Word: hersey
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...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...
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...
...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...
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...
...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...