The Park Square Years
Igor Webb
1971-1978
Memory is a poor historian, but a great artist. So, reader, beware!
For example: There’s a snapshot on John Clifford’s refrigerator, in black-and-white, of three young men, as it happens John and his brothers Doug and (I think) Danny. They are standing in front of a building, maybe even a UMass Boston Park Square building, facing directly into the camera, looking rather fetching in the style of the time, the early 1970s. Meaning earnestly bedraggled, and with vast amounts of hair.
We were all much younger then: who are those guys?
By the time I arrived at UMass Boston in the fall of 1971, as a newly hired assistant professor of English, I had been out of the U.S. for five years. I had left in 1966 to finish my doctoral studies in London, but then, having burned my draft card at a televised anti-Vietnam rally in Trafalgar Square, I was punished by being drafted. At the same time, 1968, I married Catherine Lamb, the daughter of an old IRA man (1919-1923) from Clonmel, Tipperary (dressed as a dandy, he ran guns from Liverpool to Dublin). Free Staters took over Clonmel once the fighting was done, and Kate’s father, appalled, moved to England, where she was raised. When we met she was living in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, way in the north of England, and working on a literary magazine called Stand (yes, as in “taking a stand”; the magazine has just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary.) Immediately after we married we moved to Montreal, where I had landed a job at an English-speaking college (Loyola of Montreal, later to become part of Concordia University). The growing anti-Vietnam movement in the armed forces had by then developed into an informal but well-organized underground, and I was asked to take over the American Deserters Committee (ADC) in Montreal, which I did. That’s a story for another place, but let me say, because it bears on the Park Square years, that I worked at Loyola for money but considered the ADC my real job. We established an underground railroad to get deserters official papers in Canada, as well as a kind of social club for support, a job network, and of course politics (we worked exclusively with deserters, almost all working class boys, and not draft dodgers, almost all middle class boys).
Then the courts ruled you couldn’t draft someone for political reasons, and I was suddenly able to return to the U.S. without fear of the draft or arrest. I was therefore free to fly from London (where Kate and I had returned in 1970) to the Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention to be interviewed for an opening at UMass (the MLA convention was a vast job auction held in those years in the week between Christmas and New Year). Two of my friends from the Stanford graduate English program, Linda Dittmar and Don Babcock, were not only already employed in the English Department at UMass but on the search committee (I didn’t realize a junior member of faculty—one of us— could be on a job committee, so I was more than a little surprised to find them in the room!). Many of my friends from the American anti-Vietnam movement in London had also settled around Boston by 1970, one of whom, Linda Gordon, also worked at UMB, in the history department. Less than a week after my interview I received a call in London—and long distance was expensive then—from the department chairman, who offered me the job.
Little of the above could happen today!
Jobs in higher ed are much harder to come by, resources are scarce, the interviewing process is endless . . . My son Ben, now 19, has signed up with the “Selective Service System” as the law requires but it is our standing army that is today fighting foreign wars, and no one is burning draft cards in protest; and the pell mell expansion of public institutions of the 60s has been reversed: public colleges and public schools both are drained of funds, and are more likely to be vilified than praised. So the launching of UMass Boston would be unthinkable today not only on account of the expense but even more because we as a society have lost almost all sense of a common good.
For a time I used a wonderful, wild, delightfully provocative and vivacious book put together by Mitch Goodman for my Freshman English text at Park Square: The Movement Toward A New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution. The book was 8 ½ X 11 and two inches thick, on newsprint-like paper. The whole of the inside front cover was taken up by a picture of Rosa Parks on a bus (1956), with a white man behind her; and the whole of the inside back cover by a photo of National Guard troops, rifles at the ready, at Kent State (1970). Goodman had collected, mainly from the Movement press, photos, essays, cartoons, news stories, letters about all aspects of the Movement, 1956 to 1970 (when his book was published). I just now hauled the book off my shelves and found a mimeographed assignment sheet stuck inside: “On Tuesday, be prepared to choose among the following group of readings for our next series of discussions: I. The Movement The Draft The Army, pages . . .; II The Movement The Land The Air; III Women’s Liberation: A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall; IV People of Color; V The Movement The Working Class The Corporation.” The book, by the by, was published by one of the most prestigious New York publishers: Knopf!
I came across this unusual book because Goodman, a novelist, was the husband of the poet Denise Levertov, whom I met through a poetry reading series I ran at UMB (with student government money). Denise and I became friends; she and Mitch were quite political; and so one thing led to another . . . Which was typical of UMB at the time: politics, poetry, the classroom, the barricades, the parochial, the universal, the private, the public, the teacher, the student, all were intertwined. We were a wonderful instance of the spirit of the age.
I doubt anyone imagined the result when they imagined UMB. Because, for example, the improvisations forced upon us in Park Square, the accident of having to hold classes in old warehouses or in hotel rooms near the police headquarters on one side and the Boston Common on the other, between the Goodwill Store and My Brother’s Place, these violated every student’s preconceptions about “school” and “college.” The physical features of the university made a powerful assertion: we are creating an institution right in the middle of things. What should education be like? What should education be for? Even though the university had been in business for several years before I arrived, in 1971 it was still the case that you felt there were no fixed traditions, no fixed identities, no inherited ways of being, doing, thinking. Each faculty member had chosen to work at a place without reputation or history, devoted to the Boston working class. The young faculty was not that much older than many of the students, especially the Viet Vets. Many of the young faculty had not taught before; a large group of us openly identified ourselves as “Socialists,” established a formal Socialist Faculty group that had a column in the student paper, met weekly, planned political actions and educational strategies, shared teaching ideas, supported each other’s bids for tenure, etc. etc. So you could say the whole put together amounted to a many-faceted experiment in learning, one of the features of which was that traditional roles were frequently subject to radical shakeup.
It was at one and the same time easier to be the professor in the classroom under those circumstances, especially if you were young—and also more of a moral burden. It was easier because students who came to the college to collect financial aid or money from the G.I. Bill or because you were supposed to get a college degree soon found out it was OK to ask what they really wanted to know. And once these questions started to come the whole educational experience changed, at least in this profound respect: it became, to use a loaded term from that time, “relevant.” This profound change, this relevance, had (has) its good and bad parts. On the up side, students look differently on the whole paraphernalia of education (“skills,” “knowledge” ) if they believe it can help them choose their own ends in life. On the down side, relevance can be a cover for a lot of poor thinking (more about this below). Another point: once you as teacher opened the classroom to genuine questions, especially questions about how to live, you assumed a responsibility for the lives of your students that you weren’t always prepared for, intellectually but especially morally. I may have known a lot more than my students about, say, the English nineteenth century, but, really, what did I know about living?
My daughter Kelly was all of a year-and-a-half old when I began working at UMB, and she was a very early riser, 6am at the latest. So for years I taught 8 o’clock classes. I would get to Park Square when it was still more or less deserted, but no matter how early I arrived My Brother’s Place was always open, and there was always someone in the bar who was already plastered. In my family, drink—what the Irish call drink—was frowned upon. My parents had a liquor cabinet all right, and there were all sorts of bottles in it. But though you’d be offered a drink when you arrived at our house as a guest, you weren’t expected to accept. Of the handful who did accept, an even smaller handful were invited back. I knew that some of the writers I was teaching were or had been big drinkers. I had no idea what that meant: but some of my students had alcoholic parents, and some would disappear for days on binges.
My mother was a seamstress and my father a dental technician: neither had gone to college. But in my house my space for schoolwork was sacred. Most of my students were, like me, the first in their families to go to college: but, unlike me, many had no place at home to study. I recall one student who came to see me, troubled and uncertain what to do. He told me his family said they were very proud of him for being in college, but that when he came home everyone went out of their way to make it impossible for him to study. His mother waited until he entered his room to study to hang her laundry there; he didn’t have a desk or any place to keep his books. If he tried to sit in a corner to read, his father would engage him in conversation; and if he said, Dad, I need to study, his father would get angry. What should he do? In the end he didn’t make it to his sophomore year.
There were two opposed views on the faculty about the general education curriculum. On one side, most of the younger faculty, including me, argued for greater relevance in the required classes. On the other side, faculty argued that working class students deserved the same education as you’d get at Harvard or Columbia (e.g. Great Books), and should not be offered a “watered down” curriculum. As I recall, relevance won the day, but in retrospect it’s clear—or, to my way of thinking—that both sides were right. The traditional canon of those days, in the humanities and social sciences, excluded much writing by women or African Americans and taught history absent social history, from the top down, and so forth. So the traditional canon left a lot to be desired, and needed radical rethinking. To participate in this rethinking was very exciting. If you look at one of the standard anthologies—Norton—and compare the 1970s version with today’s, you can see what a dramatic change resulted from that rethinking On the other hand, should the curriculum prevent working class students from becoming classicists on the ground that Latin is a dead language and therefore not relevant to working class experience?
In November of 1978 I visited the writer Ivan Klima, one of the major Czech novelists, at his home on the outskirts of Prague. He was a central figure in the broad opposition to the regime the Soviets had installed in Czechoslovakia after they quashed the Prague Spring in 1968; he was consequently always being watched, and his apartment was bugged. So we could exchange pleasantries in his apartment, but had to go for a walk to speak candidly. Among other things, we talked about writing in samizdat. He said underground publication involved a lot of tedious man-hours, because everything had to be reproduced on a typewriter, but that nevertheless writing was very widely distributed. The trouble, he said, was that samizdat corroded criticism: pap and crap received the same attention and praise as substantial work.
The idea that learning should serve theends of political struggle can seem essential in times of trouble and rage, but it can also have harmful results. One of the dangers of relevance is that instead of expanding a student’s horizons, it can shrink them.
I was in Prague in 1978 and not Boston because Kate and I had moved back to England that summer; I remained in London for another decade, until our marriage broke up. So, since I left UMB in 1978, I can’t say whether or how the spirit of Park Square has survived or evolved into today’s university. Before the university moved, John Clifford took me out to the Columbia Point projects, where he had worked. He wanted there to be some commitment from UMB to the projects, and some connection between the university radicals and the organizers at the projects.
Ironically, the same civic-mindedness that originally built the Columbia Point houses motivated the creation of UMass Boston. In the former case, to provide “decent” public housing for working class and the poor, housing paid for and subsidized by public funds; in the latter, to provide working class students with an accessible college education, also subsidized by public funds. But whatever the original motives for building the projects, by the 70s they had evolved into a place that seemed designed to destroy people. Mainly black people. There were almost no white families left in those buildings. And there was nothing else, either: no supermarkets, no movie theaters, no bowling alleys . . . nothing. Just a public housing project in ill repair well out of the view of the rest of the city. In 1978 I had travelled outside Prague to Theresienstadt (Terezin), one of the main Nazi concentration camps in what was then Czechoslovakia; many people died there, but it was not a death camp (Klima survived the war there as a boy). Although there’s a fortress there, mainly Theresientstadt was a public housing project isolated from society, a Ghetto. When I saw it, the first thing I thought of was the Columbia Point projects.
The university was built on a spit of land that jutted out into Boston Harbor, right next to the projects, but no meaningful connection was ever made. Compared to its Park Square location, the university also seemed to have been designed as a ghetto, albeit a spanking new one complete with many amenities. Whatever the ideals of the architects, undeniably we went from the middle of things to the outer periphery. The university was right on the Harbor but all the buildings looked inward. My first office at Columbia Point was eight feet by eight feet, and had no window.
Still, something of Park Square persisted. For one thing, the people, especially the faculty, remained the same. And the population of UMB at Park Square, students and faculty both, included a lot of remarkable, memorable, and altogether quite wonderful people. One of my memories from the early years at Columbia Point is of Allen Ginsberg, whom I had brought to read his poetry at the university. We had to put him in the biggest auditorium in the place. No sooner had he begun to read to a packed house than the fire alarm went off. Ginsberg sat cross-legged and asked the crowd to follow his chanting—Ommm, Ommm. He chanted in rhythm to the fire alarm, and everyone followed, and stayed calm until the alarm stopped. That evening there was a party for Ginsberg at Alan Helms’ house (Alan was another young faculty member in the English Department). Ginsberg spent a good part of the evening hanging around the bathroom. When I made my way there, he stopped me and asked if he could come along. He liked to watch people pee, he said. I told him I really preferred to go to the bathroom by myself.
Those were the days!