March 11, 2009

Laura graduated from Stanford in 1971. She began graduate work in English at Berkeley in 1972, receiving her doctorate in 1977. She taught at the University of California, Riverside, from 1977 to 1981, before moving in 1981 to Cornell, where she still works. (Submitted by Walter Cohen)

I graduated from Stanford in 1971 and took a year off, during which I worked at Pacific Studies Center. I started a doctoral program at Berkeley in 1972 in Comparative Literature (Ph.D. 1980). I began teaching at Cornell in Comparative Literature in 1980 and am still there. Much of my time over the past 20 years has been spent in university administration. (Reasonably current photo on the web site.)

Laura Brown and I married in 1971; we have three children, aged 21, 19, and 16.

Student activism looms large in my memory of my years at Stanford, though my involvement took a great leap forward only in 1970, the year after A3M. My life has been a conventional one, but my political views were pretty definitively shaped by my undergraduate years. It is arguable--my colleagues and students would say it is certain; I'm less confident--that those views have influenced my professional behavior for the better.

My current sense of Stanford is dominated by the fact that I have a kid there. His (very happy) experiences count for much more with me these days than my own recollections. I want to put those recollections in two contexts, however. The first is comic and deflationary. When I am asked what it was like to be at Stanford in the late 60s, I cannot help but explaining that in those days men were more than men: giants roamed the earth. I have not been following the e-mail exchanges, but I assume I'm saying here what most people also think--that whatever limited pride one might feel in opposing the Indochina War should not be allowed to slip into a heroic rewriting of events.

The second is harder to discuss. As I think back, one of the most striking phenomena of those years for me was the transformation of other undergraduates whom I'd initially written off as mindless into people who couldn't sleep at night because they were so upset by American foreign policy--and in some cases domestic policy as well. I realize that political movements are made by the young, but I cannot help feeling that this was a heavy burden, too heavy a burden, on people who in most respects were still emerging from childhood. It is not a comfortable feeling to believe that your actions--or, more often, your inactions--might contribute to mass death halfway around the world.

I realize that a parent's perspective has been superimposed on my experience at the time. It would be hard to connect what I'm about to say with the angry and self-righteous person I believe I then was. Still, though I am profoundly grateful for the effects those years had on me, my memories are not only not triumphalist; they are tinged with sadness, even grief. I care a lot about politics, social theory, and the like, but it is the human losses of the time--some American, but overwhelmingly Asian--that dominate my emotions.

Walter Cohen
Department of Comparative Literature
Cornell University