The following story is adapted from Bauerlein’s recent book, “The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults.”
Back in April 1969, a surprisingly conservative thing happened at the ultra-progressive campus of SUNY–Old Westbury when radical theorist Herbert Marcuse visited to give a lecture to the students. Michael Novak describes the episode in his memoir “Writing from Left to Right: My Journey from Liberal to Conservative,” which includes a full chapter on Novak’s time teaching at Westbury, where he had joined the school as a willing participant in a new way of educating. The college had just opened with a small set of faculty and a hundred students or so. It was a deliberate experiment in youth empowerment. In this new institution “all students would be ‘full partners,’ and new ways of weaving together learning and action would be explored,” Novak remembers. Here, finally, teachers would respect the finer consciousness of students, who hadn’t been corrupted by the Establishment. Undergrads arrived fired up by Vietnam and youth revolt, convinced that the grownups had botched the world and wouldn’t let go unless the young forced them, and they demanded that Westbury show how authentic reform works. Many of the teachers agreed.
Novak was in sympathy with the protests of the time, which he paints as part of a “tumultuous quest” for “honesty, courage, and community,” but he retained enough common sense to recognize that a college needed some structure and hierarchy. The students’ call for equality became “hatred for authority,” he recalls, a full-on “contempt for normality and ‘bourgeois’ norms.” It was ludicrous: students coming to class barefoot and dirty, ordering teachers to approve their independent projects no matter what direction they took, denying the expertise of the very professors appointed to grade and accredit them, worshipping Vietcong guerrillas and harassing teachers who seemed noncompliant (one day Novak found a note on his door threatening him and his family and signed by “The Committee”). The whole experience pushed Novak toward views that would land him among neoconservatives in the 1980s.
Soon Novak and a few others split off to form their own college-within-the-college, in which the classics would be studied in a traditional manner. There, as provost, he could invite suitable outsiders to come and address the students, one of them being Marcuse. It was a logical choice. Nobody had better credentials than the famed German emigré, who had woven Marx and Freud together to create a compelling indictment of capitalist society in “Eros and Civilization” (1955) and “One-Dimensional Man” (1964). His thesis of “repressive tolerance,” which authorized minority revolutionaries to deny free speech rights to conservative foes, thrilled Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman. Students at Westbury would love to hear him.
Novak doesn’t mention it, but a year after Marcuse’s visit, an account of it appeared in Playboy magazine under the heading “Portrait of the Marxist as an Old Trouper.” It was written by Michael G. Horowitz, a young journalist who’d been a student of Marcuse’s at Brandeis a few years before. People “came in droves” to see Marcuse at Westbury, Horowitz stated, students and nonstudents eager to savor the man whose “revolutionary broadsides have always been too delightfully apocalyptic to be anything but explosively alive.” The article recounted Marcuse’s flight from Nazi Germany in the ’30s, his patriotic work for the U.S. Office of War Information during World War II, positions at institutes at Columbia and Harvard in the 1950s, professorship at Brandeis in the ’60s until his anti–Vietnam War stance and fervent Marxism poisoned the relationship and he had to go (Marcuse compared America in 1965 to “the terror of Nazi Germany”), eventually relocating to UC–San Diego. By then, Time and the New York Times had named him the star theoretician of the New Left. Student radicals who were otherwise contemptuous of anyone over thirty idolized him. The attendees at Westbury, Horowitz observed, were “as crass in their adoration as the crowd cheering Johnny Winter that night at the Fillmore East.” Novak himself appears in the Playboy account as the “Catholic theologian . . . whose arguments for the New Left were giving the Vatican fits.” Horowitz spotted him sitting “penitently on the floor, so as to be at Marcuse’s feet.”
Horowitz foresaw that the students’ adulation would be tested, though. He had previous experience of Marcuse, from when he was a sophomore at Brandeis. Just before Marcuse quit the campus, students had held a reception in his honor at which a revealing exchange occurred. Marcuse’s secretary had asked him, in an apparent reference to his formal teaching style, “Why don’t you ever talk to your students?”
“But I do talk to them!” he replied.
Horowitz, standing right there, jumped in: “Ok, let’s talk!” Marcuse let him proceed. “What do you think of student power?” the young man queried.
It was a common challenge at the time, to ask educators in authority how they conceived of their students, as children to be tutored or as budding adults to be set free? Given those polar alternatives, Marcuse was unambiguous: “On Vietnam, on dormitory rules, I am with you. But in the classroom, I believe in only one power—faculty power. When we were students in Berlin, we never dictated to our professors, we listened to them.”
That response stuck with Horowitz, who judged Marcuse’s approach “disturbingly authoritarian,” and he didn’t believe Marcuse had changed his educational views since then. What proceeded to unfold at Westbury didn’t surprise him.
“What do you think of black studies?” came a shout from the back once Marcuse took his place at the front and the discussion began.
“I don’t believe in black studies or white studies,” Marcuse answered. “There’s a certain amount of material that every intelligent person should learn.”
As Horowitz notes, this approach could only sound hopelessly reactionary to the revolutionaries in the room—a core, a tradition, a static canon of hoary works imposed upon a rising generation in order to tame it. The logical challenge would be: What “material”?
When I came across the Playboy article and read the account, such a challenge had an all-too-familiar ring. It was essentially the same question that was heard throughout academia in the 1980s and ’90s, when multiculturalists discredited the traditional syllabus with the accusatory questions “Whose tradition? Why Shakespeare? Who decides?” I heard it all the time in those years and couldn’t always figure out why it had so much authority, but it did. The questioners—from 1969 through the next few decades—assumed that those putdowns fully justified displacing Western Civilization and English lit from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf and the Great American Novel, art and architecture from the Parthenon to Picasso, the music of Mozart and Stravinsky, and all the rest. This time, though, it didn’t fly with the speaker at all. Marcuse didn’t bother with a specific defense. He didn’t offer any names or titles. For him, it was obvious what students should be learning: “I am talking about the basics of history, economics, psychology, philosophy, and so on.”
“Are these really relevant to the black student in a revolutionary situation?”
Marcuse acknowledged the apparent irrelevance of the traditional curriculum to kids from the ghetto, but insisted that that was all the more reason for the core instruction. The same year he had written that genuine rebellion in an advanced society required “a break with the familiar, the routine ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding things,” a reflection, he understood, that few uneducated persons could achieve (“An Essay on Liberation”, 1969). Marcuse didn’t go into that point at Westbury, but we can draw the implication. Without the guidance of tradition, the black student wouldn’t comprehend his own situation, he wouldn’t understand how radical the change must be to transform it, and hence his revolution would never go beyond fruitless gestures of resistance.
“But why bother preparing them?” growled a student Horowitz recognized as a member of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). “For what? The white man’s economics courses? If he’s seen rats, junkies, and the General Motors Building, he knows all he has to know!” The crowd brayed its approval.
Marcuse had had enough. His tone remained diplomatic, but not his words. “I detect here . . . a growing anti-intellectual attitude among the students. There is no contradiction between intelligence and revolution. Why are you afraid of being intelligent?” He gave an example of thoughtful activism at UCSD, when students added scholarly material to their demands of the administration and won a concession from the dean. He noted, too, the roles of Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau in the French Revolution, and of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky in the Russian Revolution, thinkers all. That argument quieted the crowd. A stand-off set in. The students didn’t want to go into Voltaire and Marx; they were sure they’d already got the tools of revolution. And Marcuse wouldn’t back down; he was unwilling to indulge youth just because they were young. You can imagine them sulking in silence, the man they revered sounding just like their square fathers telling them to finish their homework.
It was a telling encounter between American upstarts and Old World thinker, a clash over readiness, not ideas or politics. Neither side would budge. They couldn’t because the debate had become too personal. The young revolutionaries wanted to hear about the tactics of the capitalists, yes, but more, they want Marcuse to endorse them, as they were at that very moment (“Give us student power!”), and he wouldn’t do it. They were already revolutionaries, they believed, but no, he said, if they really wanted to become revolutionaries, they would have to go to their rooms and read more books. Don’t be in such a hurry, you’re not ready yet, this sixty-year-old man told them. This wasn’t a quarrel over politics. It was a quarrel over youth.
In his memory of the event, Novak saw it that way, too. He devoted only one paragraph to Marcuse’s performance. But while at the time that he wrote his memoir, many years after the event, he stood far from the political position of the young reporter, his version of Marcuse’s judgment didn’t contradict Horowitz’s at all: “After mingling with the students, he was affronted and disgusted. At his lecture, he set aside his prepared notes and instead described the severe Prussian discipline of his own education: the classics he had to master; the languages he had to learn by exercises and constant tests. His theme was that no one had any standing on which to rebel against the past—or dare to call himself a revolutionary—who had not mastered the tradition of the West.”
In both renditions of the story, the master was a disappointment to his fans, precisely because he couldn’t accept them as partners. Not even the tactician of repressive tolerance could bridge the generation gap. Horowitz concludes that Marcuse was a radical thinker, but lived a bourgeois life just like the rest of the Establishment, “paying mortgages, getting the car fixed. . .” He talks and talks, but will never provoke a revolution. Though “a despairing youth intelligentsia needs constant resuscitation,” they weren’t going to get it from Marcuse, Horowitz decided. Novak’s final remark records the impact of the guru’s refusal to approve the students’ rejection of traditional learning: “This was not at all what the students expected. From then on a chill came over quotations from Marcuse.”
That was fifty years ago, at the height of a great upheaval, and it’s amusing to look back on the turnabout that took place at this gathering of angry young men and women at the historic Long Island estate housing Westbury College. It isn’t at all ironic, however, that the guru theorist of the time should be the voice of tradition, for this was Marcuse’s fundamental point: nothing can be more reactionary than to cut the young off from the past and overestimate their novel identity. Or, put it this way: the ruling class rejoices over a stupid revolutionary who fails to spot the machinations that hold him back. Late capitalism works in subtle ways, by a misleading commodity fetishism, for instance, and you have to read a lot in order to see through it—that was the gist. Marcuse was formed in a rigid Prussian system, yes, but personal experience wasn’t what led him to locate power strictly in the professor. He didn’t assign “The Social Contract” and “Candide” because his professors had made him read them when he was a student. He did so out of tried-and-true Marxist principle.
It was a paradox, but no less true for that: if you want to be a canny revolutionary, you must start out an obedient student. Especially in a consumer society of relative prosperity, a compliant attitude in the formative years is necessary to the correct understanding of tyranny later on—of how labor gets “alienated,” how bread and circuses cloud people’s class consciousness, and so forth. If you simply trust that your generation, by virtue of its unique place in history, has special insight into injustice and power, you live only in the present, and consumer capitalism loves it when you think like that. You lack the tools of revolution, you’re anti-intellectual, no matter how much you fancy yourself a rogue. Nothing serves the counter-revolutionary faction better than the puffed-up rebel who ignores Marx and Trotsky, neglects Machiavelli and Rousseau, and misses out on Hegel and "Robinson Crusoe" (a book Marx read closely). Without the background, without the ideas, our self-satisfied subversive is unwary and undiscerning, a shortsighted resister who doesn’t realize that a “revolutionary” wearing blue jeans and a beard is fully as coopt-able by consumer society a conformist sporting an Oxford shirt and a crew cut. That’s what bothered Marcuse about the youths who revered him. They were the opposite of what they thought they were, and few of their teachers were telling them so.
Is there any better parable for the social justice warriors of today than the tale of the great leftist guru of the Sixties dressing down the ardent youth of that time?
Mark Bauerlein is a contributing editor at First Things.
