Volume 1 - Issue 12

21 The New Journal I April28, 1968

3

Vassar-Yale: what happened?

by Ellen Chesler, Steven Weisman and Michael Winger

10

Beyond the fringe: Yale misses the crisis in urban education

by James Vivian

12

Eric Sherman films Charles Lloyd's journey within

by Jeffrey Pollock

14

Book review: The village in the Vietnamese War

by Samuel Popkin

15

This particular war

by A. Dwight Culler

In Comment: Girls pose number one problem for male Yale, Crusader Nader picks on the Big Guy, Bobby tapped by Bobby biographer, Black Arts get angry, and Yale screen set for film festival.

Report The final section of a 55-page report released this week by the Student Committee on Teaching concludes that "co-education is not only the greatest overall need of the University-greatest in terms of Yale's possibilities for service to the nation or maintaing Yale's world prominence-but that it is, more precisely, Yale's most pressing educational necessity." · The report, entitled "Issues of Educational Reform," also deals with such topics as "Free Time," "Departmental Structure" and "Students in Educational Planning." Short essays which provide historical background and careful analysis of issues are followed by numerous recommendations for the reform of education at Yale.

The Student Committee on Teaching, a branch of the Student Advisory Board, owes its existence to the Steering Committee Report of 1966, commonly known as the Dahl report, which responded to the furor over the denial of tenure to a popular young philosophy teacher in the spring of 1965. In the past year both the Student Committee on Teaching and the Student Advisory Board have become increasingly emphatic in their criticism of Yale education and the University structure--demonstrating a serious concern on the part of students for integral participation in the affairs of the University.

Under the general editorship of James L. Kugel, a senior majoring in comparative literature, the members of the Student Committee carried out extensive research on educational problems and then met weekly to discuss their findings. Out of this six-month work came the booklet which bas been widely distributed to various Yale faculty and student committees. Interested students and teachers can obtain copies of the teaching report from residential co!Jege deans' offices or the Yale College dean's office.

The teaching report deserves careful attention from aiJ members of the Yale community, for it raises vital questions about the need for "increased flexibility" and "guided opportunity" in the organization of Yale and its educational offerings.

As many critics of American education have realized, formal education too often deadens the mind instead of making it alive to the possibilties of critical thinking and imagination. It is toward this goalthe recognition of the diversity of Yale's students and teachers and a provision for their needs and interests--that the student

report is aiming. Indeed, the quality of the teaching report itself argues well for the ability of the Yale student to take on greater responsibility for his own education and a larger role in University decision-making.

The overall theme of the report is the "belief that all parts of college life bear on Yale's educational strength." As James Kugel reminds us in the concluding paragraph of the booklet, it is necessary to have order in the university, but one must be aware of that order and of its limits. "The University must have as much flexibility and as many opportunities as it can, so that when its order draws a line, it's a line, not a barrier."

Derek Shearer Yale College

Nader Ralph Nader spoke at the Law School Forum on April 10. His topic was "Legal Practice: Is the Old Order Crumbling?"

"No, it isn't," says Nader, "but it should be." Naturally enough, Nader makes people nervous. The tall, intense young man at the rostrum was hitting his audience of Law School students and undergraduates in some sensitive places. The boys heading for $15,000 with the big firms down on Wall Street kept quiet during the question period. The convinced fans, however, were also there with their "tell us more, Ralph ..."questions.

Nader filled in the ftamework of his title with stories about ex-FBI men with Xerox copies and indelible memories bumping into each other in Washington alleys while spying on the avowed enemy of their corporate employers. His description of Harvard Law School, circa 1958, as a human wasteland of nervous young men with proto-corporate spirits brought much delight to the young Yale lawyersto-be.

Nader has a ready wit, the kind which gives a touch of grace to authentically intense people. It is this wit, together with his unbridled, fact-filled, articulate depictions of corporate America at work that makes Nader such a winning polemicist.

His style, coupled with his analysis of the problems of Americans today, is devastatingly effective.

The analysis not complex. He needs no devil theory. American business today is essentially dictating a very limited role to the consumer. Business, unions and government were historically countervailing elements of power, each articulating the interests of a particular group. But today the Jines are blurred. Business can still rationalize away almost any obstacles in its quest for the corporate goals of management reputation and profit. But unions and government today are no longer effective opponents or watchdogs where consumers and many minority groups are concerned.

The friendliness of government and business is best seen in the New YorkWashington-Boston axis of large private law firms, whose members move easily back and forth between business clientele and government positions. The result is a massive pool of wealthy legal talent with blurred double constituencies. The consumer is on the outside.

The title of a history of American labor, says Nader, could be From Company Union to Company Union in Two Generations. The unions have, as Robert Kennedy used to say, "grown fat and sleek with power." The less fortunate are left behind when unemployment or disability

prevent the continued payment of dues.

A classic example of the easy relationship of business, labor and government can be seen in one of Nader's current hot potatoes-the problem of lung disease among coal miners. One quarter of the industry's workers suffer progressive disability from prolonged exposure to coal dust; yet the coal companies, the United Mine Workers and the Bureau of Mines all agree that there is no such problem, at least as far as their responsibility extends.

No one is legally responsible for these men or for preventing further disability. As business, govenment and labor chant together, like the robber barons, "No One Made Them Do the Work," these men have no legal voice to speak for them. ·This is where Nader's "consumer interest" firm has its role.

American Indians, coal miners, people Jiving near natural gas and oil pipelines, the American motorist and on and onwho speaks for them? Surely Betty Furness won't turn the tide. There should be law firms outside of government, funded by foundations and disinterested private sources, that can serve as a compensating force to the present unopposed legal cadres on the questions of consumer rights and the public interest of minorities disadvantaged by government, business and union practices. These firms would research, solicit and bring suit against corrupt and negligent businesses.

Public interest law firm lawyers can expect low pay, low status and a very heavy work load. They will be under constant surveillance by corporate detective agencies, and so they must add the extra burden of an impeccable private life.

Who would be willing to lead such a life?

Nader answered this one directly for the law students. It takes one essential personal quality-:---eonviction.

Tom Harmon Yale College

Shannon Recently, William Shannon not only gave an incomprehensibly small audience in Morse College his incisive predictions for the 1968 Presidential race, but also speculated on the future of American politics with a display of far-ranging familiarity with the tides of American political history.

Before getting down to the serious part of his speech, Shannon, a member of the New York Times editorial board, let his audience know that LBJ's withdrawal wasn't surprising for a man who "wasn't a paranoiac, but only a Grade-B neurotic like the rest of us."

Shannon foresaw Robert Kennedy defeating Eugene McCarthy in Oregon and California (unless the Minnesota Senator has "a pipeline to God") and then going on to defeat Nixon in November. Shannon is the author of The Heir Apparent, a biography of Kennedy. He cautioned, however, that riots this summer would boost Kennedy's popularity, unless they get totally out of hand-which would eventually benefit Humphrey.

Shannon said that he himself would vote for McCarthy "out of curiosity" about how a "real inte!Jectual," unlike Stevenson or John Kennedy, would handle the presidency. But he did not think that the general public shared his curiosity.

Shanon showed himself to be more than a journalistic observer with his references to the politics of the 1840's and the 1850's, continued on page 19

Volume one, number twelve April28, 1968 Editor: Daniel H. Yergin Publisher: Peter Yaeger Executive Editor: Jeffrey Pollock Designer: Ronald Gross Photography Editor: Herman Hong Advertising Manager: Jeffrey Denner Associate Editors: Susan Braudy Jon a than Lear Circulation Manager: Jean-Pierre Jordan Copy Editor: Alan Wachtel Classifieds: William M. Burstein Contributing Editors: Jonathan Aaron Mopsy S. Kennedy Michael Lerner Michael Mandelbaum Steven Weisman Staff: John Boak, Paul Bennett, Peter M. C. Choy, Joseph Fincke, Jennifer Josephy, Larry Lasker, Christopher Little, Jonathan Marks, Howard Newman, Barney Rubin, James Scherer, Warner Wada, Michael Waltuch, Bruce Mcintosh Advertising: Joe Ambash, Bill Gerber, Jeffrey Harrison, Jon Hoffman, John Jeffries, Chris Moffit, Howie Newman, Will Rhodes, Edmund Robinson, Roger Sametz, Sam Sutherland, Steve Weise, Jeff Wheelright, Rick Wilson THIRD CLASS PERMIT: Third Class post· age PAID in New Haven, Conn. The NeVi Journal is published by The New Journal, 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.

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Credits: Burton Berinsky: page 4, bottom Copyright © 1967 Peter M. C. Choy: pages 3, 6, 16 Ronald Gross: Cover Herman Hong: Cover Vassar Miscellany News: page 4, top

3 I The New Journal I April 28, 1968

"Remember when Vassar was going to move to New Haven?"

"Yes." "You want to know the whole intricate, messy, detail-ridden story inside out?"

"Yes. Yes." "Read on."

by Ellen Chesler, Steven Weisman and Michael Winger On an overcast morning last November 12, Alan Simpson, seventh President of Vassar, grabbed his camel-hair topcoat and drove out of Poughkeepsie in Vassar's green station 'Wagon on his way to meet Kingman Brewster Jr., seventeenth president of Yale.

For Simpson, this was the last chance to salvage the Vassar-Yale affiliation, an arrangement that, for six months, colleagues and advisors bad been saying was doomed to fail.

Suppose Vassar set up experimental undergraduate branches in New Haven to study special topics like Man and his Environment, while Vassar herself stayed in Poughkeepsie? Simpson needed an answer.

Brewster told him the Yale Corporation would accept the compromise only if Vassar would gradually complete the move to New Haven.

Simpson was not able to agree.

Eight days later, November 20, the Vassar president was on the road again, this time driving to New York City to meet with his trustees. Simpson, who had never before been late for a trustee meeting, miscalculated his departure time from Poughkeepsie, and so was sitting in a traffic jam on the East Side Highway and not in the midtown offices of Morgan Guaranty Trust at 9: 30 in the morning, when the meeting was scheduled to begin.

He might well have wished that be could stay in the traffic jam all day.

Once he arrived at the meeting, it took the trustees a perfunctory thirty minutes to vote down Vassar's move to Yale.

Simpson, the staunchest advocate from the beginning, voted no, to make the decision unanimous. Then he drove back to Poughkeepsie. There he had to read a trustee-written statement - first to the faculty, then to student leaders, and finally to the entire student body.

Vassar's decision, Simpson read each time, was motivated by "loyalty to a place as beautiful as ours, confidence in the future of our region, desire to be mistress in our own house, our commitment to women's education, and faith in the Vassar spirit of discovery of new paths of excellence." He also revealed general proposals for graduate institutes and a men's college.

"Full speed ahead in Poughkeepsie," be concluded each time.

When the students heard the news, half of them broke out in applause; some hissed and booed. When the faculty heard the news, a gruff department chairman who had opposed the move rose to say he felt "uniquely privileged to be present at this historical turning point."

"You bet it's a historical turning point," mutttered a young teacher to a colleague.

"Like the day the Roman Empire decided the Barbarians could come live on the near side of the Rhine."

Ellen Chesler, former managing editor of the Vassar Miscellany News, is a junior at Vassar. She has worked as a reporter for NBC News. Steven Weisman, contributing editor of The New Journal, is a Yale senior. He has written for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Micluul Wingu, a first year student in the Yale Law School, has worked as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and The Chicago Daily News.

A scant eleven months earlier, optimistic backers of the Vassar move had thought most of the problems were merely mechanical. But they weren't prepared for the aggressive resistance from the Vassar faculty and the Vassar alumnae, who proved as effective as bees at protecting their hive. For these two groups, the move was a matter, if not of life and death, at least of prestige and status; and certainly it threatened that special nostalgia one feels for the places of one's youth.

The next eleven months were a period of proliferating committees, hardening attitudes, and a powerful and finally successful rear-guard battle by Vassar faculty and alumnae to preserve Vassar's identity- though no one could ever say very well what that identity was.

But long before it was officially over, strangled to death by committees, the Vassar-Yale affiliation was threatening to split Vassar apart into irreconcilable factions. It was the seriousness of those splits that make it possible now to see that the affiliation was already a failure by the spring of 1967, a half-year before the final death throes.

1 "Like Athena," Mary McCarthy has written, "Vassar College sprang in full battle-dress from the brow of a man."

Vassar was founded in 1861 by Matthew Vassar, a wealthy Poughkeepsie brewer, to be " a college which shall be for young women what Yale and Harvard are to young men."

Indeed, for many years Vassar was very nearly that. By the mid-twentieth century, however, graduate education had become an important part of American higher education. Vassar was not part of that change; like all liberal arts colleges, and especially women's colleges, she was having trouble competing for money to attract good teachers and good students.

Vassar's sixth president, Sarah Gibson Blanding, a rugged Kentuckian whose retirement gift from Vassar was a tractor, said publicly in 1961 that ninety per cent of women's colleges would within 25 years become coeducational or enlist in universities.

At Yale, meanwhile, pressure for coeducation was building, and President A. Whitney Griswold sometimes remarked that if someone gave Yale $50 million, he would be delighted to undertake the education of women.

In 1961, Morris Hadley, a Yale trustee married to a Vassar trustee, suggested to Griswold and to Miss Blanding that the two schools join forces in New Haven. It seemed a far-fetched idea. Nonetheless, Miss Blanding traveled to New Haven, where she and Griswold, golf cap atop his head, wandered up and down Prospect Street, looking at the old houses and trees and wondering how the street would look with Vassar on it.

They wondered enough to call a secret joint meeting of trustees from both schools in a New York women's club. But enthusiasm was slight, obstacles were clear, and the project was dropped. From 1961 to 1966, the Vassar-Yale idea bloomed only in cocktail party conversations that were fondly recalled during 1967. ("So I said to him on Founder's Day, 'Well, why don't we move Vassar to New Haven?' It seemed so absurd at the time.")

41 The New Journal I April28, 1968

2

Alan Simpson thought the move to New Haven would offer Vassar a way out of its crisis. He miscalculated.

Kingman Brewster climbs into a Yale plane to fly to Poughkeepsie. Meetings were scrupulously alternated between Poughkeepsie and New Haven. But it didn't do any good.

Alan Simpson arrived at Vassar in 1964 from Chicago. Witty and urbane, Simpson at 55 speaks with an English accent 22 years after leaving England. He's a wry man who once told a startled alumnae group, "When Vassar women are middleaged they should have something better to do than play bridge and fornicate." A respected historian, Simpson had been an effective dean at the University of Chicago, but he came to Vassar tired of universities and their emphasis on professional scholarship. "He'd had it with Chicago," a friend remembers.

His inaugural address at Vassar, which haunted him throughout the Vassar-Yale affair, celebrated the virtues of a four-year liberal education away from scholarly professionalism. He praised women's education and revealed that he had read widely on the subject of women and had even made a trip to Russia to see what kind of life women lead there.

But his first years at Vassar were in some ways disillusioning. Four years after the inaugural was given, Simpson refused to release it for a book of essays, saying that he had changed his mind.

"After Alan had been here for a while, he became aware of a tremendous laxity at Vassar," one of his associates said recently. "He saw- like some of the rest of us - that we were mostly very dull."

Indeed, Vassar had sat in her corner, while the other Seven Sisters were busy creating ties with nearby colleges. This isolation helps explain why she ranks near the bottom of the Seven Sisters on both college board scores and number of applicants. Kingman Brewster said, shortly after the Vassar-Yale Study was announced, "Of all the first-rate women's colleges, Vassar is one of the few that does not have a natural dancing partner in its own neighborhood."

More than this, Simpson found relatively little concern at Vassar over the college's future. Many young faculty members didn't care much because they often moved on after two or three years.

And many older Vassar professors, some of them alumnae, were simply accustomed to and liked the Vassar they knew.

But if Simpson's views on the relevance of Vassar's liberal education changed, his view of Vassar women did not. According to one associate, he continued to think of Vassar alumnae as women like Mary McCarthy- the independent, spirited writer who graduated from Vassar in 193 3. Simpson was never quite able to reconcile this image with the nearhysterical reaction of many Vassar alumnae to the Yale proposal.

Simpson bad further problems. He was a more forceful president than his predecessors, more forceful than many older professors thought he had any right to be.

There were some, however, who shared Simpson's concerns over Vassar's future.

In the spring of 1966, trustee board president John Wilkie, who is president of the Central Hudson Gas and Electric Company, sent the other trustees a memo filled with questions about what sort of future the college should have. And in late October, 1966, the board set up a New Dimensions Committee to consider I 3 specific ideas, including coeducation, a four-year M.A. program and cooperation with other schools. The committee included six professors, five trustees, four deans and

two non-voting students. But the New Dimensions Committee organized itself slowly; and so in December, 1966, an affiliation with Yale finally seemed to offer Vassar a way out of her lethargy and depression.

3 At Yale the first official statement about coeducation after the secret BlandingGriswold stroll came in the Freshman Year Report of 1963. "We think Yale has a national duty, as well as a duty to itself, to provide the rigorous training for women that we supply for men," the report said.

Kingman Brewster Jr. became president of Yale in 1964, the same year Simpson came to Vassar. In his first years he did little more for the Yale-Vassar dream than repeat Griswold's private promise to act if someone kicked in the money. But in early 1966, Brewster told Lanny J .

Davis, scrappy Yale Daily News chairman, that he wanted the Yale Corporation to state officially the University's interest in educating women.

In March of that year, Brewster got his statement. It didn't say much, except that Yale preferred a coordinate college to women in Yale College itself. But that was more than Yale had ever said before.

During that spring, the News began its coeducation forum, edited by Frederick I. Taft, whose mother, Frances Taft, became president of the Vassar Alumnae in 1966 and an eventual opponent of a Vassar move. The forum included statements on coeducation, mostly in favor of it, from about 20 educators. The readers agreed: a News poll found that eighty per cent of the undergraduates and even more of the faculty wanted coeducation.

That fall, Brewster announced that Yale had received an anonymous grant to support something called "a special study into the needs of potential improvements in undergraduate education for women in America." Edna Rostow, wife of the former dean of the Yale Law School, Eugene Rostow, was named to head the study. Unfortunately for the study, if not for the nation, Eugene was summoned to Washington one week later to aid his brother Walt in the struggle for freedom in Asia, and Yale said goodbye to Edna.

No replacement was announced.

Then came the man whom Sam Chauncey, Brewster's assistant, calls Mr. X. This Mr. X fixed Brewster and Simpson up for a date to discuss affiliation. Although neither will identify the matchmaker, bets are on Julius Stratton, a member of Vassar's board of trustees and a good friend of Brewster's since the days when Brewster was a Harvard law professor and Stratton the president of MIT. Stratton, now chairman of the Ford Foundation, will neither confirm nor deny the rumor.

Simpson, Brewster and Mr. X dined together on December 4, 1966, in New York- on neutral ground. (Later meetings were also held in New York or were scrupulously alternated between the two schools.)

Three days later, Simpson road-tripped to New Haven, where he toured the Yale campus, finally agreeing with Brewster to present the idea to the respective boards of trustees. At Vassar, on December 14, the entire board met to approve the proposal. Simpson called it "daunting and dazzling."

That night Simpson called Brewster,

S I The New Journal! April28, 1968

it lor one ol els ol ~968.''

••

who spoke from a telephone in the kitchen at Trumbull College, where he had been meeting with students. Simpson said his board had accepted the invitation that Brewster was now supposed to extract from his Corporation. "It's up to you now," said Simpson. Brewster had taken no chances; he had already contacted most of his board and, at New York's Commonwealth Club two days later, the Yale Corporation approved the study.

4 Only 12 days passed from the first Brewster-Simpson tete-a-tete to the final Yale approval. The presidents had hurried to prevent news from leaking out before everyone had formally agreed. Simpson feared a leak might lead to rumors among sensitive alumnae and faculty that the proposal was more than a proposal.

But there was a leak anyway. The best sources indicate that Yale trustee John H ay Whitney accidentally mentioned the news at a Washington cocktail party where reporters overheard it. The leak could also have resulted from the fuss surrounding Mayor John Lindsay's interruption of his morning schedule to attend a special meeting of the Yale Corporation.

As Washington Post reporters began phoning contacts at Vassar, the Vassar administration realized the story was out and advanced Simpson's announcement to the faculty to the next morning. Letters went out immediately, telling faculty to gather at ten on Saturday.

What followed was a comedy of errors.

The emergency faculty meeting tipped off the New York Times Vassar correspondent, who called New York to tell Fred Hechinger, the Times education editor, that something was up. When Steve Kezerian, head of the Yale News Bureau, called Hechinger later in the day to alert him to a major announcement for Monday, Hechinger jumped the gun and guessed it had to do with Vassar.

Kezerian confirmed the guess and filled Hechinger in on the details.

With the details he got from Kezerian and a reporter he had dispatched to Vassar, Hechinger wrote his story. At a dinner party later in the evening, he decided to call Simpson, a personal friend, to tell him the story would have to be moved up to the next morning's paper. A surprised Simpson first pleaded with Hechinger to hold the story at least until Sunday. Simpson was in a precarious position with alumnae and faculty, who would have wanted to hear about the proposal first from Vassar, not The New York Times. When Hechinger explained why he couldn't hold the story, Simpson gave him more details. After phoning the material into The Times, Hechinger went back to dinner. But before he could begin, Brewster called him with more information from Yale. Hechinger called the latest news into his office and went back to his soup, which was now cold.

Back in Poughkeepsie, Alan Simpson never finished his soup. He spent the rest of his evening hurriedly calling important Vassar people, trying to cushion the shock the morning's papers would bring. But he couldn't call all 20,000 alumnae or all 200 faculty members at Vassar.

The Friday evening before Simpson's announcement, a group of Vassar junior faculty members were having cocktails at an apartment on 'Raymond A venue. They

- LIBRARY JOURNAL

wondered why they had suddenly been told to come to an emergency meeting the next morning.

"Maybe Vassar's moving to Yale," one teacher joked.

Everyone laughed.

5 The news of the Vassar-Yale study caught everyone by surprise. I n Poughkeepsie, hundreds of girls in Shetlands and dungarees interrupted late morning coffee to assemble outside the Main Building cheering for Alan Simpson, their president, and singing choruses of "Boola Boola" and the Whiffenpoof Song. At one o'clock, somebody rang the ceremonial bell in the tower atop Main, and Simpson stood on a balcony, framed by banners: "Beat Harvard" and "Wisdom and Men" (from the school motto, "Wisdom and Purity"). Simpson grinned as he tried to cool down the frenzy. "No one is going anywhere yet," he said paternally as the girls hissed. A headline in Monday's Vassar Miscellany News giggled: "For God, for Country, for Yale and Vassar."

In Manhattan that Saturday morning, a senior editor of Life named Dorothy Seiberling, Vassar '43, stared at her New York Times and wept. And in New Haven, a young auburn-haired French instructor named Eve Katz, Radcliffe '59, saw the huge New Haven Journal-Courier headlines and thought it was good news.

They would never undertake a study like this unless the move were definitely going to take place, she thought. From Cleveland, Frances P. Taft, director of the Vassar Associate Alumnae, told a student reporter, "It couldn't have happened to two nicer schools." In Paris, Mary McCarthy said, "They deserve each other."

The city of Poughkeepsie registered horrified disapproval. Mayor Richard Mitchell proposed an immediate study of the possibility of Yale's moving to Poughkeepsie. Suddenly, local people realized how much Vassar's presence adds to the cultural fabric of Poughkeepsie and Dutchess County, plus the estimated six million dollars the college annually adds to the local economy. Thus a local newspaper declared that residents could "no longer take Vassar for granted. We cherish the college, we will do anything in our power to keep it here."

Local legislators dutifully introduced a spate of bills which would keep Vassar in New York. Vassar officials tended to discount some of the proposals as gestures. Meanwhile, some local merchants argued in the newspapers. One said ninety percent of his business was with Vassar; another retorted: "I'd be glad to see Vassar girls' checks go bouncing elsewhere."

In New Haven, Yale people took the proposal in stride. Brewster didn't speak to his faculty until January. Students spoke eagerly, but there were no rallies.

And when everyone returned from winter vacation in January, the Yale Daily News ran stories for four days and stopped.

"People are getting tired of it," said Managing Editor John Brim, and they were. They took it for granted that Vassar would move, but that nothing would happen while they were still at Yale.

6 In Poughkeepsie, Alao Simpson was beginning to suffer from the confusion

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61 The New Journal I April28, 1968

These are trees. Not just any trees. These are Vassar trees and Vassar trees are one big reason that Vassar didn't move to Yale.

surrounding the original hasty announcement. The very assumptions that the Vassar-Yale Study would work from remained unclear.

What was the study studying?

According to the first official statement, the investigation would cover both the desirability and the feasibility of moving Vassar to Ne-w: Haven. But Brewster explained things differently at a Yale faculty meeting in January. The minutes of the meeting read: "Implicit in the study is the assumption that if union appears feasible both Vassar and Yale would favor such an occurrence." At Yale, one could say desirability was taken for granted: at Vassar-well, it all depended. Sometimes Simpson did seem to take it for granted, as when he told student leaders, "Vassar needs Yale," and called the Yale project "this happy fruition." But Simpson discovered quickly that with his partly suspicious and partly hostile faculty he should stick to the idea of the original announcement, that the study was to determine both desirability and feasibility.

Brewster recognized these contradictions but dismissed them in an interview as "merely a reflection of a difference in political climate." What Brewster didn't see was how the ambiguity would anger the Vassar faculty, making Simpson's job even more troublesome.

Simpson was in a difficult position: he had to play both leading advocate and objective judge, and he couldn't play both roles to very ma.n y people's satisfaction.

Simpson blundered early in making his appointments to the Study Committee Staff. The key members were new to Vassar, and the faculty resented that.

Vice-President James Ritterskamp was in his first year in Poughkeepsie; George Langdon, presidential assistant, was in his third year; and Dean of the Faculty Nell Eurich was well into her third week. Mrs. Eurich headed the academic side of <the study for Vassar.

A hummingbird of a woman, Nell Eurich had over twenty years of experience in academic administration, most recently as a dean at New College in Sarasota, Florida. But her scholarly achievements were sparse. She turned out to be the big surprise among Simpson's appointees, for she reportedly became the only Staff member to oppose the move. But faculty opponents did not at first realize that Nell Eurich might be on their side; they regarded her and all the others as advocates of the move rather than impartial investigators.

Simpson made a bigger blunder when he circumvented the spirit, if not the fact, of the Governance, the Vassar faculty's bill of rights, by appointing his own committee to advise the Staff about faculty opinion. Because the Governance declares that the faculty has final say over "educational policy," committees are the way of life at Vassar. There's an old saying that if the Second Coming were announced for tomorrow, Vassar would elect a committee to look into the matter.

There's even a committee to oversee the committees.

Although Simpson's Appointed Committee was weighted with distinguished professors, the Vassar faculty objected. It wanted to elect its own committee. Within a week after Simpson announced his appointments, protests were voiced, and ballots were distributed through the mail; and within another week, the faculty had its own Elected Committee, composed mostly of people

opposed to the move. For the rest of the year, the two committees competed for Nell Eurich's Wednesday afternoons, when she would carefully spend an hour with one and then an hour with the other.

The Elected Committee also met regularly with Elizabeth Daniels, the dean of studies who was in her turn chairman of the New Dimensions Committee.

Simpson was stung by the creation of the Elected Committee as well as by general criticisms of his Appointed Committee. He had not expected faculty obstruction to come so quickly and with such force. He bad anticipated that his senior faculty would be reluctant to move late in their careers from pastoral Poughkeepsie, with its college-provided housing, to the insecurity of rented apartments under a layer of New Haven's industrial soot. But he had underestimated how much the faculty would fear being "second-class citizens" at Yale, without the right to teach in the graduate school.

Simpson wanted the Yale proposal to be studied independently of an emotional public debate. He kept telling his professors that they would have their "day in court," but many refused to trust him.

They saw only a Brewster-Simpson conspiracy.

Also contributing to their resistance was a statement in January by former Vassar President Henry Noble McCracken, author of two books on the history of Dutchess County, who still had influence with older faculty members and alumnae. He said "big money" was behind the Vassar-Yale Study. The 87-year-old McCracken, president from 1915 to 1946, didn't hide his opposition.

Simpson's first series of setbacks made it clear the proposal was in trouble. By March, over six months before the first rejection, one member of the Staff, Clyde Griffen, was saying that his personal count showed overwhelming faculty opposition to the Vassar move. "They're against it," he would say unhappily, as he counted names of important Vassar teachers on his fingers. "My guess is that the faculty is against the idea by sixty per cent."

7 Vassar's twenty thousand graduates also caused Simpson headaches. He spent the spring racing around the country lecturing to alumnae meetings, but his reception was unenthusiastic. The following summer, one alumna, on a tour around the world, stepped into a Buddhist shrine and prayed that Alan Simpson be struck down.

After an initial letter in December to . about 200 alumnae officials, Simpson tried to get his message across in a February Alumnae Magazine letter which asked: "Which of us could resist the excitement of building Vassar College a new home?" Apparently almost everyone could; it seemed that only the opponents were willing to beat any drums. Simpson responded to the sniping by defending the idea of a move to Yale. But he only made matters worse as he convinced people that, just as they suspected, the trustees were already certain of the move's desirability.

For Simpson the alumnae response was a bitter blow. He didn't understand itit was not what he had expected from Mary McCarthy's classmates- and in.

March he returned from a California tnp and chastised his critics. "For any alumna to organize opposition to this study before

71 The New Journal ! Apri128, 1968

"Hibakusha" (The people affected by the explosion) it has come to any conclusions," Simpson said, " is a betrayal of the essence of a Vassar education." It was like Dean Rusk trying to hold off the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Within a month, a group called Alumnae for Vassar's Future organized anyway, headed by Life editor Dorothy Seiberling, and took a full-page insertion in the Alumnae Magazine. The ad asked in big, bold letters, "Is This Trip Necessary?" and then explained why it wasn't, even quoting from a Yale Daily News editorial which accused Yale of "shortchanging" its undergraduates. The advertisement concluded with a one-word plea: "Write."

The alumnae did write. Their magazine printed 62 letters as the study progressed - most of them opposed.

Vassar Trustee Chairman John Wilkie was receiving a dozen letters a day for a while, and still more cascaded into the offices of Simpson and other trustees, most of them also opposed.

A popular vehicle for expressing alumnae dissent was tree imagery. One 1929 graduate compared Vassar to a "magnificent oak," adding that if an oak no longer has room to grow, it becomes good only for lumber. "But boards," reasoned the alumna, "can never engender the same respect and reverence as the tree from which they came." On the other hand, she continued, "should Vassar be moved ... she will become a vine, dependent on another institution .... Or, if not a vine, she will become a grafted or budded plant with roots not her own."

The letter concluded with the hope that Vassar be allowed to develop "as a tree, not as a vine or grafted plant." Most of the other alumnae opposing the move also expressed a concern for Vassar's identity.

A long and thoughtful letter from Katharine Biddle More, 1953, examined undergraduate life at Vassar and offered a summary of it from her grandfather: "It was," he said, "the best preparation for marriage because nothing afterwards could possibly be as bad." To arguments that Vassar shouldn't abandon its beautiful campus, the letter replied: "The proper study of late adolescence is Man, not trees."

Simpson confronted the alumnae en masse on April 12. From 75 Vassar Clubs across the country and around the world, and from every Vassar class from 1899 to 1966, 250 representatives assembled for the biannual meeting of the Alumnae Council.

The first night of the three-day gathering, the ladies met at Alumnae House. Alumnae House is perched on a small hill overlooking the Vassar campus, and it belongs to the Associate Alumnae, one of two autonomous alumni groups in the country.

A rambling, three-story building, Alumnae House used to be filled with women who returned to Vassar for vacations or for the lavish parties thrown

by Alumnae Secretary Gertrude Garnsey, 1926. Times have changed. Today the alumnae go elsewhere, Gert Garnsey is old, and the building is usually filled with the overnight male guests of the students- but Alumnae House is still the alumnae's, and many of them remember.

What Alan Simpson spoke about that evening seemed far away from the Vassar they remembered. Greeted initially with polite applause, Simpson declared that ..Vassar College cannot go it alonecannot go it alone." He asked if separate education for women had not "outlived

its historic justification." He said, "You can stay in Poughkeepsie and find yourself the victim of a silent move, one not so dramatic, a move away from excellence."

The applause when Simpson sat down was perfunctory.

Nell Eurich followed with a rambling discussion of the Vassar-Yale study; bubbling, a hummingbird, she left the alumnae unimpressed.

But the alumnae waited, and when Elizabeth Daniels spoke, they heard what most of them wanted to hear. Mrs. Daniels of the New Dimensions Committee had found new dimensions.

Wearing an Arnel psychedelic print dress, she announced that even as the VassarYale study was continuing, alternatives were being explored. Perhaps a Matthew College, for men - in Poughkeepsie.

Laughter and applause. Perhaps an Institute for Man and His Environment, or for public administration, or for computer research - all in Poughkeepsie.

Tumultuous applause.

Throughout the year the woman in the center of the alumnae maelstrom was Frances Prindle Taft, 1942, a sandyhaired tennis champion who is president of the Associate Alumnae. Mrs. Taft's opposition to the move crystallized in the spring, but she was to experience defeat as well as a victory that November. Her husband Seth ran unsuccessfully against Carl Stokes for mayor of Cleveland.

Mrs. Taft had grown up in New Haven and remembered Yale as large and impersonal. Although her husband and son went to Yale (she had, in fact, sold sandwiches while at Vassar to finance visits to Seth in New Haven), she still distrusted that sort of education; she thought coeducation was fine for secondary schools, but not for colleges.

College for Mrs. Taft in 1967 was still the same sort of retreat Alan Simpson had celebrated in his inaugural address. "If I had a million dollars," she once said, "I'd give it to Vassar."

Mrs. Taft was on the receiving end of what she called "League of Women Voter tactics- the only tactics the alumnae knew." The alumnae seemed to her to be "excited about having a cause"; she bad to hire one of her husband's old secretaries for one night a week to answer letters. Her own opposition to the Yale move (as a zoology major, she said, she had learned you can't graft a leg from one animal on to another) was underscored by her feeling that Simpson was not giving the alumnae a fair evaluation of the proposal. By mid-spring, she didn't trust Simpson, and told other alumnae so at the April meeting.

After that meeting, Simpson had one more mishap with the faculty. He had scheduled a Liberal Ans Symposium for May 5, and one of four featured speakers was supposed to be Duke University President Douglas M. Knight, a Yale Ph.D. Knight, who bad gone to Duke from Lawrence College in Wisconsin, was expected to tell how rewarding it was to transfer from a small school to a big one.

But Knight was ill, so the faculty listened instead to a lopsided series of accounts about the virtues of separate education and the isolated liberal arts college from the presidents of Sarah Lawrence and Swarthmore respectively. The evening's discussion, planned by Simpson, ended up lauding just the characteristics of Vassar he believed to be its major problems.

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8 In New Haven, things were going a bit better for Kingman Brewster. His faculty presented virtually no obstacles: they were unconcerned with the Staff and the Study, and they continued business as usual, sipping afternoon sherry and conducting seminars. The attendance at the faculty meeting, on January 5, was unusually heavy, but still only 150 out of 700 faculty members in Yale College showed up at Connecticut Hall to hear Brewster talk about Vassar.

The teachers remained aloof because they were certain the move, which almost all of them favored, would eventually take place, and they knew the basic framework of Yale College, established in 1701, would not change significantly.

Brewster sent no letters to Yale alumni, and did not speak to them about Vassar until the University's annual Alumni Day, February 1 8. He did not talk, as he had the year before, about Yale's duty to educate women. Instead he told the alumni, assembled in Freshman Commons: "Our concern is not so much what Yale can do for women, but what women can do for Yale." His new point was that women at Yale would raise "substantially the moral quality of the four undergraduate years." He criticized the customary "mass-produced, impersonal, mixer-type big weekend," and said that girls present every day at Yale would civilize the students while If the second coming were announced for tomorrow, Vassar would elect a committee to improving classes and extracurricular look into the matter. activities. And, Brewster noted, Vassar had quite a dowry: special library collections, professors, reputation, good students, and a $63 million endowment.

The 1000 Old Blues filling cavernous Freshman Commons answered Brewster with a standing ovation.

During this time, the Yale Alumni Magazine received four letters on the Yale-Vassar Study: three just after the Study was announced and one after Vassar finally said no.

A. S. Parmelee, 1914, wrote that he almost choked on his orange juice when he first read of the proposed move in his morning paper. On considering it, be declared, "There will be righteous indignation, but there will also be gallantry." He favored the move, he said.

9 While Alan Simpson walked a precarious tight-rope among committees, and Kingman Brewster effortlessly continued to juggle faculty and alumni, the Joint Study Committee was busy compiling a report on the feasibility of the move.

Brewster and Simpson had estimated the cost of the study and landed $320,000 from the Carnegie and Ford Foundations.

(A good portion of the fund went unused and was ultimately returned.)

In early January the Yale Corporation and the Vassar Trustees each named some of their members to a joint committee which was to supervise the Joint Staff's study: from Yale, Edwin Foster Blair, John Hay Whitney, Caryl Haskins, Brewster and Treasurer John Ecklund; from Vassar, Fred Brown, Steven Duggan, Wilkie, Mary St. John Villard and Simpson. The trustee committee met five times, always in New York and usually in Whitney's lavish 51st Street apartment, where they discussed the progress of the Staff's work, relayed to

them by Simpson and Brewster, over cocktails and elegant dinners. They were pleasant occasions, Mrs. Villard recalls, and she was sorry to see them end. "We were just getting down to depth together," she remembers.

The guidelines for the Staff Study, drafted by Brewster and Simpson, which the committee approved at its first meeting on January 17, declared that the schools were searching for a new model- a coordinate arrangement, leaving Vassar its own trustees, administration, faculty, degrees and "major functions as an undergraduate college in the liberal arts."

Unlike Simpson, Brewster had chosen the Yale part of the Staff without controversy: Special Assistant to the President Henry (Sam) Chauncey Jr., Provost Charles Taylor, Associate Provost Alvin Kernan, Yale College Dean Georges May and Comptroller Edward Bowman. The staff operated out of offices in the Woodbridge Hall basement until noise from the Kingman Brewster signature machine, which reproduces Kingman Brewster's signature 360 times an hour on official letters, forced them to move to more silent quarters in Ezra Stiles College.

Brewster was still looking for a woman faculty member to serve as executive secretary of the Staff. One January morning, Sam Chauncey called Eve Katz and asked her to come into the President's office to talk about Yale, Vassar, and coeducation. Pert and attractive, Miss Katz was teaching French, but had once indicated an interest in administrative work. She had written her Ph.D. at Yale under Georges May. She agreed to take the job.

The last appointment Brewster made was a 25-year-old lawyer, Joe Lieberman, who while chairman of the Yale Daily News had written a book on Connecticut Democratic boss John Bailey and is now active in New Haven politics. Lieberman was Brewster's special assistant to the Marshall Draft Commission. Lieberman served the Vassar-Yale Study Committee as a legal-political advisor, with special knowledge of the attitudes of youth.

At the first meeting, on January 31, Miss Katz, in her Yale blue dress, diffidently greeted the Vassar staffers, who were staying at New Raven's Midtown Motor Inn. (They thought the Inn was comfortable enough, but the band blaring from the bar below and the general gaiety of the place led one of them to conclude it was a haven for "high-class prostitutes.")

The meeting took place in the Corporation Room at Woodbridge Hall, with Brewster and Simpson presiding. The two presidents explained that they would attend each meeting of the staff and report decisions and progress back to the Joint Trustee-Fellow Committee.

The Staff's first tasks were to assign responsibilities and to gather initial statistics on the two schools. James Ritterskamp, Vassar's vice-president of administration, and Elizabeth Drouilhet, dean of residence, would gather information on class size, salaries, buildings and how much it costs to feed a girl, statistics which would later be compared with Ned Bowman's Yale figures. NeiJ Eurich and Alvin Kernan would work with the departments and faculty, assisting Miss Katz and George Langdon with work on such items as course loads, admission profiles and enrollment in departments.

The Staff decided to meet next in

Poughkeepsie to examine what they had compiled. On February 27, Kernan drove Taylor, Miss Katz and Lieberman to Vassar. None of them could believe how bad the roads were. Not for nothing had the students been complaining all these years, they jofed.

Many of tlre Yale people hadn't visited Vassar in years, and that day, cold, snowy and wet, did little to endear it to them.

Kernan and Taylor noticed that many of Vassar's buildings were falling apart. They felt the school would need massive rehabilitation if it decided not to move.

From the first day of the study Sam Chauncey had continual nightmares about Vassar alumnae pouting over their beautiful campus and actively working to protect it from cramped, urban New Haven. But now, in the February pallor, Vassar's stately trees looked black and unappealing, and the Yale staffers wondered what was so pretty about Poughkeepsie.

At the meeting on the 27th, James Ritterskamp presented his information on Vassar's building needs. (Throughout the study, Ritterskamp probably worked the hardest on the intricate details of feasibility.) He explained that Vassar would need permission from New York state courts before it could dissolve under its New York charter and move its assets to Connecticut. The college would also need the estimate of building costs in New Haven to be prepared by Moore and Hutchings, a Poughkeepsie architectural firm.

Later, Ritterskamp asked real estate and insurance companies to appraise Vassar's buildings. These estimates of the value of the buildings and land would mean nothing, however, unless Vassar had a buyer. The closest thing to an interested party was the State University of New York (SUNY), which contacted the Study Committee informally. Vassar realized that leaving New York State would put itself in a bad bargaining position with the State institution.

But the SUNY discussions never got off the ground. Although there was talk of interest on the part of IBM, the Poughkeepsie-based company never contacted Vassar officially. Finally, Ritterskamp enlisted Previews Inc., a New York real estate concern specializing in the sale of castles and islands, to help Vassar smoke out further possibilities.

Several small colleges in the area inquired, thinking they might relocate on the site.

And an English concern enthusiastically suggested that Vassar be turned into a museum. But that was all.

The February Staff meeting ended when members agreed to report to the Joint Trustee-Fellow Committee that they would study only how Vassar might be moved to Yale. Alternatives short of such a move would not be considered.

For most Staff members, this and subsequent meetings were great fun . As Brewster and Simpson bantered back and forth, the confident staffers wondered bow the schools they represented could fail to get along.

The Vassar-Yale Staff met next on April 13, when it listened to reports from Joe Lieberman and Clyde Griffen, Vassar's dean of freshmen, about coeducation at other institutions. The two decided that a Harvard-Radcliffe arrangement would be inappropriate, since Harvard had obviously absorbed Radcliffe: Radcliffe girls receive Harvard

9 I The New Journal! April 28, 1968

degrees and are educated by Harvard's faculty. Vassar didn't want that.

There were several other possibilities.

In March, Griffen and Lieberman had visited Barnard and Columb ia. They decided that that type of relationship was impractical, too. Barnard guards her identity so compulsively that few contacts are made between the two schools, and some departments barely speak to each other. They also studied Rutgers and Douglass in New Jersey and the Tulane~ewcomb complex in New Orleans, but found no ideal model.

10 The thorniest difficulties in the way of affiliation were posed by the proposed relations between Vassar's and Yale's faculties. How much of a voice would the teaching staff of one school have in the affairs of the other? Who would be invited to teach graduate school? How many joint appointments would there be?

And bow could the institutional autonomy of Vassar's faculty be preserved?

These issues were discussed mainly by Vassar's two rival Committees (Appointed and Elected) , which met each week to review information from the Vassar-Yale Committee Staff. Once the Elected Committee met with Alvin Kernan of Yale, who spent interminable hours going over and over the two schools' rules of government. Vassar and Yale each claimed a more democratic form of faculty government. Kernan contended that Yale was more committed to its undergraduate college than any other university in the country. He tried to persuade Vassar's teachers that Yale was concerned with Vassar's autonomy and her independent teaching philosophy. By and large, he did not succeed. One staff member recalled later that Yale's greatest failure was its inability to convince Vassar of Yale's commitment to undergraduate education.

In February, Brewster spoke to the Vassar faculty. He came, he told them, not as a salesman. His job was to tell them why Yale wanted Vassar.

Brewster's speech was mostly a rehash of his earlier talk to Yale's alumni. He began with a joke about the proposed Vassar site, which was partially occupied by the Culinary Institute of America (CIA). Brewster asked if Vassar would mind occupying CIA territory. During the question period, be stressed Vassar's autonomy, answering questions quickly and with wit. The faculty was impressed.

No decisions could be made about faculty affiliations, though, until more information was available from the departments. The Vassar-Yale Staff decided to have department chairmen from the two schools meet and submit reports about merging and its problems.

Brewster summoned his chairmen to Woodbridge Hall in May and told them their work was important. He asked them to be honest in their written reports, which would remain confidential.

Actual meetings between the chairmen started late in the spring. According to a Staff member, the lower the Vassar chairman's scholarly reputation, the more hostile was the meeting.

The history departments, for instance, got along beautifully.

The Vassar English department was pleased that Yale's was committed to undergraduates, but wanted greater emphasis on creative writing. They

decided to prohibit cross-registration, at least for introductory and certain required courses.

At another departmental meeting, the chairmen talked cordially, but afterwards the Vassar chairman denounced Yale in a bitter five-page memorandum to Nell Eurich. In it he accused Yale of wanting nothing more than "to bring to New Haven a collection of women ... associated with a college of social standing equal to Yal~'s, for the social benefit of Yale's undergraduates." The memo complained that the Yale department chairman didn't care about Vassar's identity and that Yale would neither let Vassar faculty teach graduate students nor let Vassar students enroll in Yale courses.

The Yale department chairman smiles today when he recalls that meeting. He says the Vassar professor wanted full independence from Yale but also wanted the right to teach Yale graduate students.

The Yale chairman feels the contradiction was rooted in fear of being a second-class citizen at Yale. "I must say I have sy mpathy for him," he says. And he has a few words for the Vassar professor's contention that Yale students would flock to take courses in Vassar's department: "A charming idea."

For the most part, corresponding departments agreed, sometimes reluctantly, to many rules which would keep them separate and independent in New Haven. Nevertheless, Vassar professors feared that these rules (such as no cross-registration) would topple under the pressures of expediency and student demands. Many Yale professors agreed privately, but publicly they reaffirmed their interest in keeping the departments separate for the sake of Vassar's independence and for the sake of getting Vassar to New Haven. Thus they were viewed as hypocritical by Vassar, even though Yale people honestly felt Vassar's new identity in New Haven would be an "exciting" one.

In another generation, Yale people argued, Vassar in New Haven would flourish as an outstanding liberal arts college for women in a dynamic and active university. But Yale never fully realized the depth of Vassar's institutional identity crisis, the dilemma which forced Vassar to ask herself what she is today and what she really ought to be in the future. Yale's own problem was merely one of male and female; Vassar had to come to grips with the whole spectrum of educational philosophy.

Some Yale staff members did realize that a move by Vassar to New Haven would involve a gamble on Vassar's part.

For an old and established institution to exchange its traditional identity for a new and uncertain one would take a great " leap of faith," as one Staff member put it.

The Vassar faculty looked before it lea ped. and then decided to stay where it was. Though Yale contended that Vassar would not be the same in twenty years even if she remained in Poughkeepsie, the Vassar faculty felt sure that what they already had was worth preserving, if only as a nucleus for something new. If a women's college in New Haven would be exciting, why did it have to be Vassar?

Yale could start its own school and everyone would be happy.

By summer, then, the majority of Vassar's faculty were opposed to the. move to Yale. Late in the school year, a greyhaired geology professor named A. Scott

Warthin bad called a class in defense of his colleagues. " At my age I never thought I'd get involved in a protest movement," said Warthin, " but we have had in the past and have in the present a top-notch Vassar faculty. There is nothing wrong with where it is and the way it is now." His students laughed, and then applauded loudly.

11 Students at Vassar and Yale did little more than applaud while the two schools were mincing their minuet. Vassar girls never took an active role in their college's Yale study, and the two student representatives they sent as non-voting members of the New Dimensions Committee had little to report. A survey at Vassar sh owed that ninety per cent of the girls wanted men in their classes. Short of that, the boys and girls paired up in such groups as the Vassar-Yale Young Democrats, jo int literary reviews and affiliated residential halls.

12 Toward the end of the school year, the Vassar faculty's Elected Committee started to look at alternatives to a move to New Haven. It concluded in May that Vassar had an identity, but only as a conservative college "which preserves the traditional subjects." (When the administration heard that some of the Elected Committee members were uncertain that Vassar should change at all, it reminded them that "the President a nd trustees have said that Vassar cannot remain as it is.")

Somewhat chastened, the Elected Committee began to mull over such proposals as turning Vassar into a university on the Hudson or introducing coeducation in the junior and senior years.

Finally, in midsummer, there was a specific proposal. It arose out of a meeting of the Elected Committee with the New Dimensions Committee and some of Vassar's trustees. Trustee Constance Ellis suggested that Vassar remain the samebut with a cluster of new units. She was vague about the nature of these new units, but the idea gained immediate popularity.

It would satisfy the conservatives; it was also progressive and maybe even daring.

The New Dimensions Committee, meeting monthly through the summer, followed just that approach. With the cluster concept in mind, the Committee was able to shuffle together a whole series of ideas already scattered around Vassar, and they snapped out subcommittees for each with the flair of Las Vegas dealers playing blackjack. "Vassar," Alan Simpson complained to friends, "is going to be committeed to death!'

For years C. Gordon Post, chairman of the political science department, had been talking about an Institute for the Study of Man and His Environment. Already be had persuaded the college to let him teach a course called The River, a study in regional development, which concludes each year with an excursion down the Hudson on the Palace II, a converted submarine chaser. Now Post was dealt a subcommittee and told to make preliminary plans for his Institute.

Florence Wisloclti, assistant to the President, had been campaigning for a graduate program in medical sciences.

She too got a subcommittee. continued on page 16

10 I The New Journal! April28, 1968

Beyond the fringe: Yale misses the crisis in urban education

by James Vivian

Three days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, President Kingman Brewster talked in Dwight Hall with students about Yale's relation to New Raven's problems. It became clear that the interests of Yale and of New Haven seldom coincide in the President's thinking. He devoted most of his remarks to rationalizing executive committeeswhich supposedly reconcile these divergent.interests - as good politics and sound grantsmanship, and as a way to avoid raising "false expectations" in New Haven.

However, if the recent events prompt any new involvement by Yale in New Haven, there must be less discretion and more discussion about Yale as a part of the New Haven community.

One suspects that President Brewster has been unwilling to have a more open debate on Yale's actual and potential role in New Haven because of the limitations which he would impose on the conclusions of such a debate.

Two days later, with a sense of urgency fitting the week, Brewster issued a memorandum committing Yale to "do more" about the city's problems and appointing yet another committee, the Yale Council on Community Affairs. The Council was appropriated $40,000.

Heading it will be Tracy Barnes, an exCIA staff member who has been Brewster's assistant for alumni affairs since January.

The Council has been given the task of working with "Yale's programs relating to human and neighborhood development in New Haven."lt is encouraging that this group has been empowered "to support planning and . . . to seek more adequate funds ... in the name of the University."

It has the potential to meet the financial problems of many of the present programs.

In addition, Brewster was empowered by the Yale Corporation to support, both symbolically and financially, the New Haven Black Coalition. If the new Council includes voting members from New Haven and if Yale's assistance to the Black Coalition is forthcoming, an important step may have been taken in recognizing how essential community leadership is to any Yale involvement in New Haven.

Something positive may have been initiated, but in the area of elementary and secondary education, the memo represents only the extension of the old concept of supplementary education, not a new commitment to the New Haven schools.

The memo alludes to a new Yale summer high school for New Haven students, which should be examined in the context of existing Yale programs. There are four which have arisen, in Brewster's words, from "free and self-determined individuals, students, faculty and staff": the present Yale Summer High School, the Transitional Year Program, Upward Bound, and the U.S. Grant Foundation.

The programs have one common denominator; they are primarily concerned with the problems of individual students. Of the four, only the Grant Foundation works exclusively with New Haven students. Both the Summer High School and TYP are in accord with Brewster's idea of a "national James Vivian, a senior in Yale College, is a past director of the U.S. Grant Foundatwn.

constituency." Whatever their impact on the students with whom they come in contact, none of these programs has really touched the source of educational problems of their students - the public schools. While they have undoubtedly bad some success with individual students, they have not helped to improve the schools to which these students return and in which other students lose interest in education.

Moreover, three of the four programs are dealing only with high school students although even casual research will show how crucial the earlier years in school are.

Studies have shown that as a bright group of inner-city students progress through public schools in New Haven, and especially after the sixth grade, their achievement levels often remain unchanged across two to three years.

There are great needs at every level of pre-college education. Yale's programs have been essentially supplementary and peripheral to the crisis within the schools.

The new summer high school has been justified as beneficial to the students who will be admitted. However, that rationale is applicable to any conceivable supplementary program. The school would finally extend Yale's commitment to New Haven students, but if Yale is now ready to accept more of a role in precollege education in New Haven, a summer high school is not responsive to the most pressing needs of the community.

Mrs. Joan Thornell of Operation Breakthrough has made this point emphatically clear to President Brewster.

The proliferation of summer programs, regardless of the quality of their winter follow-up components, under the rhetoric of doing "better" and doing "more" (which is more appropriate to Bobby Kennedy's campaign than to an articulation of the University's commitment to urban problems) evades the main issue: Yale must help to improve the New Haven schools. Three of the most important proposals which have been made in this regard in the past have received negative action or little serious consideration: changes in the Yale M.A.T. program, an experimental school, and the Learning Center.

First, Yale bas done little to make the M.A.T. program applicable to a career in urban teaching, despite a statement by Edward Gordon, director of teacher training, that the interests of students applying to the Yale M.A.T. have changed markedly over the past several years. Now a high percentage of applicants want to teach in inner-city schools, and many come into the program with tutoring experience.

A number of recent M.A.T. graduates currently teaching at Lee High School have voiced numerous criticisms of the program and concluded that "Yale has the program but has not quite decided whether it has the commitment" and that the M.A.T . is " the bastard child whose existence cannot be denied, but whose presence is ignored."

A number of changes should be made in the M.A.T. It is now a basicaJJy suburb-oriented program despite a new component at Lee High School, and it must be made more relevant to urban teaching. It suffers by having to fulfill both Connecticut teaching requirements and Yale master's requirements, and Yale should work to liberalize both. Radical changes in the actual training of teachers

need to be undertaken, and the experience of the Yale Psycho-Educational Clinic in the public schools would provide invaluable insights for restructuring the program.

Yale perpetuates the illusion that instruction in subject matter is central to teacher training. More emphasis must be placed on in-school experience with careful observation, which is not now available, and subsequent discussion in groups of experienced and new teachers.

Yale must assume a less condescending attitude toward the public schools and use the resources of the creative teachers in New Haven. A background of teaching experience and competence in education, not in an academic discipline, should be the primary requirement for the faculty in the teacher training program.

In addition, instructors who are not full-time faculty members should be welcomed with the knowledge that current experiences are vitally important to the M .A.T . student. Many of the above suggestions could infuse new ideas and methods into the New Haven schools.

Moreover, follow-up seminars for M.A.T. students, recent graduates who are teaching in New Haven, and experienced teachers might be organized.

However, the University shows no sign of changing and expanding M.A.T. along any of these lines. In May of last year, Professor Claude Buxton, appointed chairman of the Executive Committee on Elementary and Secondary Education in 1965, wrote a letter to University Provost Charles Taylor advocating the continuation of the M.A.T., apparently with no significant modifications, for five years as a "symbolic" indication of Yale's interest in education.

Second, the idea of an experimental school, with significant community involvement, could have been an important first step for Yale into New Haven. Two years ago, Professor William Kessen circulated to the New Haven Board of Education and to some members of the Yale faculty a proposal for an experimental school (not a demonstration school for some particular idea in education) which would have been under the joint administration of Yale and New Haven. Successful innovations in the school could be transplanted into other parts of the school system. Apparently, funds were available for the school from the Carnegie Foundation.

However, the proposal was abandoned by the Yale administration when the New Haven school superintendent was changed and because of a feeling that such a school would not be an appropriate first joint undertaking between Yale and New Haven - rather one which might strain town-~own relations. Moreover, there were the competing interests of a joint undertaking by the New Haven and Hamden Boards of Education on the old Quinnipiac campus.

Instead of other action, Yale took no action, and in this vacuum a group of Harvard graduates proposed to establish an experimental school in New Haven.

The New Haven Board of Education has not acted favorably on this proposal, partially in deference to Yale. An experimental school composed of a representative group of New Haven students- not Yale faculty childrenstill merits serious consideration as a means for Yale's becoming involved in pre-college education in New Haven.

11 I The New Journal I April 28, 1968

Third, an idea similar to an experimental school, under the rubric of the Learning Center, has been proposed to the Yale administration by Lawrence Paros, director of the Yale Summer High School, Robert Gel bach of the Upward Bound Program and Torrey Orton, a local school teacher. No action has yet been taken on the proposal, but it has received favorable response from numerous individuals in the University. Should this proposal garner the support of the community, perhaps through the Black Coalition, it would warrant immediate implementation.

The Learning Center would accept students who have demonstrated failure or under-achievement in the public schools. They would study six core areas in curriculum (English, mathematics, social studies, science, fine arts, and foreign languages), and schedules would be individually arranged to permit a student more concentration in the area of his interest. Students would study in a workshop, not a classroom setting, both individually and on collaborative projects.

T eachers and associates would develop different teaching styles, but they would generally be available for problem solving and frequent evaluation of students' efforts.

In brief, the Learning Center would attempt to confront creatively the problems of adolescent education with new curricula and a restructuring of the school experience. The Learning Center could complement the present teacher training program at Yale and would be an excellent facility for in-school experience for M.A.T. students if the M.A.T. is reoriented. Also very important. the Learning Center might be used to train black teachers, who are desperately needed in New Haven and elsewhere.

Instead of changing the M .A.T., undertaking an experimental school or adopting the Learning Center proposal, any of which would have an impact on the New Haven schools, the University has been contemplating the establishment of a Center for Studies of ~ucation within the new Institute for Social Science. Professor Buxton, reporting for his committee, submitted a report on such a center to President Brewster on February 4, 1968. While that report bas been rewritten and resubmitted and is not available at this time, any basic changes over the first report would be a real surprise.

The Center for Studies of Education is proposed Instead of re-establishment of the department of education at Yale, which was abolished in 1958 by President Griswold largely because the field of education was thought to be insubstantial by comparison with the research and scholarship of other departments. This attitude prevails, and the Center would be problem-oriented, drawing on the resources of the social science departments.

Thus the Center would be founded on the mistaken assumption that present department standards for hiring faculty have some bearing on a person's value in the field of education. Unless provision is lhade to bring to Yale's proposed Center for Studies of Education some of the brightest people in elementary and secondary education, who would probably IRither deserve nor desire tenure at Yale, lhe University will prolong its irrelevance to the New Haven schools. It is only the lbost exceptional faculty members at Yale

who can meet department standards and still have something to contribute to precollege education. In addition to the reservations already mentioned about the Center for Studies of Education, it should be noted that little thought has been given . to relating this Center to the New Haven schools.

At this juncture, a very important point must be recognized. Yale is not now a great reservoir of resources in public education whose flood gates might be opened to New Haven. In only a few iristances, such as the Psycho-Educational Clinic, bas the University generated through involvement in New Haven any knowledge which bears on the practical problems daily confronting teachers and students in the public schools. Moreover, a detached Yale cannot assume that it knows either what is needed in the schools or what is desired by the community.

Standards which the University would apply and its preconceptions of effectiveness may be irrelevant. Yale should not patronizingly expect gratitude from New Haven as efforts are made to relate the University to the community's problems.

We must recognize that Yale has much to learn if it is ever to have much to offer New Haven. A good first step would be the Learning Center proposal. There are other possibilities, undoubtedly, but we must keep in mind that the examination of Yale's role in education in New Haven h as been conducted for almost three years by committee and without any indication that Yale may become fruitfully involved in the schools.

Most important, Yale must act in response to the community's needs and not according to preconceptions of the correct concerns for a university with a liberal arts tradition. Yale students and faculty need a demonstration of creative leadership by President Brewster. The University must establish a new type of involvement in New Haven. The institution of a new summer high school would not be sign of that leadership.

Yale has no history o ( institutional commitment to improving elementary and secondary education in New Haven. In fact, the time has come to state simply and emphatically that Yale's concern with New Haven has been minimal. Only after this admission will Yale shed its threepiece tactfulness, making itself fully vulnerable to criticism and thereby open to new possibilities.

Yale must find a new sense of responsibility grounded in the shameful realities of how Yale's inaction has contributed to poor education for New Raven's children. Moreover, if Yale is to become helpful in the educational crisis of the urban schools of this country, it must begin by demonstrating an ability to relate to the problems of this community of which it is a part.

As black and white America have developed along separate and unequal paths, so also Yale and New Haven. And the racial implications will become dramatically clear if Yale does not break with its history in pre-college education for New H aven, admitting past failures and becoming more involved.

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Yale Film Society presents the world premier of

Charles Lloyd Journey Within A film by Eric Sherman featuring the Charles Uoyd Quartet Wednesday, May 8 and Thursday, May 9 7:00 and 9:30 101 LC

(

121 The New Journal! Apri128, 1968

Eric Sherman films Charles Lloyd's journey within

by Jeffrey Pollock "When I showed these rushes to Charles, he almost cried. The film was something we had shared intimately." Eric Sherman, Yale senior, brushed his long brown hair under the ever-present safari hat. He started searching through the cluttered New York apartment he had taken five months earlier to edit his film.

"Congress Hall in Warsaw is breathtaking," he said as he rifled through the thousands of feet of film he had shot since last June. ''The people there were so cooperative; they cleared the hall and let me set up my lights to do the shooting. When the quartet was finally on stage, I zoomed back to catch the whole auditorium as Charles began his solo."

Sherman found the reel under his editing table. He moved all the rented equipment aside-the synchronizer, the tape cutter and the hot splicer-to set up the projector. He quickly threaded the first section and turned on the lamp.

Charles Lloyd appears on the screen, towering over his quartet with wild, unruly hair and eyes that slope down like a sharply peaked roof when his face is in repose. He frantically races up and down several octaves, melting the beat into fluid rhythms, and adding fresh harmonies to~ lyric that suggests Ravi Shankar as perhaps spoken in Nashville.

Lloyd has a habit of performing in a Balliett shuffle, a tranced floating on the smooth runs, the slow-spinning sounds that seem to last for minutes. Pianist Keith Jarrett rocks back and forth with him, moving from expansive chords to violent one-note explosions.

In intense moments, when Jarrett is bouncing on the piano bench like a hot seat, the pianist and drummer Jack DeJohnette exchange a sing-song responsive chant that confirms the ritualistic ballet of the whole performance.

Ron McClure caresses his bass, his notes moving in an easy, side-stepping way around Lloyd's upper-register shrieks or bass honks. Lloyd now hits a series of tight chords, simultaneously jerking his torso, then relaxes to wind his body sensuously around a plaintive melodic aside.

The Charles Lloyd Quartet seems held together by an extraordinary rhythmic sense. It is this feeling of movement, both in the music and the physical performance, that Eric Sherman captures in Charles Lloyd: Journey Within, a sixty-minute color film to be shown here at Yale on May 8 and 9-a film that also happens to be Sherman's senior Scholar of the House project.

The movie really began last year when Sherman, then a Culture and Behavior major, wrote his junior paper on the sociology of jazz. He correlated physical movement and rhythm in jazz to the cultural background of the musicians, and discovered that the way in which a jazz man moves becomes a ritualistic ceremony paralleling his rhythmic orientation towards the music.

Last spring Sherman applied to the Scholar of the House Committee to make a film on jazz that would catalogue the performances of a number of musicians and show the relationship between their visual performance and their music. It was approved, meaning that Sherman would take no courses senior year. Sherman had previously helped photograph

and starred in Robert Edelstein's Sally's Hounds. He grew up breathing the air of Warner Brothers' back lots where his father, director Vincent Sherman, worked.

This first film effort by the younger Sherman promised to be of significance to both jazz and cinema. Never before had there been a film about jazz made by a person who was competent in movie-making and who knew something about jazz.

In March, 1967, Sherman visited Ernest Smith, the world authority on jazz in film, and was able to view Smith's collection of jazz filmography. Jam'n' the Blues, made by fashion photographer Gjon Mili in the late forties, is recognized as the most important film on jazz. But Sherman felt the film was "the coldest thing, continually working against the natural warmth of the musicians. Mili put the camera far back, and his long shots created the impersonal atmosphere that he seemed to want. He even strained to till the set with smoke, to keep the myth going of smokefilled back rooms as the only jazz atmosphere."

But in making his own film, Sherman decided to combine a subjective cinematic approach and a documentary technique that would give a sense of involvement.

Sherman constantly refers to the work of Robert Flaherty, a famous documentary film-maker of the late silent era. Like Flaherty, Sherman would not restrict himself to the cold "long shot-medium shotclose-up" progression of "documentary objectivity"; instead he would direct his subjects in highly stylized shot sequences.

But Sherman was still looking for a subject. On May 5, 1967, he found him. That day he attended a concert at Town Hall in New York to hear a new quartet under the direction of Charles Lloyd. "I saw the concert and knew Charles was the one," says Sherman. "I had never seen such visual excitement, such dynamic interplay between four musicians. Their physical closeness and warmth demanded a corresponding enthusiasm from the audience, and a simpatico was established that I had never before experienced. I immediately decided that my film could only be an intensive study of this one musician."

At that point Eric didn't know exactly how he was going to make his film. "I sensed, however, that this was the essence of film-making. I was obsessed with the desire to isolate the personal quality of the performanc.e and put it on film. I hoped to take the theatrical atmosphere of the concert, relate that atmosphere to Charles himself-his personal creative struggle."

Euphoric, Sherman went backstage after the concert, but Lloyd was too busy that night or the next day to talk to him.

The quartet was in the midst of hysteric, last-minute preparations for their now famous Russian tour. Finally, Sherman went to Lloyd's apartment. They talked for several hours. By the time Sherman left, there was already the beginning of a unique artistic relationship and a deep and lasting friendship. " In one day Eric became one of the family," Lloyd recalls. "He laid his lyrics on me and I saw we were spiritually attuned. We could communicate without all the bullshit, as if he had always been with us. Like he was doing things, and running errands, and taking me to the doctor's. I mean Eric's just a beautiful and humane person. He knows I just want to sing my own song and find my audience."

Sherman told Lloyd that he wanted to make a film about him but Lloyd joked that he had heard such promises before.

13 I The New Journal! April 28, 1968

Yale Film Society Lloyd went off to Russia. When he returned from the Russian tour, Sherman was at the airport, standing in his shirtsleeves in the rain, filming with a Bolex 16mm. Sherman had kept the faith, and Lloyd knew it.

With the help of Marty Rubin and Peter Friedman, both members of the Yale Film Society, Sherman filmed the quartet during the sumer at a Rheingold Concert in Central Park. While Marty and Peter shot the audience coming in, Sherman experimented with his new Eclair, a French camera with a powerful zoom lens, recognized as the finest light-weight 16mm camera in the world. Sherman had no organized sequences planned for the concert footage; he was more interested in capturing the quartet's visual excitement. He made long takes, quick cuts, and wide pans, as he tried to "shoot a little of everything."

In reviewing the rushes, Sherman excitedly discovered that the quartet's warmth came across. His technique was successful. The frames seemed to capture the see-saw rhythm of the whole stage and the harsh, brilliant quality of the music. Sherman also discovered that unnatural angles or contrived shots were less effective than an honest, straightforward style.

As the initial technical groundwork was established, Sherman became less arbitrary in his method and began to impose his own subjective, creative effort on the shooting.

Later, Sherman took Charles into Central Park alone, and tried to film what be was slowly seeing as a basic relationship between Lloyd and Nature. As Lloyd expresses it, " I believe that there are natural rhythms in Nature, a scene where there can be life. I search for that place in my music, and it's totally insane, but as I do my thing there is an optimism in my music, a kind of wonder or love of life. I just can't lay alienation on anyone."

Sherman's efforts to film this gentle, pastoral quality were suddenly disrupted by the death of leading jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. Lloyd went into a deep depression; he even questioned his musical career. He finally came out of it several weeks later. Then Sherman suggested that Lloyd take a trip to Memphis where Lloyd's mother and step-father still lived.

Lloyd agreed, and Sherman packed lights, 10,000 feet of of film, three cameras, luggage, and Marty Rubin and Peter Friedman into a Valiant and sped off to Memphis. He arrived in time to film Lloyd's arrival by plane, "his comin' home to pay his Memphis dues."

Lloyd's mother took Sherman around Memphis and helped recreate her son's childhood. These days in Tennessee were essential to Sherman's conception of Lloyd in the film.

"Charles' musical upbringing was like most Negro jazzmen's," Sherman explains.

"He played in the usual pick-up groups in beer halls and back rooms. And this M emphis-Blues tradition is essential to his music. Yet the thing which characterized Charles, which enabled him to develop the European-melodic side as well as the rhythmic, was a lonely, often self-conscious, but unwavering individualism throughout his youth. He could never accept the nihilistic view of Negroes around him, bitter Tomism or vicious militancy.

He bad this inner thing, this refusal to accept a label of color. He was thus able to approach his music more fully, and was strong enough to get out of Memphis and study on the West Coast."

Lloyd went to Southern Cal where he received his master's degree in music.

And it was at college that he met his future wife Joan, a tall, elegant white woman.

Things were often difficult for Lloyd at USC; be remembers, "There was no communication there, no expressive jazz like we do. You had to go round about to make the scene."

Lloyd's identity as a Negro was also first criticized at USC. Afro-Americanism was not only a force in the community but among jazz musicians as well. Musicians avoid him because he wasn't "black" enough. But Lloyd insisted, "If they don't tolerate you, you have to be bigger than it.

Music transcends the whole scene."

"It's back to what is cause and what is effect," argues Sherman. "Yes, he was light-skinned, but he felt Negro. The important thing is that he has been consistent in this drive to gain integrity. He never falls back on a bitter self-pity for being Negro. He never lapses into a black hang-up."

Black or white, the young jazzman must struggle to transcend the terrible conditions jazz musicians must accept in this country, an exhausting succession of short club dates and one-nighters. "You play in little jazz rooms or bars where people are juiced and ask you to do Melancholy Baby," Lloyd explains. "I played with Chico Hamilton and later Adderley. Playing in those holes they call jazz lounges, guys get fed up. It's hard to keep a group together."

To capture this side of jazz, traditionally portrayed on film, Sherman followed Lloyd out to the West Coast. Through his growing involvement with the four musicians, (managing them for a time, arranging press spots, living through a week of strenuous playing conditions at Huntington Beach), Sherman still saw Lloyd the individualist and Lloyd the child of Nature.

Sherman saw that the four musicians are on the same spiritual wavelength. They were concerned with an inner need to create a valid musical statement, rather than a thing of racial tensions or personal hang-ups. They are simply a group of men busy taking the music apart and putting it back together in a realignment that will dictate the future of jazz.

In Sherman's film, Keith Jarrett, the pianist for the quartet, says, "Artists learn Jaws about their art parallel to the laws of the universe. When I play with the group, I understand the Jaws."

Each musician agrees that Nature is the answer, and Nature is what their music is about. Nature and "the journey within" stand as verbal signposts for the cinematic road Eric Sherman takes in his film.

"I found myself using new norms, actually learning the Jaws of Nature," says Sherman. "When you look at the world through a viewfinder for nine months, you see different rhythms, what I call natural rhythms. I'm not a Maharishi guy, but that vernal, open quality is there. They said it was in their music, and you find that they're right. I found it in m y film as well.

There isn't one angle shot in the entire sixty minutes; I wanted to express a kind of order, a movement.

"But that fluid order is difficult. And that's the problem with a lot of experimental films. Opposition and conflict is easy to see and easy to express in film.

You just move quickly. and cut furiously.

But fluidity is much more important.

That's why I think Renoir is the greatest continued on page 18

Tuesday, April 30 Michelangelo Antonioni's first color film RED DESERT (1965) Monica Vitti, Richard Harris "Do you know what I'd like? Everyone who ever loved me ... to have them here around me ... like a wall." ' Guiliana (Monica Vitti) in RED DESERT Three showings at 4 :00, 7:00, and 9:30 Admission 75¢ 101 LC

Relax.

When you're out of the office, let VIP handle all your calls For details: 787-4104 VIP answering service

141 The New Journal I April 28, 1968

The village in the Vietnamese war

by Samuel Popkin Dennis Duncanson, Government and R evolution in Vietnam, Oxford, 1968.

Ward Just, To What End: Report from Vietnam, Houghton Mifflin, 1968.

There are two ways to study Vietnam, as history or as theater: Dennis Duncanson spent six years in Vietnam as a member of the British Advisory Mission to the Vietnamese government. A veteran of the British Colonial Service, he was Director of Chinese Education in Malaya. He understands Vietnamese bureaucracy and reads Chinese, Vietnamese and French.

Ward J.ust spent 18 months in Vietnam as a reporter for the Washington Post, and his reporting was honored by the Overseas Press Club. He understands American bureaucracy and has read Kafka, The Good Soldier Schweik and Catch-22.

In the long run Duncanson's book will be a major contribution to modern Vietnamese history. It is solid and well documented and has excellent historical summaries. But people today don't want facts, they want their beliefs reinforced.

Just's book suits the mood of today.

Duncanson seems to think the war could have been won if only American strategy had been better planned. Just gives the impression hat this could never have happened. The sense of urgency, threat or commitment was simply not strong enough to unite the American effort. Americans could not even agree on terms; as Just says, " It was a question of which Jesuit was in charge."

Mr. Duncanson is an honest hawk. Even looking back at the awesome toll the American effort has exacted in Vietnam, he favors an independent, noncommunist South Vietnam and upholds the domino theory. But he is fair in all he presents and thus gives a telling and detailed analysis of the debacle in South Vietnam. Except for the American intent to keep South Vietnam afloat, he finds very little that is right, either with the Americans or with the various South Vietnamese governments.

Speaking before the Fulbright committee, John Kenneth Galbraith once remarked that "if we had never gone to Vietnam, that country would today be enjoying the obscurity it so richly deserves." The sad fact is, however, that we did go to Vietnam and it still enjoyed obscurity. When we first became involved, no one knew or cared about the country, and no one seems to have understood the complex tangle of factions and interests we were entering. As Duncanson notes, during the Diem era, the ramshackle edifice of factional allegiance, vested interest, and patronage, resting on the shifting sands of foreign aid, opposed to the Communist threat, not a shield of national unity, but a host of 'internal contradictions', waiting to be exploited. ...

From the beginning the two pillars of American support for Diem were the building of a strong national army and economic aid to raise the standard of living. There was also some technical assistance for particular government efforts. The crux of the failure of the cumulative US effort, Duncanson notes, was want of coordination and direction in the application of aid and advice. "Defense freedom" was a slogan, not a policy or a program of action.

Vietnam needed a leader who could understand the government as a whole and Samuel Popkin, who spent ten months in Vietnam, is a lecturer in Political Science and is currently writing a book on the Vietnamese village.

see the relation of all the parts. "Diem and Nhu were not of that calibre," says Duncanson. But the US stood back, keeping up its commitment, treating " 'defense of freedom' as a problem separate from the governing of Vietnam."

Duncanson does not blame the failure of Diem and his American support on subversion, either from North or South.

Whether it was in our national interest or not, we did commit ourselves, and" ... it was precisely ... to make South Vietnam viable to the point of resisting aggression, that the programme had been embarked on."

Looking at Duncanson's review of the Diem era, the reader finds it hard to see how Diem lasted as long as be did. Diem never had the support of the various sects, factions and parties that make South Vietnam so complicated. He was in the position of having to guard against coup and revolution at the same time, an impossibie situation even for a more capable person.

In a sense Diem had to choose between guarding the state and guarding the people.

He chose to guard the state and in the end lost both. Intelligence services were fragmented and spent their time watching each other, not the spreading of VietCong domination over rural areas. The military chain of command was fragmented, and officers were appointed on the basis of loyalty, not competence.

Nowadays, the liberal oversimplification is that Diem's oppression and tyranny were responsible for the ever growing VietCong strength in rural areas. The truth, while no more complimentary to Diem, is much more complicated. The resentment directed toward Diem stemmed largely from the way he reacted to Viet Cong presence in a village; his reactions were often worse than the VietCong actions.

The Vietnamese village, as Duncanson shows, bas always been the traditional breeding ground for revolution and anarchy, and neither Diem nor any of his successors has changed that situation.

Diem believed, as do many Vietnamese and Americans even today, that the traditional village, with its ancient institutions, was the key to stability and harmony. All evidence contradicts this.

When I talked to Americans in Saigon and urban Vietnam they seemed to overlook some basic facts of village life.

The village was never a happy, cohesive community full of singing peasants. If Diem's view of the village was realistic, then so was Fiddler on the Roof with its happy, smiling Cossacks. No institutions of law and order, which would provide the peasant with redress for grievances, were developed. Justice was the province of village elders, and any problem they couldn't handle went unsolved.

Government by elders was conservative and narrow. It did not build national identification and it provided no careers for young, ambitious peasants. The only place in rural Vietnam where a peasant had an opportunity for a career with a chance of advancement was with the Viet Cong. Under the old system peasants were supposed to be happy farmers; they weren't supposed to want the corrupting careers of modern life.

Besides the lack of rural career opportunities and the absence of real law and order, life in the villages was boring, especially before the recent transistor boom. The VietCong had easy access to many villages because they brought

minstrels and puppet shows, not because they brought revolution.

As the Viet Cong's strength increased, every reaction to their activities served to increase their strength still more.

Duncanson thus can call Vietnam a "symbiotic revolution." The reaction to VietCong progress in the villages was military action by an army under urban officers who had no identification with rural peasants and no reliable information to guide them.

In this situation, ARVN (The Army of the Republic of Vietnam) did what it was trained to do. It went chasing around on big operations, walking over the villages in search of guerrillas. This was a crucial mistake. The VietCong strength was not in the guerrillas but in the local "precinct workers" or cadres, who worked in the villages to develoP. a belief among the peasants that the VietCong, whatever their faults, were better to the peasants than the government army. As long as ARVN was so destructive, it was a good idea for the peasant to fortify his village.

While ARVN was cautiously stepping around the bamboo spikes, the peasant could hide his chickens.

Things got worse as ARVN became more and more frustrated.

Diem didn't want casualties, and the Americans wanted progress. The result: more artillery was used and the spiral of escalation ascended. Though the civilian death toll from the ever mounting use of planes and artillery over the years was nowhere near what one might expect, artillery lost the war. The flow of refugees from shelled villages complicated all problems. Peasants soon learned to shelter themselves from air and artillery attacks in their villages, but the villages were being shot up. Many ambitious peasants, the ones around whom the rural government could best be built, took off for the cities. Others flocked to distant villages. A vicious climate of distrust came to exist where no peasant knew whom he could trust. And, of course, large numbers joined the Viet Cong - some because they hated the government for its cruelties, but most because they were afraid of city life and had no place else to go.

By the time Diem was overthrown, the Viet Cong were well entrenched with a good grass roots organization throughout the country. This was their strength and always has been. The large VietCong units, including those of P AVN (People's Army of Vietnam), have served as a bullfighter's cape, keeping the Americans busy chasing around in the central highlands and near the demilitarized zone, far from the villages upon whose support the VietCong depend.

Between American domination on one hand and the segmentation of their own society on the other, the governments since Diem have been no better. Every officer seems to fancy himself a Bonaparte.

One new American welfare program after another, which couldn't help being badly administered, added to the chaos.

Vietnamese bureaucracy was caught in the position of having to administer a series of unrealistic programs, with the quality of performance becoming successively lower. But the programs really did raise the overall standard of living- including that of the VietCong who began to use cement-lined tunnels.

This is where Just is at his bestdescribing the air of unreality surrounding the American military and civilian efforts. continued on page 18

15 I The New Journal I April 28, 1968

This particular war

by A. Dwight Culler "I was in the Civilian Public Program for C.O.'s during World War II," says Dwight Culler, director of graduate studies in English. "After chopping down trees in a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp in New Hampshire, I spent two years as an attendant in a mental hospital in Middletown, Connecticut.

"Later I was sent to a camp inNorthern California for 'bad boys' because I had sent an impertinent letter to the superintendent of the mental hospital complaining about the food. I spent that winter digging one garbage pit two feet square.

There was great resistance to the Selective Service System in this camp and very little work was done.''

History repeats itself curiously. Almost thirty years ago I was a graduate student at Yale and was faced by the same problem that now confronts my students. The lottery had turned up my number early and I had registered as a conscientious objector. I was not a member of one of the historic peace churches (though my father had been in his youth) and I was not even much of a churchgoer. I had merely decided I could not do this thing and would not.

I have often tried since then to disentangle the elements of moral idealism, intellectual aloofness and pure pigheadedness that went into this decision, but have found myself unable to do so. Enough to say that I decided.

Now, however, I see students who are just as religious as I was, and quite as sincere, hesitate to become objectors because they are not sure they faJI within the definition of the act. Their objections may not be religious enough and they may object only to this particular war, not to war in general. I am thus aware that I had a great advantage. Whereas I was confronted by a good, clean, sensible war and so knew that I was against war in general, they are confronted by one so horrible and absurd that they imagine it is only this particular war that they object to.

I think that they are wrong. I think that when they reflect on what they see in the television sequences they will realize that even if this were not happening in a sector of the world in which we have no business to be and for a reason which has long ago been lost sight of, it would still be horribly, horribly wrong. I think that their feeling that they are not against war in general is due to an insufficient ability to conceive of the nature of war. Any war is exactly like this one: something they could not participate in without being brutalized, something for which they could not come back and live with themselves as decent, humane people.

Still, if on reflection they find they are not against war in general but only against this particular war, then the Jaw says that they are not conscientious objectors. For thirty years I have meditated on this statement and wondered what it means.

As far as I can see, it means that, according to the Selective Service System, God thinks in abstractions. He forbids only classes of acts, not particular acts. Of course, we can all think of a famous instance to the contrary, in the second chapter of Genesis, where God declares, "Of all the fruits that grow in the garden thou mayst eat freely, but of this particular fruit thou mayst not eat"; and Antigone, I believe, did not have an aversion to unburied bodies in general.

We all realize, of course, that the intent of the directive is that the individual should not exercise his private judgment in determining which laws be shall obey.

But the conscientious objector bas already done that. He has said, this law I will obey, that not. I will stop at traffic lights, I will not go to war. We know too that classes of acts differ in the degree of their generality and in whether they are real entities or arbitrary divisions.

Just as God might have preserved his reputation for abstraction by forbidding all the fruit in the garden, or only all the apples, or all the Mcintosh apples, or all the apples on that particular Mcintosh tree, or all parts of that particular McIntosh apple, so the C.O. can object to all war, or onJy to all unjust wars, or to all wars of colonialism, or to all wars against

yellow races striving to fulfill their national aspirations, or to all Vietnam wars, or to all acts in this particular Vietnam war. If he really wishes to preserve his character for generality, let it be the last to which be objects, though I myself would say that he is not confronted by an Aristotelian category but by a particular situation.

But what, then, if he isn't sufficiently religious? Philosophically, the basis for conscientious objection is the recognition on the part of the state that if two duties, one civic and one religious, come in conflict, it is the latter that takes precedence.

Historically, the idea goes back to seventeenth-century conceptions of religious toleration. The problem in applying so simple a theory arises, of course, from the fact that, although the state acknowledges that it must give way before a religious duty, it takes it upon itself to define what religion is and what kinds of duties it may enjoin. (It would not dream of making an establishment of religion, but it does not mind theologizing a little on the side.) It is not absolutely rigid in these matters and some latitude is left to the theological predilections of the Local Board. But in general, apart from the fact that God must speak in abstractions, they prefer that he be a Person, that he communicate chiefly to people in churches, and that he discuss the matter of war largely with Quakers, Mennonites and Brethren.

In the last war I spent three and a half years with Quakers, Mennonites and Brethren and came to have a great affection and respect for them. But there is no question that they are the relic-the last two especially--of obscure sixteenth- and seventeenth~entury sects who are completely outside the main stream of modern life. The Selective Service System buys itself great mileage, in terms of a reputa-

tion for religious tolerance, by granting exemptions to these tiny, almost nonexistent sects.

At the same time it in effect declares that no one in America can have a conscience, at least on the subject of war, unless he lives in the intellectual backwaters. It takes no account of what happened to religion in the twentieth century and comes as close to denying real religious freedom as any democratic government has ever done. Its tokenism in recognizing the Quakers, the Mennonites and the Brethren is a supreme example of political cunning.

This cunning has worked so well that young people now forget that Selective Service has nothing to do with determining who is or who is not a conscientious objector. True, they frame the legal definition and decide who gets the exemptions, but a conscientious objector defines himself. He defines himself by his own act.

He is anyone who stands up on his two legs and says, out of sincere conscientious conviction, this thing I will not do. It may well be that he will go to jail for saying so--and no one should register as a conscientious objector who is not prepared for this eventuality-but he is a C.O. In the last war, if my memory serves me, there were about 12,000 objectors in the camps and about 12,000 in jail.

Legally, the latter were not C.O.'s, but by their willingness to suffer for their beliefs they proved that they were; they were so listed statistically, and many of them were later released to the camps.

Whether they were against all wars or only that particular one I don't know.

It so happens that most of us are only of age to fight one war in our lifetime, and that we must either fight or refuse.

The others are a hypothetical question.

A Yale Institution for Upperclassmen

161 The New Journal! April28, 1968

Vassar-Yale continued from page 9

Some teachers were skeptical of the alternative proposals. "There was an immense scrambling for facts without sitting back and thinking about what things meant," said one committee member. Other teachers, mostly junior faculty, thoughrthe patchwork of alternatives was impractical, an excuse for not moving. One teacher said to a colleague: "They're nothing but halfthought-out, slick, Madison Avenue money-raisers."

The alumnae came back to Vassar for their annual reunions at the June Commencement. It was hot, and conversation was only about the VassarYale affiliation. Alumnae officers repeatedly attacked the move. Simpson, recalling his earlier statement about betraying "the essence" of Vassar by abandoning neutrality, told associates that alumnae officers were misusing their offices. The officers replied that Simpson was misusing his.

The alumnae also gave birth to two of the most savage rumors that appeared during the entire affair. The first was that Alan Simpson was using the Vassar presidency and the New Haven move to become president of Yale, after.Brewster departs for the Senate. The other was that Yale had tried to get Connecticut College to move to Yale before asking Vassar. No one likes to be second choice, least of all Vassar alumnae.

The evidence for the Conn College rumor was scanty. At a cocktail party in· New York in 1964, Brewster had indeed asked a Conn College trustee, "Why don't you move that school of yours to New Haven?" And in his 1966 commencement address at Conn, Brewster had cracked that, no, it was not true Yale was moving to New London. But there had been no official contact. In May, 1967, Evalyn Clark, a history professor at Vassar, asked Charles Shane, president of Conn College, why Conn had turned down the move to Yale. "Well, we didn't take it too seriously," Shane replied.

Simpson was chagrined at the treatment he was getting from the Vassar ladies; but he remained confident that he could convince people. Some associates said be should stop pushing the affiliation, lest it split Vassar apart and do irreparable · damage to the school and to his presidency. But, like Sisyphus, Simpson persisted.

The administrations of the two schools thought they could please alumnae and trustees by taking them on a tour of Yale and the proposed site for Vassar in New Haven.

The University owned most of the 40 acres along Prospect St., and planned to buy the Culinary Institute of America to make the entire area between the campus and the Divinity School into the new home of Vassar. Yale officials were enthusiastic about the site, sloping up a hill and studded with trees, which they considered the best in New Haven- much better than the area they bad once considered on Dixwell Avenue behind the gymnasium.

As the trustees ambled about, however, they were thinking about the rundown neighborhood on nearby Winchester A venue, where racial disturbances had taken place that summer. They also objected to the proximity of Olin Mathieson's Winchester Rifle plant, and

worried that a huge highway was going to cut Vassar off from the rest of the University.

Perhaps, Yale said, but the highway would be sunk below ground level.

Some of the trustees fretted about the "postage-stamp size" of the site, even though the present Vassar campus proper occupies only about 100 out of the 1000 acres the college owns. The Yale officials kept praising the beauty of the site. On one of the trips, ~am Chauncey pointed to a tree. "Look at that huge silver beech tree," he said to one of Vassar's female trustees. "Tell me, do you have any trees as beautiful as that one at Vassar?"

"No," she snapped.

The trustees were served sumptuous luncheons at Brewster's house, along with ·a platter of promises - that the area would be well-lit and weU-patrolled, and that Vassar would get her own library building and other facilities. But as far as the trustees were concerned, none of New Raven's delights could match Vassar's pastoral home.

13 During the summer, Kingman Brewster went sailing with Alan Simpson at Simpson's retreat in Little Compton, Rhode Island. At the same time, the Study Committee Staff, which in June had assigned sections of its material for writing, began piecing together its final report, amid disagreement over whether the report itself should advocate the move.

Nell Eurich urged that its bulk remain neutral, with expressions of desirability restricted to covering letters from the two presidents. Mrs. Eurich had been gradually solidifying her position at Vassar, and she was eventually the only member of the Joint Staff to oppose the move (although she never publicly ·admitted it). Because of her efforts, the final report contained no advocacy, no general principles - only a lot of dry figures, charts and proposed arrangements.

When the drafts were completed, the Staff of the Vassar-Yale Study Committee met in New Haven for final discussion.

From August 29 at ten in the morning to noon the following day, the participants went over, word for word, the contents of the report. Kingman Brewster led the meeting and, with pencil in hand, took suggestions and corrected the final copy.

When it was completed, the report was typed up, multilithed and bound at the Yale Press in loose-leaf notebooks, which went to the trustees of both schools and selected faculty members at Yale. The Vassar faculty never got a chance to look at the report, even though it was in the library at Yale, until after the trustees' decision.

Staff members were generally relieved to be finished, and Yale people looked forward to standing aside while Vassar made its decision. Brewster told friends he thought it was "a damn good report."

14 But Yale knew it was up to Vassar now.

The Vassar trustees also received the report of the New Dimensions Committee. With its general projections for Vassar's future, it seemed far more imaginative than the meticulous but cutand-dried Vassar-Yale Study report.

At this point a few people were beginning to claim that the move to NeW

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Haven would actually be a conservative answer to Vassar's problems. In the October Alumnae Magazine, Dean Nell Eurich sampled faculty opinion and found that "the essence of the Vassar education" was its creativity and originality, its democratic and pioneering spirit and its commitment to teaching and to the individual student- things one wouldn't find so easily in a university. That same month, in a speech to alumnae, she quoted an article in Daedalus that said the trend of the future was toward privacy, independence, peace and quiet. This too obviously meant Poughkeepsie.

Vassar's trustees, half of them alumnae, convened eight times that fall, sometimes in Poughkeepsie, sometimes in New York City at John Wilkie's 73rd Street apartment. The sessions were long and tedious and inconclusive. As time went on, the Vassar-Yale Study was becoming increasingly irrelevant to the discussions, for the trustees were arguing over desirability, not feasibility.

Before the trustees made their decision, Simpson and Wilkie mailed letters to all the alumnae saying they would "consult" with the faculty under terms of the Governance before finally agreeing to make the move. But the statement was clearly hedged, not quite guaranteeing the professors veto power.

Meanwhile, alumna Dorothy Seiberling's opposition to the New Haven move had come to the attention of the editors of Life, who asked her to write a story on the Vassar-Yale Study. Pleased, she sent to Vassar a photographer, who was told by Vassar officials not to talk to anyone. Information, he was told, would come later when the report was completed.

Feeling rebuffed, Miss Seiberling, an art editor, obtained most of her information from public accounts and private conversations with Vassar faculty members. Some professors told her they bad been discouraged from talking to outsiders; several told her the rumor about Conn College.

She talked to no one at Yale except students and some art department faculty because she felt she would get only the "official line" there.

Headlined "How Dare They Do It?", her article was a ranting polemic against the move that suggested a conspiracy between Brewster and Simpson. It was enlivened by a photo of the projected Vassar site in New Haven, shot so that the Olin Mathieson gun factory and its smoke loomed directly over Vassar's proposed doorstep.

The article alleged that Vassar got Yale on the rebound from Connecticut College.

Charles Shane, president of Conn, was asked about the charge during lunch. He sputtered with rage and denied it Vehemently. Later, he mailed a letter to Life saying it wasn't true. Life did not print the letter.

A few days before the Seiberling story appeared, Brewster, somewhat concerned, bad called his friend, Hedley Donovan, Editor-in-Chief of Time-Life. Donovan laid he knew nothing about it. When Brewster saw the story, he was livid. "This 1rouldn't have happened if Harry Luce "ere still alive," a Yale official said.

At Vassar, there was an ambivalent tion to the article. Many- for the rd -expressed regret that the article appeared. Nevertheless it seemed to ieve tensions that had been building for ost a year. All the apprehensions, even

if overstated, were now out in the open, in print.

The Seiberling article, in giving form to the opposition, helped speed the VassarYale affiliation, once so fair and soon so battered, to a merciful death. At the alumnae meeting in Poughkeepsie in midOctober, passions were strangely subdued, as though everything had been said and there was nothing more to do. Interest turned to Franny Taft's husband's mayoralty campaign in Cleveland.

Fj.nally, in November, there was one last effort at compromise that brought Simpson and Brewster together.

Eight days later, the lingering came to an end.

15 November 20, when the Vassar trustees took the final vote and Alan Simpson read his statement three times, was a Monday.

Two days later everyone went home for Thanksgiving. Before she left, one student received a note from Simpson. He thanked her for her optimism about the affiliation and then concluded, "Now, let's get going."

When the girls came back, the report of the Vassar-Yale Study Group was available in the library and the New Dimensions Committee's office. It could have been a curio from a thousand years ago. Few took the time to look at it.

The following Tuesday about thirty girls gathered at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Simpson for a buffet supper. The college deans were also there, although Nell Eurich, spilling over with apologies, arrived late. Over sherry in the living room, Simpson chatted with the girls. He was in good spirits; the conversation was about exactly how Vassar could get going right now. He wanted to hear what the girls thought was wrong and what suggestions they could offer to improve Vassar.

There were already plans to talk about.

A few days before, Simpson bad said, "If we haven't produced some kind of college for men within five years, I'd be a very surprised and disappointed man." Now there was discussion in Simpson's living room of curricular changes and easing of social rules, talk about exchanges with men's schools, about the proposed graduate institutes, and even about the new dining hall plans that had been shelved a year before.

Everyone talked about the options, but no one mentioned the obstacles. For one thing, the money. For another, the Vassar progressives who want change in Poughkeepsie and the traditionalists who like Vassar more or less the way it is no longer share a common cause.

The talk went on pleasantly, as people passed along the buffet. No one wanted to believe that the trustees might have made the wrong choic.e , that Vassar might be in serious trouble. People found chairs and couches where they could balance their plates on their knees. One girl, sitting in a corner, caught sight of a pile of photographs on a bureau. Picking through them, she came upon a picture that bad been taken off Little Compton, Rhode Island, during the summer. It showed Simpson and Brewster on Simpson's yacht, smiling under the sun.

"The conspirators," joked the girl.

Mrs. Simpson, nearby,laukhed. "Alan and Kingman- the conspirators."

Across the room, Alan Simpson was talking with the girls about Vassar's daunting and dazzling future in Poughkeepsie.

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Charles Lloyd continued from page 13 director. If you can express struggle through a fluid style, you are doing something much more valid."

By the end of the summer, Lloyd was ready to return to Europe. He says, "I got spoiled in Europe. I want to play to open people under good conditions, to transcend the whole mundane scene through music.

I was tired of phonies saying 'You're big and beautiful, you look like Paganini' and doing the whole number to let me know I was cool."

Sherman already had taken enough shots to make his film, but be wanted some European footage. So he went along.

In Olso, Warsaw, Copenhagen, and London, the quartet played to packed concert halls and were treated as celebrities.

It was in Warsaw's Congress Hall that Sherman was finally able to film the opening shots that he had visualized for his film: Jack Delohnette moves around his drum set like a one-man rhythm factory, bouncing on his stool as if he were playing on springs. His cymbals have a splashing clarity, and he seems to aim his rim shots at Lloyd's feet, to keep him dancing.

And Eric Sherman was there, moving forward with his 16mm Eclair into the group's rhythmic explorations, sharing their exhilaration. The group glided with a ball-bearing motion and the student with the camera was a part of it.

DeJohnette later told Sherman, "The music was coming alive, like the earth exploding when spring arrives, and you were in it all. During my solo, I looked up and saw you with the camera and there you were, playing with us."

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continued from page 14 The US military regarded most Vietnamese as hostile, while US civilians regarded them as friendly, and the two views were never reconciled.

While Duncanson's flyleaf is illustrated wi~ the ancient art of Chinese calligraphy, Just s flyleaf contains a quote from Pinter: The desire for verification is un~erstandable, but cannot always be sattsfied. There are no bard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what false. The thing is not necessarily either true or false. It can be both true and false.

This statement applies as much to the American missions as it does to reporters, and Just portrays clearly and painfully the sense of waste and futility in so much that is done: the newcomer who thinks progress is being made, not realizing that the same progressions and regressions have gone on forever; the oldtimers with their guilt, the feeling that after all that bas been done "we must now make the future attractive for those who survive."

And the endless wondering, could anything we do make things better?

Somehow it is all unreal and unbelievable. In spite of all the killing, the rate of population growth has been high.

Surprised by that? That's what an undeveloped country is about - shoot u p the co untry and then spray for malaria mosquitoes; decrease infant mortality and it all "balances." Spend as much on fertilizer as on defoliation and rice production increases. Duncanson and Just both see all this and understand. Where

Duncanson seems to be unrealistic is in his belief that somehow America could have succeeded in Vietnam even without a colonial tradition and a real commitment to the people of Vietnam.

If military power and economic welfare were the key to success, the war would have ended long ago. But there's a missing ingredient that Americans just can't provide - human dignity and social justice.

Life under a corrupt, chaotic government -with enough US money - can be a good life. But it's not a government to identify with, that can integrate society and end a war. Somehow you sense in Vietnam, as did Just, that Saigon infects, that it is destructive. Yet, embarrassing as it may be to Vietnamese with a sense of history and ethics, it is a life that is hard to give-up.

That's at the crux of the matter- so many people from all strata have been able to adjust to the war simply by avoiding the VietCong. When you live under VietCong control, you make a commitment to the struggle - willingly or not. When you live in a government area, it simply means you are not living under VietCong control- no more, no less.

While it is all straight from Kafka for an American in Vietnam, to the peasant soldier it is, on the surface, more like Good Soldier Schweik. No one encourages the village soldiers, no one guides them.

They are on their own and have to keep themselves alive as best they can. At the level of the village soldier, the war looked t<? Just rather antic and comical, so disheveled were these soldiers. But even among the peasant soldiers, the little men who were trying to defend their villages and homes, there was often underneath the Schweik the man who felt a sense of shame for what he was doing, but who felt he could do nothing else.

Peasant youth do not sit down, compare ideologies and decide who can do more for them. A civil war is not like an American election. A young peasant usually joins the side that gets to him first. The important thing is what happens to them once they are on one side or the other. On one side a peasant is a nonentity who will fight if paid regularly. On the other side be is brought through an important indoctrination that changes his self-image.

H e becomes a man who can progress as far in the organization as his own ambitions will take him . If he wants to learn to read, he will be taught; his background is no hindrance.

Still, the majority of highly motivated and ambitious peasants are not in the Viet Cong and do not even sympathize with their aims. So what? They are not in any way contributing directly to ending this war either. They have left the countryside for the city and are working for one of the booming urban businesses, or perhaps they are even working for an American construction company.

After you have been in Vietnam a while, you become more bewildered, the closer you get to any Vietnamese.

In the evening or over a bowl of rice, the conversation eventually turns to the V ietCong. Some V ietnamese hate them , but they all somehow seem to admire and respect the m. There is always a strange sense of embarrassment. Ho Chi M inh is a true Vietnamese hero, not a d r ugsto re cowboy like Ky, and no one ever denies the honesty, ded ication and bravery of the V iet Con g.

19 I The New Journal ! April28, 1968

The closest I came to understanding this embarrassment was when I talked with.a 60-year-old peasant who had been a longtime supporter of the VietCong but who was now in a government hamlet by choice.

"How do the Viet Cong politics compare with the GVN politics?"

"VietCong politics are much better," he said, "they really know how to talk to peasants like me and what to say. The government says many things, but it is often only talk."

"How does the behavior of the VC compare with the behavior of the government?"

"VC behavior is better. They are always polite, always helpful. The village soldiers are now polite, but not so helpful. The ARVN soldiers behave badly."

"WeU, how does life under the VC compare with life under the government?"

"I can't live under the VietCong any more," he said. "Too many speeches and too many meetings. All we ever did was talk about the struggle."

That's what the myth of the village means to me. Peasants who have no material rewards are assumed to have spiritual rewards; when a son sticks to his father for survival, it's called filial piety, and when one village doesn't talk to the neighboring village, it's called solidarity.

Economic welfare and modernization are good , but somehow they don't magicaly bring dignity, pride and selfrespect to peasants, and they don't help knit a society together. We are trying to do in Vietnam what we can't do in our own ghettoes.

Comment continued from page 2 when party structure changed and the Free Soil Party's founding resulted from party disagreement over slavery. He felt that there would be a definite party realignment by 1972 if Nixon did lose to Kennedy and that the age of Lindsay Republicanism would be over. There would appear on the scene, he predicted, a third party of definite power, while the Republicans and Democrats would drift to the extremes of the political spectrum.

Michael Waltuch Yale College

Festival Two years ago the study of film at Yale was an experiment, a side-track of the academic treatment of the arts regarded with mild condescension and not a little suspicion of dilettantism. Students in Standish Lawder's Directed Studies seminar on the history of the cinema grew accustomed to raised eyebrows and quizzical looks when they spoke of their work.

The transfer of Lawder's course to the standard history of art curriculum and the opening of an undergraduate course in filmmaking were major steps forward into this peculiarly neglected field , and the acquistion of the Griggs film collection bas increased the history of art departlllent's film library from three or four titles to more than two hundred.

This year will close with what might tum out to be the most important innovation of all, the Yale Film Festival, which "ill open on May 10. By April 15, five days before the deadline, invitations to 450 independent filmmakers had brought in lllore than fifty entries. In addition, a

twelve-hour package of films from the Ann Arbor Film Festival will be considered. Approximately nine hours of this mass of film will be selected to be shown in three public screenings in the Law School auditorium, May 10, 11 and 12. Since aU the entries must be less than thirty minutes long, each screening should be a richly varied experience. " We're looking for sensitive, experimental, independent filmmakers doing the sort of original, creative work that just isn't seen very often," says Lawder.

To encourage these filmmakers to participate, the Festival will award $1000 in prizes, donated by the pioneer of the early avant-garde film movement, Hans Richter. There is an echo of Richter's taste for intense cinema in the special prize to be awarded for the best film of less than three minutes.

The film jury includes representatives of various approaches to filmmaking.

Willard van Dyke, Director of the Department of Film at the Museum of Modern Art, has accepted, along with the high priest of the underground film movement, Jonas Mekas. Warren Beatty is expected as the third judge, and Renata Adler, film critic for the New York Times, will attend.

The Film Festival is one answer to the delicate problem of the University's approach to the arts and particularly to the working artist. Yale has just begun to approach film as an area of study, and treatment of it is spread through several departments. While the problems of teaching history of film and filmmaking are still being worked out, the Festival is contributing to all aspects of film study at Yale by bringing in the best of the overwhelming number of innovative films being turned out in relative obscurity all over the country.

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