Let Us Now Praise Infamous Stocktonians

I bumped into Bill Lubenow today and he began to inquire about the volume. Ken had asked him to contribute something for the project, and his response was to let us know about a book (Louis Menand's recent Marketplace of Ideas) that might be relevant to our project – very helpful, of course, but somewhat cryptic. Would he contribute, or would he not? The note didn’t say.

In person, however, Bill indicated that it would be a pleasure to do so, and suggested that he had voluminous journals and diaries, recounting all kinds of activities going on over the years. Surely, he said, we needed to be covering the sex and the drugs, because wasn’t that a substantial part of the history?

Bill was joking, of course. No, of course he was! But there is an interesting kernel in here that needs consideration. It may well be true that there are stories to be told in this area. For some part of its existence, Stockton may have been known as a party school; faculty, staff, and students may have and no doubt did explore avenues that might not be explored so openly today.

Some of the stories may indeed be less glamorous than we have been led to believe. There is of course, the story that is often recounted (I believe I heard it at my interview in 1996 – indeed Bill may have told me) about the philosophy professor who held his classes in the nude – this being told as if this happened on a weekly basis, out on Lake Fred, and as if it had been tolerated by the college community. In fact, the story is a lot more prosaic than that, and actually led to the firing of the professor – pretty sharpish!

But, it is also important whether or not the things that happened at Stockton were unique to the institution – or whether they occurred everywhere at that time. It was perhaps unique that the college was being founded at a time of experimentation – social, political, and cultural. But was there anything unique in what Bill’s fictional journals may have covered? Probably not. And if that is the case, then maybe these things don’t warrant a great deal of attention.

I am reminded of James Agee and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Here was a journalist who wanted in 1941 to cover everything that happened in the lives of poor white sharecroppers in the South. He wanted to go through their drawers and almost check through their underwear. He believed he was endeavoring to recapture their lives and honor them – make them famous in a way. This was not to be Andy Warhol-like celebrity – providing them 15 minutes of fame – it was rather an attempt to show that what they did on a daily basis was worth noting, and perhaps more so than what Princes, Lords and Ladies might be doing.

But here’s the rub. Even if what we end up describing is something that appears to be unique, by comparison with ourselves and our own practices – the use of out houses in these rural communities, say, compared to the indoor plumbing of today – and even if these things appear to be very strange and noteworthy – are they really so when we take into consideration that what we deem as abnormal was in fact the taken-for-granted thing of the moment. Was the praise to be located in the private materials inside the closet of the sharecropper, or merely in the mind of the author who wanted to make a statement that middle-class Americans should take greater note of these people and their lives?

In line with the foregoing analysis, therefore, I believe that we should leave Bill’s fictional diaries and journals where they are. What they may describe will not necessarily provide insight into what made the college tick, especially when we are writing for an audience of today and not one shaped by the experience of living through the 1960s and 70s.

This isn’t an effort to reach for respectability and to avoid what might be deemed offensive for our readers (though this is a consideration). It is rather an effort to understand the boundaries of respectability that may have been in different social locations in the early 1970s from where they lie today.

Rob