IMPORTANT CORRECTION

Ernie Sosa just wrote to tell me that he never got a call from UMass, and certainly did not [and I think it is fair to say, would not] use such a call to get his salary raised. My humble apologies. I will go back into the text and change it.

SUNDAY MUSINGS

Since today is a day of rest -- no posts either for my Memoir or for Formal Methods in Political Philosophy -- I thought I would take a few moments to talk about what it has been like these past six weeks and more, writing and posting, posting and writing.
In the glory days of Grossinger's, Jewish families would save up and take the train to Liberty, New York where they would eat, dance, swim, play shuffleboard, and escape from the heat, the noise, the congestion, and the tedium of the Lower East Side. Since even a weekend was expensive, parents would pressure their children to take advantage of every opportunity the resort offered. Grossinger's hired tummlers, whose job was to pep things up by making noise when there was a moment of silence or start people doing jumping jacks if they sat down to rest. Out of this world came the expression "I'm dancing as fast as I can," which captures the frenetic pursuit of amusement that dominated the brief vacations. Well, all I can say is that for six weeks, I have been writing as fast as I can. I am now four weeks ahead of myself with the Memoir, so when Susie and I go to Paris in June for a three week stay, I hope to be able to continue posting.
The response to my Memoir, thanks in large part to Brian Leiter, has been extraordinary -- far beyond my expectations or even my hopes. Old friends and former students have written emails with their memories of times past. Folks have checked in from Europe, from Australia, from Canada, and from every part of the United States. Some of you have corrected my faulty memory. Others have supplemented it. The result is a collective oral history, something quite unlike traditional oral histories.
In the past, I have written alone and then sent a book out into the world to find its audience, but now I am posting each installment almost as soon as I write it. I am reminded of a wonderful story about Charles Dickens, many of whose novels were serialized as he wrote them. It is said that he stopped into a London shop one day and overheard two ladies chatting about his latest novel. They were wondering what would happen next, and Dickens realized, with a start, that he had no idea, because he had not yet written it.
There is, of course, a limit to my memoir. Inexorably, I am advancing from the past to the present, at which point I will, perforce, stop. At my present rate, I imagine that will happen some time late this summer. What will I do then? my wife wants to know. I have no idea. Sufficient unto the day, as my father liked to say. For now, I can only thank all of you for the encouragement you have given me and the generosity of your responses. I have not felt so alive in twenty years.

QUICK CORRECTION

My son, Tobias Barrington Wolff, points out that I have undercounted the number of bathrooms in the Barrett Place house. It was three and a half, not three. Sigh. The memory flags.

MEMOIR CHAPTER FOUR FIRST INSTALLMENT

MEMOIRS
VOLUME TWO CHAPTER FOUR

RUSTICATION

Our Northampton home was everything that our New York apartment had not been. It was elegantly designed, large, airy, comfortable, and beautifully decorated. As part of our renovations, we had turned the small family room and one car garage into a large, pine paneled family room with a wood-burning fire place. The kitchen was now a big country kitchen with an eating area graced by a beehive fireplace. We had fenced in the large side lot to create an area equally for our two Cairn Terriers and our children. Because the street was a dead end with only one house beyond ours, there was virtually no traffic.

There is a lovely expression that has its origins in Oxford and Cambridge. When a student is asked to leave the university, usually for disciplinary reasons, it is said that he has been rusticated. By leaving Columbia and moving to UMass and Northampton, I had in effect voluntarily been rusticated. For some years I continued to receive speaking invitations and the like, but little by little I withdrew from the public world of the larger Academy. My life came to be centered entirely on my family and the University of Massachusetts. I set myself up in the lovely third floor study, and spent as much time as I could at home, only going in to the campus for my classes or obligatory meetings. As the years passed, I felt myself dying away from the profession, and though I continued to write books which, if the publishers were right, were being read, I no longer had a powerful sense of being part of the larger conversation of American letters. Oddly enough, I did not miss it at all. My boys were now three and one, and daily becoming more delightful to spend time with. Once again, we hired a full-time housekeeper, a lovely lady named Mary McEwan who was the wife of a Protestant minister in the hill town of Plainfield. If one or another of my sons had a doctor's appointment or a dentist's appointment, I took them. In time, as they went to school, if there were teacher's conferences to attend, I was the one who showed up. I felt then, and have felt ever since, that the decision to eschew the role of New York public intellectual and instead become a teacher and father was one of the wisest decisions I have ever made.

But first things first. I had summer school to teach. I had been assigned Introduction to Philosophy with 30 students and an undergraduate/graduate course on Ethical Theory. The UMass grade sheet printout listed each student's name, class, and major. As I ran my eye down the Intro list, I saw one student listed as majoring in "Men Pe." I thought , "Hmm. Some Chinese dialect. Very recherché." At the first meeting of class, I discovered the notation meant "Men's Physical Education." I had never taught at a school where one could major in Physical education. It was clear that the State University world was not the Ivy League.

Since Philosophy, A Modern Encounter had just appeared, I decided, for the first and last
time in my career, to assign my own textbook. But it seemed to me somehow a bit scrimy to assign the book and then pocket the royalties from the sale, so I came into class with a stack of dollar bills and a roll of dimes. I said, "I make $1.10 in royalties from the sale of each copy of my text, so I am going to give each of you $1.10 back." Then I proceeded to hand out the money. No one cracked a smile. I knew this was going to be a tough room, as the stand-up comics say.

The students weren't dumb, and they did the reading. But they came from lower middle class Massachusetts families, mostly Catholic, and they had been raised not to talk back. They didn't talk back to their parents, they didn't talk back to their priest, they didn't talk back to the policeman, and they didn't talk back to the teacher. But talking back is the mother's milk of philosophy. I struggled mightily to get a discussion started, without success. One day, we had got to the chapter on the philosophy of religion, and I thought I would try something a bit different. "Look," I said, "I could prove the existence of God to you four ways, but that would really not be very interesting, so instead I would like to talk about the nature of religious experience. Has any of you ever had something you would call a religious experience?" Dead silence. "How many of you are Catholic?" Most of the hands went up. Turning to one young man, I asked, "The first time you receive Holy Communion is an important religious experience. What was it like for you?" He shrugged. "It was all right," he said. Finally, one young woman raised her hand. "I have had a religious experience," she offered. I fell on her like as a man dying of thirst falls on an oasis. "Tell us about it," I begged, 'Well," she said, "I am engaged to an Israeli boy." "Yes?" I prodded. "That is it," she said, "That is the religious experience." I gave up. "There is not enough religious experience in this room to sustain a conversation," I said. "Let us move on to the philosophy of art." The next year, as I was walking across the campus, I saw a young man who had been in the class. 'Hey, Professor Wolff," he called as we passed one another. "Great class last summer." I wanted to grab him by the scruff of the neck, and yell, "Why didn't you say something at the time?"

When the Fall semester began, I found that I was not the only new member of the department. Vere Chappell, my former colleague from Chicago, had been recruited as the new Head, replacing Bruce Aune. Vere got a raw deal, through no one's fault. He had been promised that he would be able to hire three or four new people, and I think it was that, more than anything else, that determined him to come. But no sooner had he arrived than Massachusetts went through the first of what would be a seemingly endless series of budget crises, and the plan to continue the expansion of the Amherst campus came to a screeching halt. Vere had to make do with the people he had, at least for several years.

While I was settling into my department, Cindy was doing the same, but for her, the experience was dramatically different. She had come to UMass as an adjunct, the wife of a senior professor being brought in at a good salary and the highest possible rank. Her teaching responsibilities were no different from those of any other Assistant Professor, but she felt very keenly the effect of the circumstances under which she had been hired. She was a gifted critic who began immediately to make a name for herself in the profession, but she was convinced that no accomplishments could overcome the perception that she was there merely as a courtesy to me. She once said, speaking of her situation, that how you enter a department determines forever what they think of you. I have repeated that observation to many young academics just beginning their first jobs, because I think it contains a profound truth. Cindy was forced to earn, against considerable odds, a respect that was automatically accorded to other young academics who had been recruited in the customary manner. That very first year, she published a revised version of her dissertation as a book entitled Samuel Richardson and the 18th Century Puritan Character. She also began publishing beautifully crafted essays on Jane Austen and other English and American novelists [causing me to do some hasty reading of Austen's corpus of novels so that I could talk with her about her essay as it was being written.] Eventually, her accomplishments compelled the department to promote her with tenure, but in the immortal words of Henny Youngman, she never got no respect.

The entire campus was undergoing an enormous growth spurt, with new academics flooding in. The English Department Cindy joined had well over one hundred members by the time we showed up, and I think peaked at one hundred and thirty before it began a long decline, hastened by repeated budget crises, to its present size of perhaps thirty-five. Since so many people were new, and were reaching out to establish social as well as professional connections, there were a great many dinner parties and evening gatherings, and also an uncommon amount of sleeping around and breaking up and reforming of couples [although I may simply be judging English departments by the rather stodgy manners of Philosophy departments.] I do not think my social calendar has ever been as full as it was in those early UMass years.

Our house was very well situated to facilitate our introduction into the social world of the university. Living next door to us in a large house were Bob and Sally Bagg and their five children, Teddy, Chrissy, Jonathan, Melissa, and Hazzie. Bob was a senior member of Cindy's department, and Sally was a cellist whose father had been a Professor of Music at Smith. Her mother had given the house to Bob and Sally when they married. Behind our house, on a little dead end street, lived Charles and Maurianne Adams, both literary scholars whose specialty was folklore. Bob, Sally, Charles, and Maurianne were already good friends, and they simply broadened their circle a bit to include us.

It was from Sally that we learned the true and rather wonderful back story of the purchase of our house. It seems that on Barrett Place were three members of a string quartet in which Sally played cello. They were all eager for the fourth member to join them, and they had had their eye on Mrs. Faulkner's house for some time. When the notice appeared that Saturday that the house would be going on the market on Monday, they cabled their quartet mate, who was vacationing in Europe. By the time he could cable a bid back, we had bought the house. But then nothing happened. Mrs. Faulkner went right on living there as she had since 1933. Finally, the next June, she moved out and workmen showed up to renovate the house, but still no owners appeared. By the time we did move in, everyone on the street had walked through the house to see what we had done with it. I would meet someone for the very first time who would say, "I like what you have done with the kitchen."

That first year, I taught a large lecture course on Ethics each semester, a combined undergraduate/graduate course on social philosophy, and a graduate seminar on political philosophy. This was the first time in my career that I had Teaching Assistants to meet discussion sections and grade the exams and papers. Readers of this blog might like to know what I assigned in the way of reading in the introductory course. There were five required texts: Gabriel Kolko's Wealth and Power in America, Ayn Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness [the little book the Rutgers student had pressed upon me], Lewis Feuer's collection of the The Basic Writings of Marx and Engels, Betty and Theodore Roszak's Masculine/Feminine, and Robin Morgan's Sisterhood is Powerful. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to set Marx and Rand in opposition to one another, but still under the influence of my Columbia days, I worried that Marx would annihilate Rand, so I labored mightily to make her bizarre and manifestly indefensible views as plausible as possible. To my very great chagrin, when I sampled the mid-term exams, I discovered that my students were almost all natural Randites who found Marx hard to credit.

In the seminar, I encountered for the first time the phenomenon of the Five College system. The Pioneer Valley, as the section of the Connecticut Valley is called in which Northampton and Amherst are located, is home to an extraordinary array of top of the line private liberal arts colleges. In addition to Smith in Northampton and Amherst College in Amherst, there is Mt. Holyoke College in South Hadley [where, you will recall, David Truman found a soft landing after the Columbia uprising]. The year before I arrived, these schools had banded together with UMass to create a small educational experiment in South Amherst called Hampshire College. The resulting five schools were combined in the Five College Consortium, the centerpiece of which was a rule that a student at anyone of the five schools could take one or more of his or her courses at any of the other schools. The five institutions coordinated their academic schedules so that semesters began and ended together and vacations occurred in the same weeks. That first year, a young man named Peter Rachleff came over from Amherst to enroll in my political philosophy seminar. He wrote an outstanding paper analyzing Marx and Berger and Luckman [The Social Construction of Reality] on reification, and earned the only A+ in the class. Peter is now a professor of History at Macalester, in St. Paul, and I was delighted to see that he teaches, among other things, African-American History.

The Five College Consortium continues to the present day, and from a distance, it is easy to suppose that the principal beneficiary is UMass, which gets to puff itself by its association with several of the premier private colleges in the country. Seen up close, the reality is quite different. As the seventies matured, the bright young things who had flooded into UMass grew in productivity and distinction. By the end of the decade, I could flabbergast my UMass students with a little thought experiment. "Imagine," I would say to them, "that all four of the other institutions of the Five College Consortium were somehow scrunched together into one big private college. How would each department of that super college compare with the corresponding department of UMass?" Their eyes would widen when I went down the list of Humanities, Social Science, and Natural Science departments and showed them that in each case, the faculty of the UMass department were more academically or professionally distinguished than the faculty of the assembled four colleges. The students themselves sensed this imbalance. Even though the free Five Colleges bus service was quite as capable of taking UMass students to Amherst or Smith or Mt. Holyoke as it was of bringing students from those colleges to UMass, the fact was that the traffic was heavily tilted toward UMass.

From the day that I sat down in my new office, I sensed that there was something odd about my situation in the philosophy department. We were located then on the seventh floor of a tall building called Thompson Tower. The offices are arranged in a hollow square around a core containing the elevators and stairs. My office was on the southwest corner of the floor, catty-corner from the office of young Fred Feldman. I assumed that he would be at least superficially friendly, both because I was a new member of the department and, frankly, because I was now one of the people who would eventually be voting on his tenure. But his manner was distant and off-putting. He seemed to have a permanent smirk on his face, rather like the look I have come to expect on the face of the right-wing pundit William Kristol. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that it took me more than a year to realize that not everyone in the department was pleased to see me.

I learned the true back story about my offer from the man who became my closest friend in the department and eventually my ally in an internecine war that consumed all my energies, Robert J. Ackerman. Bob is a tall, broad faced man of many talents and accomplishments. He is a pianist who, for many years, entertained customers with ragtime and jazz at a number of Pioneer Valley restaurants and clubs. He started his career specializing in Greek philosophy, then turned his attention to logic and the philosophy of science, on which subjects he wrote a number of books, and eventually reinvented himself as an expert on Continental philosophy. He and I were both so prolific that each of us alone had published more books than all of our other colleagues combined.

The story was that in 1969, when I first approached Herb Heidlberger about joining the department, a group of senior members who dominated the department -- Gettier, Sleigh, Robison and Matthews, among others -- wanted to bring in two of their friends who did the same sort of narrow Chisholmite epistemology. A rump group, including Bob Ackerman, Ann and John Brentlinger, and Leonard Ehrlich, were eager to hire me. Bruce Aune went to the Dean to ask his advice, and -- these being the glory days -- the Dean said, "Why not hire all three?" Out went three offers.

It turned out that the two people whom the inner circle in the department really wanted were merely using the offers as a way to get their salaries raised at their home institutions. They declined. But I accepted, and a year later joined the department. Of course they weren't glad to see me. I was the product of a busted parlay. They did manage to hire Michael Jubien, a new Assistant Professor who arrived the same year I did. Mike fit right in, and eventually became Department Head.

But still, even if I wasn't their first choice, why didn't they want me in their department? There were two reasons, I finally discovered. The first was political -- department politics, not real politics. Ehrlich and the Brentlingers were the old timers, people whom Sleigh, Gettier, Robison, Feldman, Chappell, Matthews, and Jubien really wished would just go away and let them create a world class department of people all of whom devoted their lives to teasing out the inner meaning of "S knows that p." Bob Ackerman had sided with the old timers in the push to bring me in, so he was classed as one of the enemies. Since I was their candidate, it was obvious which side I would be on.

The second reason was far more serious, going as it did to the very heart of sectarian orthodoxy. For those reading this memoir who have not spent their professional lives as American philosophers, let me explain that there is a phrase that, when uttered about someone, is considered the ultimate death sentence, equivalent in condemnatory power to the language with which the Jewish community of Amsterdam expelled Baruch Spinoza. Philosophers are accustomed to saying that someone's work is "wrong," or "derivative" or even "confused." or -- in the case of logic -- "trivial," After all, philosophy began with the arguments between Socrates and the Sophists, and a healthy taste for verbal warfare has persisted to the present day. but if philosophers want to make it absolutely clear that someone is beyond the pale, to be shunned and reviled and ignored, they will say that what he [or she] does is not philosophy. There is no appeal from that verdict. Well, the boys [as Bob Ackerman and I took to calling the majority faction] thought that what Ackerman and the Brentlingers and Ehrlich and I did was not philosophy.

MACROS AND PCS AN EXTRA POST

Since tomorrow, Friday, is Formal Methods Day, I thought I would post a little paper I wrote twenty-five years ago and never published, as an extra. I think it still has something to say to us on the left.

Macros and PC's:
A Last-Ditch Attempt to Salvage Ideological Critique

I am one of those dinosaurs who still use Wordstar as a word processing program. In the Wordstar program there is a utility that permits a user to define a macro - that is to say, a series of characters associated with a single one or two stroke command. When I have finished writing a letter, for example, I simply press "Escape-C." On the screen appears "tab, tab, tab, Sincerely yours, comma, return, return, return, tab, tab, tab, Robert Paul Wolff." Another macro command prints out "tab, tab, tab, Professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy," and yet a third produces "tab, tab, tab, University of Massachusetts, Amherst."

This Macro utility is a great convenience to me. It permits me to produce a standardized bit of text without mistakes and without much thought. I have ten or twelve such macros stored somewhere in the Wordstar program. I often think that George Orwell would have been quite delighted by the phenomenon of the macro, had he lived long enough to see it. In his great essay, "Politics and the English Language," written in 1946, Orwell, you will recall, talks about the corruption of political thought and language that is manifested in the mindless repetition of standardized phrases. He gives lots of examples, such as "a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind," and "bloodstained tyranny," and "achieve a radical transformation," and "leaves much to be desired." Had he written the essay only a few years later, he could have added "the free world," and "communist dictatorship," and perhaps "tax and spend liberal." He would have enjoyed the idea of politicians - or their speech writers - programming these and other phrases into their computers as macros, so that they could be produced by a single keystroke or two with no thought whatsoever. We Kant scholars have some rather specialist cant phrases for which macros might be appropriate - my favorite is "conditions of the possibility of experience in general." These reflections were prompted, several semesters ago, by an incident in a seminar I was teaching on ideological critique. The participants were a group of extremely intelligent and widely read graduate students - all impeccably radical. Despite my heroic efforts to focus their attention on particular, concrete examples, such as the controversy that has developed among ethnographers of the northern Kalahari desert, the students persisted in speaking and writing in the most suffocatingly abstract and stereotypical fashion. Things finally blew up when one member of the class, making a class presentation, referred in passing to "racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia." The phrase rolled off his tongue as though the individual words were simply syllables of one great polysyllable - stuck together by some sort of syntactical glue. Everyone in the class was quite comfortable with the phrase. It seemed to me that they found it reassuring, rather in the way little children snuggle down in bed when they hear "Once upon a time." All except a rather abrasive German student who interrupted to protest that she, for one, had nothing against classism. Indeed, she said, she regularly judged people according to their economic class, and thought it quite the right way to go about things. The class came to a dead halt, and no one knew what to say. None of the students had ever heard anyone question the appropriateness of the phrase "racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia," used as a term of opprobrium. It was as though, in the middle of a class preparing little Catholic boys and girls for First Communion, a smart-mouthed trouble maker had piped up and said, "I can take the Father and the Son, but you can keep the Holy Ghost."

I pounced on the intervention - as the French have taught us to call it when a student says something in class - and did everything I could to make it the occasion for a searching examination of unacknowledged ideological presuppositions. That was, after all, the subject matter of the course. But it was a total flop. I simply couldn't get the students to see how mind-numbingly banal, how drained of all genuine thought, that phrase had become. I could not even get them to attune their ears to the ugliness of it as language. Freud says somewhere, talking about the dynamics of psychoanalytic therapy, that if there is a single topic that it is not permitted to examine in an analysis, sooner or later the entire analysis comes to be about that topic. I have always found this a profound insight into what happens in the classroom as welL A classroom in which it is socially or pedagogically unacceptable to question the appropriateness of the phrase "racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia" is a classroom in which neither real teaching nor real learning can take place. It is like a classroom at a Catholic university in which teachers are free to explore every conceivable subject - except the legitimacy of abortion. It is like the huge introduction to neo-classical economics at Harvard, presided over by former Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors Martin Feldstein, who announced, when he returned from his duties in Washington, that the purpose of the course was to teach that the market works - not how it works, mind you, but that it works.

There are a number of ways in which an orthodoxy can be imposed on a classroom. The most obvious, and hence the least dangerous, is by administrative fiat. Considerably more dangerous, because harder to spot and to confront, is the quiet, tacit social pressure that enshrines certain ways of thinking as correct, stigmatizing deviations as morally reprehensible and unworthy of serious consideration. I have come to think of this as macro-thinking. By one of the ironies of modern discourse, this pre-programming of thought masquerades as ideological critique, when in fact it is the precise opposite.

Ideological critique is the demonstration that a putatively value-neutral and objective description of the world actually conceals a thoroughly interested distortion of reality in the service of some powerful social or economic group. As Karl Mannheim shows us in Ideology and Utopia, the critique of a text as ideological is a hostile and aggressive attempt not merely to refute the thesis advanced by the text but also to discredit the author of the text as dishonest, disingenuous, covertly exploitative and manipulative. In the polite world of intellectual combat, where ink rather than blood is spilled, the accusation of ideology is the verbal equivalent of a shotgun blast. Deployed by the weak against the strong, it can be an equalizer, righting somewhat the force imbalance that characterizes unjust societies. Ever since Karl Marx introduced it in his early essay, "On The Jewish Question," ideological critique has been the rhetorical weapon of choice of the left. Marx himself went on, in his mature writings, to expose the covert interests at the heart of classical economic theory, managing, in Capital, to discover ideological bias even in the mathematics of Smith, Ricardo, Nassau Senior, and their fellow rationalizers of capitalism. When I was young, I was awed by the depth with which left critics could penetrate the surface of social and economic relations to expose the exploitation, inequality, privilege, and self-justification that lay beneath. By comparison, even the most superficially quick-witted and mathematically adept apologists for capitalism were shallow, one dimensional, and utterly lacking in self-awareness.

Now, to my dismay, I find that those with whom I am allied on the left all too often exhibit precisely these defects of intellect, insight, self-understanding, and language. In high school Biology, we studied the autonomic nervous system by means of a particularly brutal bit of by-play with frogs. It seems that if you stick a sharp pointed object into a frog's eye and grind it around until the frog's brain is utterly destroyed, certain of its reflex responses continue to function. This is called "pithing" a frog. After the frog has been pithed, you can produce a contraction of the frog's leg by dropping a bit of acid on it. The response shows that the contraction of the leg is governed by the autonomic nervous system, centered, as I recall, in the spinal column somewhere, rather than in the brain. When I listen to speakers putatively on the left these days, I sometimes think they have been pithed, and that their speech is actually a function of their autonomic nervous system.

I hope no one will be so foolish as to suppose that these remarks constitute a brief for right-wing discourse. Anyone who listens for even a short while to the mindless repetition of incantations to free markets, democracy, and the dangers of political extremism - by which is meant anything even slightly to the left of Bill Clinton - will know that ideological rationalizations of the established order are alive, well, and awaiting a devastating ideological
critique. But that critique cannot possibly be mounted by those who have lost all sensitivity to the ritual and unreflective character of their own discourse. One of the lessons Marx teaches us in Capital is that when we wish to anatomize some practice or social formation with which we are confronted, it is invaluable to remind ourselves of its history. In an effort to understand, and thereby perhaps to counteract, the triviality and shallowness of so much contemporary left discourse, I shall try in a very few words to recapitulate the sequence of steps by which, like the powerful wizard Saruman in The Lord of the Rings, Marx has been reduced from a world-shattering necromancer to a sideshow conjuror doing cheap dialectical tricks to scare intellectual children.

The central fact of social life is the appropriation, by a ruling class, of a surplus of goods they have not produced, both for their own enjoyment and in order to reinforce their ability to continue the appropriation. This appropriation takes many institutional forms - kingship, slavery, conquest, taxation, serfdom - but always it is backed by force, and always it consists in the taking by one group of men and women of the food, clothing, shelter, and other goods that the labor of another group of men and women has produced. In a capitalist economy, appropriation takes the specific form of the exploitation of legally free wage labor by capital. The unequal allocation of the social product is immediately obvious to anyone with eyes to see: some people live in hovels, others in castles, or condominiums. Some people eat rice and beans, others eat meat and fish. Some die unattended of diseases that medicine can cure, others are ushered out of this life as comfortably as armies of doctors and nurses can manage.

Contrary to the mythology of celebratory historiography, those whose labor is being appropriated almost always know perfectly well what is happening to them, even in that most mystified of all social formations, capitalism. But the rationalizations by which rulers justify their appropriations do, nevertheless, play some role in sustaining the structure of inequality. The task of ideological critique is to expose the self-interest that lurks below the surface of those rationalizations, and in that way to cripple the rationalizers. So it is that Marx devoted endless pages to attacks on the major and minor theorists of classical political economy, even though he believed that the assault on the central keep of the capitalist fortress would be led by organized workers, not their allies from the left intelligentsia. In the early part of this century, it was still possible to hope that the working class of the industrialized world would replace capitalist irrationality and injustice with the rationality and justice of socialism, but three world-historical events - the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Great Depression - put paid to that happy optimism. The willingness of the several national components of the international working class to take up arms against one another, the appearance of a pre-capitalist dictatorship masquerading as socialism, and the success of capitalism in surviving the great crash that Marx had predicted, together sank the hopes that had buoyed the early revolutionary movement.

In response to these reverses and disappointments, radical intellectuals elaborated ever more subtle theories of hegemony, ideology, mass communication, and the mysteries of discourse, all in a desperate attempt to explain why their generous offers of leadership elicited so few followers. Eventually, the discourse of radicals lost all relation to the material base of social theory, to the fundamental facts of exploitation, appropriation, and inequality, so that we were left with an empty rhetoric of rebellion and revolution into which literary and aesthetic concerns could be poured. In the wonderful phrase of Alexander Pope, referring in the Dunciad to his rivals among the Augustan poets, the discourses of our contemporary radicals have become "shit to airy fineness spun."

With no conception of the material basis of exploitation and inequality, with no way of making that fundamental distinction between appearance and reality on which all true ideological critique rests, the invocation of such phrases as "racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia" is little more than a shibboleth, a test of politically correct pronunciation, passage of which admits one to a clique of uncritically one-dimensional flatlanders. The subject of these remarks is power and discourse - not how to control the power of discourse, or undermine the power of discourse, or apologize for the power of discourse, but how to recover the power of radical discourse, to make such discourse once again a weapon in the struggle against inequality and exploitation.

The prerequisite to that recovery, I suggest, is a refusal to invoke the macros of speech without thought. "Racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia" is to the 1990's what "running dogs of imperialism" and "capitalist lackeys" were to the 1930's. Now, there really were, in the 30's, nasty, unprincipled underlings who did the dirty work of the imperial capitalist nations, just as there are today. When first coined, the metaphors "running dogs" and "lackeys" captured rather vividly both the function and the moral degradation of those despicable people [assuming, for the moment, that one accepts the rather unjustifiably negative view of the dog.] But after endless, and eventually mindless, repetition, they lost their capacity to enlighten, and instead became obstacles to thought.

In like manner, racism is an integral component of American society, sexism is a structural feature of almost all societies, disdain for the poor [which, I assume, is what is 'meant by "classism"] has been endemic among the wealthy and privileged of European and American society for centuries, and homophobia is manifestly a widespread pathology. But "racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia," like so many other unreflective utterances of the putatively progressive, is an impediment to thought, not a tool of ideological critique. It is as devoid of critical content as that right-wing oxymoron, "the free market."

Perhaps this is merely the crotchety complaint of a sixty-year old radical who finds that, as usual, the young are listening to a different music and singing a different song. But I am convinced that we have never had a greater need for the destructive unmasking of entrenched and rationalized interests, for ideological critique as Marx first conceived and practiced it. Perhaps the next generation of PC's will come with a resident program that responds to stereotyped, one-dimensional language with the error message, "Warning: words without meaning; please pause and reflect."

MEMOIR CHAPTER THREE TENTH INSTALLMENT

As should be obvious from these memoirs, I was professionally extremely ambitious from the time I was an undergraduate. I published a great deal, went to meetings, accepted speaking engagements whenever they were offered, and in all the usual ways tried to advance myself in the profession. But in one way, my behavior was actually professionally unusual. From the start, I chose the objects of my philosophical investigations for reasons rooted deeply within my psyche, and not at all dictated by considerations of what was popular at the moment. I rather fiercely demanded that the world accept my work as it was, regardless of fashion. Readers of this memoir may find it difficult to imagine, all these years later, but my decision to turn my back on mathematical logic and instead write my first book on the Critique of Pure Reason would have been viewed back in the early sixties as a very poor career choice. Indeed, I have been told that I would have been tapped for the Society of Fellows had I stuck with logic. There were several important books on the First Critique by English scholars [Kemp Smith, Weldon, Paton, Ewing], but my book was the first full scale treatment of the First Critique by an American in the twentieth century. The history of philosophy was not then the royal road to professional success. Those facts quite literally never crossed my mind.
Having chosen to launch myself as a Kant scholar, I immediately turned to political philosophy, and rather provocative political philosophy at that. In the seven years after Kant's Theory of Mental Activity, leaving aside all the books I edited, I published A Critique of Pure Tolerance, The Poverty of Liberalism, The Ideal of the University, and In Defense of Anarchism. It was not until 1973 that I returned to Kant scholarship with The Autonomy of Reason.
As a consequence of my political writings, I rapidly acquired a reputation as a brash voice on the left, and since I was living in New York, this led to opportunities to become a typical New York leftwing public intellectual. I appeared on the David Suskind Show, wrote reviews for the New York TIMES Sunday Book Review Section, lectured both in the city and around the country, and might even, had I stuck with it, earned myself a standing invitation to The Theater for Ideas. Although this is getting ahead of my story, the year after I published In Defense of Anarchism, I received over a hundred invitations to speak on campuses around the country. And the truth is, I did not enjoy it. When it paid, I did it for the money, to pay the analyst bills, but even then, I did not find the role of a public bloviator attractive.
I did not like being away from my family. If I did accept a speaking engagement, I arranged it so that I was away for one night at most. I recall that at some point or other, Jacob Javits and several other progressive senators arranged a trip to Cuba to explore the possibility of a rapprochement with Castro. The newspapers were full of the story, speculating on its chances for success. When I read about the junket, my first reaction was, "Well, that is another three days they will not be home for dinner."
I was becoming disenchanted with my role as a Columbia professor. In certain circles in New York, then and probably now as well, it was a big deal to be on the Columbia faculty. There was a perceptible frisson of respect whenever one was introduced as a Columbia professor. I found myself thinking, "Now, people say, Oh, Bob Wolff must be pretty good, if he is a professor at Columbia. Maybe it would be better to be someplace where people say, Oh, that must be a pretty good place if Bob Wolff is there!" This is an expression of genuine arrogance, of course. It is not for nothing that I chose the Emily Dickinson poem that graces the title page of Volume One of these memoirs.
In addition, I was growing more and more uneasy about the privilege and social isolation of the elite sector of American higher education. The events of the Spring of '68 only heightened this feeling, and the assassination of King, combined with the intensification of the Viet Nam War, made me uncomfortable about the feather bed I had landed in.
These disparate feelings -- the desire to find a proper community in which to raise my children, my disillusionment with the role of Public Intellectual, my dismay at the privileges of the Ivy League -- came together in a most unexpected way on a warm August Saturday in 1969. Cindy and I had gone back to our new summer home in Worthington with little Patrick at the beginning of July for a two month stay. Once again, Cindy was morning sick, so we resumed our daily treks to Northampton for Big Macs and fries. This time, however, we had Patrick with us. At eighteen months, Patrick had a tendency to get fussy, and it turned out that quite the most soothing thing we could do was to strap him in his car seat and take him for a ride. One Sunday, in fact, I set out from Morningside Heights with Patrick and drove completely around Manhattan Island. Patrick did not let out a peep until we pulled up in front of our apartment building, at which point he began to bawl.
Cindy and I enjoyed looking at streets and imagining what it would be like to live on them, so we frequently combined our MacDonalds run with some casual cruising up and down Northampton's residential streets, Patrick along for the ride. Our favorite streets were in Ward Two, the Smith College area of town -- rows of colonial homes, unpretentious, graceful, inviting. One day, we stumbled on a dead end street with a bend in it called Barrett Place. There were no more than eight homes on the little street, and it was lovely. "This is where I would like to live," Cindy said. "No doubt," I replied a trifle sardonically, "but we work in New York, and the commute is wicked."
We drove back to the Berkshire Hills and continued our lazy summer vacation, watching Neil Armstrong take his first step on the moon, chatting with Julie and Connie Sharon next door, who had seven girls and were still hoping for a boy. Then, one Saturday, I got up early to give Patrick his breakfast, and opened up the weekend edition of the Northampton Gazette. Idly paging through it, I came on a picture of a beautiful three story brick Federal home on Barrett Place. The real estate agent was Al Lumley, and the house was due to go on the market Monday.
As soon as I showed the ad to Cindy, she said, "Let's look at it!" I pointed out that it wasn't due to go on the market until Monday, and besides we still didn't have jobs in Western Massachusetts, but she was adamant, so I called the number listed for Lumley. It turned out that he was in Amherst, seven miles or so from Northampton, and didn't really want to drive over, but I pleaded, and he finally agreed to meet us. As soon as we entered the house, we fell in love with it. It was the home of Mrs. Ethel Webb Faulkner and her late husband Harold U. Faulkner, who had been an economic historian of some note and a professor for many years at Smith,. They had had the house built in 1933, in the depths of the depression, when it was in fact the only house built in Northampton that year. Now, Mrs. Faulkner was getting on and felt that it was time to sell. The house had a large living room, formal dining room, den, and large kitchen on the first floor, four good sized bedrooms on the second floor, and a spare bedroom and gorgeous pine paneled study on the third floor. There were three bathrooms, a garage, and a double lot with a large side yard, including the remains of a grove of quince trees in which, it was said, Jonathan Edwards had played as a boy. It was perfect.
We grew enraptured by the idea of living on Barrett Place with our growing family. Moving there from Morningside Heights would be like jumping from Modern Times into Andy Hardy Grows Up. We were already beginning to think about the renovations we would undertake. I had made a contact in the Philosophy Department of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, through Gerald and Annette Barnes, a couple teaching philosophy at Amherst College whom I had met at a party in New York. UMass was in an expansion phase, so there was at least a hope that I could bag a job there.
On the way back to Worthington, we talked, and as we talked, each of us reinforced the other's desire. By the time we had turned off route 9 onto route 112, we had convinced ourselves that we were meant to live in that beautiful house at 26 Barrett Place. The asking price was $47,500. I made a low offer that was summarily rejected by Lumley, and I came right back with a full price offer, which was accepted. The next day, Sunday, I called a local Worthington real estate agent to put our summer home on the market, asking just enough to cover the original cost of $25,000 plus what we had spent renovating it. On Monday, our summer home sold, and I arranged with Al Lumley to meet with Mrs. Faulkner to execute a written agreement.
It turned out that Mrs. Faulkner really was not eager to move out of her home, even though she knew in her heart that it was time. As we sat in the offices of Alvertus J. Morse [later Judge Morse], the lawyer we had found to handle the closing, it became clear that Mrs. Faulkner really would prefer to settle the matter of the sale of her house but not to move out just yet. Since we didn't have jobs within a hundred and fifty miles of Barrett Place, I was in no hurry to start paying the mortgage. I asked, "How would it be if we sign a buy sell agreement now, put down a nice binder, and agree to conclude the sale a year from now -- say June 30, 1970?" Well, Mrs. Faulkner thought that was just fine, and hard as it may be now to believe, Nonotuck Savings Bank was prepared to make a loan commitment for a fixed rate 6% twenty-five year 80% mortgage ten months in advance of closing. So it was settled. Now all we needed to do was find a pair of jobs.
The next academic year was full of excitement and activity. The big news, of course, was the arrival of our second child on February 18, 1970, just three days more than two years after the birth of Patrick. Once again we were prepared with Emily Ann if it was a girl, but it was a boy, and we settled on Tobias Barrington Wolff. The "Barrington" was for Barrington Moore, who had agreed to be the child's godfather. In due course, Toby, as we immediately began calling the little baby, received a battered silver teething cup that had been in Barry's family for generations. Our family was now complete: Bob and Cindy, Patrick and Toby. The nuns were totally supportive of Cindy's pregnancy, and assured her that her job would be waiting for her when she was ready to return, but we secretly hoped that by the time she was prepared to resume teaching, we would be living on Barrett Place.
The Harper Guide to Philosophy had still not appeared, even though the ten essays had long since been written and submitted. Indeed, the entire Harper Guide project had fallen into disfavor. Fred Wieck had handed it off to Al Prettyman at Harper, and Prettyman in turn had turned it over to Hugh van Dusen, who headed up the Harper Torchbook division. I was getting rather eager to have my contribution appear. In 1969, I published an article "On Violence" in The Journal of Philosophy that drew heavily on the arguments of my Harper Guide essay, even referring to that essay in the footnotes as "forthcoming." But of course there was no sign that it was coming forth. Finally, in early 1970, I decided to call van Dusen. Sitting in my office, which overlooked the walkway between the campus and the Columbia Law School, I placed the call. Could I at least use sections of the essay in other things I wanted to write? Van Dusen was very apologetic about the long delay, and said of course I could do so. Then I had a brainstorm. "Why don't you publish the essay as a short book?" Van Dusen was very taken with that idea -- the Harper Guide project was an albatross, and no one at Harper really wanted to go through with it. He got rather excited. "We could publish a whole series of short books." Then he said, "But 'Political Philosophy' -- that is a really dull title. Can you come up with something better?"
When I was a boy, in the attic of the little row house in which we lived on 76th avenue in Kew Gardens Hills, I had found a complete set of the writings of Mark Twain. My favorite volume was "Literary Essays," which included such perennial favorites as "James Fennimore Cooper's Literary Errors" and "The Awful German Language." One of the lesser noted essays was an attack on Shelley and his buddies called "In Defense of Harriet Shelley." When Hugh van Dusen asked me for a better title, that essay popped into my mind, and without thinking, I said, "How about In Defense of Anarchism?" "Great," van Dusen said, and several months later the 82 page book appeared. Had it been published in the Harper Guide, no one would ever have noticed it. Had it appeared in 1965, when it was written, it might have garnered a few snarky notices. But in 1970, the world was exploding, and my little book caught fire. In three years, it sold 40,000 copies, and started appearing in foreign language translations. Thanks to a University of California re-issue, it is still in print. When last I looked, it had appeared in Swedish, Italian, German, French, Italian yet again, Korean, Croatian, and Indonesian. At one point, it was required reading for the Cambridge University Moral Philosophy Tripos, and even provoked a wonderful book-length response by Jeffrey Reiman, In Defense of Political Philosophy.
By and large, everyone who has commented on that book has claimed that its central argument is wrong, although in fact it was then, and still is, exactly correct. But the advice I like to give to budding philosophers proved right. If you want to be famous, write a short book. While all of this was going on, I continued to edit books -- two in '69, one in '70, another in '71.
At roughly the time that I was talking to Hugh van Dusen about my essay, I also made an appearance at a symposium organized to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. At issue was the question whether citizens have an obligation to obey the law in a democracy, regardless of their individual judgment of the morality of that law. This may seem a trifle abstract now, but in 1970, with men being ordered daily to report for induction into the Armed Forces to fight a war in South East Asia that was widely considered unjust and immoral, this was a question of the very greatest immediacy. Drawing on the arguments in In Defense of Anarchism, I argued the negative. Defending the positive, and using exactly the line of argument that I had demonstrated to be fallacious in my as yet unpublished book, was Eugene Rostow. Rostow was a former Dean of Yale Law School, and had served in the State Department under Johnson. He was the brother of Walt Rostow, Johnson's National Security Advisor. Rostow regularly went by the name Eugene V. Rostow, but his full name, give to him by socialist parents on the Lower East Side of New York, was Eugene Victor Debs Rostow. His parents and my grandfather might have been comrades in the Socialist Party.
Meanwhile, of course, I was desperately trying to conjure up a job offer from the University of Massachusetts. It was not totally insane to think that I might succeed. UMass was in the midst of an extraordinary growth spurt. Located among the farms of Western Massachusetts north of the center of Amherst, the university had started life as an agricultural college in 1863. In 1931 Mass Aggie became Mass State College, and in 1947, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Spurred by the growing demand for college admissions in the '60s, the university had launched an expansion campaign designed to take it from 10,000 students to 25,000 undergraduate and graduate students by the mid '70s. In '69, when Cindy and I were looking for jobs, the university was adding one hundred new faculty and fifteen hundred new students each year.
As the expansion took off, strains developed in nearly every department between the oldtimers, who in some cases had been at UMass for decades, and the flood of new, young academics, many of whom were academically more able and more ambitious than their senior colleagues. Because of its agriculture college past, UMass's science departments, especially in the biological sciences, were the strongest academically. The Chancellor, Oswald Tippo, himself a biologist, had gathered a kitchen cabinet of senior science professors who passed around the administrative positions among themselves.
One problem faced by Tippo was the opposition from the old line faculty to the wave of new hires. To undermine their opposition, Tippo created the position of Department Head, distinguished from Department Chair. A Head was appointed by the Dean and had the power to recruit without the approval of a majority of the senior members of the department. Things were being shaken up dramatically at UMass.
Prior to the expansion phase, the Philosophy Department had been a tiny operation with four or five members. Leonard Ehrlich, a Jaspers scholar who had studied at Yale, was the oldest. Among the others were Ann Ferguson, a young, ebullient Swarthmore graduate who had done her work at Brown, and John Brentlinger, a tall, politically radical man whose specialty was Greek philosophy. John and Ann were married. Bruce Aune had been recruited by Tippo as Head to build the department, rapidly bringing in a number of young men, some of whom were students or disciples of Rod Chisholm. At the time when I went looking for a job at UMass, the new wave in the department included Gareth Matthews, Ed Gettier, Herb Heidelberger, Bob Sleigh, John Robison, Bob Ackermann, and a young Assistant Professor, Fred Feldman.
I had met Gerry and Annette Barnes, who were teaching Philosophy at Amherst College, and Gerry arranged for me to have lunch with Herb Heidelberger. I told him quite openly that I was interested in moving to UMass, and he said he would see what he could do. Sure enough, an interview was arranged, and I drove up to Amherst to give a talk and meet the department.
Much of the remainder of this volume of these memoirs will be devoted to my experiences in the UMass Philosophy Department. It is a sad tale, at least in its early chapters, full of anger, bitterness, and eventually all out war. Because those events made so deep an impression on me, I must force myself to set aside my current feelings so that I can recapture my frame of mind when I entered the department. On the day that I came to the campus of the University of Massachusetts for my meeting with the members of the department, I was a full professor at Columbia University. I had published nine books, and was widely recognized in the profession both as a serious Kant scholar and as a provocative political philosopher. Quite unthinkingly, I assumed that the department would be delighted to recruit me as their colleague. The interview took place early in the winter. I stood at a window of the faculty restaurant on the eleventh floor of the Campus Center, looking north across a charming lake to the newly constructed rather dramatically designed Fine Arts Center. Fresh snow covered the ground and decorated the trees. Accustomed to the grungy urban cityscapes of Morningside Heights, I was charmed.
The talk and interview seemed to go well, although I picked up vibrations of a somewhat disturbing sort from several members of the department, most notably young Fred Feldman. Nevertheless, it seemed self-evident to me that I was a great catch, so I hoped for the best. As part of my visit, I was wheeled in to see the Dean of Arts and Sciences, Seymour Shapiro, one of the Tippo circle of scientists. I explained to him that in order for me to be able to join the faculty, a position would have to be found for my wife as well. He assured me that something could be arranged. In due course, the offer came through, and Cindy and I began planning the renovations to our dream house.
When Toby joined our family, Cindy and I still expected to be able to move into our new house during the summer months of 1970. I spoke to Bruce Aune about one problem that had me a little worried. Columbia, like many private colleges and universities, began its year for salary purposes on July 1, which meant that my June pay check would be my last. But UMass, in common with Rutgers and other state institutions, paid its faculty beginning on September first. There were going to be two payless summer months, which with our tight finances was going to be hard to handle. "That is not a problem," Bruce said. "When you retire you will receive two additional months of salary." "But Bruce," I objected, "that is going to be some time around the millennium. What do I do now?" "Well," Bruce allowed, "you can always teach summer school the summer before you start." So it appeared I would once again be moonlighting.
There were much bigger problems. After a bit, the UMass English Department offered Cindy several sections of Freshman Comp. That was a complete non-starter. Cindy had taught Freshman Comp as a graduate student. She was now an Assistant Professor, on a track leading to tenure. She was not about to go backwards. We were committed to buying the house in less than six months, but there was no compromising. I called Seymour Shapiro to tell him the deal was off. I could not accept their offer. He was astonished. Apparently, throwing a few sections to the wife was their standard procedure. I patiently explained that Cindy was an accomplished academic with a good tenure track teaching job already. She would accept nothing less.
Shapiro said it was too late in the year to consider Cindy for a regular English Department teaching job for the Fall, so I suggested we postpone the entire matter a year to allow them time to see what they could do. He agreed.
All of this sounds rather insouciant on our part, a jeu d'esprit by a couple of young academics taking a risky chance on pulling off a complicated parlay involving two jobs and a house, but it is worth recalling that Cindy was in the very last stages of pregnancy, and we were about to welcome a new baby into our home. In retrospect, our behavior was sheer madness. We were in love with the house on Barrett Place, and with the life we imagined our family would lead there, but we were taking an enormous gamble.
Not surprisingly, when I was contacted by a Prentice Hall editor about writing a different kind of philosophy textbook keyed to the tenor of those times, I jumped at the chance to make some more money. We would be carrying a big mortgage starting July 1, 1970, and we were going to need all the money I could earn. Lest anyone reading this be misled by the seemingly modest price of the house we were committed to buying, I will simply note that the $47,500 purchase price, adjusted for inflation, was the equivalent of $266,500 today.
I went to work on the text, which presented some interesting challenges. We agreed that it would be a collection of readings from the great philosophers, with introductions and commentary by me. Each of the eight chapters would begin with a contemporary controversy in which was nestled a classic philosophical debate. For example, the old arguments about appearance and reality were introduced by a debate between Timothy Leary and Jerry Lettvin about LSD. The insanity defense in murder trials led naturally to selections on the free will versus determinism debate. And so forth. I called the book Philosophy: A Modern Encounter. I finished the book while I was still in New York, but it did not appear until 1972, with a 1973 publication date. [Publishers of textbooks always fudge the pub date that way, to make the text appear current for a slightly longer time.] The only difficulty with Prentice Hall's manufacture of the book was the cover. When it came time to design the book, the editor at Prentice Hall's offices in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey gathered together some young editors and staff people and put them in front of a tree in the garden area out back, with an in-house lawyer leaning against a tree, all intended to look like a college class. For years, I kept running into people who thought the picture was of me and wanted to know why I had shaved off my mustache.
Since we were going to have to postpone for a year moving into our new house, Cindy and I decided to double down on our gamble and launch extensive renovations. There was plenty of time to complete them, Lord knows, and with my publishing and teaching, we had the money to pay for them, but would a buyer for the house like them, should it come to that? My recollection is that we never even gave that a thought. Like some New Age couple fresh from an Ashram, we were simply convinced that the planets were aligned and the spirits were with us.
A second benefit of the postponement was that it meant I was going to be at Columbia long enough actually to qualify for a sabbatical semester. The Fall of 1970, I had no classes at all, one of only three sabbaticals during my fifty years of teaching. Since I also never applied for a foundation grant to take time off from teaching, those three semesters were my only break from full time academic work. I did not do anything special during the semester. I worked on the Prentice Hall text, edited a few books, and gave talks here and there. One of those talks is worth mentioning, not because of what I said but because it was the longest distance I ever traveled to speak. I received an invitation from the University of Lethbridge to speak to the Philosophy Department and also to give a less technical talk to a general university audience. If you will take a look at a Google map, you will discover that Lethbridge is about a hundred miles west of Medicine Hat and three hundred and fifty miles west of Moose Jaw. Somewhat more to the point, it is maybe 150 miles south and a bit east of Calgary. All of this in Canada, of course.
I opened the letter of invitation while I was standing in the Philosophy Department office. After the secretary and I looked at a map, I said that I really did not want to go that far just to give a couple of lectures, but I also didn't want to seem ungrateful for the invitation. She suggested that I ask so much money they would have to withdraw the invitation. That seemed like a pretty good solution, so I asked for an exorbitant fee. [My recollection is that I asked for a thousand dollars, which in those days was a lot of dough]. Well, they said ok, and I was committed. I did not want to be away for days from Cindy and the boys, but it was going to be a bit of a trick to get there and back overnight. In the end, I flew out of LaGuardia to Toronto, then took Air Canada non-stop to Calgary, and flew the rest of the way in a tiny ten seater that did not even have a divider between the pilot and the passengers. I was crammed into a window seat next to an enormous American cattleman who had been to Calgary to sell some steers and was on his way home to Montana. He spent the entire flight fulminating against damned Eastern commie lovers while I cringed next to the window and hoped he would not throw me out of the plane. I flew in to Lethbridge, gave my two talks, flew out the next day, and was home in time to go kiss my sons goodnight and go to bed with Cindy.
At long last, our gamble paid off. UMass offered Cindy a tenure track Assistant Professorship and we accepted the pair of offers. The renovations on our new house were complete, my summer school teaching scheduled We packed up our apartment, and with very few regrets and no second thoughts, I prepared to start the next chapter of my life. On May 27, 1971, at 11:20 a.m., I had my last analytic session with Dr. Rodgers. The next morning, at 8 a.m., Gleason Movers came and loaded up our belongings for the trip to 26 Barrett Place, Northampton. It seemed I was not going to spend my entire career as a Columbia professor.

AN APPEAL TO MY READERS

My Memoirs are almost at the 500 pages mark, and a number of you have asked whether they will be published. I contacted a big deal New York agent, who said in no uncertain terms that there is no market for my Memoirs, since I am neither famous nor infamous. I would love to bring them out in book form when they are done. Does anyone have a concrete suggestion?