The Kumquat Statement

...That someone who never held elective office was elected United States Senator from New York testifies to the growing wisdom of voters The farther from government, the more likely is someone to have that healthy skepticism of new government programs which never solve problems, but only aggravate them and create new ones...

...My favorite line in the book comes after a description of a workshop held by something called the Women's League for International Peace and Freedom...

...Radicalism in America has always walked the tightrope between respectability and social anathema...

...With soft drinks...

...street people, bums, Berkeley high schoolers, perverts, pickpockets, TV matters The young man is now back at his Training Center, and it is rumored that he told Mr X before leaving that he dust dreaded those multiplication tables...

...He doesn't try to fit the Berkeley catastrophe into a philosophical or ideological system...

...These radicals--even those who in the twenties and thirties became entranced with foreign utopias--have maintained a tenuous link with the American system...

...Actually, the Crimson reviewer had good reason to choke on this book...

...From teaching assistants to computers, from bored lecturers to jargonmad administrators, the average student at a big university is, day by day, treated like an object It is, therefore, the supreme irony that in reaction to being treated like objects, many of the Berkeley students sided with the fanatics of the New Left--who, of course, also treated them like objects...

...For another, he is an excellent writer, one of the best yet to emerge from Our Generation Most importantly, Kelman is a leader among a segment of the left which is rising in opposition to the unfounded premises, contorted reasoning, and vicious tactics of the political fanatics and cultural freaks who have taken claim to the title of "radical...

...Sex Torture Boards and the Law By Michael McCollum The forces of progressive education received a devastating blow recently in Indianapolis, Indiana when the puritanical police force arrested a Mr X (we do not want to give the man any more publicity) and charged him with kidnapping and assault and battery with intent to commit sodomy Mr X is presently Director of News Services in the Indiana State Teachers Association Previous to this he worked in Public Relations with the Indiana Democratic State Central Committee At one time he also worked as a TV news reporter The police apparently went into action after hearing a complaint filed by one of Mr X's recent house guests, a young Federal Job Corpsmen who shall remain anonymous The Corpsman claimed that he was visiting the local Greyhound bus station when he was approached by Mr...

...It is the place for great preachers, great orators, great nobles, great statesmen...in which inquiry is pushed forward and discoveries verified and perfected and rashness rendered innocuous...

...Students, ex-students, nonstudents, dogs, New Leftists, hippies...

...They prodded and cajoled, but very few ever tried force...

...But most of all he grieves for the idea of a university, "a community of scholars in which a realistic concept of academic freedom is the guiding principle...

...It's not the same old carping between right and left, conservative and liberal...

...I can well imagine that at the Second Coming liberal academics will greet the Lord with a panel discussion entitled, "Why is God Repressive" which will be topped off by a box-lunch...

...X and invited to his home for a beer The Corpsman drank the beer in the company of Mr X and a friend described as "about 6'2" and 220 pounds " When he got up to leave, however, the two men grabbed him, chained him to the basement staircase, stripped him, photographed him in the nude and molested him After spending the weekend as Mr X's "guest," he managed to escape and went to the police Being the curious brutes that they are, the police decided to visit Mr X and observe his hospitality suite for themselves (I think it is safe to assume that they went in force as this wasn't the kind of case in which police customarily send an undercover man ) While searching the premises they found such modern conveniences as a "sex torture board," complete with leather and spikes, pulleytype belts and heavy chains with locks They also discovered four boxes of nude photos of men being tortured and committing lewd acts (party contributors no doubt), a sack of heavy chains, locks and a tube containing a red liquid marked "Vampire Blood " (And we thought Republicans practiced the "politics of tear ") By the middle of the week Mr X surrendered himself at the police headquarters protesting that he was not guilty because of "extenuating circumstances " It seems he was merely trying to teach his unfortunate guest to read Said Mr X, "The boy cannot read nor write and I felt sorry for him You can ask him-if I did not spend Sunday trying to teach him to read " A sex torture board may indeed be a source of considerable motivation to most people but the police still insisted that the whole affair amounted to attempted sodomy and even hinted that more charges may be forthcoming' (Having no formal training in progressive education I feel unqualified to pass judgment on Mr X's technique but I will say that I am glad to have obtained my education in one of Indiana's famed little red schoolhouses Regardless of how one views the affair, it would seem apparent that the Job Corpsman did indeed receive quite an illuminating education and as the liberals have long told us that's all that really Our Western Fruits "...a university is a place of con-course, whither students come from every quarter for every kind of knowledge...

...John Henry Newman, 1856 Many classes didn't meet and those that did were sparsely attended, mostly by people who insisted that the professors talk about racism...

...The Kumquat Statement is one of those rare books about the American campus: it is written by a man who is a conservative (and therefore is free of the superstitions that hamper liberals who write of campus life), an ex-graduate student at Berkeley (he saw it all at close range) and one hell of a good writer He is delightfully merciless in depicting the inanity of the liberal community...

...If there is a message in all this it would seem to be that we need to educate our policemen I must admit that it is a source of great disappointment to me though Since I will have children in school in a few years I was sort of looking forward to helping with the homework...

...He is the former national president of the Young People's Socialist League (PSL--prounced "yip-sil ") He is currently in Sweden studying European socialism and its possible economic applications in this country...

...They have been critical of author Steve Kelman because he has been highly critical of them ; throughout his book he pans faddish journalists and others who continue to praise as idealists those young people who are embarked on a crusade to destroy civilization...

...The Alternative January, 1971 14 Buckley, the -well-heeled potential contributors who lacked faith in the campaign and refused to support it, these memories persist--because the most cynical and skeptical suddenly become friends once the votes are counted Lacking grace or integrity, they would never acknowledge their pragmatic acts of sabotage, nor the helping hand they might have offered when the going was tough for the candidate and his campaign These people may leave later if the going gets tough, but one candidate, Jim Buckley, won without them, and in spite of them In a very real and tangible way, measured by vote totals on the television screen election night and confirmed by his certification of election, Jim Buckley reaffirms the traditional American drive and spirit...

...Interested...

...Cowles, 5.95 The Alternative 1971 15 from which to re-create the decline and fall of the American University Coyne, now an associate editor of National Review, was a graduate student at Berkeley during the late sixties when paranoid leftism, liberal schizophrenia, drug-induced frenzy, do-it-yourself fascisn, Marxist-Leninist ideology and oldfashioned incompetence and cowardice (on the part of the administration and faculty) combined to make Berkeley an intellectual and moral disaster area...

...He tells his story more in sorrow than in anger (although he has his angry moments) because he loves the Berkeley area and he has sympathy for students who suffer the indignities of a multiversity education He knows that the big universities do not--and probably cannot-educate a person in any way recognizable as human...

...Suppose you heard a book described as "a travesty," "hysterical," "bizarre rantings," "tainted with personal bile," "disgusting," "improbable," and "whining...

...They berated it, and they worked through it...

...for once the issue is clearly between rationality and irrationality, without any political smog to cloud the conflict...

...As irrelevant as serious philosophy and high principle seem to be for politics, they play the crucial role in motivating the most successful campaign supporters...

...Coyne feels he has seen the educational future--and it doesn't work...

...These students, it would seem, exist only to be manipulated by those who either don't believe in anything at all (the liberals) or who do nothing else but believe (the New Left...

...He grieves for himself and his children, for his crushed dreams of a scholarly life and for what his children will have to face when they go to college...

...But with the New Math, Freedom Schools, and now this, I am afraid I won't be of much help I guess I'll just have to sit back and be satisfied that at least my child is receiving the benefits of a progressive education that was never available to me O Michael McCollunt is a Senior in the Indiana University School of $usiness and research assistant in I. U.'s Kinsey Institute...

...Sam Adams, Thomas Paine, Theodore Parker, and Henry David Thoreau -- considered extremists in their own time--have now been granted a place in America's social and political heritage...

...And, perhaps, most important of all, it is the introduction of a fine young conservative writer to the reading public 0 John Avey Our Eastern Fruits Push Comes to Shove by Steve Kelman Houghton Mifflin Co., 2.95~ape] If you are among the few people who, through the exercise of superior restraint, have been able to ignore the flood of books--I almost said literature-on the problems of our universities, I want you to take a simple_ test...

...ca merman, lunatics, tourists, professors-the typical campus crowd--several thousand of them, filling Sproul Plaza from Bancroft Way to the Kumquat Grove, milled around waiting for Cleaver...

...The Kumquat Statement is then an invaluable piece of reporting and an admirable work of personal history...

...He is currently Special Assistant to Senator Buckley...

...If you're not the slightest bit interested by now, you've flunked the test...

...John R. Coyne, Jr., 1970 From Newman's idea of a university to the Berkeley uprisings of the late nineteensixties is little more than a hundred years-and little less than catastrophic If there is anyone disciplined and concerned enough to write history one hundred years from now, John Coyne's Tne Kumquat Statement will serve as an excellent source--indeed, perhaps the best source-The Kumquat Statement by John R. Coyne, Jr...

...It is a frightening picture, something out of George Orwell with just a touch of Kafka for good measure...

...So the battle rages, and for once the lines are drawn on non-ideological grounds...

...So who says New York is in the grip of terror9 0 Arnold Steinberg, former editor of THE NEW GUARD, the national magazine of Young Americans for Freedon, served as press secretary during the Buckley campaign...

...Even twentieth-century figures like Eugene Debs, John Reed (the only American buried in the Kremlin), the early Max Eastman and his compatriots on the Masses have succeeded in gaining a place in the American Hall of Fame, largely through the victory of the labor movement and time's slow dulling of antagonisms...

...Steve Kelman is a democratic socialist, in the tradition of Norman Thomas, Sidney Hook and his friend Michael Harrington...

...Reviewers across the country, speaking in solemn tones from their enlightened towers, have panned this unexpected attack on the Pepsi Generation by one of its most perceptive members...

...After the usual rhetorical excesses calling for an end to realism •'...the panelists sat down to a good-middle-class box lunch...

...If one were to meet him in the street, he would be easily stereotyped as a radical, complete with long hair and dungarees But Kelman is not at all typical...

...He simply tells what happened and this telling, in lucid, unadorned, straightforward American prose does more to inform the reader of what is happening in America than a dozen essays on Consciousness One, Two and Three...

...For one thing, he is intelligent (summa cum laude graduate, Harvard's 1970 valedictorian), and that quality is all too uncommon among our youthful radicals...

...With soft drinks...

...It is an idea he saw trampled upon, not only by raving fanatics of the New Left but by essentially decent professors and students who simply did not know what they were doing or why they were doing it because they had never, never stopped to think of what a university should be There is very much to praise in this book, not the least of which is Coyne's refusal to play Herr Doktor Philosopher...

...Now suppose I told you that the above quotes came from a review of Push Comes to Shove by that venerable paragon of good sense, the Harvard Crimson...

...He doesn't explain it as being "representative" of some spirit of the times...

...There is an undertone of tragedy throughout the book and it is a tribute to Coyne as a writer that the tragic vision comes through even when he is at his satiric best, for this is essentially a serious (though never solemn) book...

...Meanwhile the Democratic Party is said to be furious, charging that the whole raid was an attempt by the Republican Administration in Indianapolis to uncover party secrets The Indiana State Teachers Associatioi has made no formal comment An insider reports that several members still don't endorse such teaching aids and hale spiked every attempt to reach a co'isensus Mr X's future seems rather uncertain ct the present The John Birch Society is said to control the PTA's in Indiana and he might have to throw himself on the services of some big Eastern lawyer like Herr Kunstler At any rate Mr X is sure to get many offers from TV networks, book publishers and movie makers Maybe the party will even take him back Since he is so interested in the educational process he is more likely to take to the lecture circuit and possibly do a series of essays on radical education for the New York He% iew of Books...