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PETER BROOKS
all this may ultimately have had a good effect. It was nasty, but it
showed the students some of the forces they were attempting to deal
with. There had been and would be a great deal of talk about
"reality" as something that lay outside the university's walls and
demanded discovery. This was an element of the reality, an element
that included the charm and style of David Hilliard, his extreme vul–
nerability, the paranoia of the Panthers and the instinctive reaction
of violence, the desperately difficult position of someone like Ken
Mills, understanding the Panther reaction and the white reaction and
trying to give them both a place.
It
was sobering. And it may have
had in the days to come some effect in warding off white radical
"adventurism."
It was after the Ingalls Rink meeting that the students went
back to their colleges and held strike votes. The next day, new
formulations of the strike demands were worked out. From the in–
numerable teach-ins was born a teach-out, and students had their
hair cut to canvass New Haven neighborhoods. The Strike Steering
Committee was born, and by April 26 it had given the demands their
final formulation in the "Five Demands." Beyond the issue of the
"injustice" of the trial, they included parent-controlled day-care cen–
ters for Yale employees; unemployment compensation for Yale work–
ers; community housing built by Yale and regulation of Yale ex–
pansion by a community-university board; a halt to the new Social
SCiences Institute, which looked like a technocratic and manipulative
project. The five demands grafted white radical concerns onto the
Black issues, but with a clear subordination of the former to the latter.
And the traditional SDS concerns - ROTC, the student-worker al–
liance - were not represented. SDS would remain almost totally out
of the picture; when it tried to dramatize its existence later on,
it
managed only to look ludicrous. The tense weeks at Yale would see
no building occupations, no busts, none of the classic claptrap of
radicalization. The situation was too serious for that, and "raising
the level of consciousness" had no need for it.
"You know what this
is?
It's a goddamn Munich. That's what
it
is."
Thus one of my colleagues on his way out of the April 23
faculty meeting. This,
if
melodramatic, was true enough, yet totally
inadequate.
That the faculty was "coerced" seems plain. It had the week
