Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
Philip Larkin
That the 1960s at large did indeed prove to be transformative is not in question. That proved to be true of almost every dimension of social, intellectual, religious, and cultural life, not only in North America but also in Western Europe and beyond. Called peremptorily into question were the established modalities of political life and, with them, hallowed intellectual assumptions, long-prevailing attitudes towards race, class, ethnicity, and gender, as well as traditional marital and family roles and, as Larkin’s poem amusingly signals, the deeply rooted sexual mores of yesteryear. Living through this great and multifaceted upheaval of the spirit, and especially so on a college campus, could be a destabilizing experience, as challenging as it was invigorating. Its reverberations proved to be long enduring. In some ways, we are still forced to maneuver uneasily today as we attempt to come finally to terms with the torrent of change that stemmed from that watershed era. And not least of all in the world of higher education at large, as well as in the small sector of freestanding liberal arts colleges to which Williams itself belongs.
By the end of the decade, the successful launching of Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning testified to the degree to which change had become the norm in institutions of higher education and stasis a thing of the past. And that shift had by then left a deep imprint on Williams. In 1961 when we arrived there, it was the “Old Williams” that we encountered—an all-male, fraternity-dominated institution, with the college still functioning firmly in loco parentis and its 1100 students (soon to be edged up in number to about 1250) subject to various parietal regulations and still required, some eighty years after Harvard had abandoned a similar rule, to attend Sunday chapel. Classes were still held on Saturday mornings and classroom attendance in general was both compulsory and carefully monitored, with only a stipulated number of cuts permitted. Students took five courses each semester, and opportunities for interdisciplinary studies were extremely limited; the available majors were nearly all departmentally based and tightly organized. They were built around a substantial core of required sequential courses and culminated in a reasonably muscular major or comprehensive examination. No more than a decade later, that firm institutional profile had been radically altered. Compulsory chapel was now a thing of the past; so, too, were Saturday classes and compulsory attendance at class. Fraternities had been dislodged from their long-standing pinnacle of prominence in student life, and membership in them had come in the end to be proscribed. Instead, students were now housed and fed in college-owned residential houses possessed of a measure of self-governance, and faculty associates were attached to each house. The semester course load had been reduced to four, and the academic calendar had been revamped to make room for a monthlong January (Winter Study) term in which students pursued—on a pass/fail basis—topics not usually taught during the two regular semesters, many of them experimental or experiential in nature. Interdisciplinary studies were beginning to proliferate and the various departmental majors were beginning to be reshaped in such a way as to respond more faithfully and flexibly to the specific characteristics of the various disciplines, while the culminating major examination was now on a species of life support and destined soon to be dropped. The size of the student body was in the process of being increased by a full third, with the additional 650 students being women and an increasing proportion of the overall student body being African American. The size of the faculty was also increasing, not proportionally but enough to permit the appointment of the first women faculty and the addition of such new subjects as anthropology, sociology, history of science, and environmental studies. Finally, having been declared by legislative fiat to be mature adults, students were no longer subject to the old parietal rules and had been given representation on some of the standing committees of the faculty. And while the notion of the college’s standing in loco parentis had not altogether been abandoned, it had mutated uncomfortably into a more ambiguous form. As the chaplain of Harvard College was later dryly to observe, while students today are certainly intent upon preserving the autonomy conceded to them in the 1960s, they incline nevertheless to assume that colleges and universities are still burdened with the moral responsibility for shielding them from the consequences of the way in which they choose to exercise (or abuse) that autonomy.
In toto, this was an extraordinary amount of change to have been crammed within the narrow compass of a single decade. Nothing similar had happened before in the long course of the college’s history; nothing of comparable dimensions has happened since. Coming to Williams in 1876, Bliss Perry had found that “his first Latin lesson, in the preface to Livy,” was “exactly the same assignment” as his father had had in 1848 and, in 1916, his son was to confront that very same assignment. The 1960s were to make it clear that anything even approximating that type of curricular stability was altogether a thing of the past. Such being the case, one is led inexorably to ask what the factors were that made such sweeping changes possible.
The first factor, something not to be underestimated, was the mood, climate of opinion, and circumstances of the time. For higher education, the period stretching from the late 1950s to about 1970 stands out, in retrospect, as something of a golden age. The academic profession was enjoying an era of growing prosperity and high public esteem. While in 1983 a Harris poll was to reveal that no more than 36 percent of the populace reposed “a great deal of confidence” in those involved in the enterprise of higher education, in 1966 the comparable figure had stood at an impressive 61 percent. At the state as well as the federal level, government financial support was at an unprecedented high. On the West Coast, California’s splendid state-sponsored university system was approaching its apogee. Back in the East, the State University of New York was making every effort to match its stature and achievement. Nationwide, as the 1960s wore on (and if one includes the burgeoning community college sector), new campuses were being opened up at the astonishing rate of one a week. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!” Not only was change in the very air that academics breathed, but for academic leaders the opportunity to effect change was wide open and to an unprecedented degree.
Those students of the phenomenon of leadership who resonate sympathetically to contingency theories of one sort or another (and are prone to locating its driving force, therefore, in external environmental factors) will be inclined to attribute to the circumstances of the time rather than to any individual agency the extraordinary wave of change that engulfed Williams over the course of the 1960s. And not altogether without reason. The abandonment of parietal hours and the like, the loosening up of the old curricular forms, the diversification of the student body in racial terms, the embrace of coeducation, and so on—it is hard to imagine such common institutional changes not having occurred, whoever was serving as president at the time. But they would doubtless have occurred in different and, I am inclined to think, less effective ways had they not taken place during Jack Sawyer’s twelve-year presidency which stands out as an unquestionably transformative one. Hailing from Worcester, Massachusetts, Jack had attended Deerfield Academy prior to matriculating, like his father and older brother before him, at Williams. There, prior to going on to Harvard Graduate School, he had an exemplary undergraduate career and, again in the footsteps of father and brother, had served as president of the Zeta Psi fraternity. Thus, though he was later to prove that he could stand if necessary at a critical distance from it, he was certainly embedded in the deeply rooted culture of the Old Williams. His graduate studies were interrupted by four years of wartime service in the US Navy but upon his return to Harvard, he was elected to the Society of Fellows there and served for a while on the Harvard faculty prior to joining the Yale Economics Department. As president of Williams, he proved to be a driving and very much a hands-on leader who involved himself not only in the framing of policy but also in its implementation, sometimes, indeed, irritatingly so, and down to the level of minute detail. And two major, transformative contributions were clearly his. The first is widely celebrated; the second, because of its nature, tends usually to be overlooked.
The first concerns, of course, the definitive removal of fraternities from the Williams scene, freeing up thereby for better purposes the wasteful amount of institutional time and energy previously devoted to the fraternity problem and eliminating a major obstacle to a tighter and undeflected focus on the college’s primary academic mission. Confronted upon his arrival in office by an imperative student petition calling for a radical overhaul in the selection process for membership in fraternities, Sawyer’s response had been quite traditional: he had appointed a committee to deliberate on the matter. It was a trustee, alumni, faculty, and student committee, chaired by Jay Angevine ’11 (in his day a fraternity man) and carefully balanced between staunch fraternity supporters and others critical of the prevailing system. On that committee he imposed no precise mandate; nor did he himself attend its meetings. For many at the time it was simply yet another in a long series of similar committees, and from it nothing more was expected than another round of piecemeal tinkering. Things, however, were to turn out otherwise. The committee chose not to duck the central issue and in May 1962 it recommended that the college take over from the fraternities the responsibility of housing and feeding the student body. It stopped short of recommending the abolition of fraternities and, using diplomatically vague language, seemed to envisage some sort of continuing role for them. Or, at least, a continuing role for those among them financially able to maintain their existence under the changed campus circumstances of the future. That continuing role was not, however, to prove viable. As the complexities of the unfolding situation became increasingly clear to the Standing Committee (under the vigorous chairmanship of Talcott Banks ’28) that succeeded the Angevine committee, and as the financial challenges involved in trying to maintain a continuing existence and paying for the fraternity house mortgages became increasingly apparent even to the staunchest of fraternity true believers, the tide of opinion began gradually to turn in the direction of outright abolition. And that was eventually to be decreed by trustee vote in November 1968.
Jack Sawyer himself, and perhaps also the board of trustees, seemed to be surprised by the comparatively sweeping nature of the Angevine committee’s recommendations. Certainly, the initial public statement issued in June 1962 by way of response to those recommendations stopped short of indicating a willingness to accept and implement them. By October, however, president and trustees alike had rallied to the committee’s position and now committed the college in unambiguous fashion to the major transformation in student residential life that the committee had envisaged and to effecting the necessary changes on an explicit and fairly tight timetable. Not surprisingly, given the traditional strength of the fraternity culture at Williams, the ensuing academic year was marked among alumni by widespread confusion deepening into dismay and, at worst, to splenetic outbursts of anger and resentment. For the president himself, an essentially cautious person averse to conflict (which sometimes even made him ill), it must have been a dreadful year. Indeed, at one particularly tense alumni meeting in Los Angeles he actually fainted.
In the early fall of 1985, during my own first semester as president, I had breakfast with Jack at the University Club in New York. We had met to discuss an idea I had for a potential seminar program focused on acculturating new faculty into the particular demands and opportunities that would confront them in a liberal arts college setting, a seminar program which he thought the Mellon Foundation might well be interested in funding. Business concluded, the conversation turned to other matters. Jack, it turned out, was concerned about the pressures I was coming under from the campus protest movement pushing relentlessly for total divestment by the college of stock held in multinational companies doing some of their business in South Africa. And, perhaps by way of reassurance, he confessed that there had been times during his presidency at Williams when he had not been sure he would get through the next two weeks, let alone the rest of the semester or the full academic year. Though he did not specify when exactly he had felt that way, I simply assumed that he was thinking back over that annus horribilis of 1962–63.
After that year, however, the tide rapidly began to turn and other important issues came gradually to the fore. Not least among them was the move that culminated in the decision to enlarge the college and to embrace coeducation. It now seems clear that Jack had been thinking about some version of this latter move from the very start of his presidency. A century earlier in 1868, John Bascom (one of those faculty members at Williams critical of Mark Hopkins and who was later to become president of the University of Wisconsin), while attacking the rising fraternity culture of the day as hostile to individualism and “independence of opinion,” had also argued for the wisdom of admitting women students to the college. Now, as the 1960s wore on, the college was moving at last to follow in his footsteps, and the fact that the transition to coeducation at Williams went as smoothly as it did owes a great deal, I believe, to the prior exercise of firm presidential leadership culminating in the removal of fraternities and fraternity culture from the institutional equation.
About all of this, I should confess, I was not myself at the time all that clear. To reach that sort of clarity across time, I had to learn a good deal more about the college’s specific history and to grasp more fully the nature of its distinctive collegiate culture. Nor, at the time, was I much clearer about the second major contribution I now believe Jack Sawyer to have made to the revitalization of Williams.
This was very different in nature from the first. It involved no single bold initiative or visibly decisive exercise of leadership. It was, instead, a consistent pattern of behavior embedded in his day by day work and deportment throughout the entirety of his presidency. Perhaps because of that it seems in marked degree to have flown under the radar. What I have in mind is a dimension of institutional leadership that I have come over the years to view as foundational. It involves the educational and instructional side of the leader’s role and the building of a supportive followership. Theorists of leadership (who come in many shapes and sizes) usually classify it as cultural or symbolic in kind, and some describe it as involving an interpretative effort that pivots on what they call “the management of meaning.” That term has something of an Orwellian ring to it, and it is not one that the sociologist Philip Selznick uses. But in an illuminating discussion, he does make the activity it denotes central to administrative leadership as he understands it. Bringing the perspective of humanistic sociology to his analysis of the phenomenon, he places his central emphasis firmly on the crucial role of the leader in defining and proclaiming on a day-in-day-out basis the institution’s role and mission, in nurturing its “embodiment” of an enduring meaning and purpose, in himself (or herself) embodying that meaning, and in infusing it into the institution’s very organizational structures and the routines of daily behavior within it. In its most fundamental reaches, the exercise of leadership as he understands it (and in this I believe him to be correct) pertains less to the exercise of power than to the vindication of the legitimacy of that power. Not merely a function of service in the cause of institutional maintenance, it extends beyond that, he says, “to the defense of institutional integrity,” “the sustenance of the institutional core values, the framing, indeed, of the community’s very identity.”
It was only years later, after much brooding on the matter, that I came to grasp the central importance of this aspect of leadership on which I propose to dwell again later in this memoir. During the 1960s and early 1970s, however, as I became increasingly caught up as a faculty member in responsibilities pertaining to the governance of the college, I came to be better positioned to observe the way in which the president went about the discharge of his complex responsibilities. And, when that happened, I did begin to recognize and certainly to admire the way in which Jack went about things and I dimly began to perceive the degree to which his tenacious day-to-day commitment helped sustain and enhance the intellectual and academic vibrancy of the whole enterprise. Of course, being so positioned brought with it its own demands. As I settled into work at the college and began to get my head above water, I felt the need to become more faithful in my attendance at college-wide faculty meetings, where I was impressed by the vigor and seriousness with which my senior colleagues debated academic policy and with their willingness to engage college-wide curricular issues that extended well beyond their own particular departments. It brought home to me the fact that we constituted not a collection of departments merely gathered together for administrative convenience into a college, but a college divided for certain specified disciplinary functions into a group of departments. Though lacking in parties or even stable factions, I began to think of the faculty meeting as our own modest equivalent of the House of Commons, and, enjoying as I had always done the cut and thrust of debate, after a couple of years I summoned up my courage and began myself to intervene in its discussions. These meetings took place almost every month during the academic year. They were held in Griffin 3, a lovely room in the college’s third-oldest building, an impressive, Georgian-style structure erected in 1828. That room, which has a fine elevation and handsome fenestration, had once been the college’s chapel. It is a graceful and dignified space, an eminently appropriate setting for what, after all, is nothing less than the faculty’s deliberative and legislative assembly over which, by immemorial tradition, the president himself presides. It is a room which echoes for me now with memories of crises past and battles long ago.
At about the same time as I fell under the thrall of Williams, I was being drawn into the beginnings of what was to turn out to be several decades of committee service. It is not uncommon for academics to dismiss the latter as a dreary waste of time. And I have to concede that that is sometimes the case. But by the mid-1960s I had garnered enough experience to realize that when that is indeed the case it usually reflects either the fact that the committee lacks a clearly identifiable mission or the fact that it is being badly led. Or sometimes, God forbid, a combination of both of those things. I served in those early days on two such committees. The first concerned student admissions and seemed to function as little more than the PR wing of the Office of Admission. Those of us on it who were faculty members simply didn’t know enough about the intricacies of the admissions process either to participate in admission decisions themselves or to set sensible policy directions. The second was the Honors Degree Committee whose mission was, to say the least, opaque, and whose functions were destined soon to be absorbed by a reconstituted Committee on Educational Policy. On the other hand, I was also fortunate enough to serve on two other committees that were both possessed of clear and practical objectives and both ably led. From my service on them I learned a good deal about the college as a whole and about how a good chair should go about the task of leading a committee effectively. The first was the Pre-medical Committee, tasked in those days with doing the sort of hands-on work later assigned to an administrator. Its chair was Sam Matthews of the Biology Department, a courteous and kindly leader who was absolutely on top of his responsibilities. The Division I (arts and humanities) representative was Paul Hunter of the English Department, later on to become a scholar of note at the University of Chicago. And I was the (rather ignorant) representative of Division II (social sciences). The second such committee was the Committee of Three, charged, after the faculty had voted in the 4-1-4 calendar, with the task of getting the Winter Study Program off the ground. And that it did, under the steady leadership of Bill Oliver of the Mathematics Department, in quite an efficient manner. It was on that committee that I had the pleasure of getting to know Charles Samuels, then a junior member of the English Department. He had already acquired the reputation of being a very fine and challenging teacher and proved to be a highly intelligent and stimulating colleague. Bracingly dogmatic in the positions he took, he was also somewhat judgmental about his colleagues and prone to assuming that people were fools until they had proved to his satisfaction that they were not. But he was passionately committed to the life of the mind and determined to promote the overall intellectual well-being of the college. His tragic suicide in 1974 was an enormous loss not only to his family, to which he was devoted, but also to the college community at large, depriving us of a valued friend and colleague and a truly fine collegiate citizen.
For me personally the pace of involvement in the governance of the college had picked up fairly markedly in the fall of 1968. By the mid-1960s, talk either of linking our all-male college with a coordinate women’s college or of making an outright commitment to coeducation was very much in the air. In 1967 the board of trustees had authorized the president to appoint a committee composed of trustees, faculty, and pertinent administrative officers “to explore the question of the desirability and feasibility of including women in the Williams College community and to recommend ways and means of accomplishing this if it appeared both desirable and feasible.” In the fall of 1968 a further committee, known simply (if rather cutely) as Committee X and functioning basically as a curricular-oriented subcommittee of the principal body, was established under the chairmanship of Don Gifford of the English Department, with the provost serving as liaison with that main body and the other two members being our onetime neighbor David Park and myself. I was asked to serve, I assume, because I had just been appointed chairman of the Committee on Educational Policy. To this latter committee I had been elected the previous year as one of the Division II representatives, serving under the chairmanship of my colleague in history, Dudley Bahlman, then dean of the faculty. And I had learned a good deal about the college at large from the annual round of assembling the package of courses, new and old, for the coming academic year and helping see it through to a vote of approval at the February faculty meeting. I am not sure why the decision was made to take the chairmanship out of administrative hands and to transfer it to a faculty member. I can only assume that, for purposes of perceived legitimacy, it may have been deemed prudent to take that step at what was proving to be a time of growing tensions within the college community on more than one front. Those were, of course, terrible times in the country at large, which had endured the assassinations of Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers, was bitterly divided over the escalation of the war in Vietnam, and was also being torn apart by mounting racial tensions. The years preceding 1968 had been punctuated by riots, usually racially triggered, in the nation’s cities, from Rochester and Harlem, via Watts and Newark, to Chicago and Detroit. This last upheaval took place in 1967, was among the worst in US history, and ended only after the deployment in the city not only of the Michigan National Guard but also of elements of the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions. My brother-in-law, David, newly commissioned in the 101st and destined soon to be shipped off to Vietnam just in time for the Tet Offensive, was with one of the first federal units to arrive in Detroit and he has vivid memories of the chaos prevailing there and of the degree to which (at least in the eyes of the military) the Detroit police seemed to be out of control.
All of this, of course, generated destabilizing reverberations on the nation’s campuses—perhaps especially so, ironically, on those where there had been a clear effort to diversify the student body racially and where a start had been made on integrating the African American experience into the curriculum. On such campuses the growing numbers of black students were becoming impatient with what they viewed as the glacial pace of change and were beginning to resort to peremptory forms of direct action, unmanageable protests, and the occupation of symbolic buildings. Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and other large universities all went through their ordeal by fire. Cornell, where black students seized a building in protest against perceived racism in the university’s judicial and disciplinary system, came to symbolize the campus upheavals of the era. It did so, especially, after Associated Press photographer Steve Starr’s iconic, prizewinning picture of gun-wielding black students emerging from the building they had occupied was mainstreamed in the national press. And it did so still more in 1987 when Allan Bloom in his Closing of the American Mind highlighted the upheaval at Cornell in 1969 as having exemplified what he characterized as the shameful “dismantling of the structure of rational inquiry” which he portrayed as having taken place in the American universities of that era.
Such anomic upheavals of the spirit were not, moreover, limited to large urban campuses. Small colleges in settings like Amherst, Oberlin, and Swarthmore did not prove to be exempt. Nor did Williams. The occupation of Willard Straight Hall at Cornell took place on April 18, 1969. Less than two weeks earlier, members of the Afro-American Society at Williams, ventilating cognate grievances, had taken over and occupied Hopkins Hall, the building in which, along with some classrooms, the central administrative offices (including the president’s) were housed. That explosive moment of truth had been some time in the making. Martin Luther King had preached in Thompson Memorial Chapel during the spring semester of 1961 and, at a time when there were no more than a handful of black students at the college, a lively enough interest in the civil rights movement had emerged on campus for some forty-eight students to participate in 1963 in the March on Washington and for others to participate in the Freedom Summer of 1964, joining other out-of-state students in the Mississippi campaign to register hitherto disenfranchised black voters.
At much the same time, back at Williams itself, the Office of Admission had launched a vigorous push to recruit academically qualified black students. Ever since Gaius Charles Bolin, proud son of a New York state freedman, had matriculated in 1885 as the first African American student at the college, there had (except during the brief and troubled presidency of Tyler Dennet, 1936–39) been a steady trickle of black students coming to Williams. Some had been students of marked talent, prominent among them Rayford Logan ’17, pioneering historian of Haiti, and Alison and John Davis, classes of 1923 and 1933 respectively, both of them the valedictorians of their respective classes and both destined to become sociologists of distinction. But, as late as 1966, the numbers involved were still miniscule. In the years following, however, the Office of Admission (in this, I think, well ahead of the faculty) had moved vigorously to increase each year the percentage of black students admitted. By the 1967–68 academic year, the overall number had reached thirty-two, scaling up from four seniors to ten freshmen. And in the following year that overall number exceeded forty. A significant percentage of those students hailed from inner-city high schools and, as a small and self-conscious minority, their sense of isolation in—indeed, alienation from—the culture prevailing at a rural, privileged, all-male, and overwhelmingly white New England college campus is readily comprehensible. Given the racial turmoil in the nation at large, and as the black contingent at Williams itself came close to reaching critical mass, some sort of upheaval was well-nigh inevitable.
It was the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968, with the inevitable outpouring of anguish, disillusionment, and rage that followed in its aftermath, that was to set things in motion. Immediately after that tragic event, the Williams Afro-American Society held a campus-wide meeting focused on the problem of racism in American society at large and on the inadequacy of the response of the Williams community to such matters. In the wake of that meeting, the society made a series of proposals for on-campus change, including “the start of a Black Area program which will seek to emphasize the role the Afro-American has played in American life,” the establishment of a number of “Martin Luther King Scholarships” designed to help increase the number of black and other minority students at Williams, and the “start of an Afro-American fellowship room to increase the dialogue between white and black students.” With a sense, I think, of time running out, the administration tried to respond in good faith and without delay to these and several other proposals. In the process, some of them found their way to me, for they were added to what was already a pretty full year’s agenda for the Committee on Educational Policy (CEP).
Oddly enough, the administrator with whom I was to deal on such issues was neither the dean of the college nor the dean of the faculty, under the jurisdiction of whose offices one would have thought they would properly have fallen. My dealings instead were with the provost whose responsibilities under the Williams administrative configuration extended largely to budget formation and oversight, long-range financial planning, and the like. At that time the office was in the hands of a thirty- or thirty-one-year-old acting provost, Steve (Stephen R.) Lewis (Williams, class of 1960), a very bright young development economist whom we had somehow lured back to Williams from the Harvard Economics Department. He brought a wonderfully clearheaded intelligence and remarkably high energy to whatever he put his hand to. Later on in his career he was to serve for fifteen years and with great distinction as president of Carleton College in Minnesota. He was already a good friend and it was for me a great pleasure to see him in action that year and to work closely with him.
Apart from the annual round of assembling, vetting, and seeing the package of course changes, new courses, and so on through to a vote, the CEP had, at the start of the 1968–69 academic year, several other major items on its agenda: the question of whether or not to institute a system of student evaluation of faculty teaching and the choice of the form such a system might properly take; the need to come to some sort of conclusion about the continuing viability of the major (comprehensive) examination or the culminating moment in the college’s major courses of study; an intriguing and creative proposal framed by Bob (Robert) Gaudino of the Political Science Department for a yearlong junior study-abroad program, experiential in nature, which he proposed to call “Williams in India”; and, already emerging on the horizon, a proposal for the institution of a new interdepartmental major in the history of ideas that Dan O’Connor and I were shaping. To these items, at Steve Lewis’s fairly urgent prompting, we added the shaping of an interdepartmental coordinate (i.e., non-major) program in Afro-American studies. To deal with this last item, I appointed a subcommittee whose job it was, having liaised with the officers of the Afro-American Society and with the chairs of the departments most likely to be able to contribute courses, to draft a proposal to bring back to the full CEP. This it did in timely fashion, though the Afro-American Society was later to claim, rightly or wrongly, that it had not been adequately consulted. Whatever the case, and having consulted by phone with the man who was presumably going to be chairing the new program, we brought the proposal up for a vote at the February 8, 1969, faculty meeting where it was approved with little comment and with no dissent. The man in question, Joe (Joseph R.) Harris, a noted African historian who also taught Afro-American history, had been appointed professor earlier that year and was to begin his teaching at Williams in the fall of 1969. He proved to be a fine, thoughtful colleague and he and his wife, Rose, were to become good personal friends of ours. Williams was fortunate enough to be able to hold onto him until 1975, at which point he left to take up the chairmanship of the History Department at Howard University in Washington, DC, the country’s premier predominantly black institution, and later to become a dean there.
The other related item of a pressing nature had been bequeathed to the CEP by the Admissions Committee at the end of the previous academic year. That committee being at the time little more than a wing of the Admissions Office, it had obviously been felt that the item in question should be handled by one of the faculty’s standing committees. This indicated its belief that, on the matter of the college’s admission policy towards “disadvantaged” students,
the waters have gotten deep enough . . . to warrant the immediate attention of the CEP so that we can continue, effectively and honestly, to translate the educational objectives of Williams as we look to the future. The problem is really to try to define what should be the nature and extent of our institutional commitment to the disadvantaged students of this country. One writer on this general subject perhaps states the question best when he says that the heart of the problem is not what institutions of higher education are to do, but what they are to be.
It was the success of the Admissions Office in recruiting an increasing number of black students that had precipitated this move, and the rather vague and general way in which the issue was framed reflects, I believe, the delicacy or discomfort that still inhibited white academics at that time from speaking more forthrightly about the explicit targeting of admissions efforts on the recruitment of members of a particular racial minority. But the indirect or opaque way in which the issue was framed served also to introduce an unhelpful lack of clarity into the early phase, at least, of our deliberations. As a result, we were drawn into discussions that reached well beyond matters pertaining directly to admissions at Williams—discussions concerning the desirability of making Williams faculty available for temporary service at historically black colleges or of mounting summer remedial programs to help disadvantaged students about to enter other colleges, and the like.
We had made the issue the priority item in our fall committee meetings, and by the November 6 faculty meeting we were ready to report on our findings to date. The matter was such as to evoke from the faculty a sharply focused degree of attention. At the meeting, two members of the committee, Bill Moomaw of the Chemistry Department and Larry Graver of English, both of them very gifted colleagues, undertook to sharpen the focus of discussion by role-playing as firm advocates of competing positions. A very lively and helpful debate ensued and it was followed by a stream of suggestions submitted to the committee by individual members of the faculty.
All of these discussions and exchanges brought clearly home to those of us on the committee the need, if we hoped to bring the matter to any proximate conclusion, to insert into the debate a battery of distinctions capable of turning even a medieval scholastic pale with envy! With that in mind, I tried my hand at an appropriate memorandum and shared it with the committee, which approved it after a few pertinent revisions. That done, and in preparation for the December 18 faculty meeting, we shared the memorandum with the entire faculty. In that brief document we distinguished among the categories of students we had in mind and also among the various educational goals we might wish to pursue.
In relation to the former, we distinguished between black students in particular and disadvantaged students in general, as well as between economically and educationally disadvantaged students, with this last category being defined for our purposes to include all those “high risk” students whose educational background was such that they were not even marginally equipped to meet the academic standards currently prevailing at Williams. Such categories could obviously overlap but they were not identical. While increasing the number of black students admitted to the college would almost certainly mean an increase also in the number of economically disadvantaged students admitted, it would not necessarily also involve a commitment to admit students who were educationally disadvantaged.
In relation to the educational goals we had in mind, we suggested that we had been guilty of running unhelpfully together (and treating more or less as one) three basically different questions. First, how was the college to integrate its student body effectively? That is, the question of black admissions. Second, what should the college be doing to help the nation’s economically disadvantaged? Third, should the college be seeking a radical social pluralization of its student body such that it would include a much larger number of students drawn from the ranks of the educationally disadvantaged?
While we acknowledged that these three questions were not mutually exclusive and were all of them deserving of close attention, we urged the need to set our priorities and to decide which of the three was the most central and pressing question—the question that we needed to confront immediately. The second and third questions, after all, reached in some ways beyond the matter of admissions policy and raised some far-reaching issues concerning the very nature of the college. Our immediate focus, we argued, should properly be the first question. There, all we would have to agree upon would be the proposition that a racially integrated student body was a worthwhile goal and should be given top priority in our admissions policies. If we thought we could achieve that goal without going further than we had into the business of admitting “high-risk” students, well and good. The Admissions Office had concluded that we could do this, and there were independent indicators that that appraisal was a correct one.
Having thus moved to clear the argumentative ground clutter, and having secured the reconstitution of the Committee on Admissions as a fully independent standing faculty committee, we brought to a vote at the faculty meeting on December 18, 1968, the following resolution:
That this Faculty:
1. Wishes to endorse the efforts which the Admissions Office has been making and is continuing to make to increase the number of academically qualified black students or other racial minorities at Williams College.
2. Urges upon the Admissions Office as aggressive a recruiting policy as feasible in order to achieve this goal.
3. Charges the newly reconstituted Faculty Committee on Admissions with the particular tasks of drawing up a coherent recruiting policy in the minority group area, of evaluating the results of that policy, of responding to faculty and student initiatives relating to that policy and to its results, and of recommending to the Faculty and Admissions Office any changes in the policy which it deems appropriate.
Looking back on all of this from a vantage point of almost half a century later, I am tempted to view our earnest and protracted efforts as an instance of the mountain having been in labor and brought forth a mouse. And I have reason to believe that is precisely the (rather condescending) view that the Admissions Office took of the matter at the time. But it would be a mistake, I think, to do so. And I feel encouraged in that conclusion by the disagreements which the Supreme Court’s recent deliberations in the case of Fisher v. The University of Texas have contrived to surface. Some, evoking the experience of Israeli universities, have argued that class-based admissions policies giving “socioeconomically disadvantaged applicants an edge” in university admissions would, in fact, “work to diminish racial and ethnic diversity.” So that, in effect, “far from being complementary, broad diversity and race-neutrality are conflicting goals.” Others, denying the pertinence of the Israeli experience, have argued for the compatibility of the two goals. But whatever the outcome of this more recent debate, it seems clear that our committee was correct, almost fifty years ago now, in its decision at least to engage the issue and forthrightly to acknowledge the fact that the policy we were recommending was racially oriented. We were acutely conscious of the fact that it was the faculty, after all, who would have to shoulder the responsibility of teaching the students admitted, and their heartfelt concurrence in the policy of vigorously recruiting academically qualified black students was vital to its successful implementation. The confusion involved in the overlapping questions noted above was present in the CEP’s own early discussions of the matter and a glance at the (rather sparse) minutes of the November faculty meeting reveals it to have been evident in faculty debate then. Abetting such confusion, or so I would now judge, was the prevalence at that time of a nagging discomfort with framing an admissions policy on explicitly racial grounds. On balance, then, our careful teasing apart of the overlapping questions in play, however labored it may well seem in retrospect, was probably called for at the time. And the outcome, for the resolution carried without difficulty, was a clear and explicit endorsement by the faculty of the recruitment policy that the Admissions Office had pioneered. That commitment, fully shared by administration and board of trustees alike, has never since wavered, though it later became clear to me as I began to take on the task of addressing alumni chapters across the country that not all Williams alumni in the 1970s and 1980s necessarily embraced that commitment with any degree of enthusiasm.
It is possibly the case that comparable reservations were not altogether lacking among the faculty in the late 1960s. If so, those who shared them must have felt inhibited about giving them open expression. Certainly, I knew there to be misgivings about the establishment of an academic novelty like a program in Afro-American studies and when I brought that proposal up for a vote at the February 1969 faculty meeting, I was fully expecting to encounter opposition. And when it carried with a minimum of discussion, I could not help suspecting that an unhealthy measure of self-censorship was at work. I was also struck by the extent of the opposition that immediately surfaced in connection with the next item on the agenda—namely, our proposal for the establishment of an interdepartmental major in the history of ideas—and which culminated in its peremptory tabling, thus precluding any action on the proposal at that meeting. I could not help suspecting that that opposition reflected, at least in part, an element of displaced resentment over the need felt, in the climate of opinion then prevailing, for such self-censorship.
In the event, none of the steps the college had been taking to respond to the passionate dismay expressed by the Afro-American Society the previous spring succeeded in convincing the growing cohort of black students at Williams of the firmness or sincerity of the institution’s commitment to respond to their expressed needs. In various written communications to the society, the dean of the college, provost, and president all pointed out, inter alia, that African history had been taught at the college since the beginning of the decade and Afro-American history since 1964 (when Fred Rudolph had launched an elective course entitled “The Negro in American History”) and that the library had moved energetically to expand its holdings in both fields. Similarly, in 1966 Williams had established a summer ABC program aimed at promoting the college preparation of underprivileged students; during the 1968–69 academic year, the faculty had voted to establish an interdepartmental program in Afro-American studies; space had been made available in Mears House for an Afro-American fellowship room; and two key appointments had been made to respond to the needs of black students—a senior black historian (Joe Harris) and a black assistant dean whose responsibilities would include helping with academic counseling and admissions. All of those things were worth pointing out then. And, with the object of keeping the historical record straight, they remain worth pointing out today. For, to judge by statements in The Williams Record (the student newspaper), already in the early 1970s campus mythology had it that all of these things had come about only as a result of the building occupation that had taken place in April 1969. The momentum leading up to that sort of direct student action had been quickened by the Afro-American Society’s presentation to the college on March 12 of a set of demands. These were formulated in what was rapidly becoming the fashion of the day—not as proposals or requests but as a unified package of “non-negotiable demands,” not one of which was to be “rejected, revised, redefined, or altered.” Jack Sawyer’s response, written April 3, the very eve of the student-stipulated deadline, was somewhat indirect in its wording and even, at some points, rather opaque. While courteous and diplomatic in tone, it indicated that it would be impossible to make “any complete response [to the demands] by April 4” and, quite understandably, insisted that the establishment of a “racially segregated residence” would run counter to “fundamental principles of educational philosophy to which the College and most educators are deeply committed.”
In the wake of this communication, and of some rather frantic, last-minute discussions in which I participated, the members of the Afro-American Society sadly concluded that their set of demands had in fact been rejected. “Williams,” they said, “has failed us.” In the early morning hours of April 4, accordingly, the first anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination, they took over Hopkins Hall, the college’s central administrative building, and barricaded its entrances. While events of this sort have since become something of a tired cliché on the nation’s campuses, at the time (at least so far as the twentieth century was concerned) they were something of a startling novelty, capable of shocking dignified administrators as well as faculty of traditionalist sympathies, causing outrage among the more conservative of alumni, and setting an entire campus on its ear.
About this particular moment of crisis, certain things stand out: first, the nature of the demands being made; second, the way in which the administration handled them; third, the deportment and behavior of the protesting students.
So far as the demands themselves went, they focused on Afro-American studies, admissions, and what was referred to as “administration” but which focused on housing issues in particular and the life of black students at Williams in general. In relation to the first two, while impatience was expressed with the dimensions and reach of the newly founded program in Afro-American studies and with the allegedly sluggish pace at which the number of black students at Williams was being increased, what was being demanded pertained to degree, not kind, and was readily open to negotiation once the society proved willing to involve itself in the (implicit) negotiation of demands it had previously stipulated as being in nature “non-negotiable.” Similarly, the administrative issues which fell under the third heading, with one crucial exception. This last was the demand that the proposed Afro-American cultural center serve also as a residence for black students. The board of trustees had only just (November 1968) put the final nail in the coffin of the fraternity era at Williams and the very idea of the sort of segregated residence being demanded was, for the college, totally unacceptable. This particular demand was to be the great sticking point when the process of negotiation finally began. It was eventually to be resolved only when, in order to promote “the feeling of solidarity,” the college eventually agreed to permit black upperclassmen to choose, if they so wished (not all did), to live in somewhat “larger concentration [than heretofore] . . . within the existing residential house system.”
As for the way in which the administration chose to handle the demands, what struck me most forcefully at the time was the apparent absence of the president himself from the gritty process of arriving at the final accommodation. Or, perhaps more accurately, his comparative invisibility on campus during those critical days. He was, I know, prone to ear infections and attacks of shingles and, though he did preside over special meetings of the faculty on April 2 and (Sunday!) April 6, I got the impression, rightly or wrongly, that he may have been ill throughout this whole unhappy episode. Certainly when, after the occupation had been ended, he summoned a small group of us to meet with him to plan for the upcoming faculty meeting (that would be called in order to approve the settlement arrived at with the protestors), the meeting was held not in his office but at the President’s House and on that occasion Jack himself appeared clad in a bathrobe. Instead of the president, the college’s point person throughout had been our young acting provost, Steve Lewis. He it was who was called upon to shoulder the heavy burden of resolving the whole crisis and, so far as the administrative side of things went, he was in my view the hero of the whole episode.
So far as the dissident students themselves were concerned, I think it should be said that they were an impressively disciplined group that benefitted greatly from the charismatic leadership exerted by their chairman, Preston Washington ’70, a person who combined admirably strong character traits with an essentially gentle temperament. After he graduated from Williams he returned to Harlem and spent the rest of his life ministering to a congregation in that community. Like many other students who had been involved in campus activism directed at putting pressure on the college, he was to become over the years a very loyal alumnus and to serve for several years as a trustee of the college. Under his leadership, the occupation of Hopkins Hall, which lasted until April 8, was a peaceful and orderly affair. Office papers were left untouched, files were not ransacked, and the occupying students made a point of tidying up behind them before vacating the premises. Nothing happened at Williams even remotely akin to the miseries that unfolded at Cornell just two weeks later, when white members of one of the fraternities went on the attack and tried (forcibly but unsuccessfully) to eject the black students who had occupied Willard Straight Hall. That was the episode that was to lead to the flourishing of firearms there. In contrast, and in contrast also with some of the later outbursts of student activism at Williams that were to have a rather jaded and manipulative feel to them, there was, I think, something comparatively pure about this particular episode in 1969. The occupiers clearly did not know what to expect as a result of the novel and risky action they had taken. In a moving statement issued after the Rubicon had been crossed and the occupation begun, they confessed that they knew their action would hardly be a popular one, that it might even have been “a grievous tactical error” on their part, and that they had much personally at stake. If “we have put our futures and our status as students at Williams on the line,” it was because they sincerely believed that “the entire community” would “benefit from any change” that might “evolve from that incident.”
In the event, and (it seems) in some measure to the surprise of the occupiers, the college’s white students responded with broadly shared and publicly expressed sympathy with their plight and even with their goals. The college’s administration also reacted with a measure of sympathetic understanding, indicating a readiness to proceed to further discussion of the demands even while the building was still occupied and making sure, in the meantime, that food was delivered to the occupiers.
At the time, no faculty steering committee existed. So the provost, feeling the need for an appropriate faculty body with which he could consult, requested the establishment of an ad hoc faculty advisory committee with a membership appropriately representative of the faculty’s various ranks and of the most pertinent faculty committees (Admissions, Appointments and Promotions, Educational Policy, and Undergraduate Life). It was composed of two members drawn from the most senior ranks (Bill Gates of economics and Sam Matthews of biology), two from the middle ranks (Gordon Winston from economics and myself from history), and one from the nontenured ranks (Bill Bevis from English). We set up headquarters in Jesup Hall and met frequently throughout the occupation to discuss with Steve the progress of negotiations, to respond to his requests for advice, and, as the ice began to melt, to help draft putative public statements conveying the outcome. When a settlement seemed finally within reach, the Afro-American Society interposed a final hurdle by insisting that the provost’s signature on the final agreement was not enough and that the concurrence of the faculty was called for. The president had declined our urgent request (conveyed via Sam Matthews) that he call a special faculty meeting to secure that concurrence, so it was left for us (if the occupation was to be ended without further, damaging delay) to provide a surrogate for that concurrence by cosigning with Steve a letter indicating our “unanimous agreement with the written understanding” he had reached with Preston Washington concerning the society’s demands. Accepting that assurance, the students ended the occupation and the matter of formal faculty approval was left (somewhat uneasily) to a faculty meeting scheduled for later in that week.
At that meeting, Steve Lewis described in detail the course of events during the occupation and the nature of the agreement arrived at with the Afro-American Society. It then fell to me, representing the ad hoc faculty advisory committee, to introduce a motion to endorse that agreement and to speak briefly in support of that move. The motion carried by a simple voice vote and without protracted discussion.
With that dramatic and cathartic episode behind us, one had a strong sense that so far as the spring semester was concerned it was to be downhill all the way. All of us had to settle back into the mundane tasks of catching up on things that had been placed on hold during the crisis, wrapping up our courses, and setting and grading final examinations. So far as the work of the Committee on Educational Policy was concerned, our main tasks were seeing through the proposal to establish an interdepartmental major in the history of ideas to an affirmative vote and tying up any remaining loose ends pertaining to other curricular matters. As for Committee X, which across the course of the academic year had had some enormously stimulating curricular discussions, it had already reported back to its parent committee. When it did so, it had envisaged the possibility that a coordinate women’s college might be established and, with that in mind, had proposed a pluralization of patterns of study, moving out from the existing core of strictly departmental majors to embrace a broad array of interdepartmental concentrations and even the notion of individually constructed major patterns of study. And, somewhat prophetically, it had even ventilated the idea (though somewhat vaguely and without explicit references to the Oxbridge model) of creating what it labeled as “tutorials” or “tutorial seminars.”
In the event, however, having at the May faculty meeting secured the enthusiastic endorsement of the faculty for its recommendations, the Committee on Coordinate Education and Related Questions set to one side the idea for the creation of a coordinate women’s college and opted wisely for outright coeducation at Williams itself. At the June 1969 meeting of the board, the trustees gave their approval to that approach. Williams, without reducing the number of male students from its current 1250 or so, was to begin to enroll significant numbers (650 was the stated target) of women students as regular members of the student body by 1971.
With that, the curtain was lowered on what had been a dramatic and truly hectic academic year—tension-filled, but also creative, exhilarating, and in many ways determinative of the future shape of the college. The next year was not to be a quiet one either; it was to end, after all, amid the upheavals of Cambodian Spring. But on campus, at least, it was to be a less divisive year and, in any case, not one in which I was destined to be involved. Knowing that I was due in 1969–70 for my first full year’s sabbatical leave, I had applied to the American Council of Learned Societies for a (portable) senior research fellowship and had been lucky enough to be awarded one. We had been able, accordingly, to plan on spending that academic year as a family in London where I could pursue my research in the British Museum. We were due, accordingly, to depart from New York for Southampton (it was only the OPEC oil crisis in 1973 that was to sound the death knell for regular transatlantic passenger shipping) on the France, a splendid ship. In the interim, however, things were to be hectic for both of us. In the absence of women students at the college, it was customary for faculty wives to play the female roles in college theatrical productions. Claire-Ann, who had appeared as a dancer in the 1966 production of Brigadoon (not all that long after Brian, our fourth child, had been born!) and as one of the Bacchantes in a production of Euripides’ Bacchae, had now been prevailed upon to dance in a 1969 production of Guys and Dolls. So, apart from making arrangements for the rental of our house to a nice couple working for Sprague Electric in North Adams, for the placement of our Irish setter Siobhan with another kindly couple who owned a farm nearby in Vermont, and for the discharge of her duties teaching in the evening division at Berkshire Community College, she was also caught up in rehearsals at the Adams Memorial Theatre. And I myself, apart from wrapping up my courses and committee responsibilities, was busy preparing to teach again during July in our NDEA Summer Institute in European Cultural History. But, one way or another, everything got done and the day after the Summer Institute ended and around the time of our eleventh wedding anniversary—jobs completed, dog comfortably accommodated, house let to plausible tenants, and everything packed for the year abroad—we made our way to New York. After having ensconced the children in their own cabin next to ours (it proved to be high jinks all the way!), we collapsed with a welcome drink into deck chairs on the promenade deck as that wonderfully elegant ship slipped its moorings, hooted farewell to its attendant tugs, and, as a golden day drew to a close, made its majestic way through the Verrazano Narrows and out into the great and familiar waters that beckoned beyond.