424
PETER BROOKS
lective led by Tom Dostou and some Yale dropouts began a more
strident "Save Bobby" campaign. On April 13, the Trial came to
Yale as Dostou and Panthers Doug Miranda, Elbert ("Big Man")
Howard and Artie Seale, and William Kunstler and (later that
day) Jean Genet spoke in Woolsey Hall. The triggering point came
the next day, when David Hilliard and Emory Douglas, two Panther
leaders, were given six-month contempt of court sentences for a
minor infraction of courtroom decorum. The evening of April 15,
400 students met to consider what was to be done. The atmosphere
at times bordered on hysteria. Someone proposed that students really
lay their lives on the line: that 100 volunteers step forward, that one
of them be shot in public every day until Bobby Seale went free.
The motion that was eventually voted - half a million dollars from
the Yale Corporation to the Panther Defense fund - apparently
was, in the context of the meeting, a moderate demand. A four-day
moratorium on classes was also voted. And the fact of the May Day
demonstration was brought to Yale's attention for the first time.
I hadn't been at that meeting. When I walked into my morning
class on the sixteenth, I borrowed a student's copy of the
Yale Daily
News
and ran over the story
of
the meeting quickly, with a sense
that the demands were demagogic and ludicrous - which was evi–
dently the paper's point of view too.
I was well into a discussion of Nerval's
Sylvie.
I called on a stu–
dent who had raised his hand. He began talking in English, a viola–
tion of ground rules. So a change of language was the first gesture
to light up the "disruption" sign. "I'm not a political activist," he
began, "but I think we have to talk about the Panthers." Many
people were disturbed by what was going on, many were scared.
Yale was involved by its proximity, whether it liked it or not. Aca–
demic business as usual had to stop in order to face this reality.
As
I leaned back against the blackboard and listened, I was a little
tense. Tense because of the category, "classroom disruption," which
I hadn't yet faced, but which no teacher cannot have thought about
over the past years. I knew that, beyond the challenge to the "rel–
evance" of French Romantic literature, there was a challenge to
the whole life-style of the academic, to someone who could talk
about old books in a classroom while Blacks were dying in the streets;
the class was waiting to see how I would perform. So when I an–
swered him - in English, which was already the acceptance of a new
