(Article changed on December 13, 2013 at 19:21)
I recently published Belonging: A Memoir, which can be downloaded for free at Smashwords. This memoir is a companion piece to my novel The Rowan Tree, which is also now available for free through Christmas as a Kindle ebook. The memoir covers the experiences that inspired The Rowan Tree, while the novel imagines those experiences playing out in different ways. Both the memoir and the novel explore the universal importance of preserving human dignity. The Rowan Tree recently cracked the Amazon Top 20 Best Seller list for Literary Fiction ebooks.
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 12 of Belonging, which discusses my years as president of Oberlin College, when the stage was being set for social and political battles that are still being fought today.
During my first week in office at Oberlin, a professor, twenty years my senior, had dropped by my office to wish me well. As he left he said, "Good-bye, Dad"--those very words! I thought it was a joke until I saw the expression on his face: it was that of a little boy. The words that had escaped his lips had nothing to do with me as an individual, everything to do with my office and title. It was an example of the same transference that had made it so hard for me to call Professor Wheeler by his first name. Transference is defined by psychologists as the redirection of feelings and desires, especially those from childhood, to a new object, often an authority figure.
Psychologists see the awe that people have for the rich, famous, and powerful as examples of transference. VIPs who are insecure in their status, can even have transference on their idea of themselves, revealing their self-doubt in their touchiness over how they're treated by subordinates.
Ruth Gruber, an Oberlin student, was either free of transference or determined not to be intimidated by the trappings of authority. She approached me one day as I walked across the Oberlin campus and declared "Unless you learn to dance your growth will be blocked. If you like, I'll teach you." She explained that she had noticed me at a party enviously watching students dancing to rock and roll. I showed up at her dorm room at the appointed hour and, with her coaxing and musical accompaniment from the Four Tops, I self-consciously danced my way out of a strait-jacket of inhibitions.
It was as if Ruth had finally given me that private singing lesson promised by my seventh grade teacher. The same self-consciousness that had prevented me from singing, had kept me from dancing. I think it stems from a propensity to stand outside myself as a witness from which remove I experience existential embarrassment. The feeling is one of sticking out into the universe and, like a tortoise under attack, I want to tuck my head into my shell.
Ten years after she coaxed me into dancing, I ran into Ruth in Warsaw, where she was reporting for United Press International on the Solidarity-led revolution in Poland, and we danced all night.
The flip side of undue deference is gratuitous defiance. To compensate for feelings of transference some make a habit of resisting anything that issues from authorities. Subservience to rank and habitual rebellion against it are both manifestations of transference. Dependency and counter-dependency constitute a double-barreled threat to mature rational governance.
My presidency at Oberlin coincided with Nixon's abuse of presidential power so people were even more inclined than usual to view officialdom with suspicion--a predisposition that I shared. But Oberlin's problems stemmed from the monopoly on power held by the faculty. When power is in the hands of one constituency, it tends to interpret institutional goals in ways that perpetuate its own status and privilege, and can be late to address the grievances of stakeholders whose views are unrepresented.
Even more aggravating than the climate of distrust that pervaded campuses during the Vietnam era, was that, as president, I had to repeat the same arguments and speeches, again and again, to different audiences. I should have foreseen that administration would not be exempt from my gold-silver-mud progression. Burnout was a constant threat. Staying alive, the supreme challenge.
Staying Alive
The object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country....One thing I did to stave off administrative rigor mortis was travel. While at Trinity, I'd made two trips around South America and one around the world, all at the behest of Battelle Memorial Institute. Battelle was considering establishing a research laboratory in Brazil, and my mission was to check out the Korean and Indian Institutes of Technology for purposes of comparison with the proposed institute in Brazil.
-- G. K. Chesterton
In 1968 Brazil was under military dictatorship. When I got to the University in Rio, I was told that the students had been sent home and it was closed indefinitely. This certainly didn't auger well for a research institute, and Battelle decided against it.
When India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi learned that an American had been inspecting the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, she wanted to know what he thought of her "baby." Mrs. Gandhi had championed graduate science education in India, so when my Wesleyan colleague, the English poet Stephen Spender, who knew her personally, let her know what I was up to, she invited me and Ann to her office for a briefing. A limo was sent to pick us up, and for two hours I did my best to field her probing questions.
Her interrogation led up to one big question: How did IIT stacked up against MIT? Happily, I was able to tell her that I thought IIT belonged in the ranks of institutions such as MIT. Mrs. Gandhi had arranged for a whole generation of Indian scientists to receive graduate training at top American universities--I'd had several of them as students at Columbia and they were outstanding. So, I could honestly report that with these young doctorates in leadership roles, Indian science was rapidly becoming world class.
Time has confirmed this forecast. Indian science and technology has played a central role in the country's development, and is now emulated the world over. Mrs. Gandhi's vision has been vindicated. It's hard to imagine more than a few world leaders, then or since, with either her grasp of science and technology or her passion for education.
At Oberlin, my travels continued. In the summer of 1971, I stopped putting off something I'd wanted to do since the war in Vietnam began: go there and see for myself.
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