No Campus for Old Men
“You can't help but compare yourself against the old-timers. Can't help but wonder how they would've operated these times.”
It’s a recurring nightmare. I’m back on Campus at Reunions, struggling to find my way amidst an otherworldly mix of the familiar and the jarring new. My old dorm room, I find, is now a women’s restroom. I begin to contemplate the contrast for this locale on the comings and goings of coeds then and now, but a devastating realization paralyzes me. I’ve no place to stay for Reunions Weekend! Then I remember — if only I can present a suitable grievance, I can lodge at Old Nassau in the President’s office. . . . And then I wake up.
So, the students at Stanford Law School just recently shouted down a federal appeals judge who’d been invited to give a talk there. Even the DEI dean joined in on the bashing. Demanded, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” And she never got around to telling those kids straight to quiet down and let the guy say his piece. Never that they’d face consequences with the university if they didn’t. Got so bad that, rather than let him stay a moment longer, the federal marshals took the judge out of the room to protect him.
And that DEI Dean before Stanford had been an attorney with the ACLU. The “C” and the “L” used to stand for “Civil Liberties”. Seems I missed a big change.
A strange piece of the West these days, California. Water’s for lawn care and pronouns for fightin’.
But you can’t top the stupefying irony of those Yale law students who last year shouted down two speakers who’d come there to talk about free speech itself. No discipline taken there either. Stanford Law, at least, ordered mandatory free speech training for their kids. Not Yale.
As an alum of neither of these places, I’m tempted to point out these goings on at those famous law schools with delicious relish. But those places make the state of intellectual freedom and open discourse smell like a rotting corpse. I hope against hope for a Lazarus recovery – there and elsewhere. With elite students acting like this, what lies ahead for our legal system, government, and our culture?
What would Bob Goheen make of this, I wonder. He led Princeton 16 years before handing it over to Bowen in ‘72. Made big changes at Princeton, and kept the place together during the ‘60s. What a decade. The older I get, whenever I look back on the ‘60s, the crazier yet more profound it seems. Even before I showed up on Campus in ‘70, Goheen showed how to lead and bring forth the better angels of our nature. Took the uproar over the Vietnam War and killings of protesting students in Ohio and Mississippi, and shepherded in the Princeton Plan. That leadership carried us through a crisis. And he proactively led Princeton with vision to adopt and then successfully implement coeducation.
Goheen knew how to enforce limits, too. In ‘68 kids wanting basic civil rights for all South Africans took over the New South Building. Goheen refused to talk to them or have anyone in his administration negotiate. Sent word if they didn’t give up the building right away, they’d face disciplinary measures. They didn’t, and Goheen followed through as promised. In ‘70, other kids shouted down Nixon’s Secretary of the Interior when he tried to give a speech. They got disciplined big time.
Not perfect, but things went better during my years on Campus. No takeovers. Nixon’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff came. There were protests, but he gave a speech to a full crowd at McCosh 50. A way greater controversy arose when William Shockley, 1956 Nobel Prize winner in physics, showed up to debate a Princeton professor of anthropology. Shockley was campaigning for his voluntary eugenics proposal. Probably most people considered him a racist crank. There were active protests outside, but inside McCosh 10 the debate proceeded. And both sides had their say. Such were my Campus years.
Still haven’t figured out whether Eisgruber was misguidedly stupid or instead 3D chessmaster smart when he let those protesting kids stay in his office. Goheen wouldn’t have put up with that. And Eisgruber was setting a dumb precedent – or so I thought at the time. He did the opposite of Goheen. He let the kids crowd his office. Even spend the night. He himself talked with the kids about their demands. And, of course, no sanctions. And for whatever it’s worth, not five years after the takeover of his office Eisgruber wound up implementing those kids’ key demand. Took Woodrow Wilson’s name away from that residential college and the school of public affairs.
One of my first-year law school teachers was Ed Levi. Just before returning to campus to us, he’d ably served as Gerald Ford’s Attorney General until Jimmy Carter took over. Before Ford tapped him, Levi’d been the university’s president. In ‘68 campus protesters had taken and occupied not just his office but the entire university administration building. Levi later told us that Milton Friedman himself was among the many who wanted the Chicago police called in to clear out the building. Levi thought the protestors would tire of the admin building and leave the place of their own accord. And that’s what happened. And – as with Goheen – Levi had the university sanction those kids.
Years after my time in law school, I visited the Stanford campus. Friedman had retired to the Hoover Institution there. Dropped by his office. Hoped to say hello, as he was one of my former teachers. Even wrote a law school recommendation for me. He wasn’t there, but Gloria Valentine – one smart, engaging black lady and his secretary who’d come with him from Chicago – showed me how that renowned man still kept on his desktop his own class notes from a course decades before by one of his beloved professors. I smiled.
I still had my notes from my classes with Friedman and, for that matter, all of those binders of xeroxed readings Ed Levi put us through in his Elements of Law course. Was the first time in some 25 years Levi’d taught that legend of a class. I now summon those digitized notes and readings from the clouds whenever it strikes my fancy. Do it with that third half of my brain I keep in my pocket. So, too, that copy of the Constitution Scalia told us aspiring lawyers always to carry, and a copy of his beloved Federalist Papers, to boot. Keep my real desktop a place for honest-to-god junk, or so it seems to others.
My mind wanders at times here in Londontown as I await my turn at granddad duties. I don’t think I’m getting old. But I see those alums coming back for their 25th Reunions as kids. Have for years. Perspectives change with time.
A few months ago, a first-year wrote, “Princeton’s ‘free speech problem’ is imaginary.” I most certainly disagree. Once thought I’d put together a response. Even had a title in mind, “Yes, Virginia, Princeton’s Free Speech Problem Is Real!” Got waylaid by Witherspoon instead.
But she was right about one thing, at least. Princeton hasn’t had a takeover since Eisgruber decided not to throw out those students who took his office. And, unlike those sorry free speech disasters at Stanford and Yale, no speakers at Princeton have been shouted down at Eisgruber’s Princeton, none I know of anyway. Heck, even that dispute over old Witherspoon’s statue has gotten national coverage for being a model of decorum. A hundred years ago that so-called “Christian Student” statue next to East Pyne never got that kind of respect.
But I still wonder whether this is now no Campus for an old man, or “old” anything. That Great Awokening coursing through every institution these days, or so it seems. I keep tryin’ to understand, but fail. Tell myself, a Scarlett O’Hara, “I’ll think about that tomorrow.”
I try to be grateful as I look around these days, think back, and wonder what’s to come. And giving “praise of Old Nassau” still feels good. And so I sing, “Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!”
Bill Hewitt is an alumnus of Princeton in the Class of 1974. Even when channeling his inner Sheriff Ed Tom Bill, in this exercise of free speech Bill is prepared to be labeled a Concerned Reactionary Alum of Princeton (CRAP), preferably by Yalies. He can be reached at hewitt74@alumni.princeton.edu.
