The president, Kingman Brewster, sent a directive to faculty members about the conscience and the responsibility which they must feel as human beings; and the implication that they might feel this way because they are human beings, exposes their unfeeling nature as representatives of a larger more significant society outside the iron gates of the university, although that larger society, America, might be equally unreal, and just as hypocritical as Yale.
I recognize and personally sympathize with the widespread and deeply felt concern about the prolongation of the war in Vietnam,” the president said, in his directive. “I also share the general irritation with the expressed official intention to disregard campus expression such as protest and to discourage open critical discussion. In my own official capacity, however, I cannot give positive University sanction to the interruption of normal educational activities. Yale should not forfeit its educational neutrality for a political cause, no matter how widely backed.
Normally, whether to miss a class, or whether to postpone it, it is up to the student and the instructor, as long as absence or the postponement does not demonstrably impair the effectiveness of the educational process. In accord with this general policy, the University does not intend to interfere with any individual decisions about attending or postponing classes on any single occasion, including October fifteenth [Moratorium Day, 1969].
As far as employees are concerned, if there is a New Haven community exercise at midday to express concern about the war, anyone who wishes to be present should ask his supervisor if it would involve absence from working hours. I would hope that the supervisor would permit such absence at the noon hour if it would be consistent with the proper functioning of the University and if the absence could be made up by readjusting some other hours of work.
In sum, while the University does not wish to use its official authority to sponsor any moratorium of normal activities on October fifteen, it does not want to stand in the way of individual faculty, student and staff expression of concern as long as the educational and other functions of the place are not unduly hampered.
This directive from the president of the university was written on the 2nd of October. It gave those to whom it was addressed exactly thirteen days in which to digest its equivocation. It is the kind of language more suited to the State Department of America embroiled in moral crises than it is bent upon translating into non-moral prerogatives for guidance. As it happened, it put the radical factions of Yale community into greater moral and academic conflict.
But there are graver, more deceitful implications in this directive than that. To begin with: this directive establishes an official position for the separation of an institution of higher learning from the realities of a “political cause”; and in so doing, it has then decided that not only is this university above politics — an abysmal lie as anybody who lives in New Haven can attest to — but it also implies that this university has, on its own, decided to choose which “political causes” are suitable for its official sanction and involvement; and also, which of these causes can have the prestige of being backed by the university.
And for a university to state that it cannot “give positive sanction to the interpretation of normal educational activities,” when those “normal activities” themselves cease to be normal and relevant in face of an “interruption” of national proportion and gravity, as is the war in Vietnam, is further proof to emphasize how unreal a place is Yale in the world that surrounded it, during the latter part of the sixties.
But what is even more puzzling and difficult to understand other than the implications that may be read into this directive, is the admission that the university has abrogated to itself the position of a moral leader in the community of New Haven, in the state of Connecticut, and in the whole of America. It has, in taking this stand, sacrificed whatever honour one can now associate with what has been referred to as “institutional neutrality,” with a demonstration of its politics; the politics not necessarily of the university itself as it is seen by the students, but of what the university symbolizes and represents. This sacrifice of honour was made at a high moral price that the students themselves were demonstrating against; and the immorality of the university’s position had already been pointed out by the students, and was reflected in the very nature of the war in Vietnam.
The final paragraph of the directive really sums up the attitude of the university toward demonstrations and toward positions of conscience. And the university is, at best, schizophrenic. On the one hand, there is the intention to personalize the university (for instance the proposed presence and participation in the moratorium speeches on that very day); and on the other hand, to deny that this presence and participation is possible, while basing it on an institutional point of view, or position. For no college president in America, with the war in Vietnam threatening national unity, is able to “personally sympathize” and “deeply feel” any problem of the moral magnitude of the war in Vietnam, or a problem like black unrest and black injustice, while at the same time, seek to modify his personal and moral attitude by reminding his institution and the people associated with it, of the “institutional neutrality” which must necessarily bind the university’s expression of such problems, in a directive. The entire last paragraph is meaningless, if it were to be applied, logically, to a college in Vietnam.
The real importance of this directive as it affected the overall consciousness of the university is this: no president, no member of any standing in the administration, could have afforded to write this kind of diplomatic jargon, unless he had behind him the assurance or the complicity of the entire faculty; and by faculty in this case, I am referring to the heads of departments and other members of the ruling junta of Yale, such as the masters of the colleges. The real significance of this directive is the ridiculousness of it. It made the students laugh. But even in their merriment and ridicule, in their victory of being told by their institution that their institution itself was not serious on moral matters, lay the very powerlessness that that merriment occasioned. Yale University is big enough, powerful enough to jive, and be laughed at, without one stem of its ivy being tarnished or ripped from its walls. And it is not the ridiculousness of Yale that would postpone this destruction, but rather the students of Yale themselves, over whom the university had an ungodly power.
The tendency on the part of the administration to make Yale more personable is illustrated in the attitudes of those who find themselves associated with the place. Yale becomes Mother Yale. The most ironic and perhaps obsequious expression of this kind of matriarchy is to be seen in the way black students relate to Yale. The personalization of Yale as their mother, as a place providing such comfort to them, conflicts with the nationalistic and racialistic responsibility which they boast of possessing. It is a personal conflict and one that further challenges the larger self-proclaimed responsibility they talk about: their racial accountability. The black student who comes to Yale from the projects and places like Harlem, and places that stand for Harlem in terms of deprivation (even if this particular student does not have this Harlem experience in the real sense, he certainly has a symbolical experience of deprivation in America), will admit that there are some very good things about being at Yale.
The place is quiet, usually when he needs it to be quiet, when he needs his personal breathing space in an otherwise hectic environment, the student can find peace, perhaps during which he might be caught up, if only temporarily, in pondering his suicide; or pondering the suicidal amount of work that the Yale instructor has assigned him.
Work is synonymous with Yale, for faculty and for students. Work is also reality for faculty. “Publish or perish.” At Yale University, this is not merely a euphemism for intellectual diligence; and it certainly is not a cliché.
Because of tradition, and because of the romanticism that overcasts the place, Yale can and does attract some very important lecturers and visiting professors. They come from the ultra-conservative r
ank of America, to the blackest Black Panther Party member. But mainly the presence of these visiting lecturers and professors generally has no relevancy to the interests of the black students. The black student would, in spite of his confessed bewilderment over the university’s choice of visitor and the subject of his talk, still regard such a selection of guest as having some substantive bearing upon his own presence in the university, and as a contribution to his education in the Black Studies Program (later to become a department), which was a demand he had made upon the university.
For instance, Herbert Marcuse might have been a brilliant modern philosopher; but what he says during a guest lectureship at Yale has very little to do with the lives of the black students there, or with the lives of black people elsewhere. Mayor John Lindsay might have been a good mayor, something of an evangelist, and, in addition to being a radical politician, something of a “hip” mayor who dared to walk through the Black and Puerto Rican ghettos of New York City during the threat of “riot and racial apocalypse,” as every politician was saying — and some, hoping — and in spite of Mayor Lindsay’s “radicalism” that Harlem and the barrio and other “mean streets” still existed during his administration; and they exist today, 2005, almost untouched by his liberal-radicalism. So, in spite of every act and promise by his jurisdiction and administration, what contribution could he make, and did in fact make toward the existence of the black student at Yale? Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye may be the best scholar of William Blake, but what insight and solution does he — like those other world-renowned thinkers applied to help solve the problem and the culture of the American ghetto — offer to improve the black student’s existence on the campus of Yale? Or the welfare of the black student on any campus in America?
I doubt whether the social and cultural position of the black student at Yale is ever considered in lectures by these men, although I am told that a black student here, did manage to get a very good recommendation from Mayor Lindsay when he applied for admission. Did the mayor know the black student?
The university does not take the black student into consideration, does not take the black student seriously when guest lectureships are being planned. World-renowned visitors to Yale University do not come from the world of the black student, or from any other world that he is culturally acquainted with.
It is only when Imamu Amear Baraka (Leroi Jones) comes to Yale that Yale becomes important and “relevant” to the “existence” of the black student. Otherwise, the latter’s cultural alienation is complete. And even although the black student might not understand what Baraka is trying to tell him about his presence at such an institution as Yale, still there is a great amount of knowledge that might be gathered and conveyed from the podium in the Yale Law School, which is a symbol of excellence. This kind of knowledge, vicarious though it might be, this kind of black presence on a white landscape, the black student himself readily calls “relevance.” When a man like Mayor Carl Stokes of Cleveland spends an afternoon with John Hersey, the master of Pierson College, both the college and the university take on an aura of “relevance” so far as the witnessing black students are concerned. But it may be a superficial “relevance.” But that act might very well be construed to show that the university is contemporary and is politically non-neutral, in spite of what the directive of the president said, would say, or feel.
There is a feeling of uncertainty which comes over the black student from the very head of his adopted institution, and which grips him and binds him into a confusing relationship to his “alma mater,” a term used consciously and constantly by these black students who can boast, and in some cases can wish that they all had been born in a ghetto background. They therefore castigate themselves and their striving parents who fought for middle-class standards for their own lives and the lives of their children, so as to escape the very meaning and experience of “ghetto background” which their educated black sons and daughters, black students at Yale, now think of as the badge of legitimacy. But it is only a black student at a place like Yale University, or at any other Ivy League college, who would willfully yearn to have come from the guts of a ghetto. The black student at the University of Texas at Austin does not indulge in such fantasies. His presence on the Campus at Austin is too close, and is measured too deeply in the spilling of blood and the bludgeoning of balls and testicles, for him to yearn for, and indulge in, such images of social desolation, and consider it “cool.” So, this kind of “wishing for ghetto origin” on the part of the Yale black student, is the first stage of a conditioning, a state of mind that permits him to look at his life through a romantic prism of equally romantic “legitimacy” and wanting that legitimacy to connote something that he himself is fleeing from.
If the black student who yearns for the legitimacy of “ghetto background” were really to be thrown back upon that dump heap, he would readily repudiate any kind of allegiance to an institution such as Yale. And whether his repudiation is spoken “silently or loud,” as Amiri Baraka says in a poem, and spoken openly, or within the close and tribal gatherings of black students in college dormitories, the voice would be the same. He would reject the black ghetto background as he has, from the pit of his guts, already have rejected Yale. “Yale is a motherfucking racist institution,” they say all the time. And they use “institution” to connote incarceration in a federal prison. This is what the black student thinks of the school he is attending; Yale. But he is there, at Yale. And he is there as one of the most ardent constituents of Yale. Yale “is a racist institution,” to use his words; everybody knows that; but what everybody does not know, is that the black student, after having made this pronouncement, continues to see and to crave that his mental development shall be measured in the strict terms of success, or of failure, using the slide rule of Yale University’s standard. And he makes a desperate effort within the framework of his militancy not to step beyond the bounds of radicalism, which Yale and the faculty expects him to, at least, stutter.
This expectation of radicalism from the black student, this expectation of black militancy even, is natural at Yale, as it is the expectation of loss which a businessman makes provision for in the setting of price of his items, and which he understands to be an aspect of his success in carrying on his business. But the pertinence in the statement, “Yale is a motherfucking racist institution” lies not in the fact that it comes from the mouth of a black student, but rather that it lies in the presumption that any black student at Yale could be so bold as to disregard the implication in the concessions being made (and understood by both parties), to bring him here to study.
So you find that these black students, in their desire to be associated with a first-rate university, and at the same time not wanting to be seen as “Uncle Toms” or “bourgeois Negroes” by the “heavy relevant brothers in the ghettos” or by the “brothers in less heavy” Ivy League colleges, are caught up in the same two-faced posture of hating and loving the institution in the same breath, as they are in their schizophrenic relationship to the larger American society. They are forever locked into a position of duality of existence, and perception. Theoretically, no black student should ever go to Yale University. He or she may not attend this kind of an institution, and still claim, or remain, black. Or, perhaps, Yale should have been permitted to remain purely, pearly white, so that at that cataclysmic moment when pertinence and the spirit of equality and equal opportunity visited the university to make it contemporary and relevant (even to white youths), then Yale and its tradition could more easily be buried under the unreality that emanates from the entire administration and faculty, in particular the Department of English, which sees fit to repudiate all that is modern from its curriculum of study, associating “modern” with the untried and the unproven, and the uncriticize-able, and which for years to come, perhaps, will continue to study the “classics” of the dead language of dead English writers in English, and forget the existence of modern “black literature,” which wil
l always be relegated to “Black Literature” or “Post-colonial Literature,” or “African American Literature.” Never simply Literature!
And when the necessity or the demand to be modern, does come, when the twentieth century has to be considered, this Department of English considers a book like Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead, or The Horse’s Mouth as its two selections of good modern fiction. No professor with political power or with academic brilliance in the Department of English faculty, when the list of modern and twentieth-century fiction was being discussed, thought to include The Systems of Dante’s Hell, or Invisible Man, or The Man Who Cried I Am. James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Arna Bontemps, and Langston Hughes were not even thought of. But the latter named three books, written by Amiri Baraka, Ralph Ellison, and John A. Williams, were enthusiastically relegated to the Black Literature list.
There is something safe in studying only the works of dead writers: there is enough critical material already written about them. And the authorities of this kind of criticism are already — like cement blocks — entrenched in the Department of English. Conservatism is as important a critical point as is critical judgment in Departments of English. But critical material of this kind is stale, and it does not reflect the sensibilities of people who are living today and are studying this dead literature in contemporary times. There is something destructive to the mind, morally and socially, if one could only emphasize with Dante and the Romantic Latin Poets in Translation, to the exclusion of important contemporary works like Herzog, or The Chosen Place, The Timeless People. The latter novel is written by a black woman, Paule Marshall; and her work would have to obtain literary legitimacy, not from the work itself, but from the Department of English at Yale, before it could be placed on the curriculum of study for English Literature.
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