I knew that Pierre in War and Peace had been changed by wandering the battlefield at Borodino, and I fancied that experiencing Vietnam in person would do the same for me. Ambassador Bunker, who got wind of the fact that an American college president was poking around, invited me to dinner at the Embassy and offered me the use of a helicopter to see the country. My daredevil pilot amused himself by swooping down to buzz water buffalo--while I turned white.
At a dinner in the Ambassador's residence, I quizzed many young foreign service officers and CIA agents, and not one of them thought America's war aims could be realized. A few years later, as the North Vietnamese occupied Saigon, I pictured my helicopter pilot evacuating our Ambassador from the Embassy roof to the safety of aircraft carriers offshore.
When I returned to campus, the students assumed I was an expert on the war. Their credulity enabled me to focus the righteous indignation of the Oberlin community into a constructive protest. Oberlin sent fourteen busloads of students, faculty, administrators, and trustees to Washington to meet with virtually every Senator and Congressman and express opposition to the bombing of Cambodia. While those students descended on the Capitol, others back on campus erected a mock Vietnamese village. A helicopter was hired to napalm it as singers from the Conservatory of Music chanted a Greek chorus. The spectacle was broadcast to the nation that evening on the CBS News with Walter Cronkite.
Travel can jolt us awake and cause us to see anew. When it does, it's a vaccine against dogmatism and an antidote for chauvinism. As we struggle to reconcile what we're experiencing with what we take for granted, we strip away what's arbitrary in cultural practice and edge a bit closer to the universal.
Non-travelers are more apt to slip into habitual seeing and thinking. Even to cross the street in a foreign city, we must cease sleepwalking"or risk death. It must be admitted, however, that travel may also confirm some in the superiority of their ways. As Thomas Fuller observed in 1732, "Travel makes a wise man better, but a fool worse."
Travel not only invites us to see the world with new eyes, it gives us an unaccustomed look at who is doing the seeing. None of the benefits of travel compares to the oblique glance it allows us of ourselves.
So, we do not travel to get away from it all. The bumper sticker-- Wherever you go, there you are--has it right. Travel fails as escape, but it succeeds as confrontation--confrontation with our habitual selves that, deprived of confirmatory surroundings, may first stumble, but then find new footing.
In my youth, I traveled to grow up; at mid-life, to wake up; and in age, to stay on my toes.
Wild Times
My years at Trinity and Oberlin--the late sixties and early seventies--coincided with one of the most transgressive periods in America's cultural history--the Age of Aquarius, of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Love affairs were as yet unconstrained by fear of HIV-AIDS, and, thanks to the pill, sex had at last been freed of the inhibiting specter of unwanted pregnancy. For a brief shining moment, it seemed as if the strictures of American Puritanism had been repealed.
As president, I would hear rumors of intimate relationships between teachers and students, but so long as they were between consenting adults, I did not regard them as the proper business of the College. In those heady, heedless times, it seemed as if students felt shortchanged if their education did not include an affair with a professor.
The creative arts flourished during those years. Against the backdrop of Oberlin's world class Conservatory of Music, a continual parade of artists passed through the campus. One such was Twyla Tharp who, nine months pregnant, performed a solo dance.
The Oberlin Dance Collective, under the direction of Brenda Way, gathered enough momentum during its formative years to take off and establish itself in San Francisco as a dance company and center known worldwide as ODC.
I recruited Herbert Blau, formerly a director at Lincoln Center, to head up a new Inter-Arts program. Among others, Blau mentored Bill Irwin, who became a distinguished actor, and Julie Taymor (stage and film director, known widely for The Lion King).
There were also early stirrings of what would become the movement for gay and lesbian rights. Two incidents stand out:
First, a phone call from a wealthy trustee and major donor, ordering me to fire an administrator who'd been detained by Cleveland police for engaging in a homosexual act. Here the bylaws protected me from the trustee's attempt to impose his views. I told him that before the administrator could be fired, he would first need to produce a majority of the Board to remove me from office.
Second, a contingent of gay and lesbian students, inviting me to attend what they billed as the first gay dance on an American campus. After trying in vain to concoct an excuse for not attending, my wife and I dutifully showed the flag. Afterwards, a professor who'd also attended let me know that seeing us there was the first time he'd ever felt that he belonged at Oberlin.
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