Privilege and Merit at Yale

To the Editor:

Readers can judge for themselves whether Michael Kazin (“New Ivy League, Same Old Elitism,” September 11) is correct that our books describe “the changes that took place during the ’60s in almost entirely rosy and self-congratulatory terms” and that we are “hardly the only scholars too besotted with ‘transition’ for their own good.” But readers may well wish to know about what our books actually set out to accomplish.

On the Cusp: The Yale College Class of 1960 and a World on the Verge of Change, by Daniel Horowitz, starts with the experiences of classmates in the classroom and in extracurricular activities and then ranges beyond the center stage of Yale to larger contexts, including the New Haven drama of urban renewal, the long shadow of McCarthyism, liberation movements in Africa and Vietnam, and the shifting ways Americans thought about ethnicity, sex, race, and gender. It explores the consequences of the transformation of the world of elite, white male Anglo-Saxon Protestants not only through the familiar figures of Yale’s president, Kingman Brewster, and chaplain, William Sloane Coffin Jr., but also by looking at undergraduates who would break through the confines of their backgrounds, in many cases privileged; in others not. This study reveals the messiness of historical change and insists on the unpredictability of lives of individuals experienced over time. On the Cusp provides historical background to issues very much alive in the public arena today: the tension between privilege and merit; the relationship between college majors and postgraduate careers; the circulation of elites; and transformations in the meanings of race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender.

Like On the Cusp, Howard Gillette’s Class Divide: Yale ’64 and the Conflicted Legacy of the Sixties grapples with issues central to the late 1950s and 1960s in the effort to broaden understanding of the lasting impact of that era. Adding to existing studies focused on the left and the right, this book consciously examines men of privilege, who might otherwise have been expected to become part of a cohesive elite. Instead, beginning at Yale and in subsequent years, they found themselves severely at odds as they tried to address the contradictions embedded in the triumphal postwar consensus into which they had been socialized. While many were positioned by temperament as well as their position as part of a hinge generation to mediate the 1960s controversies that still rage, they fell short of that goal as they, too, splintered. Far from falling into the same camp, as Michael Kazin suggests, ’64’s politically visible members, the senators Joe Lieberman and John Ashcroft, opposed each other on issues of gender and civil rights, even as they agreed on national security. The list goes on: In religion, in views toward marriage and sexuality, and even in the nature of intellectual enterprise, this group of Yale graduates formed an unbridgeable divide with wide-ranging implications for the nation as well as for themselves.

Daniel Horowitz
Professor Emeritus
Smith College

Howard Gillette
Professor Emeritus
Rutgers University at Camden