Remembering 1980s activism
Thank you for the article, “The Shanties on the Plaza” (November/December). I was one of the campus anti-apartheid activists in the mid- to late-1970s. Our principal demand from Yale, as with the activists in the 1980s, was divestment. We met similar dismissiveness: “It would be a drop in the bucket,” “Yale should focus on improving the world by educating its students,” etc. Ultimately, it was the people of South Africa who won their own liberation from apartheid, but we learned a lot from our work on campus. One, leverage matters. We took aim at the economic supports propping up the apartheid regime, whose anxious and loud opposition suggested we had identified a real vulnerability. Two, persistence matters. These struggles are never resolved in an academic year, or even the time it takes to earn a degree; campaigns are won in the long haul.
I think most of us Yalies who fought the awful apartheid regime continued our social justice work long after graduation. Me, I became a labor movement activist and professional (recently retiring as executive director of the Writers Guild of America East)—always remembering the lessons I learned stirring things up as an undergraduate. I learned a lot in the classroom and in the stacks, but I also learned from organizing and agitating on Beinecke Plaza and Cross Campus.
Thank you for examining this work.
Lowell Peterson ’79
Port Washington, NY
It is truly Orwellian that the Yale Alumni Magazine featured a cover article celebrating the role of student and faculty activism opposing the apartheid regime of South Africa the same month the Yale administration tells us that the university’s core mission is best served by “refrain[ing] from issuing statements concerning matters of public, social, or political significance.” In another turn of Orwellian doublespeak, the policy of not talking is advanced under the banner of “institutional voice.” President McInnis and her hand-picked committee expressly sought to distinguish it from “institutional neutrality,” perhaps because the latter has a bit of an image problem when we look back at how great powers professing “neutrality” in the face of mass violence and injustice have fared in the historical imagination (poorly).
This policy follows a crackdown on student and faculty activism. Last spring, Yale called in the local police department to arrest its own students and now stands by to support their criminal prosecution for non-violently remaining in tents. These are the same kinds of structures that were erected during the anti-apartheid protests described in Besche’s article. The article (perhaps ironically?) made no mention of the fact that students engaging in the activities acclaimed as courageous and transformative in that era would be punished under the university’s current approach. Yale’s new rules limit the size of posters to 11 by 17 inches, their display to “designated” spaces, and states they must disclose the name, email address, or phone number of the organizers. New rules also limit student protest to a “defined space,” which they decline to define in advance. These vague and broad terms are a blank check for discriminatory and arbitrary enforcement.
It is easy to herald the heroes of history. It is hard to pay the very real price for taking a stand today. When Yale commemorates the actions of a past generation in a battle that was—as Besche’s article so clearly points out—very controversial at the time, it is taking a position on politics and values. We are associating ourselves with those who did that work, saying it was a moral good that they choose to stand for that cause. How is that consistent with what Yale is doing now?
Issa Kohler-Hausmann ’08JD
Brooklyn, NY
Our cover article about the anti-apartheid movement was conceived and executed by our editorial staff, not by the Yale administration. Our article about the recommendations of the Committee on Institutional Voice is in this issue.—Eds.
I expected some mention in “The Shanties on the Plaza” of the recent protests against apartheid in Israeli-held territories, given the parallels in the mistreatment by the powerful of the weak. A difference in the reaction to the two groups of protesters may stem from the fact that the US government is complicit in the suppression of the Palestinians, in a way it wasn’t in South Africa. Furthermore, there were few apartheid supporters on campus during the 1980s. As with the earlier protests, it may take another quarter of a century for the Palestinians to be accorded their human rights.
Eugene Krc ’80, ’85PhD
Torrance, CA
I really appreciated John Besche’s excellent article “The Shanties on the Plaza.” That said, I found the article’s concluding summary of the movement’s impact unnecessarily tepid. Upon considering the broader movement, the success of student activism in that era becomes clearer. A 1992 study published by the Investor Responsibility Research Center reported that by 1989 more than 80 percent of colleges and universities instituted divestment policies and ultimately more than 150 institutions pursued some form of divestment. At campuses where protests occurred, 60 percent of those institutions divested at least partially, compared with less than 3 percent at the schools where no protests occurred.
In turn, these policy changes were linked to a larger stream of anti-apartheid momentum nationally that included the divestment of $18.5 billion from state and local government pension investment funds, Congress’s 1986 override of President Reagan’s veto of an economic sanctions package, and the decisions of corporations such as GM and IBM to pull out of South Africa, which itself in turn fed into a stream of international pressure that ultimately witnessed the end of the apartheid regime.
Though the main case studies in my own chapter on the movement in The Other Eighties (2011) are Dartmouth and Cornell, I interviewed several Yalies from the era who concur with Tony Marx’s sanguine perspective of the movement that Besche uses as the article’s last word. My intent is to give that some additional, deserved heft.
Brad Martin ’88
Barrington, RI
As a foreign service officer assigned to our South Africa delegation between 1981 and 1984, I read your cover story on campus activism against apartheid with great interest. During my tour there I worked primarily as liaison with the Black, so-called colored, and occasionally more radical underground anti-apartheid groups. I can attest to how fervently they followed and cheered the growing divestment movement on campuses across the US. They recognized that divestment, economic sanctions, and isolation from world markets would inflict the greatest pain on the very communities they represented, but remained unanimous that such a short-term sacrifice was well worth the longer-term victory of destroying the barbaric structure of apartheid. They viewed the US policy of “constructive engagement” designed by Ronald Reagan’s assistant secretary for African affairs Chester Crocker as little more than a protective cloak to protect US corporate profits.
I agree with my classmate Paul Goldberger that to a considerable extent our cohort’s social consciousness was constrained by personal immediacy. Issues such as the Vietnam war and domestic civil rights were paramount; brutal government policies enacted on the southern tip of Africa existed in the margins of our outrage. But I encourage current campus residents to heed the lessons of the anti-apartheid movement and continue to advocate for whatever issue sparks their passion, however geographically remote or obscure that issue might be. It’s impossible to know what succor distant warriors might take from such efforts.
Jeff Gersick ’72
San Francisco, CA
John Besche’s thoughtful feature on anti-apartheid activism at Yale prompts reflection on current efforts to reject and rebuke campus divestment campaigns. How sobering and saddening to recall, thanks to Besche’s piece, that great universities once took student ethical concerns seriously.
The governing board of Brown University, my undergraduate alma mater, recently rejected a carefully framed and widely supported call to divest from companies that supply arms and equipment used by the Israeli government to surveil, subjugate, and slaughter Palestinian civilians. The university administration also took aggressive disciplinary action against many of those who dared to raise this issue, having numerous students arrested and banishing one student group altogether. In an apparent gesture toward consistency, Brown’s trustees have now also declared that a call for divestment from fossil fuel enterprises can likewise never be considered.
We can all agree that the primary task of investment committees is to ensure institutional solvency. We can even agree that dropping certain specific investments would likely have nugatory real-world economic impact. But the symbolic impact of university divestment is obviously considerable. Were it not, wealthy trustees and intrusive right-wing legislators would not be so eager to remove divestment from the range of issues that can even be discussed.
Peter Laarman ’93MDiv
Providence, RI
This article brought back memories. I was at Yale Divinity School in the late 1970s and attended one of the first anti-apartheid protests near the Yale president’s office. I felt the need to do something to try to end this horrifying system in South Africa, and I’m glad I participated. Thanks for this very good and meaningful article!
Sandy Riggins ’79MAR
Hartford, CT
One additional element that would have fleshed out this article would be the other presentations on campus raising awareness of apartheid’s evils, at a very personal scale. I refer to the presentations by Yale Rep of the plays of Athol Fugard.
These plays, both lyrical and devastating, are 3D live indictments of that horrid system. I can’t imagine their presentations didn’t raise awareness among students and the Yale community, contributing to the divestiture movement.
Geoffrey Cohen ’83MFA
Brooklyn, NY
A thank you
Re: Kathrin Day Lassila’s announcement of her retirement as Editor of the Yale Alumni Magazine (“Reminiscence, a Farewell, and Gratitude,” November/December): What I know is that after reading each issue’s “From the Editor” column, I learned of someone I needed to know about or was informed about something I had somehow overlooked.
What I know is that reading the YAM is a civil conversation among people who may not agree with each other but who are willing to read, to listen, to respond, and to be part of the conversation, together.
What I know is that the School Notes remind me that my education at the Divinity School places me in an academic ecosystem in which all the parts work towards the same goal: light and truth.
What I know is that the YAM staff has been shepherded by an editor whose care, candor, respect, humor, and political balance created room for an eclectic audience representative of the body academic and no less the wider human neighborhood.
What I know is that after each reading of the YAM I was left more curious than informed, more grateful than entitled, and more inspired to give than to take.
And, what I know is that YAM’s next editor will inherit a publication that has been crafted to be a vehicle for information but no less a witness to one school’s desire to encourage progress, community, correction, insight, reconciliation, and to celebrate the truth. No one has all the answers; instead, everyone has part of the answer, and, thus, no one, no one, can be left out or left behind.
Augustus E. Succop III ’79MDiv
Davidson, NC
A superhuman crew?
In describing Yale’s amazing victory in the 1924 Olympics, Mark Alden Branch tells us that its crew reached “a nearly unheard-of 40 strokes per second” (Old Yale, November/December). Per second? I yield to no man in my admiration for Yale rowing, but that rating is a bit hard to visualize!
Victor A. Altshul ’60MD
Hamden, CT
40 strokes per second—truly unheard of. 40 strokes per minute—an outstanding finish for the 1924 crew headed to the Olympics.
Carl Pike ’66, ’67MPhil
Lancaster, PA
Mark Branch responds: “The letter writers are correct, of course; it should be ‘minute,’ not ‘second.’ I have no defense for this cringe-inducing error, especially since one of my pandemic pastimes was to try rowing for the first time. So I do indeed know the difference between 40 strokes per minute (impossible for me) and 40 strokes per second (impossible for anyone).
Swimmers’ bonds
I was inspired by the article about Ali Truwit (“Pain and Courage: Reorienting a Life,” September/October). She clearly was a support and inspiration to all those around her, even before her injury and her superb Paralympic performance. I swam varsity in the 1980s, and I am ever grateful for the camaraderie that I found with my swimming and diving teammates. Friendships among us have endured and strengthened over the 40 years since we graduated. Moreover, the ties that have grown among Yale swimmers and divers who graduated decades apart have affirmed my opinion that Coach Henry and his team are doing all the right things with the young leaders under their charge. I was overjoyed to learn of the support that Ali’s teammates have given her in these past years, and I hope to meet her at the Women’s Swimming and Diving 50th reunion in January 2025!
Courtenay Murakowski ’84
West Lafayette, IN
Omission
I find it disturbing that the review of the book Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family (Output, September/October) failed to identify the “family that fled to America” in 1938 from Austria as Jewish. The summary of the book on the Amazon website states this very clearly. I hope this was an oversight rather than an intentional decision not to refer to Jewish suffering during the Holocaust because of the Israel–Gaza conflict.
Jonathan Perlman ’75
Cincinnati, OH
It was in fact an oversight. We assumed it was implied by the context that the family was Jewish, but we could have made that more explicit.—Eds.
Confronting slavery
Regarding the article “Yale, Slavery, and its Aftermaths” (May/June): If only every institution—educational and otherwise—would do such research and soul-searching, perhaps this country could start healing from the knowing of these hard truths.
Krista Forsgren ’97MA
Fort Worth, TX
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