A President's Third Year

My First Sit-In

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By Robert A. Weisbuch

"Yale or Jail." That was my senior-year motto at Wesleyan in 1968. Draft resisters to the Vietnam War held a special graduation at which I was the student speaker. With bloated rhetoric, I listed the injustices of American foreign policy, beginning each point with the phrase, "Of course I'm afraid but ...."

On the following day, The Middletown Press reported something like, "Professor Barry Commager of Amherst spoke of the ecological damage being done to Southeast Asia by the war. Wesleyan's Professor Ihab Hassan intoned the names of Wesleyan students as if they were the war-dead. Senior Robert Weisbuch said that he was scared."

Which was more true than my rhetoric. Like many other middle-class kids, I avoided jail, made it to Yale, and nearly 40 years later found myself the very kind of university president whose office I once would sit in upon.

How pleasantly nostalgic then was a special conference on the year 1968 organized last autumn at Drew University by my colleague in history, Jeremy Varon. The keynote speaker was Mark Rudd, the famous anti-war activist and former head of Columbia University's chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. He used the occasion to both recant some of his actions and provide excellent advice for potential student organizers.

How much less pleasant was the scene in my office several months later when, so instructed, waves of students came to protest a new campus food contract with a vendor whom they accused of racism and union-busting. The students, members of Drew's renewed chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, had located a British Web site making those claims in a well-documented fashion.

The students employed a great technique. Each read a few idealistic statements from one or another of my campus speeches, with the purpose of implying that I was embarrassing myself and the university by hypocritically signing a major contract with a supposedly corrupt corporation.

The students did not count on my egotism -- on occasion, I would ask them to repeat the reading of one of my better-turned phrases -- but the truth is that I was abashed and disconcerted. Wasn't I just a few short decades ago on the other side of that desk? More sharply, shouldn't I be on that other side now?

It hadn't all been fun in the Demonstrating '60s. I recall very well having my eyeglasses (nonpsychedelic, at that) jostled from my face and ground into the cement by an angry police officer at a draft-office sit-in. But it had felt far more righteous sitting in than being sat in upon.

In fact, the food contract had not been signed, but the process had become messy. A relatively democratic committee of students, staff members, and professors had favored one of the other bidders at first, and that was reported by the campus newspaper. The final choice was indeed unanimous, but the newspaper not only failed to learn that but also reported the charges against the chosen vendor as undisputed fact.

Lost in the hubbub was the progress we had made in ensuring local organic produce and other health-related, environmentally sound offerings and practices. I had not imagined we were signing with Darth Vader and the Evil Empire.

I promised the students I would learn more before our next scheduled confrontation. The students lightly applauded my will to learn more, just as they had applauded or jeered anything I had said earlier. In a true Drew touch, two of the students returned 10 minutes after the group departed to apologize for being "too edgy."

"No, no," I said. "You're not supposed to say that." But I was next to tears at the sweetness of their worry.

Speaking of personal humidity, my usual mental atmosphere is generally cloudy, heading toward fog, but on the intervening Saturday afternoon, a rare sun broke through. We could make this a liberal-arts moment. If indeed the food corporation was as socially nasty as the students believed, better indeed for Drew to find another vendor. Yet they were relying on a single Web site in this new Internet world of multiple, often unreliable, and contradictory sources.

We have a program in business, society, and culture at Drew, and I asked its talented leader, Richard Greenwald, to head a new ad-hoc committee, made up of professors, students, and staff members, to investigate the vendor, employing all available information, and reporting back to me and the University Senate within 10 days. Tall order, and yet the committee went beyond my charge, interviewing labor leaders and various investment experts in the catering sphere.

The upshot was different, I expect, than any of us would have predicted. The corporation indeed had been guilty as charged, but several years ago. New ownership and management had achieved a turnaround, winning multiple awards for diversity in hiring and promotion. Further, labor leaders, while emphasizing that no corporate suits are angels, affirmed that this corporation was about as good as it gets in terms of a collaborative attitude.

Reader, I married him. But the students had made some important points. Drew is still dealing with some general labor issues they raised. I became sensitized (a verb, I guess, invented after the '60s in the soft-rock '70s) to the need to fully investigate a vendor's corporate and social policies. We built into the contract some stronger points protecting current workers, and we further strengthened some organic-food guarantees.

It isn't as if a love-in followed upon the sit-in. It's more like interest dissipated. Graduation and summer intervened; and even then the committee had rejected some of the student concerns -- for instance, that this corporation supplies food to bases of the U.S. Army. I don't doubt that other issues will arise any moment now to allow the university administration to be portrayed as the brutal, bullying Establishment, or whatever we call tyrannical authority in 2007.

Still, in all of this, I actually came to understand my 1968 self better. I'd never been as much of a radical as I had wished to recall, just a stirred-up liberal facing a real decision. Just so, I'd never been much of a hippie. My moderation was equal parts timidity and complexity, an acceptance of my circumstance and my country as well as a quarrel with each.

Yet last year in my office, speaking with my similarly not-that-young-anymore colleague Wendy Kolmar about a major curricular reform, I felt a shock of recognition when she said, "Bob, don't expect some other faculty to agree with this. This is our cultural moment talking."

And for better and worse, at Drew, as at many other universities, this is also the personification of that cultural moment leading what is, after all, a social institution. If at times I wonder what we are doing, I wonder more seriously and without any answer how we are doing. Has rock lifted leadership or ruined it? Woodstock or Altamont? When Aquarius becomes a Suit, which changes who?