Books Mephistopheles and Faust at Yale Letter to the Alumni,

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Kingman Brewster, in the standard interpretation of Mayday at Yale, emerges as a sort of Faust figure, a corrupt, conniving academic who sold his soul to the devil for an easy out. Very few people have compared him to Marguerite, the naive, innocent young girl whom Mephistopheles lures into damnation. The Faust interpretation, after all, has one important flaw; it presumes that the Yale administration is made up of Faustian academics overflowing with guile and cunning, who completely controlled the events of last spring. In fact, the reverse was true.

Something of this same way of thinking is apparent whenever people at Harvard talk about Yale, and especially when they discuss Yale's reaction to last Mayday. Conditioned by the belief that the academic is essentially corrupt, an opportunist, a man in search of personal gain, it is easy to understand why the actions of the Yale faculty seem suspect, or why a Harvard observer would be moved to speak of King-man Brewster as a "grinning hypocrite." If Yale did not go to Hell, it was not because it didn't deserve to go.

The situation at Yale last spring was an independent organism, towering over the people involved. Every side: students, Panthers, police, administration, struggled to define its own position, and everyone agreed that he was not trying to attack anyone else. Kingman Brewster said that he doubted that black revolutionaries could get a fair trial: Big Man, the Panther spokesman, called for solidarity with students and radicals; the police chief announced that his men would keep a low profile; a group of students and faculty members offered to ride around in unmarked patrol cars and help the police break up incidents. No one was in control, and everyone thought he had the situation in hand.

In one sense, Yale was on a communal ego trip. It was pulled together, like a wagon train circling up before an attack, by a sense of persecution. Suddenly, everyone was united and Brewster became Joan of Arc, leading the new community against the infidels.

THE NEW COMMUNITY was a lot like the old Yale, smelling of Hotchkiss and Zeta Psi. An ad hoc committee of Faculty and students was thrown together to find out what was going on outside the college gates, and started holding press conferences in William Sloane Coffin's living room. (The dean of the ad hoc press corps was a J. Press-outfitted Time reporter who later said that Coffin had been his Sacred Studies teacher at Andover.) The leaders of the group- Hersey and Coffin and Kenniston and Erikson- were the same people who always occupied centerstage at Yale.

But if Mayday did not change the cast of characters at Yale, it did change their perspectives. For the first time, they found themselves confronted with the world and the problems of the city. It is easy to see them as sophisticated academics oozing charm to get themselves out of a light situation, but at the same time they seemed real, convinced of what they were doing. Not cynical academics, they were just the opposite: naive, innocent, unable to understand what was happening around them, why they were being attacked by Left and Right.

People at Yale are still trying to piece together exactly what happened on Mayday, and why it happened. One of them has written a book in an attempt to justify last spring to the world outside Yale, and perhaps also to explain it to the people at Yale. John Hersey's Letter to the Alumni will not be remembered as his greatest book, but it may become known as his most curious. In it, he has summed up the whole overwhelming feeling of innocence which led most of Yale to act as it did. This book will not please many people; in fact, it will tend to infuriate almost anyone who reads it. To the conservative Yale alumnus, it offers a somewhat offensive sermon; to the undergraduate, it offers a patronizing attempt to explain 'youth culture'; to the black, it offers even more condescension. This is sad, because Hersey has set out with the best of intentions.

Hersey's new book is set in the form of his annual letter to the alumni of Pierson College, where he has just completed a five-year term as Master. Rather than concentrate on the affairs of the College, however, he talks this year about Yale as a whole, and about America. Unfortunately, he tries to give the letter a universal appeal, and, in so doing, manages to alienate almost everyone who could conceivably read it. He begins by offering an apologia for the use of dirty words by undergraduates which will surely strike all but the most puritanical alumni as gratuitously vapid. He follows with an account of the Alex Rackley slaying which somehow manages to make everyone look guilty, and spends the rest of the book explaining the conduct of undergraduates.

Certainly, there must be Yale alumni who have no idea what contemporary undergraduates are like, but Hersey's descriptions are not especially illuminating. To Hersey's mind, today's college student is a long-haired, dope-smoking, peace-loving flower child, trying to get his head together. These students, Hersey assures the alumni, are really not much different from the beer-drinking fraternity types who went to Yale twenty years ago, except that they have a little more commitment. While trying to make the college student palatable to the alumnus, he has created a ludicrous caricature of students as a class.

NOTHING Hersey says about the Yale faculty or administration would contradict the idea that they acted out of naivete, not cynicism. His account of the faculty meeting at which Yale decided its position on the Panther trial makes it a ceremony of innocence, with total catharsis coming when Brewster rises to say, "I am appalled, ashamed that things should have come to such a pass that I am skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States." Suddenly, with this statement, Yale finds a purpose, and the whole university joins in a crusade. Like children looking to a father for guidance, they have heard the true gospel from the President, and now go out to act on it.

All of this tends to make everything that happened on Mayday and in the weeks before seem ludicrous. This is due in part to the way Hersey has presented the material, in a bowdlerized version suitable for distribution to rich conservative old Blues. And, in fact, it does look ludicrous in retrospect, to some extent. But, at the time, it was anything but absurd. There was a lack of hypocrisy, a feeling of commitment in the whole Yale community. It is easy to see now that they had not the slightest understanding of the problem in the black ghetto, and that they could have done little to help in any case, but the innocence of their reaction was unprecedented in the American university. The University put its life on the line or thought it did, and took a stand. As it turned out, nothing of great value was lost; but the members of the Yale community were convinced that their university would be burned to the ground by the end of the Mayday weekend, and yet were still willing to lend their support to the rally on the Green.

Yale is not deserving of praise for its conduct last spring but it has not merited the censure it has received. Perhaps the only useful thing about Hersey's book is that it demonstrates the curious motivations which led Yale to act as it did.