Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The Movement and Me
- 2 Among Friends in Philly
- 3 Mississippi Summer: A Quaker Vacation
- 4 Professing at Smith and Selma
- 5 Return to Mississippi (Goddam)
- 6 The Draft: From Protest to Resistance?
- 7 Visions of Freedom School in DC (For Bob Silvers)
- 8 Resisting
- 9 A New University?
- 10 A Working-Class Movement of GIs
- 11 A Man in the Women’s Movement
- 12 Where We Went and What We Did (and Did Not) Learn There
- 13 Authority and Our Discontents
- Appendix A A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority
- Appendix B Syllabus for a Course on the Sixties
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
4 - Professing at Smith and Selma
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 January 2023
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The Movement and Me
- 2 Among Friends in Philly
- 3 Mississippi Summer: A Quaker Vacation
- 4 Professing at Smith and Selma
- 5 Return to Mississippi (Goddam)
- 6 The Draft: From Protest to Resistance?
- 7 Visions of Freedom School in DC (For Bob Silvers)
- 8 Resisting
- 9 A New University?
- 10 A Working-Class Movement of GIs
- 11 A Man in the Women’s Movement
- 12 Where We Went and What We Did (and Did Not) Learn There
- 13 Authority and Our Discontents
- Appendix A A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority
- Appendix B Syllabus for a Course on the Sixties
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
Wordsworth, not a poet with whom I ordinarily connect, conveys the wonder of that time and place. This is a book about the transformation of minds, my own and many others’. In 1964 the dawn of change cast splendor and excitement over all it touched, however rough or silly a cooler eye might have pronounced our acts of desire, protest, and expectation.
Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth,
The beauty wore of promise . . . .
(The Prelude, XI, 108–9, 117–18)Smith College, where I taught in 1964–65, had arranged a brilliant schedule for faculty: we had classes on three consecutive days, Monday to Wednesday for me, and then did whatever we did on the other four. I began speaking, fundraising, and carrying out a variety of tasks for Friends of SNCC, in New York, Washington, Poughkeepsie, and many places in between. I learned how to use a mimeograph machine and to write leaflets people could actually read. I joined others at Smith in circulating a statement proclaiming resistance to the Vietnam War, and in organizing a teach-in on that subject. I helped establish and sustain a Smith-Amherst SDS chapter. I traveled to Montgomery with a couple of my students during the Selma-Montgomery march and got arrested. In short, for a wonderful academic year, I experienced many of the pleasures of an undergraduate education at a fancy liberal arts college.
And this, too: as a single man of thirty-two, I was set loose among exceptionally smart and attractive young women at a moment when having a fling with one’s professor was becoming part of the educational program. It would take a few years for the just-stirring feminist revolution to challenge that perfidious mentality. Smith actually had a reputation for hiring gay men—a number from Yale—presumably because they offered no threat to its young women. That practice had come to a disastrous end in 1960 when the Northampton Post Office had opened a packet of what they designated gay “pornography” addressed to Professor Newton Arvin. In fact, the material was what we might today call “beefcake” photography—scantily-clothed muscled guys—hardly sexual in content, much less pornographic.
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- Our SixtiesAn Activist's History, pp. 61 - 74Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2020