Why They Leave

It's not surprising that many of us who stay here are puzzled about those who leave, or that our puzzlement is compounded by the likelihood that, in addition to students who "vote with their feet" by taking time off or withdrawing from Harvard, there are increasing numbers of strong, intelligent young people who "vote" by never applying here to begin with. It kinda makes you wonder about the rest of us.

I graduated Yale College in 1969 and am a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Education. Along the way I took a few years off to be a youthworker (as a Conscientious Objector), hop freights, write for the Phoenix, learn carpentry at an industrial school, work with radical political groups, and generally ponder the state of the country and of my soul. Returning to Harvard in 1974, I thought I noticed a drop in temperature which wasn't "just me." If it would be presumptuous to preach or speak for others, perhaps I can at least share some impressions to see if they resonate at all. They boil down to the claim that we are being fatefully socialized here into a way of knowing and naming the world which renders whole populations invisible and entire regions in ourselves inaccessible, and which saddles us with gloomy characterizations of human nature that keep faith with no one and aren't half so realistic as their proponents insist.

When so many talented, well-intentioned people are chronically lonely and confused--or stridently busy and heartless about it--there have to be reasons. There have to be reasons for the scarcity of teachers who are fearless, comradely, and fun-loving, or for the fact that so many of us move through a day unattuned to friendship, unwilling or unable to take time with one another in unspoken things.

We know that the pace has quickened here, but not through love; desperate students wander into the Bureau of Study Counsel in sufficient numbers for the Director to report to the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences a "defeat of their yearning for a sense of purpose." The wonderful things we have been told about ourselves don't really satisfy, and I guess James Baldwin, speaking with the wisdom of the oppressed, had us best in hand:

...each of us has a profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror. All of us know...that mirrors can only lie...It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. (The Fire Next Time.)

It does sound familiar, and it is precisely in this that, turn and turn again, we find so little help at Harvard. I would count it a cop-out to say that the place wasn't set up for that kind of help; we have to reject the emotional parsimony of a liberal institutional mentality which confuses demands for a sensually just and loving community with cries for a nursemaid. Instead I think we would have to conclude that there are connections between that old bogeyman, the concentration of wealth and corporate power, and the everyday fragmentation of identities, failure of relationships, and encroachment of new and subtle patterns of domination and decadence in our lives--patterns against which the protest movements of the 'sixties cried out, and against which a "counter-culture" of re-affirmation and resistance was attempted.

***

To argue that way, I must open old wounds, for the 1969 strike here turned precisely upon those connections, and the current CRR controversy shows that we badly need our own history. In 1969 a curious amalgam of demands for emotional sustenance and social justice boggled liberal minds with the "outrageous" contention that there is an interdependence between the two:

Strike for the Eight Demands Strike to seize control of your life Strike to return the Paine Hall Scholarships Strike because there's no poetry in your lectures Strike because your roommate was clubbed Strike to abolish ROTC Strike because classes are a bore Strike to smash the corporations Strike because they are trying to squeeze the life out of you.

(African Research Group, How Harvard Rules.)

"Moving on in their 'analysis'," said President Pusey of the rebels, "they see our universities as having been taken over by the business and military establishments...[and as] devoted to 'the present and future domination of the people of the world.' Obviously, they live in a world of fantasy." He got the political part of the radicals' critique right, on the whole, though by 1975, with Walt Rostow trapped on celluloid repeating his war apologies before audiences watching "Hearts and Minds" while hundreds waited for helicopters on the roof of our embassy in Saigon, one could be forgiven for wondering whether the "world of fantasy" won't soon be Pusey's own.

But neither he nor the majority of the faculty really understood the enotional part of the critique. Among some professors there was a great wagging of jowls about the "barbarians'" disregard for scientific inquiry and decency, but the strikers retorted that these worthy considerations had long ago become nostrums having little to do with the rhythm and structure of anyone's life at Harvard, to say nothing of life--and death--in our cities or in Vietnam, and that in any case it was not the professors' blood which Buildings and Grounds was cleaning off the steps of University Hall.

One need not glorify the protestors, or apologize for their own brutality to argue, as I do, that they had stumbled upon a fault-line in Harvard's humanism. Every encounter here became colored by the fact that the privileged structural realities of a "Harvard education" contradict its teachings. Donald Fleming was more candid than many of his colleagues when he wondered aloud how students could ever have expected that exciting things would transpire during their appointments with professors (Crimson, Spring, 1975). For the sad fact is that, while teaching and learning in a humane community ought to be an encounter of whole persons, this place serves powers whose consolidation is inimical to their nurture. Erik Erikson, who was also on the faculty, expressed well what the authors of the strike slogans felt was happening at the university, and what I believe is still happeneing to us:

...masses of young people feel attuned to technological promises of indefinite progress; and these promises, if sustained by schooling, imply a new world-image and identity for many, who can combine the techniques of mastery and domination with their identity development...

Each new consolidation also makes for institutionalized inequalities and built-in contradictions that become glaringly obvious to outsiders--those who lack appropriate gifts and opportunities, or have a surplus of not-quite appropriate talents.

...those who become consolidated...limit their horizon so as not to see what might destroy their newly-won unity with time and space or expose them to the fear of death--and of killing. Such a consolidation along technological lines is, I submit, now taking place. [in it]...the technologically possible may replace the ethically permissible....and this can only cause subliminal panic, especially where the old decencies will prove inadequate, and where the mere possibility of overkill can be denied only with a mental strain which will match the sexual repression of the passing era in unconscious pathogenic power. (Toward the Year 2000; Bell, editor.)

For most of its participants the strike was a cry that, despite the faculty's insistence upon the "old decencies," students were being pressed to combine their identity development with "techniques of mastery and domination," repressing their awareness of "institutionalized inequalities" and the "fear of death--and of killing." The strikers went on to say that it is not technology itself, but capitalist technology which demands a repression whose "pathogenic power" has skewed our emotional, sexual, and intellectual lives in training us to manage the lives of others.

***

The late 'sixties exploded the "New Frontier" assumption that personal career advancement is complementary to the welfare of all the people, sending many students stumbling across class lines as cab-drivers, carpenters, farmers, factory-workers, and bums. The spiritual nub of their "downward mobility" was a thirst to encounter the world differently from the way a newly-minted upper middle class professional does--to encounter it with reverence, in dialogue, and with some of that delight, that "excellency of childhood" (Reinhold Niebuhr) without which all the wellsprings of human endeavor run dry. They felt that, if permanently cast as "professionals" and "clients," as managers and managed, they and the poor were but two sides of a counterfeit social coin, clasped together in necrophilic embrace, each with its own hurts derived from its objectification of the other.

In those years the Brazilian revolutionary educator Paolo Freire wrote in his Pedagogy of the Opressed that "rejoining the people" requires a profound rebirth into an equality which no amount of expertise, however necessary, can provide--or replace. He said that leadership grows from the depths of one's caring, with the support of those who entrust a member of the community with a task in their continuing humanization. Bright-eyed junior managerial lemmings who crowd around political figures over sherry in our common rooms may have no inkling of this, except as platitude; neither, for that matter, may self-congratulatory sectarian "radicals," precious literary "humanists," or other "individualists" coping with the pains of life in a liberal market economy. The lesson of the late 'sixties was that we must surrender these insidious self-conceptions, for without a stronger social glue, without people's sense of themselves as passionate shapers of a common destiny, whole cultures lose the will to live, and all our social scientists' horses and men cannot put Humpty Dumpty together again.

***

"Downward mobility" seldom occurs voluntarily now nationwide. A "subliminal panic" shot through the middle classes after Kent State, and again when thermostats dropped and gas lines formed in the early morning darkness; today many students are unapologetically out for themselves alone. Especially telling are the rise of guru- and pseudo-liberation fads in the wake of the earlier protest's defeat, and of "decadence" at schools like Yale, where leaves of absence are at an all-time low; they signal most vividly a spiralling-off of individuals into private worlds within a corporate universe.

The harsh realities unveiled during the 'sixties are still with us, then, but going to Harvard means minimizing them with a stiff upper lip. We know there are warm spots in the water around us, but we are sailing over them on a self-important little ship piloted by proud matrons going nowhere with a great show of dignity, dragging the water for warmth with elegant fishnets. We are the crew, and now and then we jump over the side, but only to repair the nets, seldom to swim. Our boat belongs to a fleet which still fancies it controls the ocean, but our nets are the old liberal language and theories, which do not catch what we need now to grow; they certainly don't help us to recognize a pervasive ruin which has come quietly down upon the vast suburban sprawl so many of us call home, or to face and find meaning in the fact that many of us were raised there on the spiritual analogue of a dry heave. No wonder our words to one another ride lightly upon the deepter currents, as whitecaps upon the sea.

Ironically we needn't cross class lines anymore to glimpse the meaning of our pasts and of what lies in store for us. As power becomes increasingly centralized in the service of corporate profit, more of us will find ourselves doing alienating work for large employers even as doctors, even as lawyers. Ultimately we are contronted with three choices: reaching ever higher, at increasing personal cost, for influence in the structures as they are; succumbing to a decadent privatism which depends upon the structures it disdains; or finding new ways to band together with others, and perhaps to attack the concentrations of power.

Many of us are taking the first choice, convincing ourselves that only sissies or dreamers would complain of its rigors, and hoping somehow to avoid waking up ten years hence with bloated faces in the middle of bad marriages out there in some of those sad, empty places whence we came. Not a few of us appear headed toward a genteel version of the second choice. The last choice is one we are emotionally least-equipped to make. "Rejoining the people" is difficult because the "people" themselves may be unfree and afraid, trading upon old patterns of domination and submission. In that context, "rejoining" them can only seem foolish, quixotic, a kind of unilateral disarmament where one surrenders precisely those defenses and advantages which have proven so necessary to survival in a malevolent environment. One fears a loss of "individuality" and "sensibility," little knowing that it is only in a community of equals that real love-risks may be taken, a full range of feelings shared, or wisdom truly nurtured.

Odysseys and Pilgrims' Progresses lead to that knowledge; so, if real, does every coming of age. In the struggle to deploy one's gifts humanely there is often no guidance or material reward, only that scent of tragedy which always attends the decision to find out the truth about oneself, whatever the cost. But we are not so tone-deaf to the classics, I hope, as to have forgotten that in tragedy there is real life of a kind we seldom see at Harvard.

I suppose it is at first a matter of choosing different academic courses, or, indeed, of taking a year off, or of assessing the vitality of one's relationships, and groping towards new ones. And, yes, it is a matter of seeking help if all the world seems grey. But while there is an inner, personal struggle which politics can never replace (oppression doesn't just come straight from GM or Washington, but is internalized through primary relationships, and must be uprooted there), there is also a social struggle to build communities which sustain individuals, and for which no amount of personal therapy can substitute.

Mao Tse Tung once remarked that it takes an intellectual ten years to rejoin the people, but I suppose the time estimate for students would be much shorter. Only yesterday we arrived here children fresh from suburban hothouses, living contradictions cast up by a society which was twisting us as much as those we were being trained to rule. For all God's dangers, our critique of a "Harvard education" will spring again and again from our struggle to become "ordinary" in the most profound sense of the term.

Who among us, after all, wants more than to be able to look back, when someday the touch grows cold, upon oceans of light, upon friends and lovers touched and embraced, upon comrades with whom we have shared honest work, and strangers well-met along the way? We are going to have to take risks to build social contexts for that kind of life--risks in some instances with nearly overwhelming feelings of loss, loneliness, pain, and humility along the way to a deeper joy we have scarcely remember exists, yet never completely forgotten.

After all, it is 1976; the country is changing, and we are growing old so young. I think some of ourclassmates have left us because they've found the courage to stop putting a brave face on things, and have brought themselves instead to the touchstones of whatever dreams they still harbor, to see how they live, what has become of them, and whether they may yet "rejoin the people" in themselves.

1. James Baldwain, The Fire Next Time (Dell pb) p. 128.

2. How Harvard Rules, booklet published by the African Research Group during the strike, 1969.

3. Ibid, front cover.

4. Erik Erikson, in Daniel Bell (ed) Toward the Year 2000 (Free Press, 1968) p. 188.

James A. Sleeper is writing his thesis on the socialization of suburban adolescents.