As the Times has reported, Boston University held a make-up graduation for the class of 1970 whose Commencement exercise was canceled in the wake of the national student strike following the killing of four students by National Guardsmen at Kent State University. I personally don't think there was any need to do that. Certainly not for fear of violence. But that things had been gummed up is certain. I went from desk to desk in the library during exam week asking students to join the national student strike (class boycott) to protest the Nixon decision to invade Cambodia to seize the enemy's jungle hideouts. That fiasco was a last ditch effort to win what had already been lost: the American effort to defeat the Vietnamese Communist Party's armies - the NLF in the south and the NVA in the north - both fighting now throughout the south.
I was at BU as a graduate student of Howard Zinn, the populist/pacifist/socialist historian. Though the Times account and the BU video below don't mention him, Howard's was the spirit of the day. I had read his Vietnam - The Logic of Withdrawal before I left for the Peace Corps in India in 1967. Planning my return to America while in Bassein, Maharashtra State, a master's degree seemed to be a good idea. Combined with a law degree, I thought it would give me the choice of teaching or practicing law. So much for unaided career planning. My contemporaries had flooded graduate schools seeking draft deferments and a PhD would be needed to teach full time (though I did teach at Rutgers night school and at 2-year Essex county College during and after law school).
In fall 1968 I wrote to Howard and discussed India, the Peace Corps, and Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night (reviewed here by Alfred Kazin). Mailer described himself as a Left Conservative, constructing a legendary account of the anti-war March on the Pentagon in October 1967 - when some sought to levitate it, others to put flowers in gun barrels, and others to find a porta potty. ( I had missed it because we were in Peace Corps training north of Bombay.) Howard appreciated the spirit, warned me gently not to take Mailer too seriously, and invited me to come study with him. No college transcript, no references, no application - though I probably mentioned my GRE scores (at least the verbal). My inquiry yielded a typewritten acceptance letter from Professor Zinn who told me to contact the registrar about enrolling in the fall.
We read a book a week in Howard Zinn's seminar - works on history, method, and ideology. Karl Mannheim - Ideology and Utopia, Barrington Moore - Lord & Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, a dose of Karl Popper, and the impenetrable Herbert Marcuse are ones I remember. And in a public administration course I went to D.C. and interviewed the GSA lawyer who had negotiated the terms of the Pentagon steps confrontations between protesters and their expressionless contemporaries - the soldiers who faced the dissenters at the massive labyrinth's gates.
Howard had two doctoral students with him - Jim Miller (don't know what became of him), and Peter Irons who had a brilliant career as both historian (May It Please the Court) and lawyer (challenging the government successfully to make up for the Korematsu error and compensate the Japanese-Americans who had been incarcerated during World War II. Peter retired from University of California at San Diego in 2004.
Howard Zinn died in 2010. His People's History of the United States sold two million copies. He tells the story to Bill Moyers in 2009 here:
This video depicts scenes of Boston University at the time which I recall - some hazily and some well.
No comments:
Post a Comment