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pace, while clinging to a halo whose golden glow was fading. The first
chapter to foreshadow the effect of demographic changes and of future
conflicts is chapter 5: "Keeping Them Quiet: Yale 1954-1960." Now
that the G.I. students from less privileged backgrounds had become pro–
fessors, they could not keep up with their peers who relied, also, on
some private income. (Ambitious students received government aid, and
wealthy ones family help.) This was hard on faculty wives who wanted
to keep up appearances, and on their husbands who took on extra work
while having to "publish or perish." Kernan's tenure tale is typical of
this rite of passage in most universities. He was lucky to have found the
topic for the required book and a publisher for it-and to have made it
through the arduous process.
When in 1963 the president of Yale, A. Whitney Griswold, died and
Kingman Brewster replaced him, the university found itself short of
funds and closed down a number of departments. Two years later, Ker–
nan accepted the job of associate provost. But he did not know what he
let himself in for, and found few satisfactory means of plugging up holes
in that ever more leaky barrel. By 1969, the year of uprisings, women
were admitted into that male bastion. Now, secretaries' complaints were
no longer handled discreetly but legally, and under the tutelage of a
group of militant students, New Haven prepared for the Bobby Seale
trial. Things got nasty: threats against Yale's president mounted; the
community crowded around to be entertained. They cheered "radical
blacks, angry faculty, outside militants, and outraged students." Yale's
administrators took it all very seriously, negotiated every point, and
then caved in. They thought they might lose their tax exemption from
the state of Connecticut if they were not to be neutral. Kernan recalls he
then believed that the courts were more competent to judge Seale's guilt
or innocence than a bunch of professors, but if he did argue along such
lines, he certainly was not heard. Drugs, revolution, power, and the irra–
tional were being praised. Similar scenarios were taking place in uni–
versities large and small, public and private, while the country
increasingly put its fate into the hands of the courts and the legislators.
As David Frum holds in his book,
How We Got Here: The 70's-The
Decade that Brought You Modern Life-For Better or Worse
(2000),
the decline in learning blamed on the 1960s really happened in the
1970S with grade inflation and lack of discipline, student strikes and
sheer anarchy.
In
other words, things went from bad to worse when fac–
ulty became laughingstocks for students who "questioned all author–
ity," and the rhetoric of love supplanted rigorous learning.
