting a chance to put their blueprints to the test, suddenly had a reason to expect that money and opportunity would come their way for the massive job of rebuilding and humanizing the inner-city world.

This new hope naturally infected the forty-three student planners at Yale, and throughout the fall they met in groups to determine what they would do about it.

Many of the department's required courses were outmoded and dull, with a tendency to belabor worn-out theories.

Weaver: the middle man is no man at all "We'd had enough of this theoretical bullshit," says second-year student Jim Hunter. "What we wanted was greater exposure to the actual methods and tools of professional planning." At the same time, members of the faculty (five fulltime professors and many New Haven planners who taught part-time) were deciding that they, too, wanted a change; and by November teachers and students were meeting together informally, sharing their hopes and talking about how the department could be revitalized, and wondering what the new chairman would think.

And at this point Christopher Tunnard returned to Yale from Australia, and took charge from Acting Chairman Harry Wexler, an associate professor. Tunnard is an internationally respected author and planning historian. He was delighted as he listened to the planner's ideas at a department-wide meeting called by the students.

Although Tunnard and Wexler both had reservations, it was decided at that meeting in mid-December to try a new experiment: to have the students and teachers together run the department. There would be no rules, and the meetings would not have a formal structure or "official" power. At this meeting the planners rededicated themselves to the Black Workshop, through which the handful of black students at the School of Art and Architecture could offer their skills to New R aven's black community After Christmas vacation, the members of the standing committee, as it was called then, started to meet regularly.

As a first step, they began to consider questions of the budget, admissions of new students and the curriculum; and they were confident that Howard Weaver, the new dean of the School of Art and Architecture (of which city planning is one department) would help them when he could. Tunnard met with Dean Weaver and told him that a student-faculty committee was operating with regard to admissions in the department. Weaver said that this was unusual, and they should recognize this. He was, however, content to accept the existence of the group as long as responsibility for decisions rested in the "normal channels"-those being the chairman, Tunnard, and the admissions chairman, Ralph Tucker, himself a member of the new group. Weaver added that student involvement might even be a good thing, and agreed with Tunnard also that the priorities for admissions in the coming

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13 I The New J ournall September 28, 1969

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DeLuca: fell with the Forum spring should be changed: admissions should be based on the applicant's qualifications alone, and more black students should be recruited and admitted to all the departments of the school.

Here, the edges begin to curl. While the city planning department was taking a careful look at itself, it apparently had company; many of the planners began to worry that Yale was preparing to disman• tie the department. They were able to cite several reasons why this was more than simple paranoia.

For one thing, there was uncertainty about how the department would be fit into the developing Social Science Center Yale's chief response to the crisis of the ' ~ity. It was obvious that the University mtended to commit huge amounts of 'f money to the Center, and was already involved with plans for a monstrous new ~uildin~ to house it. Secondly, and more tmmedtately, Associate Provost for Urban Studies and Programs Joel Fleishman was having amazing success in raising more than a million dollars in foundation grants for newly-created Yale urban programs.

Not a penny went to the city planning department. ("Urban studies takes resources out of the city and puts them into - books," one student planner angrily complained.)

It was not hard for the planners to guess ~hy they were being slighted; anyone w1th a passing interest in Yale administrators' opinions on such matters had heard that they were displeased with the department's lack of national renown and, with the exception of Tunnard, big names to attract the attention of the press.

If, as President Brewster told the alumni last year, "education has become good business," it might follow that bad press is bad education.

Good or bad, the city planning depar~ment might reasonably have hoped for mcreased funds to make it better. But " when Dean Weaver met with the group ~ to deny rumors that the department was on the way out, he found it hard to be convincing and at the same time inform them tha! there would, yes, be slight cuts in thetr budget for hiring faculty members the next year. ..The man who really got us started on the whole thing was Pat Goeters," says second-year student Howard Brown. ~oeters, a professional architect and adJUnct professor in the city planning department. "had for years been telling his

Brewster: no sentimental egalitarian he students to take a good look at their own world before they were so eager to rush out and tamper with other peoples' lives.

But before last year the students were mainly slide-rule engineers intent upon building bridges," Brown continued.

"Suddenly, last year •. there were enough people who agreed on a few basic things.

You can't believe how exciting it was sitting around that table. There was so much energy generated there-we just knew we were starting to do something, human beings together asking questions about how to take control of their lives.

And we weren't talking about 'radical' ideas, except in the sense that they were democratic."

One of the first things the department agreed on was to make an effort to enroll ":'ore black and Spanish-speaking people, smce the work to be done in the ghettoes would have to involve largely non-white planners. With the expressed encouragement of Dean Weaver, both the city planning department and the architecture department (their heads were going through similar changes) worked out an arrangement with the Black Workshop, whose job it became to recruit black students from all over the country for admission into the two departments. (It has been a tradition at the art and architecture school that each department handles its own admissions and financial aid; this year, though, Dean Weaver was charged with arranging aid for the admitted students.)

Since recruitment activities would take more time than usual, the city planners decided to divide admissions into two parts-normal acceptance letters to eighteen students, mostly white, by April I; subsequent letters to black applicants

by May 1.

On March 31, Dean Weaver informed Tunnard that university Provost Charles Taylor had just imposed a limit of 14 incoming students upon the department, based upon an overall enrollment of 35 students. This reduction in numbers f~om previous years perplexed everyone, smce recent entering classes had numbered more than 20, and the current enrollment of the department ~as 43. The dean djd not give any reasons for this decision, except to relay that fact that the department was currently "overenrolled."

"It was like something out of Catch 22 " said one student. "Members of the forum' (which the group had by then named itself) would ask Weaver where be got the number thirty-five, and he wouJd say

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141 The New Journal ISeptember 28, 1969 )

it came from the provost. And the provost in turn got it from the city planning department- presumably from the records of three or four years ago."

The City Planning Forum, which meant all the students and faculty in the de-partment- including Tunnard, Lou De Luca, assistant dean in charge of financial aid for the art and architecture school, and Ralph Tucker, chairman of the department's admissions committee-made itself the "official" voice of the department on April 14 when it adopted a set of by-laws and placed them on Weaver's desk: the by-laws stated that teachers and students were to have an equal number of votes at each me.e ting of the Forum, which would have jurisdiction over the department's budget, faculty recruitment, curriculum and admissions. "If you're going to share power you share power," said Goeters. "You don't just let people know what it looks like ." Tunnard thought the arrangement was " more in touch with the times."

Even Weaver seemed pleased with the decision. "My own feeling," he said afterwards, "was that student involvement in general was a good thing. And there were normal relations between the dean, the department chairman and the assistant dean. It seemed to me that by working along with them everything would be okay."

For two weeks, everything was. The Black Workshop completed its recruiting work and gave the Forum admissions files on twelve candidates (nine black); the Forum received eight acceptances (one black) from the first round. On April 28, the Forum passed three resolutions and placed them on Dean Weaver's desk: that the new class contain ten white and ten non-white stude nts; that the students be admitted only on the basis of ability and awarded financial aid only on the basis of need; and that three assistant professors be hired to fill existing vacancies.

Having been informed of these resolutions, Provost Taylor sent Weaver a letter the next day under! ining Weaver's re-sponsibility to make sure that "theresources available to the school for student aid are not overcommitted" and reminding him that the President and the Fellows wanted only "fully qualified" students admitted to the department. At this time, neither the Dean nor the department had a clear idea of what "the available resources" came to.

Weaver's response to this letter was singular. He told all the departments that their letters of admission would have to have his approval before being mailed.

Up until then, letters had been subject only to the approval of the chairman of the admissions committee for each department.

The departments were outraged (the architecture department's first reaction was a cool "we'll handle admissions the way we always have"), but on May 1 the Forum sent the Dean twelve letters of acceptance, along with the applicant's folders, and asked that be act promptly in approving them.

Most schools send acceptances out by the middle of April, and the Forum was worried that the black students would get fed up with waiting to bear from Yale and choose to go some place else.

The weeks of May droned on, and Weaver did nothing with the letters lying on his desk. When people in the Forum tried to arrange a meeting with Dean Weaver to talk about the admissons, they

would get a variety of no's. Sometimes be was preoccupied with other matters (raising funds for the new educational T.V. facility, raising funds for the centennial of the school, raising funds for the 1969-1970 film-making program ...).

Assistant Dean DeLuca made repeated attempts to convince Weaver be should meet with the Forum, but Weaver, who by this time bad doubtless beard that Brewster considered the.Forum an "illegal body," would refuse with a complaint about the group's defiance of the University. Tunnard sent him several formal invitations for a meeting, and was answered with what has to be a classic example in doublethink: Brewster bad promised fairer financial aid ("parity with tecture, drama, and music schools as the result of a vocal student demonstration at the end of April. Therefore, Weaver would not deal with the problem of admissions until Ralph Burr, director of the university's Office of Financial Aids, had worked out the new allocations. The black students' letters collected dust.

Finally, the Forum was able to arrange a meeting with the dean for the afternoon of Wednesday, May 21. Everyone showed up except the dean. When the members of the Forum asked his secretary what had happened, she told them Weaver was leaving for Washington and could not · offer an alternate date.

That evening the husband of one of the girls in the department called Weaver's house, and Weaver answered the telephone.

The next day a boiling mad Forum met and agreed that "the dean bad left us no alternative but to take action on our own."

They resolved unanimously to send out letters of acceptance to the twelve students no later than ten o'clock the next morning, by which time new letters were to be typed and signed on behalf of the Forum. They also agreed to let the dean know their plans.

When De Luca told him what they bad decided, Weaver still did not meet with the Forum. Instead be told Tunnard "that such a procedure would be improper," and gave DeLuca responsibility for making sure the letters did not go out ("acting," Weaver explained later, "with full delegated authority of the dean.") De Luca says he told Weaver he would relay Weaver's wishes to the Forum, but that he doubted it would do any good. That afternoon Weaver told the secretary of the city planning department "that if I typed the letters, or put the letters in the envelopes, or mailed the letters, I would be putting my job on the line."

At five o'clock, according to a university official who wants to remain anonymous, Dean Weaver was seen leaving the office of the financial director, Ralph Burr.

At 10 o'clock Friday morning, the members of the Forum, sick of delay, decided finally to mail the letters. In the letters they stated that "the extent of financial aid available to the School of Art and Architecture bas not yet been resolved." They sent them out even though Tunnard had shortly before agreed to a Forum meeting with Weaver for two o'clock that afternoon.

Weaver had called the afternoon meeting to discuss "procedures for completing admissions to the department for the coming academic year. •• He showed up at two o'clock armed with the new financial

aid memorandum, which Ralph Burr bad finally relinquished that same day, and Weaver said he would think about the Forum's admissions recommendations in reference to it. The memorandum, which outlined a slightly more generous definition of "subsistence level" for students in art and architecture, drama, and music, also managed to straighten out some previously wavy policy lines: it admitted that starting salaries and career prospects for the various professions were taken into account when making loans, to insure that the student will repay the loan; picking up momentum, it noted that " . . a considerable burden on the Yale exch~quer ... makes it clear that we cannot move right away into an admissions policy which disregards the financial requirements of the applicant;" and finally, it concluded, "The President bas invited each dean to solicit revised applications for financial aid." It is, in short, altogether baffling, and says nothing which should have affected the admissions of the twelve students.

Back, now, to the drama. As Weaver spoke-almost jovially, some members of the Forum thought, in view of what they had do~e just four hours ago-he had in his possession another document, and this too had been sent to him just hours before.

It was a brief, almost incidental-looking note from Provost Taylor. Taylor mentioned that he had now read the Forum by-laws (Weaver himself later said he told Taylor about them in April), and went on to "remind" Weaver that "for recommendations concerning admissions to be valid they must be endorsed by the dean, who is expected to act on the basis of recommendations from a committee of t!'J.e faculty, whose membership and procedures he approves."

Weaver insisted at the afternoon meeting that Tunnard and Tucker meet with him the coming Monday to complete the admissions procedure; and although it meant abandoning the solidarity of the department, the two men agreed. "Everyone could see that the thrust of the Forum was with the black students, and not with student power or the concept of a forum," explained Rev. Ed Rodman, the advisor to the Black Workshop. Many of the planners assumed by his behavior that Weaver intended to endorse the Forum's letters after the fact.

In the good spirits of the moment, someone mentioned a calculation he had just made: enough students were planning not to return in the fall so that all twelve applicants could join the department without swelling the enrollment beyond the provost's mystical thirty-five. They enjoyed this irony until Weaver said he would give it consideration when hereviewed the twelve folders next Monday.

By now, something had struck all the Forum members with dreadful clarity.

Harry Wexler stood up. "Do you know that the letters have been mailed?" he asked Weaver.

Weaver did not hear him. and a few minutes later the dean left for another meeting. People looked at each other in silence for a moment and then made a loud search for anyone in the room who knew what the hell was going on. Had no one told him the letters were sent? De Luca left to find out.

According to people in the room, Weaver was shaking when he came back.

He asked for copies of the letters, names of the signers and left before anyone bad a chance to say much.

Unreal: there is little point in detailing the subsequent overkill performed on the city planning department by Brewster, Taylor et al. In the next few days, Brewster used the mailing of the "unauthorized" letters to relieve Tunnard and DeLuca of their administrative posts, to promise Wexler he would be fired, to hint that Goeters and the students who signed letters would receive the same treatment, to advise the students already admitted to the department not to come in the fall because they could not be assured "adequate" training and so on. It makes very weary reading.

As far as the city planning department was concerned, the qualifications of the twelve applicants were never in question.

"If anything," said the department's registrar, "they were better qualified than the first round." But a week after the· department accepted them, it learned over the radio that Yale had considered only seven of them qualified enough to be admitted, and not for a degree in city planning, but into an "environmental design" program.

These seven, it turned out, had bachelor of architecture degrees, which to no one's knowledge had ever before been a prerequisite for admission.

As if in explanation, Brewster made this statement a week later, in a commencement address at Johns Hopkins: " No sentimental egalitarianism, racial or otherwise, can be permitted to lower the standards for the relative few institutions which are capable of really superior intellectual accomplishment."

Further suspicion that Brewster was using the issue of "unauthorized" letters to conceal more serious grievances was encouraged when Newsweek reported a letter Brewster sent to Weaver, in which Brewster "raised the 'practical question' of whether a predominantly white school like Yale should promote a black orientation in one of its professional schools."

But there is no doubt in the minds of the forum members that "student governance" played an equally important part in Brewster's decision to break up the department. In his Johns Hopkins address, Brewster coined the slogan "any rule is better than mob rule," and said that "decision by open meeting revolts all the most basic instincts of the scholar with its elevation of caricature over accuracy, epithet over measured discourse, sentimental brutality over reason."

Over the summer Brewster appointed some committees to look into "the matter of governance." When students and teachers in the city planning department came back to Yale this month, they discovered that Brewster had established "less ambiguous" lines of authority between the University and the School of Art and Architecture: administrative posts and responsibilities were reshuffled, the result of which was to remove all responsibility for appointments, budgets and-let it not be ambiguous-admissions from the departments.

It may not make any ditlerence. In a general sweep of feeling that the university is not where it's at, many student planners have left Yale to work directly in the ghettoes, and most of last year's faculty have found jobs elsewhere and plan to be at Yale only for the one or two classes a week they have agreed to teach. There is little chance that anything like the Forum will assemble this year-at least, not at Yale ~ven though Christopher Tunnard still thinks the experiment "was the most important experience of my life." ~

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- - - what Yale did to thrash out the issues connected with establishing a controversial new program.

101 Linsly-Chittenden 7:00 & 9:30 p.m.

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SOCIETY Thursday, September 25 Buster Keaton's THE GENERAL (1926) Friday, September 26 Alfred Hitchcock's TO CATCH A THIEF (1955)

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Saturday, Septem ber 27 Jerry Lewis's THE BIG MOUTH (1967) Tuesday, September 30 Dziga Vertov's MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (1929)

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Wednesday, Octo ber 1 Norman McLeod's MONKEY BUSINESS (1931) Thursday, October 2 John Ford's MOGAMBO (1953) Friday, October 3 Orson Welles's THE STRANGER (1946) Saturday, October 4 Sergei Lecne's THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY (1968) Tuesday, October 7 Stan Brakhage's DOG-STAR MAN (1964) Wednesday, October 8 Norman McLeod's IT'S A GIFT (1934)

Black Studies In the University: A Symposium edited by Armstead L Robinson, Craig C. Foster, and Donald H. Ogilvie

1969-1970 ,.

dent laundry

The B lack Student Alliance at Yale University, aw ar e that the prob lems they encountered in convin cing the facu lty of the validity of a b lack studies cu rriculum were not confined to Yale, conce ived the idea of sponsoring a symposium in which all r amifications of this topic could be discussed. As a result, in May 1968 key faculty and administrative personnel from a number of institutions joined in discussion with a group of respected black and white intellectuals vitally concerned with various aspects of the black experience.

Here are the papers included in this volume. They propose no definitive solution but stand as an indispensable pioneering inquiry.

• The Integ rationist Ethic as a Basis for Scholar ly Endeavors

by Harold Cruse • The Intellectual Validity of Studying t he Black Experience

by Martin Kllson, Jr. • The Black Community and the University: A Community O rganizer's Per spective by Maulana Ron Karenga

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• Deck the Ivy Racist Halls : The Case of Black Studies

by Gerald A. McWorter • A Student's Reflections by Donald H. Ogilvie • African History and Western Civilization by Boniface Oblchere • A Radical Perspective on Social Science Curricul a

by Nathan Hare • African In fluence on the Art of the United States

by Robert Farris Thompson • Some Thoughts on Afro-American Studies by McGeorge Bundy • On Teaching and Learning Black H istory by Edwin S. Redkey • The Role of Education in Provid ing a Basis for Honest Self-Identification by Dr. Alvin Pouaaaint cloth $6.00; paper $1 75 Avellable et your bookstore

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