The Way Some of Us Were: Cornell, 1946-49

In HIS memoirs of Bard College in the immediate postwar years [“The Way We Were,” Sept. 18. 1981], Anthony Harrigan suggests that the decline in American values which peaked in the pseudo-Cultural Revolution of the Sixties began with indoctrination by professors who, as the cold-war chill set in, “didn’t want us to enlist in another struggle against another form of totalitarianism.” Everyone’s political theory is, of course, his or her autobiography —even in 1946 Bard was generally considered a progressive kindergarten—but I submit that Harrigan’s thesis is seriously flawed.

Let us change the setting to Cornell University in the same era. Probably 90-plus per cent of the students were essentially apolitical. Virtually all hands were veterans who were going full speed to reclaim the three to five years summarily excised from their lives. Many were married with children and looked with some bemusement at those of us who seemed to spend most of our time in arcane struggles over the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, or the saintly qualities of Gerhard Eisler.

JR

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John P. Roche

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In HIS memoirs of Bard College in the immediate postwar years [“The Way We Were,” Sept. 18. 1981], Anthony Harrigan suggests that the decline in American values which peaked in the pseudo-Cultural Revolution of the Sixties began with indoctrination by professors who, as the cold-war chill set in, “didn’t want us to enlist in another struggle against another form of totalitarianism.” Everyone’s political theory is, of course, his or her autobiography —even in 1946 Bard was generally considered a progressive kindergarten—but I submit that Harrigan’s thesis is seriously flawed.

Let us change the setting to Cornell University in the same era. Probably 90-plus per cent of the students were essentially apolitical. Virtually all hands were veterans who were going full speed to reclaim the three to five years summarily excised from their lives. Many were married with children and looked with some bemusement at those of us who seemed to spend most of our time in arcane struggles over the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, or the saintly qualities of Gerhard Eisler.