George Kateb, former professor of political science, was interviewed by William Taubman, also a former professor of political science.
[0:01] William Taubman: Professor George Kateb taught political science, political philosophy in particular, at Amherst College from 1957 through 1987. He never held the formal office of Dean of the Faculty, but he was dean of our faculty in the sense that he was brilliant, wise, stimulating, provocative, a distinguished scholar, a marvelous teacher, a magnificent colleague.
[0:34] In 1987, he moved to Princeton University, leaving many of his colleagues, including me, and his students bereft. There, too, he had a wonderful career as a mesmerizing lecturer, a devoted advisor to students, a director of the Program in Political Philosophy and of the University Center on Human Values.
[0:57] Like so many people at Amherst, I learned so much from George, just how much I was reminded as I prepared for this interview. I culled some of his orations from the Amherst College archives, I reread some of his writing, and I listened to two tapes that he made, or were made of talks he gave at Amherst in 1987 and 1989, impressed yet again by his powerful arguments, his eloquent statements, his concern that every sentence, indeed every word, be precisely just.
[1:35] George, I wanted to start with your pre-Amherst trajectory. We know that you got an, a BA, an MA and a PhD from Columbia University. But where did you grow up? And where did you go to school and what was it like?
[1:54] George Kateb: I was born and brought up in Brooklyn, in Park Slope section of Brooklyn. I went to public schools, including Brooklyn Technical High School, which wasn’t one of the three exam schools in New York City at this time. It was a kind of prison outwardly and in its discipline, but what made it great was the fact that there were many children at that school of German Jewish refugees. Um, and they were unusual and gifted and not sorrowful or rueful that, that they had been kicked out of their country, but eager to learn about American things. They taught more than they learned, these students, my fellow students at Brooklyn Tech. As you said, I then, I continue to receive my schooling in the city. Uh, I went to Columbia College for some years as a subway student, didn't live there but lived there as a graduate student. And then, um, I spent a few years at Harvard as a graduate student and went directly from Harvard to Amherst, and I joined the faculty in Amherst in 1957.
[3:06] What was it like? What can I say to you? I moved from one, from world to world. There was the world of Brooklyn, Park Slope, Brooklyn, um, almost suburban in some respects, but very urban thanks to the proximity of Manhattan. There was the world of Columbia College, uh, a great, great school then, it is great again, it had its troubles of various sorts but it, it made all the difference in my life. Harvard was [laughs] I hate to put it this way, but it's true, it was a kind of slight disappointment in relation to Columbia College, but, and it took me time to get Harvard's point. I finally did just as I was about to leave, um, and, but look back on those three years at Harvard with, with a mixture of a mixture of feelings, most of them positive.
[4:00] And then Amherst. Amherst, unlike Harvard, unlike Columbia, unlike Brooklyn, unlike New York, unlike everything I had ever known, and that took getting used to, but that, that getting, process of getting use, the process of getting used to it was part of the process of growing up, really growing up in my mid-to-late 20s. And, um, there, too, uh, my life was changed and it meant a great deal to me to be here. [crosstalk]
[4:34] Taubman: May I go back to your--
[4:35] Kateb: Yes.
[4:36] Taubman: You were saying it took you a while to get the point at Harvard. What did--
[4:39] Kateb: Yes.
[4:39] Taubman: --what point do you have in mind?
[4:43] Kateb: Not, not e--, question not easily answered. Um, Harvard assumed it was, it was at, on the top of everything, that it was better than everything, better than everything put together. Um, it was, uh, proud of itself in the way Columbia was not. Um, and it was also more various from what Columbia was in the ‘50s. Um, It had students from all over the country, graduates and undergraduates. Um, and it was New England and the concept of New England was, was new to me--uh, understatement, parsimony. Uh, much of the good it did it did while not looking at the object on which it was bestowing it's good.
[5:32] Taubman: [laughs]
[5:33] Kateb: It was an altogether different, uh, in some respects a different culture from, from any I knew in New York, in New York City. Um, I did not think Harvard was a better university than Columbia, that's the point I've, I finally had to forgive Harvard, if you will, it's arrogance, um, and see through its arrogance to what was underneath which was a selfless, Harvard stood for a selfless commitment to the pursuit of truth. It is with good reason that veritas, just veritas is on, is, is, is, is on its shield, you know this better than I do. Um, you yourself went to Harvard College. Um, yes, veritas, Harvard stood for veritas and it, it continues to do so. Still, it took me some getting used to.
[6:22] Um, but I guess the greatest difference in culture that I experienced in my life was not the difference between Brooklyn and Manhattan, was not the difference between New York and Cambridge, Mass., it was the difference between all of them, all of them and Amherst. Small town, small college, Western Massachusetts, beautiful with a beauty that I had never seen before. Um, and really different and if you want, we could, I could, we could speak about those differences. I could, let me turn it on you just for a second. Wasn't Amherst also really different in your experience of life from anything you had known before you, before you began to teach there?
[7:12] Taubman: It, it was I, I, I got there in the, in 1967.
[7:18] Kateb: ‘67.
[7:19] Taubman: As you well know, because you were the man who called me up to invite me to an interview.
[7:23] Kateb: Right.
[7:24] Taubman: And, um, it was smaller than any place I had been; that is to say, I’d grown up in New York City, as you did. I had gone to Harvard undergraduate--
[7:34] Kateb: Right.
[7:34] Taubman: --and Columbia graduate school.
[7:36] Kateb: Yes.
[7:36] Taubman: And it was more traditional, but more stilted in many ways. But since I'm not the one being interviewed [laughs]--
[7:44] Kateb: Yes.
[7:45] Taubman: --I'd rather hear what you have to say. How did you find Amherst when you got it and, and how did you react to it?
[7:51] Kateb: Right.
[7:54] Um, there was, um, something about Amherst that, um, was almost defiantly unurban, anti-urban. Um, there was something also self-contained about Amherst. Um, and there was pride there, but it was not the kind of arrogance that, that Harvard stood for. I found it, um, a place of subtlety and small differences and distinctions. Um, a place that looked inward, a place that thought it did not really need too much of the rest of the world. Um, and it had no graduate students with all the culture the graduate student centered-research faculty will bring to an institution of higher learning. It was a kind of utopia, um, a small scale utopia, small scale New England utopia.
[9:21] And I had to get used to, uh, the culture of the place. Um, but what made it, for me, especially interesting, and I think I noticed this from the start, there were a number in the faculty who felt Amherst to be as strange as I felt it to be strange, who came from larger places, other places, often not New England, um, and who joined the faculty the year or two before, or while I was there, or a year or two after. I could sense they also were trying to learn the customs of this utopia.
[10:09] Um, I think of, for example, our senior colleague Henry Steele Commager who left Columbia to teach at Amherst. Um, I think of Alfred Kazin, the New York intellectual who for the first year or two of my stay at Amherst was a member of the English department of Amherst and had a very hard time accepting and being accepted. Then there were people who, um, did not come from research faculties the way that Commager and Kazin did, uh, certainly Commager did, but who, nevertheless, were not used to living in small colleges and in small towns teaching in small colleges. Uh, I think of people, say, like Benjamin DeMott in the English department, or Bill Kennick in the philosophy department--though he had gone to Oberlin, a small college, he grew up in Pittsburgh, after all. There was Frank Trapp of the, of the art department, again, a Pittsburgh native, graduated from, at least got his advanced degree from Harvard.
[11:17] Um, there were a number of other people hired by Charles W. Cole, then president of Amherst who was trying to open Amherst up to the world and make it less of a utopia and more of a, more of a cosmopolitan place. Let's call a spade a spade, it's Charlie Cole, who, as president insisted that, that Jews be admitted to the undergraduate body in large numbers and who opened the faculty to every ethnicity and religion and type--not, not African American, that has to be said, but practically, and not Asian American, but practically everybody else.
[11:56] Um, so Amherst was changing even, even as I was arriving. I think you, I would have to put it this way, if I were looking for a job in 1936 or ‘7 or ‘38 or ‘39, I don't think I would have been hired. I think that goes for a number of the other people that, that were hired. So--
[12:17] Taubman: Because of, because of your background?
[12:19] Kateb: I--
[12:19] Taubman: Because of your ethnicity? Because--
[12:20] Kateb: Yes, yes, I, I did not, I didn't conform to certain, um, traits of culture and perhaps even character, uh, that, that they expected of people. It's Charlie Cole, who under the force of the Second World War and the principles for which it was fought, um, with the, and with, certainly, the approval of the trustees, said “the world has changed, let us, let us have Amherst change with it and not lag behind. It can become another kind of utopia, it will remain small, it will not have graduate students. It will not insist on, on everybody doing research. Um, but let's open it up.”
[13:13] So, this is what I mean to say to you, Amherst was still significantly different from anything I had known even as Charlie Cole was opening it up. What helped was that there were some others, as it were, like myself, who were new to the culture of Amherst and who were trying to get its point as we went along, and it was after a while, absolutely exhilarating, being in touch with an older life and, and now the emergent life.
[13:42] Taubman: And how, how would you compare the students, the Amherst students you encountered there at the College, to those you had studied with or taught at Columbia and Harvard?
[13:57] Kateb: There's no generalization that could, that I could produce that would accord justice to my fellow students at Columbia or the students I knew at Harvard, or the Amherst students, and they were the first students I taught. No, no formulation captures, cat--, would be adequate. But let's say there was a certain, a certain freshness or innocence or naivete, um, there was no, practically no cynicism and no weariness. There, there were, there was cynicism, and there was weariness among some Columbia undergraduates and some Harvard undergraduates. Um--
[14:41] Taubman: Was there less ambition, at least openly displayed?
[14:47] Kateb: Yeah, I think you could say that.
[14:48] Taubman: Yeah.
[14:48] Kateb: Less ambition, good, and also less eccentricity.
[14:53] Um, I know from my experience of both Columbia and Harvard, these are two of the handful of American institutions of higher education that encourage, often tacitly or subtly, experimentation on the part of students to the point of eccentricity. And there are a few who take advantage of the invitation and many more who, seeing that even eccentricity is tolerated, develop a little more along their own lines, even if not to the point of eccentricity or idiosyncrasy.
[15:31] Amherst seemed despite its opening to the world, its greater openness to the world in the administration of Charlie Cole, still a place that, because it was small, all male, still fairly homogeneous in religion and ethnicity, preponderantly if not Protestant then certainly Christian, and Northern European, as I say, for the most part, there was a tendency to, how shall I put it, not to encourage eccentricity. [both laugh] And the students did it each other so they could at times be a little heavy handed towards anyone who, who stood out.
[16:23] At the same time, to be just, there were always students who prospered because they felt they had to push back against that which was pushing them in and, uh, flourished. It is no accident, as I would like to say, that Amherst produced more than its share of poets in these years, famous poets, Richard Wilbur and James Merrill are just two of them, Robert Bagg is a third.
[16:52] Um, there was something at Amherst, uh, there must always have been something at Amherst that, um, permitted a quiet excitement to the truly gifted. And no matter what the pressures to conform might have been, and I'm not saying they were suffocating, they were just stronger than at elsewhere. Uh, despite these pressures, whatever the severity, um, Amherst always, always had some people who went as far as anyone at Harvard or Columbia did as undergraduates and, and subsequently. But, again, it took, it took some getting used to that kind of undergraduate population.
[17:36] Taubman: Um, the word “suffocated.” Uh, I'm looking at a talk that you gave, a text of a talk that you gave in 1969 to Senior Assembly in which you talk about the ‘50s and how you felt in those years. And your talk begins this way: it says, “listen to my story. I went to school in the early- and middle-’50s. All through the ‘50s as a teacher and a student, I felt alienated. I hated the times. The word “hated” is not too strong. I hated the Cold War rhetoric, the unbelievable smugness, the complacency found in the writings of the most prominent writers on political and cultural affairs. I felt suffocated.”
[18:26] I wonder if you could talk about this feeling you had in general, and also the degree to which it was linked, specifically, to your early years in Amherst?
[18:42] Kateb: Um, the worst of it was, the worst of the ‘50s for me did not come, uh, uh, in Amherst or because of Amherst. Um, these were the days of McCarthyism and the presidency of Eisenhower. No doubt, um, there were many good things about the presidency of Eisenhower, he did lower some of the temperatures which his own party had, had raised in American political and cultural life, as it always tends to do for its own purposes. But, um, um, there, there was the, the, the sense you had that, um, the rules were the rules, and if you didn't like them, you should hide yourself or go to another country or shut your mouth. Um, don't be too outspoken politically, don't be too outspoken culturally, um, uh, don't be too questioning.
[19:51] Uh, now, I say that and I'm conveying to you indistinct impressions. And there was a resistance every step of the way. I went to Columbia College. Columbia College was where the beat poets got their start, they were all Columbia undergraduates, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and I think Gregory Corso, they all met at Columbia. If, later, their poetry was read in San Francisco bookstores, San Francisco didn't have it to originate a movement as dissident and as powerful and as culturally subversive as the beat poets. It took New York City to do it, and it took, it helped that they all congregated at, at Columbia College. What do I mean to say? The ‘50s had a tremendous amount of dissident life going on, but the, the dissident life was not prominent, it had to push hard to be noticed. And when it first emerged, it was rebuffed, and even, really, denounced, uh, espec--, beat poets and other dissident phenomena.
[21:07] Um, the Columbia faculty had great dissidents in it in the ‘50s, including C.Wright Mills, the, the eminent, so--, left wing sociologist, and it had some professors there who had belonged to the Frankfurt School in Germany in the 1930s. Columbia always stood against the tide, really in a way that Harvard did not; that was part of my sense of the difference between the two universities. Of course, there was pressure to conform, um, probably greater then than at any time since, uh, but there was also great resistance. And resistance in the ‘50s as interesting, not quite as interesting, perhaps, as what came in the next decade, but nevertheless, interesting. So I don't mean to caricature the period.
[21:57] Also, I spoke there in 1969 under great pressure, internal, internally-felt pressure. And when I use the word hate, I guess I felt it when I wrote it. I don't feel it quite now. And I think I, I think I could accuse myself of having exaggerated when I use the word. Though it didn't quite feel like exaggeration, then. [laughs]
[22:27] Taubman: I want to go on a bit later to ask about the pressure you felt--
[22:31] Kateb: Right.
[22:32] Taubman: --when you uttered those words in the 19--, in 1969, but, first looking in the same talk you gave on May 15, 1969. After describing how you felt during the ‘50s, you said, “then, in the early ‘60s, things started to change. You could see it everywhere, Amherst became for me, I dare not speak for others, a better place. The average student was more giving, more open, more responsive. The brightest were more sophisticated. They were voracious in their intellectual appetites, politically and socially more sensitive. My feeling of suffocation passed.”
[23:11] Um, what was it about the world outside Amherst, as well as at Amherst that accounted for this change in your sense of things?
[23:25] Kateb: Uh, things were changing in the culture. Uh, as a whole, I think the election of Kennedy to the presidency of the United States and then his murder three years later, at least in 1963, um, had a powerful cultural effect.
[23:48] He stood for something new, um, and vigorous and open and sophisticated. Um, he seemed to have the ability to rouse people from their sleep. And I think to some extent, the culture, the culture of the educated young, the young who wanted to be educated, responded.
[24:21] It is undeniable that, um, the civil rights movement with its insistence that, at last,
“simple justice,” to use the phrase that is the title of a book of a distinguished Amherst alumnus on the civil rights movement, that simple justice, simple justice had to be done.
[24:46] Taubman: Richard Kluger, right?
[24:47] Kateb: Richard Kluger, it is, thank you.
[24:51] This somehow met a response that Kennedy helped make possible. When I think that if Nixon had been elected in 1960, what would have become of this country, I really shudder. Um, that's an important thing. Kennedy, the civil rights movement, the power and the eloquence of Martin Luther King and, and others in this cause. You had a sense, as I say, of people, of sleepers awakening.
[25:35] Um, and then one has to mention a local event. All the while, let me say, Amherst itself kept hastening the process of openness to the world, both in the students they admitted and in the faculty they recruited. Calvin Plimpton consolidated and advanced the efforts made by Charles Cole and both presidents with the encouragement of their trustees. But something happened that was good, good for Amherst. I say this as one who does not wish to be a heretic even though it sometimes sounds as if that's all I wish to be.
[26:23] Taubman: [laughs]
[26:24] Kateb: I think it was great for Amherst when the core curriculum was at last abolished. Now, I don't remember the year. Is it 1965 ‘6, or ‘7? Something like that?
[26:35] Taubman: I'm not sure because I arrived only in 196--, it was gone by ‘67.
[26:39] Kateb: It was gone by ‘67.
[26:41] Taubman: Yeah.
[26:43] Kateb: The deconstructor of the core curriculum was Armour Craig, in some respects as fine a president as Amherst College has ever had. And he was president for a year and a half, I think, owing to the death--
[27:03] Taubman: He was an interim president, in effect, right? [crosstalk]
[27:04] Kateb: He was an interim, he was acting president. No, I--
[27:07] Taubman: Acting, yeah. [crosstalk]
[27:03] Kateb: Yes, acting, acting president because of the death of Julian--
[27:10] Taubman: Gibbs.
[27:11] Kateb: --Gibbs while he was on holiday, terrible loss. Um, Armour Craig before he became president, led the committee, I think Joe Epstein was also on it, the late philosopher that said, [laughs] “you know, this core curriculum has had a pretty good run. It's done good. It's had a pretty long run for a curriculum. But we think it is now old skins into which new wine should not be poured.”
[27:55] And what had made Amherst into a kind of utopia was the, um, “common experience,” that's the phrase they used, that the core curriculum required courses for freshmen and sophomores, that required of all students. It seemed to me that the core curriculum was too much the creation of its most powerful teachers--Ted Baird, Armour Craig himself, Arnold Arons, the physicist, the teacher of the required science course, and some others. The two most influential core courses were English 1-2 and Physics 1-2. Arons was known for his fierce, um, almost harsh inculcation of the principles of science as he understood them.
[28:53] And the English 1-2 course pioneered by Ted Baird and taught by a loyal staff, um, had more or less the same effect on students that Physics, Science 1-2 did, which is to say, um, “yes, define your terms. Watch what you're saying. Don't say too much. Be sure you can verify what you say. Be expected for the dec--, be expected to receive the deceptions of language and the obscurities of common sense, and you'll be better, you'll be alright.”
[29:36] Well, I thought that this, the effect of these courses, the effect of this core curriculum, I thought it from the start had an effect that was more inhibiting than liberating on the intellect of the students, and I was thrilled when it was abolished. And I know there remains a great deal of nostalgia for it, even on the part of those who never endured it as students, much less as faculty.
[30:19] But I think that is the, one of the best things that, that have happened to Amherst, since my acquaintance with it began in the ’50s. That's the local event that contributed to the cultural, larger cultural effects of a, a greater, of a loss of inhibition. Not always a good thing, but preponderantly good then for a while, and the flowering that, that took place.
[30:50] Taubman: At this point, we've arrived, as it were, at the mid-’60s, about the time I arrived at Amherst. You had been there for 10 years.
[30:58] Kateb: Yes.
[30:59] Taubman: 1967. So now, my recollections are firsthand, um, obviously untutored in the sense that at the time I myself was very young, my first teaching job, my first exposure to a place like Amherst. But my recollection is during those tumultuous years, which were characterized by less turmoil at Amherst than at, say, Columbia or Harvard, but we did have first a moratorium of classes, we had a strike, we had a sit-in at Westover Air Force Base, big things were going on. My recollection is that you, this is the way I recall seeing you, that you, your stance changed.
[31:44] In retrospect, it may be that the times changed and that your stance remained the same, but I'm particularly eager, particularly eager to inquire about your own view of that. Um, the change that I recall is that in the in the beginning, in ‘67-‘68, you were opposed to the College getting too involved in politics or politics entering too strongly into the College, whether that took the form of statements by the faculty on political issues, um, attempts to make courses more relevant to current politics.
[32:30] I remember your speaking eloquently at faculty meetings and elsewhere. Uh, over time, you yourself seemed to become more political to endorse a strike that occurred, I think, in 1969, or perhaps ‘70. And then finally in 1972, to actually join with the then-president of the College, John William Ward and colleagues and students in an act of civil disobedience at Westover Air Force Base. So, um, I wonder whether you could talk about how you yourself understood your evolution if such there was during that particular time?
[33:20] Kateb: You're certainly right. Um, I did change. Um, the change occurred “in the twinkling of an eye,” to use the phrase of St. Paul. It occurred on that May afternoon/early evening in, um, 1970. Was it May 4 or 5 that was the day when two great events, uh, both of them now receding, receding, receding into oblivion, but two, then to me, they, they struck me as great events occurred. Same day. Same, if you will, Walter Cronkite newscast that evening. It was the, the, uh, invasion, or incursion, as they called it, into Cambodia of American troops, really is an invasion by American troops of a foreign country. And the murder of students at Kent State in Ohio.
[34:32] Uh, I underwent a kind of convulsion, I guess, um, and thought if this country could do those two things, there wasn't very much that they couldn't do, led by the Nixon administration, no matter how much resistance to it existed. And I changed and I guess I have been permanently changed by that day when I was, I had just, few months ago, had turned 39 years old.
[35:19] So if, if, if you, you think this appropriate, I would mention to you that until that day, I thought a few things that were, that went against the current. First, I thought that the notion of student power, student involvement in the governance of a college or university was, yes, very democratic, it goes back to ancient Athens if, if you if, just consult Plato's Republic when he talks about democracy. He says, “in a democracy, children instruct their parents and students instruct their teachers. And the animals are so bold because of the democratic spirit in the culture, that they push people aside so that the animals can walk on the streets and the people in the, in the gutters.” [both laugh]
[36:22] Yes, students wanted to teach their teachers, but they had. What they didn't know is that they taught best when they didn't intend to teach and simply radiated an influence or said things in class. Yes, parents did want to instruct, sorry, children did want to instruct their parents and all the other reversals that democratic culture stands for, but I couldn't take too much of it. I didn't want to see students. I really didn't approve of students grading their teachers, for example, as you might remember. Well, students still do, everywhere, it's now mandatory, certainly at Princeton, that you fi--, students, undergraduates fill out these evaluations of their teachers. Um, I didn't, I didn't like that I didn't like student evaluations of teachers, I didn't like student power, um, I did not like the invasion of the academy by, by political passions or social causes. I've always thought that truth was such a fragile thing than anything political, partisan, or polemical would, would weaken it even more. It is said that love of truth is the faintest of human passions. Well, politics is no, no, of no help in strengthening what is already a rather frail passion.
[37:52] And then, so I tried to oppose student power and I spoke against making education “relevant,” that was the big word then. Not that I wanted it irrelevant, I wanted to dir--, indirectly, not directly, indirectly relevant. I wanted people to absorb old things. They were new things, the students were new. They would benefit from absorbing older things, older than themselves, much older than themselves. It would strengthen them, arm them for life. So I was against, against relevance for the most part as well.
[38:36] Um, and then, when that day happened, Cambodia and Kent State, I said to myself, um, “if I am to go on teaching subjects in the humanities, I could not be completely, uh, divorced from terrible things going on in life.” I could not any longer subscribe to the view espoused by Bill Kennick then, and doubtless still. This is what Bill Kennick told me, and told others: he said that when the Nazis were invading Poland, the great Polish logician Alfred Tarski, really great, using candlelight, continued to lecture on logic in the basement of a house as bombs were falling on Warsaw. It is admirable, you know, for Tarski to have done that.
[39:48] But the fit wasn't tight enough. So if you're going to talk about truth and the benefits to goodness of truth and the relation between goodness and truth, you had to respond somehow to the promiscuous infliction of pain by your own government. The killings in Cambodia, the killings in Kent State, not to mention, of course, the larger background of this, of this then seemingly interminable war of aggression in Vietnam. Of which, as you know, people still say they are proud.
[40:36] Um, you could not divorce the teaching life entirely from the life of the citizen. That, in a nutshell, is what I thought, was the sentiment that overcame me on that day in, in May 1970.
[40:58] Taubman: Is it, is it fair, then, to say, or is this too simple that your view of education itself did not change, what you were trying to accomplish as a teacher, but that the context, the policies of the government, the changes in the world, overrode what had got so serious and so dangerous as to lead you to alter some of your behavior, but not your view of what education ought to be in a more propitious environment? That is, absent some of those conditions that you just cited, and in particular, the two, the two events that you've just described. [crosstalk]
[41:43] Kateb: Right, right. Yes, no, I think, I, I, you're right. You've, you've got it exactly right.
[41:49] Um, I would just add, um, or emphasize the point that If you are as a teacher, to be in a position to be as free as possible of hypocrisy, you had to show by some of your acts that you didn't take without some kind of resistance activities that seem to undercut everything you were trying to teach. It's a matter here of one's own person. It's not self regarding. It is the integrity of the profession as a whole. It can't be seen to be docile when terrible things are being done by the government, which is to say teachers are also citizens. They must not be propagandists for any cause, and they should be very cautious about allowing partisanship of any kind to affect their inquiry and their statements giving you the results of their inquiry. But they, they can't, they can't be absolutely inert or docile in certain emergency, I thought this was an emergency.
[43:45] Taubman: They're, reading closely, your own text from 1969, I sense that there is something else at play as well that, that in making this change and acting upon it. you were also altering your stance against some developments and even some people, uh, whom you had opposed before. That is, it’s not simply a sense that you had had a view of teaching and of education as deserving to be protected from politics and had entered it. But I'm looking at your text and you say that although in the early ‘60s, you felt more at home in the world than you had in the ‘50s, later in the decade, you found alienation returning: “so there I was, again, at odds with the times.”
[44:51] Um, “I fear,” this is your saying in 1969, “that things are getting out of hand, that things are going too far. I do not mean to exaggerate. All in all, I greatly prefer my present alienation to the alienation of the ‘50s.”
[45:07] Now, I must say that when I read that I interpreted that to mean your alienation from some of the radicalism--
[45:13] Kateb: Yes.
[45:14] Taubman: --around you.
[45:14] Kateb: Right.
[45:15] Taubman: So that in changing as you did, you were, as it were, acceding to, or, or joining to some extent those--
[45:22] Kateb: Some extent.
[45:22] Taubman: --those, those to--
[45:23] Kateb: Right.
[45:23] Taubman: --from whom you had, those whom you yourself had resisted?
[45:27] Kateb: Right. Yes, this was now 1969, is that right?
[45:30] Taubman: Yeah, yeah.
[45:30] Kateb: Yes. I obviously had to feel sympathy and did feel sympathy for their, the students, rejection of the war and their encouragement and their participation in the civil rights movement for, uh, the rights of, uh, African Americans.
[45:49] Um, I just still thought then, that, well, you know, some of the passion behind these two movements--civil liberties, anti-war--had come from university, from universities and not only students but teachers and you don't want to, you don't want to, um, damage what permitted the cultivation that issued in this kind of activity. Um, so don't, don't get carried away, don't, don't disrupt the university, don't damage the university, don't convert the university into one instrument of political action. This will not do. I was afraid that something like that would happen. Of course, my fears were exaggerated. And, uh, um, this, it really never did get out of hand, certainly not at Amherst.
[46:51] Taubman: But now looking back a year or two before that to a different text of yours from a Chapel talk in 1967, you talk about what it means to be academic. And, and you talk about what it was you were trying to cultivate in your students in your classes. Um, and if again, I may read from your own marvelous language.
[47:19] “They must be taught to know the difference between appearance and reality, between the transitory and the permanent, the parochial and the universal. The wish and the fact, the truth and rationalization, the truth and deception.”
[47:35] Well, some of this one could certainly see being promoted and accomplished by the turn you took when you, when you, your own behavior became more political, but in other ways, one senses that you must have felt you were sacrificing something because in the same text, you talk about the importance of being academic, of being studious, of sacrificing everything to the demands of critical intelligence. Um, and you also give the impression that this great task can be best accomplished in a classroom rather than on a barricade.
[48:23] Kateb: Yes. I guess I, I really always, um, felt that which accounts for the resistance I, I felt. Um, you know, I felt resistance even when I underwent this change in 1970. Uh, I've always, always thought that maybe you lose more in action than you gain from it, for the purpose of understanding what is happening.
[49:05] Taubman: This is, this is a particular commentary, isn't it, on politics itself? Are--
[49:09] Kateb: Yes, it may, it may be. [crosstalk]
[49:10] Taubman: You are, in effect, you are a great teacher of an activity which you have yourself just indicted. [both laugh]
[49:16] Kateb: Right. Look, you don't want doc--, you don't want doctors to be friend, friends to pathology, do you? [crosstalk]
[49:24] Taubman: No.
[49:24] Kateb: So I don't see why I, as a teacher of politics, have to like the content of the matter that I teach--it is mostly woeful. The study of politics is mostly the study of, if you will, pathology, not the pathology of the body, but the pathology of the imagination and of the mind. Um, don't expect me to like politics, just because I study it, I guess is what I'm trying to say to you.
[49:53] Taubman: But I remember when we taught together in Political Science 11, the introductory course in politics, what you've just said is, was in effect the message of much of those courses. And yet we were teaching students, many of whom aspired to be politicians and, and leaders, political leaders even.
[50:12] I wondered then and I still wonder, what if, if, what you would say, what did you say, what would you say if a, if Obama or somebody else today were to ask you, how should I act? What, how should I behave on the basis of, of your jaundiced understanding of politics? What, what, how would you distill, if it can be distilled or should be distilled, your wisdom about politics into advice to a statesman? [crosstalk]
[50:46] Kateb: [laughs] You expect me to answer that question?
[50:48] Taubman: [laughs]
[50:49] Kateb: I can't answer that question. It's an impossible question. Um, all I know is, um, this: um, maybe the world as a whole is better off if, um, there are a few of us who say what they really think, not expecting it to have any great effect, warn about the perils and the dangers, the disasters of political involvement, not, as I say, not expecting to be listened to, but who preserve a record of discontent, of dissent, of opposition and, um, try to get the record straight.
[51:51] Um, so, I think that is, that, that is how I would define our, our job, really. You yourself have written about one dictator, Khrushchev. You have studied all the Russian, the Soviet dictators, you now, you know, much better than I do, how impotent any admonition or piece of advice to any of these dictators would have been from somebody with a bleeding heart, or what Hegel derisively called a “beautiful soul,” lamenting the pathology of politics and recoiling from it.
[52:40] Um, no, the gap is great between, and should be great between, the academy and the world. No matter what involvements I may have had, as a citizen that's subordinate, that is minor. What really matters is, I think and this is not, for me, especially or in particular, it is that there must be some group in the world that stands apart from the world sufficiently to observe the world and render it as accurately as possible. Don't expect me to like what, what I, what I study. Um, enthusiasts for politics aren't always the best professors of politics.
[53:36] Taubman: At one point in the period we've been discussing, I remember, partly responding to my own sense of you, but also to a piece in the Amherst student newspaper that I later discovered and brought with me, in which you were described as a conservative, and you rejected that.
[53:54] Kateb: Yes.
[53:55] Taubman: I think I asked you about it--
[53:56] Kateb: Yes. [laughs]
[53:56] Taubman: --and your response I remember to this day was “I am a radical conservative.”
[54:01] Kateb: Right.
[54:02] Taubman: Is that what you are? What, what--? [laughs]
[54:04] Kateb: I, I don't know what I am, I really don't, never have quite because I feel the pull of a fairly wide spectrum of attitudes. I know the student who called me a conservative, he was my senior assessment, assistant when seniors were helping faculty teach freshman seminars. Do you remember those courses? [crosstalk]
[54:23] Taubman: Um hmm, um hmm.
[54:24] Kateb: This student was Pete Scheer, one of the best students I've ever taught in my life, class of ‘73, he just celebrated his 35th reunion. He was back at Amherst, I was told, by, by a colleague who saw him in action. Um, this was Pete Scheer. He was, I think, he wrote for The Amherst Student, didn't he? [crosstalk]
[54:46] Taubman: Um hmm.
[54:47] Kateb: And he took, I think, a kind, kind of fiendish delight in calling me a conservative. Um, and so be it. [laughs] In some respects, I guess I am a conservative. I want to conserve what I think deserves conservation. I wanted, I want to conserve the radical potentiality of the inactive academy. That's what I want to do. Right.
[55:12] Taubman: Which lead--
[55:13] Kateb: You think this is inconsistent?
[55:17] Taubman: No, not by your standards, so to speak. [laughs]
[55:20] Kateb: Not by my standards, okay. Alright. [laughs]
[55:23] Taubman: Maybe by those, by those of others, yes. Yeah [crosstalk]
[55:25] Kateb: Yes, right, like Pete Scheer, yes.
[55:27] Taubman: In fact, in this, this leads me to one more incident from the ‘70s, and that is the sit-in at Westover itself.
[55:34] Kateb: Yes.
[55:34] Taubman: Which you did take part in and you wrote a piece which I also have here about civil disobedience--
[55:43] Kateb: Right.
[55:44] Taubman: --and a defense of it.
[55:45] Um, but in that connection I asked the other day, Gordon Levin, a colleague of ours who went to the sit-in with President Ward, about your participation, and he said, “George, yes, George was there but he didn't sit down.” I wonder, I'm sort of joking, but I wonder whether the distinction between being there and actually sitting down in the street and blocking traffic had some meaning to you or did your back hurt that day?
[56:14] Kateb: Uh, now, we, I want to make sure we understand each other. I did sit down and I was arrested. [crosstalk]
[56:22] Taubman: You did. Oh, okay, okay.
[56:23] Kateb: Yes. Gordy Levin, I think, is, is do, is going through a certain motion of the, of the intellect. Here's the motion: what Gordy Levin is saying is that if George had been true to himself, he would have witnessed the act without taking part in it. [both laugh] The trouble is, I did sit down--
[56:41] Taubman: You did sit down.
[56:43] Kateb: --and was arrested and we were held in an outdoor pen for a couple of hours. It was not raining. It was a nice day, and I went through the ritual of being summoned to court and pleading nolo contendere.
[56:57] Taubman: Yeah, yeah.
[56:58] Kateb: Unlike Ted Green, late of the Amherst faculty, who pleaded innocent. No, he didn't. He pleaded guilty. That's what he did. Um, and he had the Yankee courage to do so. I pleaded nolo, which is really a kind of cop out, but most people did and I paid my court costs, maybe a fine, I don't know what it was and that, then that was the end of the story. This was in April of 1972. It was the bombing of Haiphong Harbor I think--
[57:34] Taubman: Yes.
[57:34] Kateb: --or the blockade of Haiphong Harbor. Bill Ward gave an impassioned address followed by an even more impassioned support of it by Leo Marx, also a key figure in Amherst life in my time there until he left in 1976. Great man, great professor, still going. Um, I would not have done it if Bill Ward had not done it and given his speech. Some of my friends did it with, before Bill Ward did it and not as a result of Bill Ward. Kim Townsend is one who was arrested often.
[58:17] So, um, Gordy Levin tells a good story, but like many good stories, it is a little off. I, I did sit down, I was arrested. What do I think of that act now, if I may ask myself this question? [crosstalk]
[58:32] Taubman: Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, yes.
[58:34] Kateb: Um, so many enthusiastic acts in a person's life strike that person when he or she gets old as childish. Do I consider this an act of enthusiasm? Yes. Do I consider it, looking back at it, as childish? No. Do I look at it with some embarrassment? No, not really. I do look at it, however, I look back at it as, if you will, a mere gesture that had no importance to anyone except to Bill Ward, a president you, whose, whose presidency you knew the entirety of on the Amherst faculty.
[59:28] Taubman: Yes.
[59:29] Kateb: Right. He became president in succession to Cal Plimpton. He became president in 1971, was it?
[59:36] Taubman: You were on the committee, weren't you? The, um--
[59:37] Kateb: I was on the search committee.
[59:38] Taubman: Search committee.
[59:38] Kateb: Chaired by the late Francis T. P. Plimpton, Cal’s half brother. Um, Bill Ward was president until ‘78, was it?
[59:51] Taubman: Maybe ‘79.
[59:52] Kateb: ‘79. Right. Okay.
[59:55] Taubman: Maybe even ‘80, but--
[59:56] Kateb: Now Bill Ward did two things, as we know, that earned him the displeasure of the trustees. One was the act of civil disobedience in 1972, they thought he really had politicized the College to an unacceptable degree. I don't know what to think. Um, I could see their point of view. Perhaps some of my reluctance came from that very sentiment, my reluctance to go and join Bill Ward one afternoon at Westover Air Base.
[1:00:30] The other act that Bill Ward earned the displeasure of the trustees about was, of course, pushing for the, uh, making Amherst into a coeducational college. You and I both signed Prosser Gifford’s petition to the trustees, uh, to reopen the question that they thought they had settled and settled in the negative. Bill Ward’s presidency is, historically speaking, a fascinating stretch of Amherst history. It deserves, it deserves a study devoted exclusively, almost exclusively to it.
[1:01:12] He was a considerable man, um, and a friend. And you could see that every minute of the job he took seriously. He was, if you will, an intellectual in an executive position and he had all, he retained all the scruples of an intellectual. He wanted, he paid attention to every case before him and every matter that came before him and worried about it and probably didn't sleep well and all the rest of it. And then got into trouble with the, with the trustees. It was not an easy time, it was not a happy time. Um, I think about him a lot actually. Um, he stays with me, tragic end. Um, to return to the question, um, what was I doing at Westover Air Base? I thought I was saying in a rather powerless way that this war, it just can't keep on going, can it? It had begun in 1962, hadn't it? Here it is 10 years later, and the war is still going on and worse and worse by a man elected on the platform that he had a plan to end the war. He no more had a plan to end the war than the Pope has a plan to end the papacy.
[1:03:05] Taubman: [laughs]
[1:03:06] Kateb: Ridiculous man, ridiculous man, Nixon. Uh, so that's, I guess my hatred of Nixon was as strong a feeling than as any let's let me face that fact. Just this visceral hatred of this terrible man.
[1:03:27] Taubman: One of your books, published in 1968, was Political Theory: Its Nature and Uses, and that seems like a way of asking this question: how did you, what is the nature of political theory, as you have practiced it yourself, and how have you used it in your teaching?
[1:03:52] Kateb: But let me begin with a confession. The confession is if I know anything at all about teaching and teaching, I think, is an art that can be cultivated but not taught. You can't teach teaching, in my judgment, you just have to pick it up as you go along.
[1:04:14] If I know anything about teaching, it's because I, my first job and my onl--, the job I held for 30 years was at Amherst College. It is a teaching college. When Leo Marx, our senior colleague, left Amherst College for MIT in 1976, he said to me a year or two later, “if you want students, if you really want students, if you want teaching, you stay at Amherst,” and he was one who had taught before coming to Amherst at the University of Minnesota. If you want students, you teach at Amherst, I think that's still true. Not that, I haven't been to Amherst for more than 20 years as a teacher, but I can tell from what my friends, like yourself, former colleagues say about the classroom experience at Amherst. If you want teaching, if you want to do teaching, if you want students, be at Amherst, I think. And it’s not, obviously, the only school in America. But it, teaching is its, is its religion. Um, students expect to be taught, students expect that teaching them will be the center of the teacher's life. And many teachers are willing to teach in that spirit and with that strength.
[1:05:48] The truth is, it took me almost 10 years to feel comfortable in an Amherst classroom. I think it's, in part, a natural shyness, timidity. But also, um, there was no tradition of teaching political theory at Amherst by a political theorist. Political theory before I came, when it was taught, was taught by Richard Fenno, a distinguished Amherst alumnus, president of the APSA, and one of the major students of American representative institutions of the 20th century. But he taught political theory because the courses he really wanted to teach, somebody else was teaching. And he subsequently left Amherst and flourished at the University of Rochester, great political scientist. I was, if you will, the first one to teach political courses in political theory, even though my senior colleagues--Earl Latham; Karl Loewenstein; and Ben Ziegler, Benjamin Ziegler--all had theoretical interests, undeniably.
[1:07:00] But I was the first one to teach the books in order, uh, of political theory as one who was educated to do so. So, it was to me a gift of, a priceless gift to be entrusted with teaching the, the courses in political theory, the books, Plato to Machiavelli, Machiavelli to Hobbes, uh, excuse me. Plato to Machiavelli, Hobbes to Marx, and Marx into the 20th century, and American political thought as well. Four, four courses, year after year, often the same books. There's no way of learning a book in order to teach it except by reading and rereading, and rereading it, provided it's a book that's worth, really worth rereading, not merely reading. The canon of political theory, it's made up of masterpieces that has taken two thousand and a half, two and a half millennia to accumulate. 20 books, 24 books that never wear themselves out, that you wear yourself out trying to understand and teach to others.
[1:08:12] This was Amherst’s gift to me, the right to teach these courses. And then what about the students? 10 years, still feeling uncomfortable. I felt the subject wasn't, I couldn't get the subject to be appreciated. I thought it was the fault of the core curriculum, which had a kind of prejudice against abstract ideas. I didn't like that.
[1:08:42] Um, and then it changed. What changed? It changed, they changed, I changed. And I became, it's never really good to be comfortable in the classroom, but I felt less anxious, let me put it that way. And I felt the subject was being esteemed at Amherst at last. So I taught seminars, but also, as you have, Red Room, is it still called the Red Room?
[1:09:15] Taubman: No, it's now called the Charles, the Cole Assembly Room.
[1:09:18] Kateb: The Cole Assembly Room, built by Calvin Plimpton, uh, money he raised. He, he, as you know, he renovated Converse and moved the library out of it. And, and the faculty met in the Red Room. Um, I taught in the Red Room for many years, large lecture courses, but I also taught some seminars.
[1:09:39] The ability to teach these students those books is the gift of a lifetime, there's never been anything quite like it. And I felt that I gained strength from them, from the quality of their attention, and from the perceptive things they said in class. Often brilliant things. I was incredibly indebted to them for my understanding of the books I was supposed to be teaching them, and for then thinking further about these books in order, sometimes, to write about them. Now, let me just add a footnote to this. Like Harvard students, Amherst students are exceptionally good in talking about books they have not read.
[1:10:25] Taubman: [laughs]
[1:10:26] Kateb: So, uh, they said marvelous things in the classroom because their native intelligence prepared them to, to see what was going on in a book without too close an acquaintance with it sometimes. [laughs] And they could, as it were, intuit the next, the next point to be made or the next, the next argument that had to appear. I learned immense, immensely, uh, from them.
[1:10:53] Um, I think that political theory, especially if done by, by teaching the canon of great books, is a subject that enriches a scholar provided the scholar is willing to teach and teach in earnest these books. These books lend themselves to intellectual dialogue in a way that not all cannons do. Um, so I grew enriched from my contact with the students at Amherst, and yes, if you want, if you want to teach political theory, Amherst is the perfect place to do so.
[1:11:39] Taubman: Why, uh, why is the epitome of teaching to teach undergraduates at a place like Amherst rather than, let's say, graduate students at a place like Princeton?
[1:11:52] Kateb: Well, I now must make a confession. Um, I've made two confessions so far. The first was for 10 years, I really, I really didn't get it, didn't know what, how to teach at Amherst, really. Second confession is: it is true that I left Amherst, in part, large part, most important part, to teach graduate students.
[1:12:21] Question then has to be what is it that Amherst students were, were not, if I may put it selfishly, were not giving me? I hate to put it that way, but candor requires it. I guess it's going the extra step in the subject, insisting that small points be looked at as well as large points in a text. Uh, that the background of the text be talked about. The contribution of the text to later texts be talked about, the contribution of the texts to world events be talked about.
[1:13:02] Um, a certain, um, passion has to be combined with disinterest. And only graduate students can supply the dispassion, the disinterest. Do all of them have these qualities? No. Are there, are there some undergraduate students that I taught at Amherst that are as good for political theory as graduate students I've taught at Princeton? Absolutely. Some of them have gone on themselves to become political theorists--Jeff Abramson, George Shulman, John Seery--and that, those are just a few who stand out in my memory because I advised them in their independent study projects. Does Amherst still have independent study?
[1:13:57] Taubman: Yes, although it's not often used, I think.
[1:13:59] Kateb: Not often used. Some of the best students did use it in the, in the ‘70s.
[1:14:04] Um, so, I went to Princeton largely for the sake of having graduate students, I was not disappointed in them, thanks to the tradition of political theory at Princeton embodied in the person of Sheldon Wolin. Good graduate students wanted to study political theory at Princeton, and I was accompanied by a number of distinguished political theorists who also helped attract students that I could teach. Do I miss the Amherst classroom? Yes. Did I enjoy teaching undergraduates at Princeton? No, not especially.
[1:14:44] Taubman: Hmm.
[1:14:45] Kateb: They're not used to the give and take as they are at Amherst. And they're not used to it at Princeton because there are graduate students who teach the seminar sections of the lecture courses. Did I dislike teaching undergraduates at Princeton? No, but they, [laughs] it was preferable if there were freshmen, untouched by the social system at Princeton still. Freshman seminars at Princeton were, just, I loved them. But was there anything at Princeton for me, like, say a Red Room course at Amherst College in political theory? No.
[1:15:22] Taubman: Um hmm.
[1:15:23] Kateb: As simple, as simple as that. Um, yet I felt I had to, at the age of 56, right, if there were to be another chapter in my life, not that there had to be, but if there were to be, well, this was the time to do it.
[1:15:39] Taubman: [laughs]
[1:15:40] Kateb: Princeton came along, made me an offer. Uh, and, um, I went. Do I think about Amherst every day? Yes. Much of my dream life takes place in Amherst, not, not anywhere else. [both laugh] Do I miss the classroom at Amherst? Yes, absolutely, there's nothing quite like it when it is good. Now, are there bad days and Amherst? I sure had more than my share of them, even after those first 9 or 10 years, when you think that they are unreachable, that they'd rather be any place but where they are then, when they've not even begun to think about the text, when holidays are either approaching or have just ended.
[1:16:28] Armour Craig used to say, “Amherst students are really themselves only in the fall term.” Well, that wasn't quite right. Um, the spring term wasn't always a slackening. But, um, yes, there were, there were, there were bad, bad patches. Um, but it was great.
[1:16:48] Taubman: You--
[1:16:49] Kateb: I think it still is great.
[1:16:52] Taubman: Um hmm. In one of these talks that I got the text of, you, you ended it with a peroration that I have remembered to this day, and it speaks to the extent to which you feel you have learned from your students.
[1:17:08] Kateb: Yeah.
[1:17:09] Taubman: You ended it by saying, “my students, my fellow students, my future masters, my adversary, my beloved, stay good. Be lucky. Goodbye.” This was 1969, this was May 15, 1969.
[1:17:31] Kateb: Right. They, was this to the senior class? [crosstalk]
[1:17:33] Taubman: Yeah, the senior assembly. Yeah.
[1:17:35] Kateb: Right.
[1:17:35] Taubman: So I, I, I, I--
[1:17:38] Kateb: They were great. [crosstalk]
[1:17:39] Taubman: I’d be interested, of course, in, in the meaning of words like this to you--
[1:17:42] Kateb: Yeah, right.
[1:17:43] Taubman: --but particularly about what you learned from your students of political philosophy.
[1:17:49] Kateb: Well, good. That, that, that is a good ques--, not, good question. It's not only that Amherst gave me the chance to, to make a living by rereading books and teaching them and receiving responses to them from gifted students. It is also these students that came in, what shall we say? From the class of ‘67 to the class of ‘74. Class of ‘65, ‘63 to ‘74, ‘76 and into the early ‘80s, they were unusual people. The class of 1973, the class that Pete Scheer was in, was in, the student that called me con-- [laughs], conservative--
[1:18:35] Taubman: [laughs]
[1:18:36] Kateb: Uh, it, I mean, these were wondrous people. Pete Scheer, Jay Swanson, Charlie Trueheart, David Brown. Uh, around this time, Michael Madow, um, Chip Long. So many, so many, all still going, going strong, leading one kind of life or another.
[1:19:00] They wrote papers. I can't tell you how awestruck I was by the quality of the papers that, that these students wrote. Uh, they were amazing. That's all I can say. Did I keep them? No, I couldn't keep them, there were too many to keep. Do I trust my recollection? Not on many matters, but on this one I do. I think of papers, say, that David Brown or Charlie Trueheart or Pete Scheer wrote. Uh, I said to myself, “this is brilliance.” How does it happen? They're not political theory majors. They're not for the most part going on to graduate school in political science.
[1:19:50] I don't know. You know, there is a spirit of the times. The spirit of the times, mid-‘60s, early, to the early ‘70s that seemed to take classrooms out of academic life and out of the world of abstraction somehow inspired them at the same time to write these sentences. Uh, and I wasn't the only one to, to have that. These are celebrated classes. Bill Ward, then president of Amherst addressed the class of--no, he wasn't. No, he addressed the class of 1973. A great class, saying to them, “I love you. I think you are a great class, but you are not as good as the class of 1969.” [laughs] This is the president of the College speak--, giving the president, presidential address at commencement.
[1:20:46] Taubman: That may be because in ‘69, he was a professor, and in ‘73, he was a president. [crosstalk]
[1:20:51] Kateb: Yeah. Having to deal with the effects of mischief of these students. Absolutely. These were great days. Great days. I don't think I've ever lived as intensely as I lived in that period, ‘67, ‘8, ‘9, ‘70, ‘71, ‘72. Then, the fall of ‘73, the world ends. The freshmen that come in, class of ‘77, they're not the same. They're as smart, they're not as interested.
[1:21:26] Are they as interesting? To each other, undeniably. To some of their teachers, undeniably. Not quite. To me, yes, now and then there are, there are flashes, more than flashes, long periods when they seem as impressive as their predecessors. Something has happened though, something has happened. Uh, and it never restores itself.
[1:21:50] Taubman: I was going to say, to this very day.
[1:21:52] Kateb: Probably it never restore, never restored itself. If you were not 20, and not 60, but somewhere in between and--well, you couldn't be 20. If you were not 25, still too young. If you were not 60 in 1967, or ‘8 or ‘9, little too old. If you were in your 30s or 40s, early 50s, there are exceptions as always.
[1:22:27] They were unlike any, any experience. I didn't have the ‘60s. I didn't have that experience as a student, I didn't have it as an elderly professor, I had it as, um, a professor, um, young enough for some things and old enough for other things. And the impact of these students, uh, the effect of their deeds and of their words, their mere presence, their mere appearance, um, may, gave my life, at least, a certain intensity that it did not have before then and has not had since.
[1:23:14] Taubman: Could we talk a little bit, in the time that remains, about the political science department as you experienced it, especially the great older men when you came in--
[1:23:23] Kateb: Right.
[1:23:24] Taubman: Karl Loewenstein, Earl Latham, Benjamin Ziegler? I'd also be interested to hear you talk about, um, the Committee of Six on which you served many times--that's the governing committee of the faculty--the faculty itself, either in comparison to Princeton or not, but maybe we could start with the political science department and it's great men. [crosstalk]
[1:23:49] Kateb: Right. Well, Bill, you have known the political science department, um, even for more years than I have, uh, this is now what? What anniversary are you celebrating in the faculty? You came in ‘67, do you say? [crosstalk]
[1:24:04] Taubman: Um, 41st.
[1:24:05] Kateb: 41st. I had a mere 30 years at Amherst, if you will, in the political science department. When I joined it in 1956, it was made up, as you said, of three senior people and there was, uh, there were two other junior people.
[1:24:23] Um, the three senior people, let's concentrate on them, uh, were, were people then in their 40s, going on their 50s. Um, Earl Latham, chairman for most of, uh, for all the time he was active in the faculty, he was chairman; uh, Karl Loewenstein, older than Earl Latham by maybe 10 years, a German émigré scholar of great distinction; and Benjamin Ziegler, Ben Ziegler. These were the three senior people. And I entered this with, uh, John Kessel, we joined the department at the same time, and I think there was, there was one other person but I, I’m sorry to say, I can't remember now.
[1:25:09] Uh, John Kessel and I entered it, so to speak, in 1957 as freshmen teachers. It wasn't easy for either of us; wasn't easy in the College for reasons we've already discussed, and it wasn't easy in the department. What made the department not easy? It had three senior people, let's face it, who did not especially get on with each other or like each other terribly well. Um, they were all very intelligent men. And for some reason, they, they did not like each other's company. When I was hired, Charles Cole said to me, “don't get too close to any of them.”
[1:25:53] Taubman: [laughs]
[1:25:54] Kateb: Well, this is something for--
[1:25:56] Taubman: Yeah.
[1:25:57] Kateb: --to hear from the president of the College. [laughs]
[1:26:02] And I said to myself, but only to myself, “I'm going to try to get on with all of them.” They were commanding personalities, you either had to accept them or they would reject you. Even if you didn't reject them, if you were lukewarm towards them, they would reject you. They were very demanding. I would like to think that by the time you were hired, there was some insulation as they were approaching retirement and there was someone else besides these three senior professors.
[1:26:40] Taubman: Namely you.
[1:26:41] Kateb: If you will.
[1:26:45] Earl Latham was a commanding personality, as you know, uh, a man of, uh, great character, uh, one who went his way regardless of what people thought, who said what was on his mind regardless of the effects of what he said, who was a gifted scholar and insisted that anyone he hired--and he took personal responsibility for hiring me and others--that they had to also become not only Amherst teachers, but scholars. He put up, he put on me a tremendous pressure to write. I owe him a tremendous amount especially, but not only, for the pressure he put on me to make sure I attended to my writing and not get too unhappy about whatever happened in the classroom.
[1:27:49] He was a man who should have taught at Harvard, he thought, and I think he was right. He wrote a number of books, all of them still worth reading. But he was a very difficult man, he was as difficult as he was powerful in his personality. He invited me to share disdain for Ben Ziegler. I was not going to share disdain for, for Ben Ziegler, Ben Ziegler was a smart man. Henry Steele Commager used to like to say, “the best book Amherst Political Science has ever produced is Ben Ziegler's dissertation on the international law of John Marshall.” Well, Ben Ziegler was really an eccentric man, a kind man in his own way, but so thin skinned, really so thin skinned, so given to being upset, it was almost impossible, um, to deal with him. But somehow, somehow I, I managed well enough. His wife, Hilda, I think she's still going, tremendously humane, civilized woman, I think she, she made a big difference.
[1:29:07] Karl Loewenstein, German scholar [laughs]. Wrote many, many books; suffered fools, not at all gladly; um, learned, learned in a way that I could never aspire to be. He knew languages, which is one definition of being a learned man. Uh, he was in Max Weber's circle. Think of that, we had a colleague who was in Max Weber's circle. He never mentioned that to me, somebody else did. He was a vain man whose vanity controlled the expression of his fantasy. He didn't tell me he was in the circle of one of the greatest intellectual figures of the 20th century but he was, and he wrote on a wide variety of subjects and, and with, with distinction.
[1:29:59] So, here I am, poor little George entering this department of these three senior men who don't get along with each other. [laughs] And I tried to get on with all of them. I eventually did, really, uh, and grew to like them all. I must say, personally, the impress of Latham was greater on me than the impress of these, of these other people. We then, everything moves on. We hired you. We hired Hadley Arkes, we hired Pavel Machala, we hired Amrita Basu. We hired Ron Tiersky.
[1:30:33] Um, I learned from my colleagues in political science, it was a diverse department. It was a department in which, again, the tradition was maintained. You'd better get some writing done. If you teach badly, sorry, but if you don't write, sorry. You had to, you had to try to teach well and write uh--
[1:30:55] Taubman: You also hired Austin Sarat.
[1:30:56] Kateb: And we al--, and that was the last, I guess, was that the last one? And then Austin Sarat, who, of course, uh, is a tremendous scholar as well as, uh, a “fabulous,” to use one of his favorite words, a fabulous teacher. Um, and I’ve, I've learned from, I taught with Austin Sarat. Um, I learned from him. I've learned from you, obviously, and I've learned from, from all my colleagues. So that was a kind of education in it, in itself.
[1:31:24] But let me, let me insist on this point: the department was one thing when I joined it, and when these three seniors had to retire, it had to change drastically and it did. Uh, the one thing I will take credit for is the initiation of a practice I think you still follow which is that no one is chair for more than a year and it rotates alphabetically. Do you still follow that practice?
[1:31:51] Taubman: No, it no longer rotates alphabetically and, at the urging of the current administration--
[1:31:27] Kateb: Yes.
[1:31:58] Taubman: --we will have next year for the first time in, in a long time a chair who is chairing for the second year.
[1:32:04] Kateb: In a row?
[1:32:05] Taubman: Yeah.
[1:32:05] Kateb: Oh, it's taken this long, though. [crosstalk]
[1:32:06] Taubman: They, they have asked us to, yes, to--
[1:32:08] Kateb: Oh, okay.
[1:32:09] Taubman: They're, they’re seeking continuity.
[1:32:10] Kateb: Well, Tony Marx is used to big university chairs. Um, sorry, I didn't mean alphabetically. It rotated in order of seniority. So it was, right, Arkes and then you, isn't that so?
[1:32:21] Taubman: It no longer does that, it just rotates according to who happens to be there.
[1:32:25] Kateb: Who happens to be there.
[1:32:26] Taubman: [laughs] And whose turn it is, yeah.
[1:32:28] Kateb: [laughs] And whose turn it is. I love the casualness of it, I must--
[1:32:32] Taubman: Yeah.
[1:32:32] Kateb: It's very aristocratic, I greatly admire it, good.
[1:32:36] Um, yes, this is, I think this department, uh, was, uh, when Loewenstein and Latham joined it--and its Loewenstein who takes credit for hiring Latham--uh, it has become an eminent department of Political Science over the period of, well, Earl Latham joined it in 1948. You know, that's a long time ago, that’s 60 years ago, that's a, a very long run for a small college department, and a department not of great size. It is a distinguished department, and I'm proud of, of having been in it. Uh, and I learned a lot from the colleagues in it. Uh, I'm now Emeritus from a department that has 60 members, if you can believe that, and it's, it's all together, all together different.
[1:33:29] Taubman: We haven't talked about, you've talked about several of the presidents you knew up through--
[1:33:33] Kateb: Yes.
[1:33:33] Taubman: --uh, Bill Ward--
[1:33:35] Kateb: Right.
[1:33:35] Taubman: --haven’t talked about Julian Gibbs or Peter Pouncey.
[1:33:38] Kateb: Right. I left when Peter Pouncey was president of Amherst College. Um, I thought he was a splendid president. Um, I'm sure everyone would agree that he was an accomplished president. Some people, uh, thought that, I guess, to put it simply, that he didn't like them well enough.
[1:34:08] Um, I thought he was a first-class president. I thought he had the best interests of Amherst College in mind. And I thought that he wanted to make sure that the faculty remained on as high a level as possible. I admired him, I served on the Committee of Six when he was president.
[1:34:31] Uh, we did have one bad year, you might remember it, when, uh, 7 or 8 of 10 candidates for tenure were denied tenure. There was an inquiry that the faculty initiated afterwards to look into what was going on. We caused a great deal of pain by the decisions we made, I don't deny that. I regret it to this day, the pain inflicted. Did we make mistakes? I don't know that we did. But the amount of pain is a mistake in its own right, if you will, the pain of denying tenure to someone is a terrible pain. Some people never get over it. Some do.
[1:35:15] Um, Peter Pouncey denied tenure to a lot of people, and not only when I was on the Committee of Six. And of course, I wasn't alone in this, in these decisions. I thought he was a very fine president, nevertheless.
[1:35:34] Taubman: Amherst has a rather unique mode of governance in which great authority is in the hands of the faculty, and great authority is in the hands of the Committee of Six serving simultaneously as the tenure and promotion committee, the executive committee of the faculty, and an advisory committee to the President. You served on the Committee of Six many terms, as I recall. Uh, I wonder what your feeling is in retrospect about that mode of governance?
[1:36:05] Kateb: I think for a, a liberal arts college, it is a very good, um, arrangement. You may think otherwise, and I hope you'll, you'll say what you think. Um, Amherst is a congregational college. It is, it was founded on congregational principles. Congregationalism is a system of self, of collective or collaborative, collaborative self-government. The faculty is disputatious. You go to Princeton, and there's rarely any dispute at a faculty meeting, so I never bothered to go.
[1:36:49] Taubman: [laughs]
[1:36:50] Kateb: I expected something like Amherst and it, it didn't exist.
[1:36:55] Presbyterian has a, Princeton has a Presbyterian foundation. Little different. They believe in hierarchy. Amherst doesn't. It's, the faculty is disputatious, I must say I feel a priori sympathy for anyone who assumes the Office of the President of Amherst College; he or she will have a hard time no matter what. And it seems to me to be the case that practically every president I knew left the presidency in a condition of feeling disappointment and even chagrin. It can't be helped. That's congregationalism.
[1:37:37] The disputatious faculty, however, is well served by having an executive committee of the faculty that meets with the President every week. And the President, the Dean of the Faculty, and is there a third administrator there these days? Is there a secretary or--
[1:37:54] Taubman: There is a recorder--
[1:37:55] Kateb: A recorder. [crosstalk]
[1:37:55] Taubman: --who happens to be the Assistant Dean of the Faculty, yeah.
[1:37:57] Kateb: The Assistant Dean of the Faculty.
[1:38:00] I think it's good for there to be six members of the faculty chosen by the faculty in a very exacting ballot, as you know, um, who convey to the President the sentiments of the faculty that are not conveyed on the floor of the faculty and who convey to the faculty, uh, some of the deliberations needed to make these decisions. It is a great deal of work. Princeton has a committee of three but it only is on appointments and tenure. It is not, there is no executive committee of the faculty at Princeton, the business is too great.
[1:38:44] Um, uh, Amherst is lucky to have a faculty willing to serve on the Committee of Six, A. B, anyone who serves on it, as you have, as I have, knows that you learn something about life from service on that committee that really is, uh, quite valuable. Um, and it, but it does take a lot of work. It is exhausting, serving on the Committee of Six, it is exasperating.
[1:39:14] Um, you can get into dispute not only with your colleagues on the committee but with the faculty as a whole and you can get into dispute with the President. A long time ago, Ted Koester wanted, a late professor of psychology at Amherst College, before your time, he wanted, um, votes on the Committee of Six on tenure to be secret. Now they may still, perhaps, are they still s--?
[1:39:46] Taubman: They are supposed to be secret.
[1:39:50] Kateb: They are supposed--no, no secret in the Committee.
[1:39:50] Taubman: Oh, in the Committee?
[1:39:51] Kateb: Yes.
[1:39:51] Taubman: No, no, they are not.
[1:39:52] Kateb: Right. He so did not trust--I needn’t finish that sentence--
[1:39:57] Taubman: Yeah.
[1:39:57] Kateb: --um, that this is what he wanted. So, it is, it is a kind of, of, of locus of turbulence, the Committee of Six is. Uh, or, or, or can be, it needn't be. Um, but it's indispensable. And, um, I'm all for its retention, though, of course I speak not only as an emeritus professor but one no longer at Amherst, I would not abolish it if were, you know, if it were up to me. Right.
[1:40:29] Taubman: I thank you. Um, and I think the record of this conversation, your, the words you've spoken, what you've said, will not only provide a sense of, uh, your views, but of the time in which you taught there, and perhaps most important of all the exhilaration and fascination with which your students attended to you as a teacher. So thank you, Professor Kateb, very much.
George Kateb came to Amherst in 1957 and served as a professor of political science until 1986 when he went to Princeton University. He is credited with making significant contributions to liberal political theory, focusing on the ethical dimensions of the individual in a constitutional democracy. He has written scholarly works on Emerson, Mill, and Arendt as well as articles on the bill of rights and constitutional law. He retired from teaching at Princeton in 2002.
William C. Taubman is the Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science and in 2004 received a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Khrushchev. He has been a member of the faculty since 1967 teaching in the field of international, Russian, and Soviet politics.
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