Studying Literature in the ’60s

Majorie Perloff

At 5:30 A.M. the police began to withdraw. Fifty-one students and seventeen police needed hospital treatment…certain students were undoubtedly guilty of the most appalling vandalism, in particular the attack on the office of Professor Orest Ranum and the destruction of both his notes and original sixteenth-and seventeenth-century French manuscripts—manifestations, no doubt, of bourgeois culture. Still, the students did gain concessions on all their main issues [beginning with the cancellation of the gymnasium project on the edge of Harlem], and one huge symbolic victory, the resignation of President Kirk.

—Arthur Marwick, The Sixties (1998).

Did confrontations like this one, which took place at Columbia University on May 22, 1968, really occur? From the perspective of 2014, the above account seems surreal. Today, as I hear it from colleagues as well as from my grandson (a very engaged sophomore, majoring in political science and economics, and performing his electronic music at different venues on weekends for tidy sums), could hardly be more different. Given the steep tuition and the even steeper cost of living in New York, given the large student loans so many undergraduates are carrying, given the sense among students that huge fortunes are there to be made on Wall Street or in the Silicon Valley, and especially given that the faculty and administration at Columbia are surely more left-wing than the largely wealthy student body, the world of 1968 has been turned literally upside-down.

But before we wax nostalgic for those idealistic days, when student radicals were committed to overturning a reactionary World Order, let’s drop the decade label and see how the university actually evolved, from the idealism of the Kennedy era to the dark days of Nixon’s Draft Lottery at the height of the Vietnam War.

The birth control pill, which came on the market in 1961, is emblematic of the promise the decade held for women like me. I was a married mother of two small children in 1961 when I decided to go to graduate school in English at nearby Catholic University in Washington, D. C. Teaching assistantships were not yet common, and in any case I could only go to school part-time, but since tuition was roughly $150 a course, I just applied for admission, was accepted, and four years later I had my Ph.D. and had been offered a job at my own university. I began as an Instructor (four courses a semester, of which two were Freshman Comp, two advanced undergrad seminars) and within five years I was an Associate Professor. At that point, I received a job offer from the University of Maryland in College Park and moved there.

When I tell my students I never applied for a job, they are incredulous. It worked like this: one day I was standing at the card catalogue (no online facilities then!), looking up material for my dissertation on Yeats’s poetry, when the Chair of English, one J. Kirby Neill, a Renaissance scholar from whom I had taken a seminar on the sonnet, came up to me and said, “Mrs. Perloff (no first names then!), would you like a position with us next year?” I nearly flipped, swallowed, and said yes. No applications to fill out, no interview, no meetings with faculty or administrators! And when I moved to Maryland, it was not very different. I did visit the College Park campus for a lunch and chat with the Chair and a few of his colleagues, but I never gave a job talk or underwent the grilling we now routinely put candidates through on campus and at the MLA convention “job market.” Indeed, when I was first hired at Catholic U., there was no short list: there was only me. And Ph.D. candidates at top universities like Berkeley routinely had three or four offers, from other top universities or colleges, usually via their dissertation directors, and chose the best offer.

The early sixties, let’s remember, was a time of incredible expansion for higher education. In 1960, the University of California...