Finding the Words—Plenty Already

Monday, May 14, 2007

By A.S. Erickson

“It is, sir, as I have said, a small college, and yet there are those who love it.”
—Daniel Webster ‘01

“From the very beginning of my college years, Harvard nurtured my sense of destiny.”
—James O. Freedman

tWe are all familiar with the ridicule President Wright faced when he called Dartmouth College “a University in all but name”; Wright was, however, merely following in the forlorn footsteps of his predecessor James O. Freedman, president of the College from 1987 until 1998 and champion of expanding the school’s graduate programs. Freedman died one year ago this spring (fittingly in Cambridge, Massachusetts) leaving behind not only a mixed legacy at the College but also an autobiography, for posthumous publication.

The work, while not completely without merit, fails to accomplish most anything of worth. Freedman is remembered at Dartmouth for many things, and though not all of them were necessarily bad, he will be specifically remembered for three events that punctuated his presidency at Dartmouth.

The first was his unfortunate opening remarks as President of the College. In his 1987 speech he said, “We must strengthen our attraction for those singular students whose greatest pleasures may come not from the camaraderie of classmates, but from the lonely acts of writing poetry or mastering the cello or solving mathematical riddles or translating Catullus.” Many saw this, coupled with the hiring of a new “anti-frat dean,” M. Lee Pelton, as an outright attack on Dartmouth’s work-hard, play-hard mentality.

The second and most important event is closely tied to the first. It centers around the portion of his time at Dartmouth slightly elucidated by his book. Freedman’s zeal in expanding the graduate programs at the expense of undergraduate studies at Dartmouth gave many alumni cause to fear that their beloved undergraduate college was changing from just that into a research university—a second-rate Harvard. His fascination with Harvard can find a plausible explanation in his mother’s influence on him, as we shall see.

The third incident—a tiff with The Dartmouth Review—while trivial in the long run, gained the most national media attention of all three discussed. David Halberstam, a close friend of Freedman’s who recently died in an automobile accident, highlighted the incident in his foreword to the book. Freedman’s clashes with The Dartmouth Review resulted in everything from suspending TDR Editors to a 2,500 person ”rally against hate.” Halberstam paints the unlikely picture of the “lionhearted” President standing up against that most dangerous of things: impertinent undergraduates. He had “the rarest kind of courage” when, with what tiny power the administration possessed, he took on the overwhelming juggernaut known as The Dartmouth Review.

Finding the Words is an autobiography of the first twenty seven years of Freedman’s life, from his earliest childhood memories in blue-collar Manchester, NH, until his graduation from Yale Law School.

The book’s chief weakness is its superficiality. Freedman refuses to delve with any depth whatsoever into almost any aspect of his life. The book sheds nearly no light on why he may have been the administrator he was, nor does it offer anything in the way of entertainment. It is largely the work by a man who is trying to salvage what he can of his legacy. Given this, it makes sense that he would focus on his life only up until his law school graduation.

If there is anything at all to be gleaned from the pages of Finding the Words, it is the origins of Freedman’s fascination with Harvard. Just like most awful habits of which one is unable to rid oneself, Freedman’s fixation on Harvard was acquired during his childhood. His overbearing mother drilled admiration for the school into him. Indeed, his mother, and what she believed, would come to play such a great role in his life that what he became was little more than the shadow of his mother’s expectations.

The first chapter after his prologue is the strongest in the book; from there on, the book steadily declines in quality, from the moderate plateau of being interesting (if not thrilling), to wide swaths of uninspired, unenlightening prose. It is in this first real chapter that we get an idea of what shaped Freedman’s identity and why he did what he did.

Freedman grew up in a lower-middle-class family in Manchester, NH. His father was a high school English teacher. His mother was a domineering housewife who occasionally worked as an accountant. A family dynamic was nonexistent; his vitriolic mother ruled by fiat. She was an angry women, as Freedman writes, “My mother’s anger had a complex influence on my life. Small deviations from her will could stir the embers of her powerlessness and send her into a rage.” His mother’s behavior was “explosive and unpredictable.”

She, unlike Freedman’s father, had come from a relatively well-to-do Jewish family and was completely unsatisfied with the conditions in which she lived once she was married. She continually pushed the elder Freedman to do more with his life, but the old man was either too timid or too complacent. Freedman, Jr. found out later in life that his father had turned down two teaching opportunities at the college level. Freedman says of his parents: they were “sadly mismatched… each unsuited to the other, locked in a permanently unhappy marriage.”

His mother’s frustrations with his father were transferred into a cold and calculative drive to push Freedman to success. For his mother this meant one thing: becoming a Harvard man. Her obsession with Harvard never died, even after Freedman graduated from the school in 1957 and dropped out of Harvard Law School a year later due to psychiatric reasons.

She could not, even into old age, shed her obsession with the legitimacy and prestige she believed Harvard conferred. When I called to tell her that I had been appointed President of Dartmouth, her immediate response was, “That’s okay, next time it will be Harvard.” A few days later, she wrote me, “A friend called to ask what you could possibly do to top Dartmouth. Without hesitation I shot back: ‘Harvard!’”

At an early age one sees that Freedman’s head filled with naught but the grandeur of Harvard. He writes further that for his parents’ “generation of New England Jews, Harvard represented the most exalted educational opportunity available. For a Jewish boy to be a Harvard graduate was, to them, the nearest social equivalent to being a Mayflower descendant.” He was indoctrinated early and often by his mother. In this light, Freedman’s aborted attempts to transform Dartmouth College into a personal homage to his alma mater can come as no surprise; he was merely forcing the same dream on the College that his mother had forced on him.

In the prologue to the book Freedman discusses his chief frustration with Dartmouth, the “ persistent anti-Semitism.” Freedman, who was the first Jewish president of an Ivy League institution lists off what he thought were the troubling tendencies of the College:

[You can imagine] my chagrin when friends told me how surprised they were to learn that a Jew would choose to be president of Dartmouth; my anger when a fundraising consultant warned me that a Jewish president should expect to face difficulty in raising money from Dartmouth alumni; my exasperation when the tirades of the Dartmouth Review [sic], an off-campus conservative newspaper, were often characterized (accurately) by the national press as anti-Semitic and erroneously contributed to the college; My impatience when the press found it relevant to continually refer to me alone among Jewish college presidents as Jewish.

Freedman’s overbearing focus on the alleged anti-Semitism he encountered at Dartmouth is perplexing and exaggerated for a number of reasons, not all of which can be resolved in this space. One, however, that remains unexamined is his mother’s self-hating identification as a Jewish woman. As Freedman writes, “My mother was consumed by self-hatred that focused on her Jewish identity…. she was the only Jew I knew that called other Jews ‘kikes.’”

Freedman’s description of his mother fits in well with his pattern of selective victimization. If a family member or someone who held similar political beliefs was anti-Semitic, he or she was not challenged in anyway by Freedman. For another instance of more of the same, one need only to look to the invitation extended by Freedman to noted communist and anti-Semite Angela Davis to give an address at the College, twice.

Another disingenuous affect of Freedman’s is the title of his book. Perhaps the name just seemed apt to describe the contents, but, in all likelihood, he was trying to bring to mind the title of the Henry Adams classic. Adams’s work consisted of meditation and introspection, both on himself and the educational system around him. Freedman’s book is merely a catalogue of events, names, and book-title-dropping meant, I suppose, to impress the reader with the breadth of his knowledge.

Introspection in Finding the Words is hard to come by. With the exception of his parents’ relationship, Freedman refuses to look at anything with depth or insight. The book reads like a timeline, the reader merely hops from one hash mark to the next without learning anything more than names and dates.

On the back cover, Stanley Katz of Princeton claims that “this is really a book about books—how beautiful they are, and how the unexamined life cannot be lived without them.” If only it were true, but this is not a book about books, but rather an annotated reading list—without the annotation. Title is heaped upon title; context is missing from nearly every pulled quote; and if Freedman had ever engaged with the books he read, the reader doesn’t know it. For Freedman, it seems, books have surface value, but little depth; they are worth little beyond their titles and a few memorable quotes.

One chapter of the book is entitled “A Passion for Collecting.” That, however, is exactly the problem. Freedman seemed to collect books, but to do very little else with them. For that is all one can conclude, when one looks at the books Freedman shamelessly name drops in comparison with the actions Freedman takes decades later at Dartmouth College—actions that included, among others, founding the Women and Gender Studies program and the African and African-American Studies program. Why the discrepancy? Dead, white men wrote all the books that excited Freedman, at least according to Finding the Words.

One cannot help but wonder if Freedman took anything at all away from these classics of the Western Canon, other than a few good quotes to be dumped on the appropriate occasions to impress the right people. In many ways, then, the students at Dartmouth are following Freedman’s legacy; just a few years ago, a student, speaking at Commencement, mentioned the Greek poet Catullus.

A consistent theme throughout Finding the Words is Freedman’s ‘Manifest Destiny.’ When speaking of his Yale Law School friend, Alan Dershowitz (now a professor at Harvard Law), Freedman writes, “Alan and I… saw a common trait of considerable significance: we both possessed a pronounced sense of destiny; both of us were quietly confident that we would somehow make our marks nationally.”

This is in all reality probably another manifestation of his mother’s egomaniacal drive for him to succeed. Throughout the book, Freedman continually references this sense of destiny. Things obviously worked out for him, but one can’t help but wonder what kind of warped sense of himself he possessed as a young man.

Finding the Words—Plenty Already

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