First of all, the president’s letter was silly, and of course simply reinforces the humorless portrait of the administration depicted in the book.

Secondly, I enjoyed the book; I think the most representative thing about it, in fact, is Rushfield’s own experience as an awkward oddball wandering around campus in a confused and lonely fashion. Plus, I had forgotten that SAGA had a middle room.

However, on the question of “representative” experience, I have a few things to say; if the book was not subtitled “a memoir of Hampshire College”, I’m not sure I would care.

The book does seems accurate to me regarding, well, one particular subculture at Hampshire College (given the above comments, I’d say that some, um, fortysomethings are still clinging to it). On the other hand, I would have to agree that the book does misrepresent Hampshire–but not in the way the president suggests.

Mainly, the problem is that Rushfield’s narrow scope depicts a culture where a small, heroic band of mischief-makers face off against an unsmiling, politically correct mob, and at the same time differentiate themselves from “tribes” of punks and hippies.

The annoying thing about this picture is not the casual deployment of frisbee-U stereotypes, which are true as far as they go. The problem is twofold:

On one level, it represents a ridiculous level of paranoia. Many passages in the book suggest that the Dicks were the target of the entire campus, that everyone was up in arms about their behavior. Now, I have cross-checked my memory of this with several other 80′s Hampshire alums, and I have to report: The Dicks were a relatively minor blip in the consciousness of most Hampshire students. Moreover, they were hardly universally hated; most people found them to be a mildly entertaining phenomenon, when they thought about them at all. There were a number of humorless administrators and a fairly small number of students who I can imagine being triggered by the Dicks in the fashion presented in the book, but I can only attribute the Dicks-vs.-the-Campus narrative to (sorry) megalomania and narcissism. It is untrue that the “entire campus” (or really, hardly anybody) was upset about the prospect of a fake fraternity, wet t-shirt contest, and so on. Mostly, we either smirked or rolled our eyes.

The bigger sin, though, is really one of scope. Hampshire in the eighties was, in fact, a deeply strange place–much, much weirder and more complex than the book bothers to investigate. It was certainly not the place that President Hexter describes in his letter (I don’t think any accurate description of the period would be great publicity), but neither was it the shallow bastion of punks, hippies, and the PC police that Rushfield describes in his book.

If Rich had bothered to emerge from Greenwich occasionally, he would have noticed that most Hampshire students were closer to the slightly lost, slightly oddball, slightly lonely version of himself that he depicts himself as being than a bunch of conformists and hypocritical aggressors. It is, of course, true that many of use were wearing either Dockmartens or Birkenstocks, but that was often as far as being a punk or a hippie went. It is also true that Hampshire students tended to become involved in causes ranging from the admirable to the easily mockable–someone is going to bring up the lawn-mowing protests, eventually–but that does not mean that we were all a bunch of Stalinists.

It IS true, though, that Hampshire was a deeply processy, deeply incestuous, deeply navel-gazing place filled with a lot of earnest, smart, political, emotionally inexperienced, depressed social misfits. What Ralph Hexter says has some truth, also–though there were some legends of academic infamy, a lot of people were also working pretty hard.

That doesn’t mean that they weren’t also eating mushrooms, leaving angry refrigerator notes for their modmates, fighting about whose dog ate the greenhouse bunny, attuning themselves so carefully to the subtleties of their relationships and friendships that their emotional lives became perversely distorted and byzantine, giving a lot of backrubs, creating separate cultures for each individual mod and hallway that had to be understood and respected, engaging in intellectual posturing in the sauna, exploring various marginal beliefs, and having small-group pseudo-therapeutic experiences that broke up a lot of solitary, unstructured time.

In other words, the problem with the book is not inaccuracy–it’s that it misses the richness of the place and time. On balance, I miss it–despite Rushfield’s claims, it was a place that was tolerant of misfit personalities, creative and intellectually serious, and socially idealistic in both admirable and naive ways. I much prefer it to the smug, unreflective, crass, angry, dumb-ass, conformist forms of culture that replaced it.

True story.

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.