Word: mayday
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Kingman Brewster, in the standard interpretation of Mayday at Yale, emerges as a sort of Faust figure, a corrupt, conniving academic who sold his soul to the devil for an easy out. Very few people have compared him to Marguerite, the naive, innocent young girl whom Mephistopheles lures into damnation. The Faust interpretation, after all, has one important flaw; it presumes that the Yale administration is made up of Faustian academics overflowing with guile and cunning, who completely controlled the events of last spring. In fact, the reverse was true...
Something of this same way of thinking is apparent whenever people at Harvard talk about Yale, and especially when they discuss Yale's reaction to last Mayday. Conditioned by the belief that the academic is essentially corrupt, an opportunist, a man in search of personal gain, it is easy to understand why the actions of the Yale faculty seem suspect, or why a Harvard observer would be moved to speak of King-man Brewster as a "grinning hypocrite." If Yale did not go to Hell, it was not because it didn't deserve...