Bright College Years

The pitfalls of the genre—clearer to me than when I thought of trying my hand at it—strike me now as inherent, some of them inescapable. Whether you write as an involved memoirist, which is Horowitz’s approach, or as a cool scholar, which is Gillette’s, you’re stuck with making sense of a group of people (all men in this case) who are thrown together accidentally and who have little collective identity save for being on the same campus during the same years. It’s not that such collective identity is without significance: It’s rather that, like the identity of every college class, it’s adventitious. What sets each class apart is the accident of being in the same place at the same time, by the luck of the draw.

One could write the same kind of history of every class that’s ever made its way through undergraduate years in any college in the country. Which is why the nature of the institution itself, Yale in this case, has to play a role. And that’s the challenge: how to make it do so. Why should we think that, once cut loose from college, the lives and careers of people as diverse as those of Horowitz’s and Gillette’s classmates have anything in common beyond four undergraduate years in late adolescence in the same place?

And why Yale? These historians tell us that they chose the subject because they happened to attend college there. Behind that fact, surely, is the historian’s unacknowledged assumption that a Yale class is, by virtue of the age, authority, and elite status of Yale University, likely to be Historically Important. The authors are also curious (as I’ve been) about what befell their contemporaries, some of them close friends; their books are part of the authors’ attempts to understand their own lives. But how does attendance at Yale differ from attendance at, say, Whittier College, the University of Michigan, the Naval Academy, Georgetown, Wabash, or Columbia? We can’t answer that question because few, if any, of their specific classes have gotten their own historians.

So are Gillette and Horowitz writing of their generational cohort or only of their collegiate one? And if the latter, why should we care? I pose these questions not in derogation of the authors’ efforts but because I don’t have the answers to them. The trouble is these two skilled historians don’t seem to have the answers to them, either. That doesn’t make the books insignificant or without interest. It simply makes their contents puzzling.

Gillette defines his subject as “an elite group of men” who “lived through the unforeseen drama of their later years” by “selective adaptation and reorientation to a universe of experience that was markedly different from what they had been socialized to expect.” That seems to describe just about every group of men, “elite” and otherwise, in the modern era. Gillette’s elite group, however, is a selection of his classmates; like Horowitz, he can’t follow them all, and some simply drop from sight. Except for the fact that many of them started with great advantages, such as precollegiate schooling at some of the nation’s greatest boarding and public schools, and then gained new advantages from attending Yale, those whom Gillette and Horowitz follow don’t seem to differ much in achievement or disappointment from men who didn’t attend such an institution.

Both authors like antinomies. They juxtapose hard leftists and unyielding rightists—Gillette makes much of his classmates Democrat Joseph Lieberman and Republican John Ashcroft—”hippies” and more straitlaced men, daring activists and thoughtful quietists, old- and new-style scholars, those who set their compasses by the Yale Daily News, the Whiffenpoofs, and secret societies and those who scorned what those institutions stood for. Should we be surprised that, decades later, their classmates are still diverse in their work and commitments or that they’ve made adjustments to changes in American society? That strikes me as just about right for all college classes. Among my own classmates are those who similarly distributed themselves by politics, occupations, achievement, and note (as well as notoriety); and on the whole, we are not the same men we were over a half-century ago.

Gillette was an insider of sorts, high in the editorial apparatus of the campus newspaper and close to its editor, Joe Lieberman. Horowitz’s stance, by contrast, is that of the classic outsider, but one who writes from the inside, “a historian watching myself as I write about my own life.” This memoir-ish approach lends his book more texture than Gillette’s more scholarly distancing. It also allows Horowitz to give a full picture of his early life, to show how a high-school insider became a Yale outsider who is now, because of changes in American society as well as at Yale, very much the historian-insider.

The son of Jewish parents when Yale, like many elite institutions, still maintained quotas on Jewish and Roman Catholic students, Horowitz attended a nearby public high school before matriculating at college. He lived to see his father, a local banker and also a Yale graduate, become the first Jew and first petition candidate to join the university’s “corporation,” its board of trustees. Yet for all the welcome the Horowitz family now experiences at Yale (as that university undergoes yet another challenge over racial integration and free expression), he’s also more disenthralled about his alma mater than Gillette, more critical of his classmates (and of himself), less taken in by the institution that he, like Gillette, so clearly loves.

In three respects, these books have to frustrate readers who haven’t shared their authors’ collegiate and professional lives. They invoke the shopworn motif of “transitional period” in characterizing their era. The notion that members of these two college classes were either “on the cusp” of a major transition from one historical era to another or lived through and handed us a “conflicted legacy” seems so well established as to be beyond challenge. But if we accept the interpretation, what new does it tell us? Are we to take these Yale students as somehow representative of an entire generation? Moreover, can we say that, given the ever-increasing rapidity of change, any generation since the early 20th century has not been a transitional generation?

In a second respect, one scarcely noticed or remarked on by the authors, they and their classmates had to reckon with a civic situation—the military draft—no longer the lot of collegians, whether privileged or otherwise. Like all American men, until 1973, they were under the threat of conscription and of service under fire in Vietnam. They were forced to make choices about public service that could interrupt, sometimes end, their lives. Military service hung over everyone, even in peacetime. It could be a boon or a threat, an opportunity or a confinement, a chance (like college itself) for personal growth or for withdrawal, something to embrace or to flee from.

A significant proportion of Horowitz’s and Gillette’s classmates performed military service, some of it career-long. But you get no sense of how all of them thought of, or experienced, that service, how they avoided or embraced it; how they negotiated the complex choice among ROTC, the draft, enlistment, and officer candidate’s school; how, if at all, military service was connected in their minds and lives to their collegiate years, and how they look back on it now.

Finally, what’s striking about both books is the absence from them of Yale—of Yale as anything beyond the site of each class’s four collegiate years. This great seat of learning, a place dedicated to the creation, evaluation, transmission, and preservation of knowledge—a university of extraordinary faculty members, libraries, and laboratories—plays only a small role in the authors’ stories. One gets little sense of how the learning undertaken, the teaching experienced, the knowledge gained, the ideas exchanged at Yale affected their lives. We learn of political events, the role of secret societies, the influence of the Yale Daily News, and the like. We learn of campus life but little of intellectual life. Few faculty members make their appearance, chaplain William Sloane Coffin (not a faculty member) being the most recalled. But this is a university we’re talking about. What was the faculty like then? What were its divisions and debates, the intellectual currents that ran through it and affected students, even if the students weren’t aware of them? What were the university’s strong departments, its most popular majors? And how, specifically, did all of this mark Yale students?

In short, it’s unclear what all of these formerly young men owe, or think they owe, to Yale as an educational institution.

One wonders what the two authors might have found had they, instead of concentrating on what became of their classmates after Yale, tried to evoke the feel of the undergraduate campus in their years there. Each of them has spent his career at a college or university. Each has guided students through their collegiate experience; each has known intimately the people and ethos that make up their institutions; each has been woven into the community of which he’s a member. They know what colleges and universities are like. It’s disappointing that they don’t devote more of their knowledge, experience, and art to bringing their alma mater to life in the days when, young and impressionable, they, like their classmates, absorbed there what they learned in order to become the people they became. One would like to know how that happened—to all of them.

In the meantime, these books should be read for what they reveal of some members of a particular slice of American society—most of them after college. The books add to the history of Yale University, which, inexplicably unlike Harvard and Princeton, does not have a history of itself in the 20th century. Horowitz’s perceptive evocation of his alma mater especially gets us inside the campus, as well as inside himself, over four undergraduate years. Anyone looking to learn more about a university college and its students and former students at a particular time in American history, whether “hinge” or not, should read both.

James M. Banner Jr. is the author, most recently, of Being a Historian.