Hampshire’s President Responds to DFMIL..And I respond to him
January 25th, 2010 by Richard under News. 4 Comments.
Hampshire President Ralph Hexter wrote a letter about DFMIL. Doesn’t appear to be a fan.
His letter includes the line: “While I was not at Hampshire during the 1980s, colleagues and alumni who were have questioned the “composite” characters created by Rushfield. In reality, most students then pursued their education with serious intent and maturity, as they do now”
Now I guess I’ve tip-toed around this question, by just saying the book is about me, and I want to focus on my experience. And some people may have been hard working students, while some were not, i have no idea… I was just writing about my own experience,…not meaning to cast general aspersions beyond the scope of my own experience…etc.
And all that is true, that is my meaning.
However, when the criticism begins to suggest that i am more or less creating a fantasy world of deadbeats out of a land of dilligent, nose to grindstone, highly motivated pHd’s in the making, I must respond.
There may have been many in that above category. It many have even been in the majority. And Hampshire since for all i know may have become a veritable sweat shop of academic labor. But the stereotype of Frisbee U did not come from nothing. My friends, my extended circle may or may not have been the typical Hampshire student, but if they were a minority, they were an extremely sizable one.
A few facts and question about Hampshire College circa 86- 88, the years when the events described in this book occurred:
- The drop out rate at the time. If some would care to pony it up, im not going to name exact figures because i dont want to be off, but im willing to bet anything they would be very significantly higher than the liberal arts average of the time. If it’s not, I’ll be delighted to learn that and put up another post here so proclaiming.
- I had a friend there who went three years without finishing a class. And until the end of that period, no one seemed to notice or care. That’s one example. I’m sure if President Hexter wants to check the academic records of the period, he would find thats not the only one. By far.
- As described in the book, one student earned her diploma by getting her friends to lie on the ground in the shape of a peace sign and renting a helicopter to fly over and shoot it as the center of a music video. Buy me a cup of coffee and I’ll share with you a few dozen examples comparable to that.
- The presence of drugs on the campus. If anyone truly wants to dispute the ubiquity of marijuana and other drugs on Hampshire campus at that time, if anyone who was there from 1986- 88 can look me in the eye and say they rarely encountered them, heard about them, were aware of them, say more or less every time they walked across the quad, I would really have to look that person right back and ask, do you really really think your Hampshire experience of the period was more representative than mine? Really?
- And what no one seems to dispute, not President Hexter, nor anyone else, is the part of my book this the really crucial climax here – the rise of the armies of PC’dom, the little mini-stalins they unleashed and the body count that crusade claimed, all tacitly or actively abetted by the school. People lives were horribly horribly damaged in that period in a way that school is directly responsible, and has never addressed their part in those issues. So if we’re really going to reopen the record of the past, how about we take a look at that too folks? Not just the question of what percent of the student body was stoned what percent of the day?
In any event, this is, truly an argument about the past. If you have read my book, you will know that the final third is devoted to the end of this period, how by the time 1988 came around, the atmosphere that had encouraged this sort of debauchery was behind us. The word “Twilight” is in the very title of the book for crying out loud.
But happy to debate the question forever. I would just ask those who were there at the time and say that their experience was completely different than mine, what makes you so sure that your experience was more typical or representative of the era than mine?
Your servant,
Richard Rushfield
Reefer Man on January 27th, 2010
Hey- Ralph has a college to sell. Whaddaya expect him to do?
The PC folks were so easy to upset it was hardly any fun. In ‘83 (during the Reagan-El Salvador-Nicaragua circus) there was a group that called itself CASA (Central American Solidarity Alliance), distinctive for the fact that it contained not one member who was in the least bit Central American. Dave Taub & Stevie Hormone (who had somehow established a beachhead in otherwise whole wheat Enfield) started an organization called SACA – Students Against Cuban Aggression. I was interim chair of the community council, and I think we managed to kick some beer money their way.