John Hersey - Wikipedia
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John Richard Hersey (June 17, 1914 – March 24, 1993) was an American writer and journalist. He is considered one of the earliest practitioners ... After the trial of the Black Panthers in New Haven, Connecticut, Hersey wrote Letter to the Alumni (1970 56 歲), in which the former Yale College master sympathetically addressed civil ...
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Yale Alumni Magazine
#tbt: Fifty years ago, author and outgoing Pierson College master John Hersey ’36 published a book called “Letter to the Alumni,” a post–May Day apologia for student activism at Yale. “It would be impossible for many of you alumni, whose lives are insulated by covenants of psychology and real estate, to realize how deeply, how overwhelmingly deeply, the issue of the future of black people in our country . . . must penetrate into every corner of America’s consciousness before it is resolved,” Hersey wrote. Our October 1970 issue featured excerpts from the book, illustrated with portraits of current students. Oddly, none of them were identified in the magazine. Does anyone recognize a friend or classmate?
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Will the campus blow again? Can the White House or the Unrest Com mission or anybody on earth devise a cooling strategy that works? What should be done to close the gap be tween distraught students — graduates, undergraduates, high‐schoolers —and the citizenry at large?
Letter to The Alumni
By John Hersey. 145 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $4.95.
The usefulness of the answers implicit in John Hersey's “Letter to the Alumni” may well astonish the trade. The author isn't, to begin with, an Ed Expert—no Ivy lifer, scholar,
pedagogue or the like. Master of Yale's Pierson College for a five‐year term finished last June, he came to the academy as an established novelist and journalist, has since returned to his last, and allows no whiff of Educational Statesman ‐like ambition to rise from his page. For another, he isn't primarily interested in prophecy or strategy. His closing chapters define two futures for the American community—one bright, one gloomy, both granting pivotal influence to student movements—but the largest portion of his effort goes to the task of explaining to Pierson College old boys precisely what happened at Yale last May, why President Brewster said what he said about prospects for justice for blacks, how undergraduate behavior ought to be interpreted.
Beyond all this—and still another reason for low expectations of Mr. Hersey in high academic places—the man isn't utterly free of defects as an observer of college scenes, or as a political intelligence. His assessments, for instance, occasionally lean hard on Nixonian superlatives that betray shaky understanding of the qualities rated:
His schemes for persuading students that some political men aren't knaves seem uninformed about the nature and sources of political effectiveness. His vision of Yale triumphant
Beyond all this—and still another reason for low expectations of Mr. Hersey in high academic places—the man isn't utterly free of defects as an observer of college scenes, or as a political intelligence. His assessments, for instance, occasionally lean hard on Nixonian superlatives that betray shaky understanding of the qualities rated:
“[You alumni] do not seem to realize that Yale is, at least at the instant I set this down, quite simply the best private university in the country, and that this is at least partly so because Kingman Brewster Jr. is the best university president in the country... Nor is this eminence entirely to Yale's credit; it is some what to Harvard's discredit, for Harvard, so long a Hertz, has an endowment of a billion dollars, while our poor Avis has but five hundred million!”
His schemes for persuading students that some political men aren't knaves seem uninformed about the nature and sources of political effectiveness. His vision of Yale triumphant
reconciles fire and ice too beamishly (“... there had in fact been only four instances of destructive violence — the two Law School fires, the explosion at the Rink, and the New Politics Corner fire... the elements of a holocaust had been assembled yet Mayday had been cool”). And his sentimentality, a problem in several novels from “A Bell for Adano” to “The Child Buyer,” here touches some profiles of individual students — Jeanne d'Arc coeds, poet jocks, fearless marshalls, brilliant teen kings all—with results that may not fit everybody's facts. (The present reviewer, visiting English prof and Branford College member at New Haven from 1968‐70, slogged through a batch of postponed Yale papers the other night — marshal's among the authors — that were incontrovertibly the work of mortal men.)
But despite defects of mind — and extravagances of heart—this ex master is, to repeat, immensely more helpful than most journalists, moral ists, public men and students who've thus far offered themselves as guides to campus crises. The key to the quality of the performance is plain as day: Instead of merely cooing at his brood over the years, Pierson's chief worked carefully, to the limit of his imaginative powers, hampered now and then (as indicated) by soft heartedness, to learn what the texture of the students ’ experience was like the intricacies and contradictions within undergraduate feelings, the content of confusions and absolutisms alike. He operated on the assumption that if you're going to have opinions about The Student, you need to know something about the creature's insides, how his head works, what principles—loony or otherwise —determine his view of the world.
The payoff of that assumption in the “Letter” is knowledge that's “valuable in itself,” hence better than Relevant. Mr. Hersey knows how the notion of incarceration imprisonment in college as imposed by the 2‐5 draft classification— shapes the consciousness of students, intensifying appetites for alternative free communities of love and openness. He lays bare the odd configuration of idealistic egotism and altruistic irresponsibility underlying the current breakdown of representational forms in student government and faculty student assemblies. He explains why skepticism about “chosen leaders” grows steadily stronger in student generations. He steps beyond thought chokers like “Alienation” into scrutiny of a series of specific behavior patterns, probing the psychological and moral implications of unisex (it permits postponement of the fragmentations called Career and Marriage), of the gospel of “helping and relating” (it sustains at least a possibility of noncash ‐oriented human connection), of the taste for humble work in crafts and trades (sanctuary from technological specialization), of the ceaseless demand for experience “in a new key,” easier access to closed‐off worlds (escape from the reductiveness of fixed role, sex, job, character, age, social level). And time and time again he presses him self—as Theodore Roszak and others like him in the field seldom do—to speak from inside. Witness this bit on the undergraduate's rueful relish ing of blacks: “How enviable the accessibility of their emotions! What fun they have, how loud they laugh, how easily they weep! They really seem to love each other. Their phrase, brothers and sisters,’ is so meaningful that we... take it over, but we have a harder time feeling like members of an extended family, a tribe, a folk... Perhaps even the blacks will extend their family of rebellion to include us. That may be one road to richness of feeling.”
But what bearing does talk “from inside” have on the queries above about future explosions, cooling strategies, gap‐closers, etc.? Well, one important effect of such talk is to re‐emphasize the indispensability of candor on the contemporary cam pus. Met in its context, the knowledge of student psychology crisply, readably set forth in this “Letter” coalesces, in the end, as the most potent injunction yet to authority on the theme Stop Lying. No matter how cute or canny you know you can be, Mr. Chancellor‐President Dean—so goes the thrust of these pages—no matter how comfortable you are at spinning one line to students, another to faculty, another to alums, no matter how sure you are that nobody in the adult community around you will dare to blow the whistle at the old con and jolly up of yesteryear, forget it. Forget it not because honesty guarantees peace but because the deepest‐running tide everywhere at this moment is dis gust at duplicity, and if you can't feel that weight on your bow, then there's no chance whatever of communication.
But the most important use of speaking from inside is that, in con tempt of universal stereotyping, speech from this angle compellingly confirms that there are people out there in the student body. We need to know more than Mr. Hersey can tell us about those who aren't Yalies (thanks to the American Council on Education's massive, longitudinal re search program on entering freshmen, this need is beginning to be met). We also need to know how an adminis trative commitment to honesty can be embodied in reasonably explicit rules and procedures for meeting the challenge of demonstrations (thanks to the finely argued report recently released by the American Bar Asso ciation's Commission on Campus Government and Student Dissent, this need too is beginning to be met). And we need imaginative penetration of professorial and administrative minds in crisis, not just those of 20‐year‐old kids..
But “Letter to the Alumni,” regardless of insufficiencies and sentimentalisms, is at its best an act of imaginative penetration—for which there are no substitutes. Kind, generous, alert to the ways in which each part of a student's mind works on every other part, it has the bewildering Beautiful Generation in a clearer view than the White House or the New Intellectual Hardrock ‐Backlash Press or the New University Conference or thousands of us holding office hours again this week have yet managed to achieve.
Non‐Yalies, in and out of academic (or other) power: Check the \ document closely, especially the fifty pages on “A Survival that is Worth It.”
Men of Pierson College: Read your lucky mail.
But despite defects of mind — and extravagances of heart—this ex master is, to repeat, immensely more helpful than most journalists, moral ists, public men and students who've thus far offered themselves as guides to campus crises. The key to the quality of the performance is plain as day: Instead of merely cooing at his brood over the years, Pierson's chief worked carefully, to the limit of his imaginative powers, hampered now and then (as indicated) by soft heartedness, to learn what the texture of the students ’ experience was like the intricacies and contradictions within undergraduate feelings, the content of confusions and absolutisms alike. He operated on the assumption that if you're going to have opinions about The Student, you need to know something about the creature's insides, how his head works, what principles—loony or otherwise —determine his view of the world.
The payoff of that assumption in the “Letter” is knowledge that's “valuable in itself,” hence better than Relevant. Mr. Hersey knows how the notion of incarceration imprisonment in college as imposed by the 2‐5 draft classification— shapes the consciousness of students, intensifying appetites for alternative free communities of love and openness. He lays bare the odd configuration of idealistic egotism and altruistic irresponsibility underlying the current breakdown of representational forms in student government and faculty student assemblies. He explains why skepticism about “chosen leaders” grows steadily stronger in student generations. He steps beyond thought chokers like “Alienation” into scrutiny of a series of specific behavior patterns, probing the psychological and moral implications of unisex (it permits postponement of the fragmentations called Career and Marriage), of the gospel of “helping and relating” (it sustains at least a possibility of noncash ‐oriented human connection), of the taste for humble work in crafts and trades (sanctuary from technological specialization), of the ceaseless demand for experience “in a new key,” easier access to closed‐off worlds (escape from the reductiveness of fixed role, sex, job, character, age, social level). And time and time again he presses him self—as Theodore Roszak and others like him in the field seldom do—to speak from inside. Witness this bit on the undergraduate's rueful relish ing of blacks: “How enviable the accessibility of their emotions! What fun they have, how loud they laugh, how easily they weep! They really seem to love each other. Their phrase, brothers and sisters,’ is so meaningful that we... take it over, but we have a harder time feeling like members of an extended family, a tribe, a folk... Perhaps even the blacks will extend their family of rebellion to include us. That may be one road to richness of feeling.”
But what bearing does talk “from inside” have on the queries above about future explosions, cooling strategies, gap‐closers, etc.? Well, one important effect of such talk is to re‐emphasize the indispensability of candor on the contemporary cam pus. Met in its context, the knowledge of student psychology crisply, readably set forth in this “Letter” coalesces, in the end, as the most potent injunction yet to authority on the theme Stop Lying. No matter how cute or canny you know you can be, Mr. Chancellor‐President Dean—so goes the thrust of these pages—no matter how comfortable you are at spinning one line to students, another to faculty, another to alums, no matter how sure you are that nobody in the adult community around you will dare to blow the whistle at the old con and jolly up of yesteryear, forget it. Forget it not because honesty guarantees peace but because the deepest‐running tide everywhere at this moment is dis gust at duplicity, and if you can't feel that weight on your bow, then there's no chance whatever of communication.
But the most important use of speaking from inside is that, in con tempt of universal stereotyping, speech from this angle compellingly confirms that there are people out there in the student body. We need to know more than Mr. Hersey can tell us about those who aren't Yalies (thanks to the American Council on Education's massive, longitudinal re search program on entering freshmen, this need is beginning to be met). We also need to know how an adminis trative commitment to honesty can be embodied in reasonably explicit rules and procedures for meeting the challenge of demonstrations (thanks to the finely argued report recently released by the American Bar Asso ciation's Commission on Campus Government and Student Dissent, this need too is beginning to be met). And we need imaginative penetration of professorial and administrative minds in crisis, not just those of 20‐year‐old kids..
But “Letter to the Alumni,” regardless of insufficiencies and sentimentalisms, is at its best an act of imaginative penetration—for which there are no substitutes. Kind, generous, alert to the ways in which each part of a student's mind works on every other part, it has the bewildering Beautiful Generation in a clearer view than the White House or the New Intellectual Hardrock ‐Backlash Press or the New University Conference or thousands of us holding office hours again this week have yet managed to achieve.
Non‐Yalies, in and out of academic (or other) power: Check the \ document closely, especially the fifty pages on “A Survival that is Worth It.”
Men of Pierson College: Read your lucky mail.
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