The college had a new president, Edward J. Bloustein, a
constitutional lawyer, or so he said. The U. S. Constitution is
amazingly malleable. Regardless, he was a law-and-order guy,
and he didn’t belong at Bennington. You might say it was him
or me. He wanted a more conventional Bennington with a more
conventional student body and a fully conventional liberal-
arts curriculum. He wanted to expand the student body, which
would make classes bigger. He wanted al the hippies gone
and al the druggies gone and al the lesbian lovers gone. He
was for abstinence at a time when virginity before marriage
was highly prized; he was against abortion and once told me
in a confrontation we had in his of ice that Jewish girls tried to
get pregnant - thus the problem with pregnancy on campus.
That was a new one. He considered the faculty blameless.
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Strategy
Feeling under siege by this gray, gray man, students elected
me to the Judicial Commit ee of the college. It was clear that
he was looking for a scapegoat, someone to expel for defying
parietal hours especially but also for smoking dope and
having girl-girl sex. The students knew I could stand up to
him, and I could. The scapegoat he wanted to punish was my
best friend, and he just fucking was not going to get the
chance to do it.
She had been seen kissing another girl on the steps inside
the house in which she lived. I’ve rarely met a Bennington
woman from that time who does not think that she herself
was the girl being kissed. Someone reported my friend for
shooting up heroin in the living room. I recently asked her if
she had, and she said no. In the thirty-five years that I've known
her, I've never known her to lie - which was the problem back
then. The college president confronted her on marijuana use,
and she told him the truth - that she only had a joint or two
on her right then. Knowing her, I’d bet she offered to share.
The house where I lived, Franklin House, was a hotbed of
treason, so first we had her move there. She could not quite
grasp the notion of turning down music while people were
sleeping, and in our house that was a crime. One could shoot up
heroin or kiss girls, but one could not be a nuisance. Nevertheless, everyone knew a lot was at stake and so the music blared. To protect the personal freedom of each person living
in Franklin we seceded from the school. We declared ourselves
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Heartbreak
entirely independent and we voted down parietal hours. So
stringy, hairy boys were in the bathrooms at 4 a. m., as one of
the few female professors noted in outrage at one of the many
public meetings. If they weren’t bothering anyone, it was no
crime. If they were, it could be bright and sunny and midafternoon and it was a crime. We elected an empress, an oracle, and other high of icials. (I was the oracle, though I
preferred the tide “seer. ”) This was a pleasant anarchy. No one
had to live there who didn’t want to, but my best friend was
not going to be homeless because some rat as was upset by
some deep kissing.
The secession heightened the conflict between students and
the administration. It was just another version of adults lying,
having a pretense of order, as the foxes on the faculty sneaked
into the henhouse with impunity. They impregnated with
impunity. They paid for criminal abortions with impunity.
The apocalypse was coming. Each day the class warfare
between students on the one side and faculty and administration on the other intensified. The lying, cheating faculty began to piss a lot of us of . They always presented themselves as being
on our side against the administration because this was how
they got laid, but slowly the truth emerged - they wanted the
appearance of professorship during the day and randy acces to
the students at night, between 2 and 6 being hours that carried
a lot of traf ic. As the tension grew, my best friend was closer
and closer to being tied down on the altar and split in half.
8 6
Strategy
I worked out a plan. The school was governed by a constitution. The Judicial Commit ee had the right to expel students.
My plan was to cal a school meeting, ask everyone to submit
a signed piece of paper saying that she had broken the parietal
hours, and then expel everyone, as we had the right to do. Out
of a student body of a few hundred students, only about six
refused. The Judicial Commit ee expelled everyone else. In
effect the school ceased to exist.
It’s always the law-and-order guys who turn to tyranny
when they’ve been legally beat. In this case Bloustein exercised
raw power. He waited until graduation before reacting; he
sent a let er to al the expelled students' parents that said they
could not come back to school unless they signed a loyalty
oath to obey the school’s rules. I didn’t go back to school. I
would never sign any such oath. But I thought his tactic was
disgusting: it’s bad to break the spirit of the young, and that’s
what he did. In order to go back to school, students had to
betray themselves and each other, and most did. I learned
never to ignore the reality of power pure and simple. I also
learned that one could get a bunch of people to do something
brave or new or rebellious, but if it didn’t come from their
deepest hearts they could not maintain the honor of their
commitment. I learned that one does not overwhelm people
by persuading them to do something basically antagonistic
to their own sense of self; nor can rhetoric create in people a
sustained determination to win. I thought Bloustein did
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Heartbreak
something evil by making students sign that oath; how dare
he? But he dared, they did, and I left sickened.
8 8
Suf er the Lit le
Children
In Amsterdam I knew a hippie man whose children from an
early mar iage were coming to stay with him. They were thirteen and eleven, I think. The older girl had been incested by her stepfather. This came into the open because the older girl
tried to kill herself. This she did at least in part valiantly
because she saw the stepfather beginning to make moves on
the younger girl in exactly the same way he had gradually
forced himself on her. The stepfather had started to wash and
shower with the younger girl. The mother, in despair, wrote
the hippie man, who had abandoned al of them, for help. She
wanted to mend the relationship with the second husband
while keeping her children safe. The hippie man made clear
to those of us who knew him that he considered his older
daughter responsible for the sex; you know how girls flirt and
al that. His woman friend made clear to him that he was