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PETER BROOKS
by forces on which the faculty had no hold. I left the meeting fear–
ing the backlash from those who had voted, or remained silent,
through psychological duress. I myself felt the duress. But the more
I thought about it, the more I realized that here, too, an
Aufhebung
was necessary. To charge coercion was superficial, since the coercion
was part of the Blacks' existential condition - and hence of our
own.
If
our forms couldn't handle this reality, we'd have to find
new ones. But where?
ARMAGEDDON MINUS SEVEN
At times, it was a little like Flaubert's description of the days
following the revolution of 1848, with its spawning of idiot utopian
schemes and clubs. I heard students discussing day-care centers who
might just as well have been talking about the processing of hotdogs
for all they knew about children and their needs. I heard a good
deal about the liberation of Yale and how the old academic bullshit
was gone. But mostly it was sober and concerned, with a sense of
strength and unity emerging from the meetings in the colleges. I began
to feel that planning for May Day - housing, feeding, first aid, mar–
shaling - was absorbing too much attention and was diverting
peo–
ple from the real issues. The Armageddon image had given the issues
their intensity, but now it threatened to make them irrelevant com–
pared to the fact of 30,000 expected May Day demonstrators and
all that seemed to entail. But I was wrong to consider preparation
for May Day a diversion, because it was probably the most concrete
education in the forms of the new that Yale could have. Starting from
what was perhaps the single most significant decision of those weeks
- to have the privileged, elitist university open to the demonstrators,
and to
all
the forces assembling in New Haven on May Day, rather
than a locked bastion - it became an exercise in the elaboration of
new processes of responsibility, decision making and fraternity. It
was almost like Cohn-Bendit's "glimpse of a possibility."
A colleague said to me both mockingly and admiringly: "Yalies
really are different from other people. You come to understand the
'thousand leaders' bit." The managerial instinct had come into the
open and begun to shape the situation. I experienced it most on the
Monitoring Committee, which Bill Coffin organized on Monday,
April 27. The students had pads of yellow paper and they made
