Learning on the Left: Political Profiles of Brandeis University by Stephen J. Whitfield (review)

Learning on the Left provides a detailed review of whom Stephen Whitfield admires and whom he does not. The book could use tighter editing. At 480 pages, it periodically wanders off into discussions unrelated to either Brandeis or the left. The author and I do agree on one thing: Brandeis is/was an excellent school and provided opportunities for a wonderful and challenging liberal arts education. I was a student there from 1958 to 1962 and was privileged to have as teachers some of the people mentioned in the book, including Louis Coser, Frank Manuel, Ray Ginger, and Herbert Marcuse. President Abraham Sachar hired them and others with unconventional backgrounds

Without a definition of what he means by "left" or a clear understanding of the damage the Cold War did to democracy in America, Whitfield begins with the assumption that fighting communism is as important as social justice. He thinks Dissent, with its fierce Cold War politics, is wonderful, as were all those who contributed to it, such as founders Coser and Irving Howe, both Brandeis professors. There is a charming story of Howe's "job interview" at Brandeis when he and the interviewers switched into speaking Yiddish. Despite not including in his books the prominent writers and poets of the 1930s whose politics were too red for his taste, Howe's translations of Yiddish authors and poets to English remain important..

Whitfield also thinks highly of Michael Walzer, a Brandeis undergraduate during the 1950s. Walzer is a highly regarded political theorist who supported the first Gulf War, a decision that the author praises unequivocally despite the strong opposition to that war from the left. In Walzer's theories of Just and Unjust Wars (1977) he developed criteria by which some wars are justified. In practice, critics note that his theories have been applied to justify whoever has military might and can profit. Although most of Walzer's work was written long after his undergraduate years, he features prominently in Learning on the Left. Similarly, Whitfield admires Martin Peretz, publisher and editor of The New Republic, who is not universally accepted as a leftist and openly appreciated the accomplishments of George W. Bush and supported the invasion of Iraq. Neither of these Brandeis-connected individuals can be uncritically associated with the left.

The author is less enthusiastic about two philosophers with much larger reputations as radicals, Herbert Marcuse and his student Angela Davis. When Marcuse, with whom I had one course on communism, turned sixty-five in 1965, Sachar decided not to renew his contract. Thus the man who was arguably the deepest and certainly the most influential thinker ever to teach at Brandeis was sent packing. Whitfield uses less weighty intellectuals like Max Lerner to criticize Marcuse's thinking and then informs us that perhaps the aspect of Marcuse's thought that has least stood the text of time was his tendency to equate the fate of the Weimar Republic with the course of the American polity. After four years of Trump and the far-right siege of the Congress, Marcuse's thought does not seem so far off the mark after all.

While it is not possible to ignore Angela Davis because of her prominence and her success as an intellectual, the author treats what might have been the most important battle of her life, the accusation of conspiracy to murder at the height of the Black Power movement, dismissively and without much regard to the systemic racism involved in these charges, of which she was acquitted. Black students at Brandeis were more aware of these issues, and in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., they occupied Ford Hall in 1969 and demanded that a departmental major in Black studies be established with ten designated scholarships for black students. This flew in the face of Brandeis's commitment to individual merits. As Whitfield aptly describes the conflict, "The confrontation...