The campus Communist

by David Benjamin 

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to say what people do not want to hear.”

— George Orwell

 

MADISON, Wis.—Although I can’t track down the quotation, I recall somehow that Lillian Hellman once said something to the effect that feminism is the art of winning small battles in order to lose big ones. This observation—which also applies to student activists—came to mind when I read about the current free-speech fuss at Stanford University. Two small opposing cells of left- and right-wing law students are striving to silence speakers to whom the majority of their peers would be perfectly happy to listen—if only they were not threatened with vituperation and water balloons as punishment for their intemperate moderation. 

This sort of controversy has become, of course, pandemic on American campuses well beyond Stanford’s Palo Alto monastery. 

A gag-order tendency among collegiate purists is eternal, but it has never prevailed because the campus is traditionally an unfettered laboratory of uncensored utterance. 

I recall, for example, an event at the University of Wisconsin in 1963. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a racist who had run for President on the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948, was invited to speak. The news of Thurmond’s appearance triggered a ripple of consternation in the People’s Republic of Madison. But no concerted effort to either shut him down or shout him down materialized.

He spoke, and was then spoken to, by opponents. He left town having changed not a single mind. His gig at UW amounted what was intended: entertainment.

A few years later, I was a freshman at a small, conservative college in Illinois. This campus offered an ideal stage to one of my first friends there. Bill and I were both working our way through school. Even before I met Bill over the steam tables in the cafeteria, I was aware of his reputation as the college’s foremost—and possibly only—Communist. 

After a few suppertime conversations with him, I grew doubtful of Bill’s Marxism. Rather than quote Lenin, he would croon Lennon and talk of many things: of shoes and ships and sealing-wax, of cabbages and kings. He was a fun guy, hardly anyone’s image of a slinking pinko. As soon as Bill introduced me to his sweetheart, Dovie, the jig was up. Bill and Dovie, you see, were both theater majors, quietly consumed by the joy of imposture.

Arriving on campus a year before me, looking around, sensitive to the rigid conservatism of Dr, Howard, the school’s president, Bill cast for himself a part that would both set him apart from his compliant peers and rankle the big cheese. Protected by the First Amendment and the free-speech tradition of American higher education, Bill let it be said of him—without once saying so himself—that he was the campus Commie. 

He never made a speech. Never uttered a slogan. Never waged a protest. Never quoted Das Capital, denounced Trotsky or praised Joe Stalin. He attained celebrity, without effort, by an innuendo of his own insinuation. 

Bill and I never talked politics. He was barely interested in politics. He was an actor, and possibly one of the best to ever attend the college—because no one (except Dovie and me), ever questioned his unique status as campus Commie.

The following year, the school held a model United Stations, in which, of course, Bill represented the Soviet Union, with me as his co-commissar. I wore my best duds, a  dark blazer, white shirt and a beautiful tie sewn by a friend named Betsy. The model UN afforded me the opportunity to give a speech. It began with the phrase, “I come to you as a worker.” The rest I forget.

The session’s fireworks were provided by Janice, a bleeding-heart classmate. Waving an unsanctioned flag, she insisted on being seated as Czechoslovakia’s delegate. This was the year of the Prague Spring, when reformists under the leadership of Alexander Dubček tried to shake off Kremlin dominance and were crushed in the streets by Soviet tanks. When Janice and friends attempted to cry out in rage on behalf of the Czech people, Bill and I, of course, objected. We won because, in the UN (both real and “model”), Czechoslovakia was represented officially by a puppet government controlled by, well, me and Bill.

In real life, of course, we were on Janice’s side. However, by applying Robert’s Rules or Order, we stifled poor Janice—who hadn’t read the rules—and we shut her up. Everyone, except Janice, was entertained—which was the point. Bill understood, sooner than me, far better than Janice, and more thoroughly than almost all his fellow students, that college is a sort of theater, where you pretend to be grown up but bear no adult responsibilities, where you can play a different role every semester, where you can say whatever comes to mind without suffering any consequences—but also without being taken very seriously by anyone.

While I was at this college, I formed with four friends (Gerry, Jody, D.P. and Stephen) an enigmatic fraternity called the Chapultepec Social Club (CSC). We had no charter or mission statement. We weren’t listed among the roster of campus organizations. We wrote no manifestos. The only writings we ever generated were little notes posted on the campus center’s bulletin board, suggesting (but not mandating) our extremely random activities. Our most orderly moment was a reception arranged by the Admission Office for prospective freshmen, held one evening in the strangely named Forrest Cool Lounge. All five of us arrived to circulate among faculty, administrators, upperclasspersons and the promising high-school seniors of northern Illinois. In homage to the immortal Dwight Pullen (“You really look sharp/ Wearin’ sunglasses after dark”), we all wore wraparound shades. 

Despite our countercultural aspect, the Admissions officers were cool. They had long since figured that we were more ironic than radical. However, Dr. Howard, who skipped the event but heard of our intrusion, was not amused. But he was never amused. I don’t think the guy ever perceived that the saving grace of the Sixties was its fragile, but therapeutic strain of humor… Vaughn Meader, Tom Lehrer, Dick Gregory, Alice’s Restaurant, Country Joe and the Fish…

In those days, I played the role of long-haired hippie—along with my fellow CSC members—much like Bill played the role of campus Commie. Among my fellow students, one was a John Bircher convinced that the CSC was an offshoot of a Marxist-Leninist faction formed in Mexico during the time of Pancho Villa. Yes, whispered to him, that’s us. He was serious. We weren’t.

We had numerous conservative friends. We argued with them, about LBJ and George Wallace, about the Panthers and Ho Chi Minh, about baseball and Raquel Welch. The arguments went on until Mrs. Moose, house mother of the Men’s Living Center, emerged from her kitchen and settled our differences with a huge bowl of popcorn. 

What we understood was that, though we might be ideologically miles apart, we had no power to change anything that was happening beyond our little collegiate cloister. We knew that the ebb and flow of politics would wash over us like waves sweeping over pebbles and empty shells on the beach. Dr. Howard, our president, was implacable and intractable. He was not amused, nor was he amusable. We, his kids, had an incongruously healthier outlook because we had—until Selective Service got us—a sense of humor. If we lost the power and perspective to kid one another, we could never hope to find common ground. If we could not tolerate—and laugh about—one another’s youthful convictions, as we shared Mrs. Moose’s popcorn, we could never contrive a single solution and we’d always be part of one anther’s problems.