Review of *Learning on the Left*

The distinguished historian Stephen J. Whitfield, a graduate of (PhD ’72) and emeritus faculty member at Brandeis University, is eminently qualified to write a study of this unique institution and the “considerable influence” its faculty and students have exercised in American politics (1). Named for the great jurist Louis Brandeis—the first Jew to sit on the US Supreme Court—and established in 1948 in response to the discrimination against Jews that was once rampant in American higher education, the university epitomized a characteristically Jewish commitment to the liberal ideals of equal opportunity and social justice for which Brandeis fought. “The point of the new ‘Jewish-sponsored secular university,’” as the New York Times put it in 1946, “was the promise of being ‘open to students and faculty members of all races and religions’” (30). Ironically, “history was to play a trick on this particular remedy for academic antisemitism” (16). “The Third Reich made discrimination based on blood or creed look despicable,” and “in the immediate wake of revelations of the scale of the Final Solution, … discrimination against Jews [in America] was rapidly vanishing” (17, 31). Like Kafka’s moshiach, the remedy came when it was no longer needed. It is not surprising, then, that Brandeis faculty and students turned their attention to other injustices.

Learning on the Left portrays a great many people, all of them fascinating in their own way. The sheer number of personalities can be overwhelming. Like Richard Linklater’s 1990 film Slacker, the book follows one character after another, never staying with one for very long before picking up someone else in the scene and following them. But there is a reason Whitfield wrote the book this way. The case for political influence is “cumulative,” he argues, “so depth must be sacrificed to breadth” (1). Two other overarching themes lend the book coherence and clarify the larger import of these portraits. One of these themes concerns the Jewish character of Brandeis (not only its sponsorship but also many of its faculty and students were Jewish) and the relationship of “Jewish values” (5) to the political thought and activism described in the book. In addition, the book’s portraits “constitute a case study of the fate of liberalism” as it was “subjected to pressure from a nascent militant left” beginning in the mid-1960s (2).

The portraits in chapters 4 through 8 impart a sense of the intellectual and political ferment at Brandeis as well as the wider influence of its faculty and students. They include “champions of human rights” like Eleanor Roosevelt (a Brandeis trustee and instructor), Stephen Solarz (an alum and congressman), and faculty member Pauli Murray (an activist for civil and women’s rights); legendary American studies scholars like Max Lerner and Lawrence Fuchs; brilliant political philosophers and public intellectuals like Michael Walzer and Michael Sandel; “foreign-born radicals” like Ralph Miliband, Herbert Marcuse, and Jean van Heijenoort; and the editors of Partisan Review (Philip Rahv) and Dissent (Irving Howe and Lewis Coser).

With chapter 9 (“The Sixties”), the fate of liberalism begins to come into sharper focus. Borrowing William Blake’s phrase, Whitfield describes how the “tigers of wrath” began to triumph over the “horses of instruction” (221, 361) as bitter conflicts over race and the Vietnam War fueled a “vertiginous” radicalization (222). Brandeis students and faculty lent their active support to the civil rights movement. However, when black students occupied the university’s Ford Hall in January 1969, their demands jeopardized faculty autonomy and threatened to substitute race for individual attributes in admissions. As Whitfield puts it, “the method that had once been deployed to reduce the number of Jews”—quotas—“was now proposed to increase the number of blacks” (292). The illiberal character of the demands made even some black professors like Murray uneasy. Brandeis president Morris Abram (Abram Sachar’s successor) responded brilliantly to the occupation. “We’ll just simply say they can stay there as long as they want to, we’re going to run the university,” he recalled (292). In the end, the strategy (implicitly endorsed by Marcuse, of all people [299]) worked. There was no violence or escalation, no police were summoned, no arrests were made, and the students walked out of the occupied hall eleven days after the occupation began (302). The university resisted the illiberal features of black students’ demands, but it did give them some of what they wanted, including the creation of a Department of African and Afro-American Studies. Furthermore, to his credit, Abram acted to protect leading black student activist Roy DeBerry from military conscription (307). Abram was a good liberal, but the occupation of Ford Hall revealed that his “brand of liberalism … was vanishing” (308-9).

“The political reputation of Brandeis University,” Whitfield writes, “changed from a redoubt of liberalism to what seemed a petri dish of radicalism” (315). Chapter 12 portrays two Brandeis alumni, Abbie Hoffman (’59) and Angela Davis (’65), who contributed to that shift. The connection of the book’s Jewish theme to its political themes is again evident in the portrait of Hoffman. “Hoffman’s autobiography compulsively returns to the topic of his Jewishness,” Whitfield notes, “with wry and bittersweet irony, and with neither defensiveness nor vindictiveness” (326). Whitfield is more critical of Davis, and for good reason. For all her radicalism—she was a student of Marcuse and for two decades a Communist Party member—Davis did not condemn “the forms of domination that Communism itself imposed.” When she flew to Moscow in 1979 to accept the Lenin Peace Prize, she flatly refused Alan Dershowitz’s plea to “speak out in behalf of the political prisoners there, such as dissidents and Jews seeking refuge in Israel.” Davis could muster no sympathy for those whom she callously called the “‘Zionist fascist opponents of socialism’ in the Soviet Union” (341-42).

Chapter 13 portrays five main figures, four of whom reveal the violence to which political extremism can lead: Brandeis alum and Weather Underground founder Naomi Jaffe (’65); Brandeis students and ’60s radicals Katherine Power and Susan Saxe (’70), who fell in with the violent ex-convict Stanley Bond, who was at Brandeis to be rehabilitated in a misguided federal experimental parole project; and Aafia Siddiqui (MS ’98, PhD ’01), who became a murderous jihadist, antisemite, and al-Qaeda operative. The fifth, redeeming figure portrayed in this chapter is Brandeis alum Michael Ratner (’66), who chose law over violence and championed civil rights and liberties during George W. Bush’s war on terror. “Like Louis Brandeis, Ratner wanted the machinery of the law to be pushed in the direction of an ideal of justice,” and he succeeded: “Ratner made history when the Supreme Court upheld the right of habeas corpus for enemy fighters in military custody—even during wartime” (371).

The radicalism and violence of the 1960s recede in chapters 14 and 15, which portray Thomas Friedman (’75), “the most influential newspaper columnist in the nation, and almost certainly in the world” (378); the lawyer, public intellectual, and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich; John P. Roche, the political scientist and advisor to presidents Kennedy and Johnson; and Martin Peretz (’59), the political scientist who bought the New Republic magazine. Whitfield uses his portraits of Roche and Peretz to return to the fate of liberalism: “Each in his own way … encapsulated the realization that liberalism required significant criticism and correction” (410).

Whitfield concludes his book with thoughtful reflections on the successes of Brandeis University as well as a pair of problems, “political in the broadest sense,” that remain unsolved (444). One problem is how to incorporate African Americans fully into higher education. To combat discrimination, American Jews placed their faith in what sociologist Nathan Glazer called “‘the abstract measures of individual merit—marks and examinations,’ whether earned on civil service examinations or on standardized tests” (448). However, relative to white and Asian Americans, African Americans perform poorly on standardized tests like the SAT, even when one controls for family income. This leads Whitfield to infer that “unless black candidates for admission to selective institutions are held to lower or different standards, it is hard to foresee how representative numbers of African Americans can be fully incorporated into the multiculturalist milieu…. The liberalism that sanctioned the establishment of Brandeis University was unprepared for the failure of minorities to realize equality of results,” once intentional and blatant discrimination was eliminated (449). The other problem concerns truth, the Hebrew word for which (emet) appears in the university’s seal. “The unending task of education is to protect that ideal,” Whitfield rightly insists, yet “truth in the United States is constantly besieged,” which threatens the very “functioning of democracy” (450, 459). Which Brandeis faculty and students will help to solve these problems in the 21^st century and how? Those portraits remain to be written.