June 9, 2017--Freedom Summer

It's graduation season but though it's 2017 some of the official celebrations feel a bit like back to the future.

For example, at Harvard, Harvard, African American graduate students had their first separate ceremony with their own speaker.

Reading about this took me back to the past--my early years as an English instructor at Queens College, a selective unit of the City University University of New York. Thus, because of rampant inequalities and lingering segregation in New York's K-12 system, when I arrived in the early 60s, the student body was overwhelmingly white.

Two years later, I became deputy director of the SEEK Program, which was a pre-open admissions effort to foster the enrollment of minority students. It worked quite well. After a few years we had 500 or so mainly Black and Hispanic students and almost all of them excelled academically when, if needed, after some remedial work, we mainstreamed them into the "regular" course work and programs of the college.

Was everyone happy about this? Far from it. Some on the faculty were upset about what they perceived to be pressure to lower standards. In fact, in too many cases, mean-spirited faculty raised their expectations to help assure that SEEK students would fail. To contribute to a racially-motivated self-fulfilling prophesy. But, for the most part, rising to the occasion, many SEEK students did not feel at home on campus, sensing that they were not fully welcomed there or in the surrounding all-white neighborhood.

So, in the student cafeteria minority students arranged to sit at self-segregated tables. There were Black tables and Hispanic tables. I hated it, but understood.

In addition to understanding, there was an irony--Queens College was where civil rights worker Andrew Goodman was enrolled. With companions James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, a few years earlier, during the 1964 Freedom Summer, near Philadelphia, Mississippi, he and they were brutally murdered and buried in a shallow ditch.

During one English Department faculty meeting a memorial service for Andrew Goodman was underway right outside the building where we were gathered. They were remembering him while we argued about the way in which a new Medieval Literature course was to be described in the college catalog.

So, again, I understood the reasons for those separate tables.

But a separate graduation at Harvard? In 2017? Though I understand this as well it is not quite for the same reasons.

SEEK students at Queens College were not made to feel comfortable. Often quite the opposite. There was widespread resistance to their admission and attendance. Any number of faculty confronted me about how thanks to us the academic currency of the college was being debased. There were all-college faculty meetings at which some professors did not feel reluctant to speak out against the change in complexion of the Queens student body.

That was one reason there was a SEEK Program.

But at Harvard and other elite colleges where various forms of self-separation are being reintroduced, in a campus climate that includes an infusion of Black Lives Matter's agenda, minority students are saying, as one did recently to a New York Times reporter, "We have endured the constant questioning of our legitimacy and our capacity, and yet we are here."

Here and yet not fully here. And not during their separate graduation ceremony.

Also not at Emory and Henry College where this spring they held their first "Inclusion and Diversity Year-End Ceremony." The University of Delaware held a "lavender" separate graduation for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students; and at my old college, Columbia, where they held a "First-Generation Graduation" for students who were the first in their families to graduate from college.

I wonder if I would have been happy to attend. I suspect not. I was trying to "pass."

Passing no longer needs to be on too many agenda--and that's a good thing. But isn't that the point?

That with colleges and universities for at least four decades getting comfortable, seeing it advantageous to have a diverse student body, what we used to call campus "climate" has changed and there should thus be less not more need for separate tables much less graduations.

Harvard Black-Student Graduation Ceremony

August 19, 2014--Googling Oneself

A guilty pleasure that I confess to is occasionally googling myself. All right, checking at least once a month.

I rationalize this act of vanity as one way to see if my Web-presence has been contaminated by hackers. Actually, it's really to see how many times I am listed on Google (OK, how many pages it takes to list all my listings) and to check if anything interesting has been said about me via the Internet. All right, to see anything that's been added during the past month.

And also, less frequently (3 or 4 times a year), I check my virtual presence in the New York Times database. As a digital subscriber I am able to find any mention of me back to 1883, not the year of my birth announcement.

Being mentioned in the Times is a big deal to me. Read what I say about the NYT just to the right of this below my now out-of-date picture. The thing about my father and me and how the Times every morning was one of the few ways in which we communicated with each other. Etc.

Killing time Saturday morning I checked in with the New York Times. There were my occasional published letters to the editor and a quote or two from the days when I was responsible for education grant-making at the Ford Foundation.

But for some reason, via the TimesMachine, I thought to look up reports from early 1969 when I was a young administrator at Queens College, during the time when a coalition of black and Puerto Rican students occupied the campus, demanding that administrators of the SEEK program, a special admissions and scholarship program for minority students, who were white (virtually all of us were) be fired and replaced by people of color.

In many ways I agreed with the demands, feeling, though, that I was an exception and should be the one white administrator to be retained since . . . . well, you know. I was that young and naive.

I seemed to remember that I was mentioned in at least one of the articles covering the months of events that eventually led to violence. And sure enough, on January 14, 1969, I indeed was. In an article about SEEK students invading the office of the director and in a symbolic act (at least at the time I thought it was symbolic), since the president and deans were was not agreeing to the students' demand that the SEEK director be fired, they moved all his office furniture and telephones out into the street.

I recall being there at the time and acting heroically, trying to talk them out of doing this and urging the students to seek to negotiate peacefully with the dean of the college to whom the SEEK program director reported. I even offered to help.

But, according to the Times, my behavior was a little more--how shall I put this--ambiguous.

Quoting--

When the intruders arrived and swarmed into the office, Steven Zwerling, assistant director, escorted three women assistants outside, foresaking any attempt to thwart the invasion. He noted that the demonstrators carefully avoided harming anyone in the office or even touching them.

As an old English major I did a little textual analysis--

Intruders first arrived, then swarmed, and after that morphed into invaders and eventually demonstrators. I failed to thwart the invasion, forsaking any attempt, but did step up to escort to safety three damsels in distress. Though, according to my New York Times, it appears that was unnecessary since, as I apparently told the reporter, no one was harmed much less touched.

Well, at least they spelled my name correctly.

And, yes, the director resigned a month later. A few weeks after that he was replaced by a black professor of psychology, and shortly thereafter I and all the other white administrators were fired.