Tufts University - Jumbo Yearbook (Medford, MA)

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The new dean is an academic rather than a disciplinary dean; she is also a teacher. Her interest in the city has resulted in several urban courses, and in talk of a more formalized program of urban studies for Tufts. She has taught a course on urban social planning both semesters this year; the second semester course being an elaborate simulation of the actual planning of a Model Cities program. Drawing on her past experience in the city, she has arranged extraordinary field placements for students interested in urban studies. Attempting to bring Tufts off of the Hill into the community, she has organized a program of continuing education. Under this program, beginning next fall, ma¬ ture women, many of them underprivileged, will study in special and regular courses at Tufts. Issues have seemed to form naturally around Mrs. Chayes. The new social rules for Jackson, and dormitory autonomy for the whole university incited some controversy, much of which centered around the Jackson Dean. Coeducational living began to look within the realm of possibility, particularly with the begin¬ ning of construction of an all university dormitory. Urban studies as a major, a department, or a program was discussed, often in reference to Mrs. Chayes. She is a white liberal, an innovator and a student of academic and social change. To her admirers, she seems charming and exhilarating. To her critics, and she has some among both the students and the faculty, she seems ruthless and aggressive. She is one of “the beautiful people,” one of the “Kennedy People.” To many people, she is the most exciting administrator at Tufts today. 29

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Antonia Chayes By profession a lawyer, by vocation an urban social planner, and not inciden¬ tally, Dean of Jackson College and mother of five children, Antonia Chayes brings a totally new atmosphere to the office of the Jackson Dean. The deanship is no longer held by one or even two stern, virginal spinster types, but by five attractive, ambitious, controversial, but undeniably capable women. No longer is the sole interest of this office Jackson College and its social rules, but now, for the first time, social and academic change for the entire university community stems from the Jackson Dean. Before coming to Jackson, Mrs. Chayes used the law training she received at Yale and George Washington Universities for work in metropolitan areas. She has been admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia, the Interstate Commerce Commission, and the Court of Military Appeals. Locally she has served as Education Coordinator, and as Director of Urban Development for Action for Boston Community De¬ velopment, the Boston poverty agency. She also has worked as a consultant for the Boston Model Cities program. Both Mrs. Chayes and her husband were on the staff of the President’s Committee on Civil Disorders. 28

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Robert Carleton Dallery It struck me today that the real meaning of this year’s campus protests by black students has been so obvious that no one has seen it. Liberal administrators and teachers, who seem to believe that human goodness consists in having nice intentions, have been caught by surprise: black students want courses in black history, black literature, black culture. “But this is racism,” say the well-intentioned, “and culture knows no color.” Which is both true and false. The culture taught white students by the new breed of impartial, cosmopoli¬ tan, value-freed, objective academics is indeed colorless; the upshot of being edu¬ cated seems to have become colorlessness. The objection is false, though, in an¬ other sense. The colorless culture now called into question not only by black students but by many white students too has been the culture of white Europe, particularly the arrogant, manipulative, impatient Europe that sprang out of the Enlightenment. This is the Europe that needed the savages and the heathen against which to define itself and prove itself. Very few people even profess to be interested in this part of European culture anymore. We still live by it, pretty largely; the habit is hard to break. Who wants to believe in it? Its inevitable culmination is the historical mass society. Another surprise in the black protests: not only do they ask for programs of study, they want teachers too! And this at a time when teachers are becoming obsolete. Is it to be the destiny of these few black youth to bring education back to itself? What is so striking about so many “black demands” is that they ask higher education to be higher education, to concern itself with living culture, its continuity with the past, and its growth into new forms. This is what the culture- less data-gatherer and liberalizer can’t stand. The black people used to be our “barbarians”; we thought their lack of culture helped to show how cultured and civilized we white men were. We thought they wanted something we have. Now the truth is out. They are the civilized men. They have had to form themselves and live their values in the teeth of daily opposition; not for them, even if some should want it, a culture of distractions and spectator sports. No race of color ever perpetrated the horrors white Europeans and Americans have visited upon humanity in the past forty years; no race of color has produced a country dedicated to economic policies whose very continuance demands vio¬ lence—since the rich get richer, and the poor are still getting poorer. Only a white country can—and must—buy off and enthrall the rest of the “free” world to keep its own kind of freedom. Travel the world over, then return to our land of the free: you can see in the white faces on every street that life is a tiresome chore, relieved only by moments of childishness, that there’s no place to go, nothing new to say, and nothing really to do. Human faces looked this way in the sick society of Hellenistic Greece, and in the early thirties in Germany. So the chroniclers have reported. And yet — surprise!—here on our very campuses those former barbarians dare to tell us that they aren’t rushing to buy our thing. The nerve! They actually desire to study history, art, literature, music—because these are parts of their lives together. Not ornaments, not prizes you give yourself when you’ve made it. But this is the kind of desire only free men have. How surprising to suspect that people needn’t learn white ways in order to be free, that the hollow rituals of white American culture, its white heroes, white holidays, white gods, and colorless ideas aren’t even wanted by those “others.” The scandal is that a lot of black people are not saying they want to be free, “please mister”; they are showing that they are free in that fundamental human sense that once was recognized in the European tradition. The freedom they still want—and will have to struggle for—is the material freedom to be humanly free. More scandalous still, the black protesters are showing where our gods are: in private property and in authoritarian rituals. The various black “uprisings” on American campuses have, for the moment, unseated the professoriat as the teachers of young America, black, white, brown, yellow, red. They have shown it: there is such a thing as black culture; which means perhaps that there is such a thing as culture, a way of being oneself in a community whose communal existence is a source of joy. Black students are demanding black teachers to teach courses in black culture. Take the word “black” out of that sentence and you’ll see how amazing it is. The whole idea just might catch on. 30