Slouching Towards Gomorrah Read Online Free Page B

exception of times of war or the decade of the Great Depression. Some of those books have been analytical, some factual, most are admiring. But there is a different story to tell, and that story focuses on the universities, for it was there that the cadres of the new liberalism first appeared.
T HE S ACKING OF THE U NIVERSITIES
    The campus madness may have started at Berkeley, but “it was the Ivy League that was ultimately to set the pace in the retreat of reason.” 3 When the first demonstrations broke out at Yale, a visiting professor pointed out that it was organized by a transfer student from Berkeley. At every university, he said, the first eruptions could be traced to a radical who had “come down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from Berkeley.” Yale had for years been politically liberal, no department more so than the law school. I was one of two Republicans on a faculty of about forty-five. When it was proposed that we hire a man who might possibly have been a third, he was rejected, one faculty member remarking that he would “tip the balance.”
    But liberal as it was, Yale was unprepared for the shock when student radicals first appeared in our midst. We knew of the riots at places like Berkeley and Columbia, but that was not the same as seeing irrational fury face to face. The change at the law school began abruptly with the class that entered in 1967. Unlike the traditional liberal students of the second-and third-year classes, whom they frightened as much as they dismayed the faculty, these students were angry, intolerant, highly vocal, and case-hardened against logical argument.
    Two decades before their leftist orthodoxy had been given a name, this group developed a rigid “political correctness” of its own. In the first-year course on constitutional law, I led one student through a conventional analysis of an aspect of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, in which he reached the only coherent and legally non-controversial conclusion possible. (I think it was that the amendment prohibited only official and not private action.) About ten minutes later he raised his hand, was recognized, rose from his front-row seat, turned to his fellow students, and said, “I want to apologize to the class for reaching the conclusion I did.I must have sounded like Attila the Hun.” He resumed his seat and waited for me to proceed with whatever topic was then under discussion. The class showed no sign that anything unusual had happened. Neither then nor afterward did he explain what was wrong with the reasoning that led to the conclusion; the latter was just not acceptable politically, and that was that. When last heard of, he was a professor of law. No doubt he is indoctrinating his students in non-Tatar constitutional theory.
    The entry of another politicized class in 1968 gave the radicals effective control of the student body. I was on sabbatical leave that academic year, but upon returning in 1969 I saw the entry of a third such class and a law school becoming an intellectual and pedagogical shambles. At Yale, as elsewhere, part of the faculty began to side with the students. Some professors were radicals themselves, a few were emotionally unstable, some needed student approval and would do whatever was necessary to keep it, others simply withdrew or went into denial. This was characteristic of all the university departments outside the hard sciences. The administration, thoroughly intimidated, refused to get involved. All of which meant that effective faculty resistance was impossible. The results were calamitous.
    Turmoil was the order of the day…student strikes, arson in university buildings (three episodes in the law school alone), angry demonstrations, classroom disruptions, rejection of rationality as reactionary, obscenities shouted at faculty members, the usual assortment of barbarities. There were a few compensating amusements. Students would notify the press of a scheduled demonstration, but if the