PARTISAN REVIEW
423
I can understand the Bickel-Brustein position. I was at moments
in
it myself and could lapse back into it easily. I could write, "the
whole crisis was fearful enough but had no real meaning," and
believe myself momentarily. But any definition of meaning which
excludes the Yale crisis from the field of its application is clearly
"academic" in the worst sense. Because the other thing that you felt
was that the forces at play were very real, so real that you couldn't
handle them. I remember .the faces of some of the girls in one of
my classes a few days before May 1: an image of uncomprehending
concern and compassion, of wanting to be right and useful yet with
a sense that one couldn't help, that the forces coming to bear were
more than anyone could handle. The tension was too great; a cata–
clysmic rendezvous of American society seemed in preparation, and
Yale, par excellence the naive liberal institution if one of the most
enlightened and communitarian, could not survive such a rendezvous.
I don't want to exaggerate: certainly there was some loss of per–
spective, some inflation of the Armageddon imagery as the world
shrank to the dimensions of one city and one day. Yet even when
you sought to cleanse yourself of melodrama, the rendezvous, the
convergence of intensely charged forces seemed undeniable. A con–
clusion that none of it made sense, that it was
all
hysteria and
manipulation, really meant that you chose to draw a hermeneutic line
that you, as a university person, could not cross. The only other
course was to say that you couldn't understand, that Yale couldn't
deal with it, but that unless you were going to erect and maintain a
Maginot Line - which in the most specific terms would mean not
accepting any significant number of inner city Blacks at Yale - you
had to learn. There were vast amounts of white
guilt,
of course, but
it was more than that: not simply a giving
in
to white guilt, passive
surrender and lambs to slaughter because in the deeper analysis
all
the lambs are guilty, but a conquest of the whole American imagery
of blackness and its terrors. T. S. Eliot in
Little Gidding:
"History
is
now and England." History was now and New Haven, and just be–
cause you didn't like it and couldn't handle it, it wouldn't go away.
CONSCIOUSNESS
The Panthers had begun to bring their case to Yale some weeks
before. Quietly and diplomatically, they had expounded their case
and raised money among some left-liberal faculty. At the same time,
the Panthers Defense Committee, centered on the white radical col-
