This time they met at William Livant’s house in Burns Park. About 40 were there. If the meeting at Kaufman’s place had been tense, this one was “nerve-frazzling, soul-scraping,” according to Anatol Rapoport, a mathematician and pioneer of game theory. Reporters were let in, then tossed out. Same with representatives of the faculty’s top governing body, the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs.
Eric Wolf put the case for a teach-in to the militants. And what was a teach-in, exactly? The term was brand new. Instead of canceling their classes, he explained, participating faculty would invite students for an all-night conference of lectures, rallies and seminars. It would signal their objections to U.S. policy, yes, but with an educational purpose. And it would sidestep the fury over a strike because it would not disrupt the teaching calendar.
At first the militants were dead set against it. Kaufman remembered being called a coward. He all but conceded the point: “I, for one, was frightened.”
The moderates were just as acerbic. With images of the unrest at Berkeley very much in the air, they accused the militants of “riot envy.”
Decades later, the sociologist Tom Mayer, a close friend of the meeting’s radical host, Bill Livant, wrote: “I can still hear Bill passionately arguing for more radical action.”
Long after midnight, Rafe Ezekiel, a social psychologist and Peace Corps veteran, polled the room. One by one, each professor gave his position, often in “the slow-paced, sometimes convoluted fashion of academics,” Rothman wrote.
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