About the same time, I was startled one day when the door to my basement office in McCosh Hall[4] burst open and there stood Lawrence Stone, the great British historian who had arrived at Princeton in 1963. He could be blunt and intimidating, but he was also enormously generous with his time and his help to younger colleagues, including me. “I have just come from Nassau Hall,” he announced. “They want me to become the chairman of the department. I made it a condition that you be the assistant chairman. Will you do it?” It was more a command than a question, so for the next few years I did much of the scutwork of the department while Lawrence transformed a good department into a great one. I learned a lot by watching and listening to Lawrence; he ranks alongside Vann Woodward as my academic hero and model.
I remember walking across the campus one day in the spring of 1968 when I encountered President Robert Goheen heading back toward Nassau Hall. He stopped me and said that he had been trying to reach me because he wanted to talk to me. I was startled to think that he knew who I was. Furthermore, I was young enough to think that when the principal sends for you it isn’t going to be good.
On the other hand, a summons from the President might have meant anything in those days because remarkable things were happening at Princeton. The revolution was in full cry. A faculty committee chaired by Gardner Patterson was doing a careful study of the likely impact of coeducation, a study that provided the factual support for President Goheen’s successful argument to the trustees that coeducation would be cost efficient, would attract more and better male applicants, and would in other ways improve Princeton. The trustees agreed and decided to allow the admission of women as undergraduate students the following year. At the same time, Professor Stan Kelly and a faculty/student committee, on which I served, were working on a report that would make the governance of Princeton much more consultative. The system of selective eating clubs was under attack from within the student body. Various impolite voices disrupted the collegial calm from time to time about the war in Vietnam and racial justice at home. It was a great time to be alive and to be at Princeton.
As I walked with the President to his office in Nassau Hall, he explained that he thought the University had to respond in some way to the demands for more recognition in the curriculum of the experience of black Americans. It was not clear to him what needed to be done, nor that the faculty would approve any significant steps that might be suggested, but he was committed to supporting a serious consideration of various alternatives. It was bound to be controversial, but he wondered if I would be willing to chair a committee on the subject.
That President Goheen was turning to a junior member of the History department might have seemed a little ominous. It never occurred to me, however, that I might have been picked to be point man of this skirmish line because I was expendable. Being young and foolish, I was flattered. There were, after all, benign explanations for my being put in charge of this project. I am a specialist in the history of the American South, which is inherently about blacks and whites and their relationships to each other. Revealingly, there was no one else on the Princeton faculty whose field was more centrally concerned with the black experience. In the supercharged atmosphere of that time, my being white made it more difficult for me to be taken seriously by black students or by black activists and scholars outside the University. However, there was no choice on that account. Princeton had no black faculty member, other than the economist, Sir Arthur Lewis, and this was not his thing.
So, the committee was appointed. We spent the summer gathering information about what other institutions were doing and constructing a reading list of available scholarship. One of the quiet objections to doing anything was that, however legitimate the subject, there simply wasn’t enough scholarship to support a serious intellectual effort. The mere heft of the committee’s bibliography refuted that argument.
The major fault line within the committee, and among the faculty in general, distinguished between a department and an interdepartmental program. That question occupied a good bit of the committee’s vigorous discussions during the academic year 1968-69. I will not rehearse those arguments here. The committee eventually chose to recommend an interdepartmental program. I believed then, and continue to believe, that in the Princeton context, that was a crucial and wise decision.
Nor will I plod through the politics of winning the approval of the faculty for a new program in Afro-American (now African American) Studies. Approval was not a foregone conclusion, even with the support of President Goheen and Provost William Bowen. Suffice it to say that we succeeded. We cobbled together a sufficient number of related courses already on the books which, with the addition of a couple of new courses, presented a respectable beginning of an effort to include the experience of African Americans throughout the humanities and social sciences at Princeton.
By the time the faculty brought the program into legal existence, it was clear that we did not have adequate faculty to lead the program or to sustain real scholarly inquiry over a long period of time. I served as the acting director of the program through its first year of existence while we recruited a permanent director.
Then, in the wake of the Cambodian incursion, in the spring of 1970, when the dormant anti-war movement was awakened with disturbing fervor, I was asked by the administration to set up a draft counseling office where students could have their options and legal obligations explained. This was a situation that made me very uneasy, though I understood the University’s desire to be as responsive as possible to legitimate student needs and desires. I was opposed to the war, but I was not in favor of draft resistance. My own Southern sense of honor would have required me to accept a draft call even though I was against the war. On the other hand, I also thought that every eligible man deserved to know what rights and options he had within the system so he could make up his own mind about what to do. I proceeded on that basis. I was the chair of the local ACLU, so I easily found my way to qualified counselors in the region and arranged for them to staff a center in a university building where students could go for information. It was the policy of the center, of course, that there would be no advocacy of draft resistance, and so far as I know there was none.
As the unpaid faculty overseer of this activity, I was one of the people consulted by the Princeton undergraduates who organized a chapter of what became the Union of National Draft Organizations (UNDO). That summer, UNDO called a national meeting in Princeton. Hundreds of politically engaged college students would be coming to our picture-postcard college town. Where would they stay? There was certainly no room at the Nassau Inn. My wife and her friends, with enormous effort, enlisted scores of sympathetic Princeton faculty and townspeople who were willing to house groups of visiting UNDO students. However, when those students arrived in Princeton for the rally, hirsute and unkempt, they would have nothing to do with bourgeois hospitality. They brought their sleeping bags, guitars, and recreational substances, and they sprawled together on the soccer fields of Princeton, saving many a neat, clean, wholesome Princeton home from certain depredation.
I was on sabbatical leave during the academic year 1970-71, spending a good bit of time on the road doing research on the Civil Rights Movement. When I returned to full-time teaching in 1971-72, the mood on campus had swung dramatically toward quiescence. This was the period when the commune movement was roaring along. Young people disillusioned by the supposedly ineffectual attempts to change society through direct confrontation or through politics decided to build intentional communities that would live by alternative values, thus converting the world to a better way of life by demonstrating the superiority of cooperative values.
This was also Bob Goheen’s last year of a remarkable presidency that had transformed Princeton. To the surprise of very few, the Trustees turned to his provost, William Bowen, to become the next president of Princeton. That winter, President-elect Bowen asked me to meet him after a basketball game, a considerate bit of timing in that we were both Princeton basketball fanatics. I don’t remember who won the game that night, but I do remember that Bill asked me to take his place as provost when he moved into the president’s office that summer.
As Lucy and I talked about it that night and the next