Coming Apart

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...They were perfectly willing to throw black studies into The American Spectator • June 1997 71 r MOVING...

...He had a reputation as a rare faculty member who understood the "younger generation," one who would go to bat for students in front of Harvard's disciplinary "Ad Board...

...Jamie Gorelick, then a sophomore, who became deputy attorney general of the United States in the Clinton administration, was on the University Hall steps...

...He was satisfied with a February 1969 decision to establish a committee —not a full department— in Afro-American studies...

...The corrupting excesses of political correctness, segregated bilingualism, nationalism, and multiculturalism, which also lay ahead, could not obscure the real advances that had been made...

...Nowhere is this tendency more evident than in the matter of Harvard's attempt to establish an Afro-American studies program that spring...

...Rosenblatt was invited to sit on a "Committee of Fifteen" that would decide how the students were to be disciplined—at a time when 2,000 students and faculty had signed a petition urging that the protesters not be disciplined at all...

...These were the people who took over University Hall...

...Why Harvard Hates Harvard Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969 Roger Rosenblatt Little, Brown / 234 pages / $24.95 REVIEWED BY Christopher Caldwell Through the 1960's, students at Harvard had to wear a coat and tie to meals, but by the time I got there in 1979, dinner was considerably less formal...

...It would be years before they were identified and named, but political correctness, bilingualism, and nationalism were integral to the sixties' campus reforms from the outset...

...Yet Rosenblatt mentions Progressive Labor only in passing, as an "offshoot of the Communist party" that existed "under the umbrella of SDS...

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...The paintings have been shipped off to the "new" Busch-Reisinger, in a more utilitarian structure down the street...

...CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL is senior writer at the Weekly Standard...

...On April 9,1969, 135 students affiliated with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) occupied Harvard's main administrative building as a protest against the Vietnam war...

...The department wound up a disgrace to the university, with a farcically politicized curriculum and bylaws that allowed six undergraduates to vote on tenure decisions...

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...and William Alfred, the playwright and inspired teacher of Old English, who refused to let his students44 It's mostly a dodge, a way of always claiming the "sensible middle ground" for himself...

...Looking at the university of today, he says: There also would be more concern for courses in ethics, for a fair distribution of minority students, and for other issues that had to do with equality...

...77 join a campus-wide boycott, saying, "You can't strike...

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...Rosenblatt was on good terms with all of them...

...the following morning, when hundreds of police officers from nearby towns broke up the occupation, amid accusations of brutality on both sides...

...Name: (Please Print) Address: City: State: Zip: Date of change: L VCAFRMchaos because the subject did not affect them...

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...Serving on the junior faculty were Doris Kearns (now Goodwin), Martin Peretz, and Stephen Jay Gould...

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...They wanted the entire issue out of the way...

...On the one hand, he is still proud of his meteoric rise through the Harvard brass, and still revels in it with the very worst kind of false modesty...

...Many, if not the majority, of the faculty acted as they did simply because, perhaps unconsciously, they wanted the black students to isolate themselves even further than they were already...

...One begins to suspect that the idea of Afro-American studies was laudable as long as it was the sole preserve of Roger Rosenblatt...

...It is a performance of which he is still justly proud...

...Journalist Roger Rosenblatt, then 28, was a rising star in Harvard's English department...

...was a great career move for Rosenblatt...

...In a darker sense, they were enacting the sort of triage that policemen practice when they refuse to patrol violent black inner-city neighborhoods...

...On the other hand, Rosenblatt fears that he owed that rise to a rotten side of his character: a "coward's ambiguity...

...The excesses didn't "lie ahead...

...More accurate to say the actions of the deans—in having the effrontery to call in a mob of jackbooted Irish proles to break up an intra-Harvardian dispute—left the students feeling betrayed, the more so since the cops, unlike the protesters, actually had relatives who were dying in Vietnam...

...That's all there is to it...

...I wasn't even a very good teacher, no matter what was said in that article in Newsweek or by the Crimson's Confidential Guide to undergraduate courses, in which English 263 was praised to the skies and called by some students the best they had taken in college...

...Rosenblatt was outraged, again on the grounds that the younger generation (radical students) and the older (stodgy faculty) were unwittingly collaborating to destroy institutions...

...These are not ultimately the details that most interest the author...

...This book is filled with a curious kind of retrospective name-dropping: Martin Kaplan, who wrote the screenplay for The Honorable Gentleman, which starred Eddie Murphy, and who was then a Dunster House junior, said...

...But in the wake of the University Hall takeover—at an April public meeting at which a black student was on hand to greet arriving faculty by waving a meat cleaver — Harvard's professors acceded to radical demands and voted to establish a full department...

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...James Atlas, the Delmore Schwartz biographer who is now an editor at the New York Times Magazine, was a sophomore at the time and had been sitting...

...This is Rosenblatt's attitude towards practically everything—and it's for the most part a dodge, a way of always claiming the "sensible middle ground" for himself...

...So what on earth is he complaining about...

...Rosenblatt is sensitive to this tension, but he is insistent that there was a higher principle at work as well: "In a sense," he says, "the ejectors and the ejectees cooperated with one another for opposite purposes...

...Making excuses for both radical students and liberal faculty made Rosenblatt immensely successful and popular —for a time...

...They held the building until 5 a.m...

...Rosenblatt favors a middle ground: adducing only the muttered comment of one student that the University Hall occupiers were "ass ----- ," he thinksthe whole incident would have blown over had the police not been brought in...

...70 June 19 9 7 • The American Spectator What gives Rosenblatt confidence that a decades-old Harvard ruckus is worth recounting— more worth recounting than, say, the more explosive riots that took place at City College of New York two weeks later — is, of course, that the people involved on both sides of it now run the country...

...The students were abandoning academic standards, but their professors were motivated by moral carelessness...

...Coming Apart is at once a memoir of the time, a settling of scores with faculty adversaries, and a stab at making sense of what the University Hall takeover meant for America...

...The protesters heaved frightened deans down stairways, beat up students who had arrived to remonstrate, vandalized offices, and broke into files...

...The Busch-Reisinger Museum—where, in my day, undergraduates could bring their books and study in a garden among one of the best collections of German art in North America—was converted into office space for the deconstructionists who run the chic European studies department...

...Such wholesale change in Ivy League folkways arose from many incidents large and small over the course of a decade, and of these the signal one was the takeover of University Hall...

...N othing speaks more highly of Rosenblatt than his choice of mentors in Harvard's English Department: the great scholar of Irish literature John Kelleher, a working-class Irishman from Lawrence, Massachusetts, who saw the students as "spoiled brats with an underdeveloped sense of history and a flair for self-protection...

...1 72 June 1997 • The American Spectator...

...You can only load so much in theway of a non-academic agenda on a university before it begins to betray its mission in favor of that agenda, and Harvard reached that point earlier than most...

...Along with two of Rosenblatt's fellow Committee members — social scientist James Q. Wilson (a neoconservative who later moved to UCLA) and economist John Dunlop (who would later work in the Ford and Reagan administrations) — they backed Rosenblatt as he bravely voted to discipline a number of the more violent occupiers of University Hall...

...But it harmed the college, and it was only once black radicals carried this watering down to its logical next step and began to devalue Rosenblatt's own credential that he became a great defender of Fair Harvard and her time-honored ways...

...The main purpose of his book is to figure out what went wrong not with Harvard or the humanities or America, but with Roger Rosenblatt...

...Harvard, in fact, had such a hair-trigger racial sensitivity that it was the first corporation in the country to demand that its contractors establish racial quotas...

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...The actions of the police had swung opinions in favor of the occupiers," Rosenblatt writes...

...What malarkey...

...It also gave both sides cover as they set about their business, each in its own way, of tearing apart a great university...

...He opposed the Vietnam war in a mild sort of way, and was generally thought to be economist John Kenneth Galbraith's man on the Committee...

...Rosenblatt is right to blame the faculty for the Afro-American studies debacle, but their fault was the opposite of the one he claims: not cynicism but cowardice...

...In the last half-decade at Harvard, the Freshman Union—at which generations of freshmen dined—has been remodeled into palatial offices for the Afro-American studies department...

...Using his course to steer students away from Chaucer and Milton and towards Chester Himes (the black Mickey Spillane...

...This leaves the impression that University Hall was taken over by a bunch of unruly trade unionists, or at worst a bunch of guitar-strumming longhairs...

...An unfortunate misimpression, since how one views the takeover depends on whether one thinks of the 135 perpetrators as representative of the student body or as merely selfish saboteurs...

...he was an operator...

...Frank Rich and "Mike" Kinsley were still students, "Jim" Fallows was running slavishly pro-protester reports as president of the Harvard Crimson, and Al Gore was rooming in Dunster House with Tommy Lee Jones...

...The students have been scattered to make do around campus...

...And even if the "committee" arrangement Rosenblatt favors had been maintained, Afro-Am would surely have become a department eventually...

...At Quincy House, for instance, there was a "Space Table," at which students would swallow various hallucinogens to keep the mealtime conversation from flagging...

...Rosenblatt, who taught the University's wildly popular first-ever course in black fiction, felt he had a special stake in the matter...

...The House system, under which students could bid to join one of thirteen smaller scholarly communities of their own choosing, has been abandoned in all but name, in favor of random housing assignments, on the grounds that the old system of applying to Houses was too "competitive" and "exclusionary...

...They say, in effect, "Let them kill themselves...

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...This is a preposterous accusation...

...Rosenblatt tries to salvage a sense that his role was somehow productive...

...The more important question of whether the incident should have been allowed to blow over by any self-respecting institution of higher learning is one he doesn't address...

...And continue to be...

...They could not care less what happened to black studies at Harvard...

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...And yet, although he ultimately came down on the side of order, Rosenblatt went through the whole process with considerable disingenuousness, political and otherwise...

...But he was also queasy about smashing Harvard's institutions altogether, and that reluctance would eventually put him wholly at odds with students just half a decade his junior...

...Within three years, he would be the youngest house master in Harvard's history and short-listed for the job of university president...

...Rosenblatt was not a mediator...

...As Paul Berman has noted in his excellent A Tale of Two Utopias, by 1969 SDS was little more than a shell for two radical tendencies: the Weathermen and Progressive Labor, a Harvard-centered sect of hard-line Maoists which had carried out, in Berman's words, "a disciplined infiltration that was coordinated from [Communist] party headquarters...