MEMOIR VOLUME THREE CHAPTER THREE SECOND INSTALLMENT

When I first went to South Africa in 1986, radical proposals for the transformation of higher education were everywhere. The old leftist dream of breaking down the wall between hand work and head work was taken seriously by academics and reformers, and it was easy to imagine that once liberation was achieved, South Africa would leap to the forefront of the world movement for educational reform. It was into this exciting, frustrating, bubbling mix of contradictions that I thrust myself, eagerly and somewhat naively, when I founded USSAS in the Spring of 1990.

All the legal and organizational arrangements had been made, but I still had no money. What to do? My only experience with fund-raising was my stint as HRAAA Executive Director, and that had been conducted principally through mailings, so I decided to assemble the largest list I could find of potential donors and send out letters. I had the HRAAA list still installed on my computer, and a Boston-based anti-apartheid organization named Free South Africa, or FREESA, agreed to lend me part of their list [all but the big donors], so that was a start. But since it seemed to me that academics were my best target population, I decided to buy sets of mailing labels from six or seven academic professional associations -- the American Philosophical Association, the American Economics Association, the American Sociological Association, and so forth. My next step was to draft an appeal letter and get famous members of each association to sign a letter of appeal to their colleagues. A sheltered workplace in Boston would handle the task of folding and stuffing and labeling the letters, for not too much money. In all, I planned a mailing of about 85,000 letters. [The number of American academics is vast -- something that is completely outside the experience of their South African colleagues.]

Sam Bowles actually managed to persuade a group of superstars in Economics to sign, including Nobel Laureates Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow, and future Laureate Amartya Sen. With the help of Milton Cantor and other friends, I recruited historians, sociologists, and literary critics to sign letters. I rounded up the philosophers myself, but I ran into an odd problem when I tried to recruit John Rawls. The letter I had drafted said that we were aiming to help "poor Black South African students who have been active in the struggle against apartheid," and Rawls thought mentioning participation in the struggle was a bit too strong, so he declined to sign. [Readers of these Memoirs will have noticed that I take a jaundiced view of Rawls' genuine commitment to social justice. It is incidents like this that explain my dismay.]

Out went the 85,000 letters. I waited anxiously for the returns. My expectations were absurdly overblown. How could any members of the Economics profession turn down a request from Samuelson, Arrow, and Sen?, I thought. In fact, experienced fundraisers will tell you that a 1% response to a letter of that sort is considered very good. In the end, I did a bit better than 1%, and managed actually to cover the cost of the mailing. No money yet for students, but I now had more than 1,000 people who had given once, and might be persuaded to give again. I was on my way. From then on, Susie and I did the mailings ourselves, at first twice a year and then later once a year.

Putting together a mailing for a thousand people is a rather complicated process, at least for someone with my limited computer skills and a modest PC. The donors are on a database -- a small program at first, later on Excel. Some of the letters go to one person [Professor so and so], some to two people [Professor So and So and her husband, Professor So and So. Very early on, I learned the dangers of assuming that the wife or husband of the person on my list was NOT also an academic]. Some folks have one address, some two [i.e., Apartment X, or whatever]. And some people are addressed as Dear Professor Lastname --- while others, whom I actually know personally, are addressed as Dear Firstname. Thus, there are eight possible permutations, and therefore eight sub-lists to be broken out. [I know, I know, you are supposed to be able to do all of this at once with filters and sorts and if then statements, but I have never figured out how to do it, and so twenty years later I am still going through the same tedious process.] Then, using my desktop printer, which can hold ten envelopes max, I generate eight sets of envelopes, taking care to keep them in alphabetical order. After this, I write the appeal letter, limiting myself [for reasons of weight and postal costs] to two sides of one sheet. I make two versions, one signed with my full name, the other [to be sent to the people I know] signed "Bob." These are xeroxed up, and then merge printed with the address and the salutation being inserted from one or the other of the eight files. Now we are ready to fold and stuff. Each Number 10 envelope gets a letter, a return envelope [number 9], and a contribution card with suggested donation levels. [It was a major move when, after some years of offering donors a minimum contribution of $35, I dropped that and made $50 the suggested minimum.] With a wet sponge, the letters are then sealed, and then finally stamped. A thousand letters actually fill up several pretty big cardboard boxes. They then go off to the mailbox [or several mailboxes -- you can't stuff one thousand fat envelopes into the standard curbside mailbox.]

Over the past twenty years, I have tried all manner of things to broaden the support for USSAS and coax donations from those whose names and addresses I had on my database. At one point early on, I managed to get hold of a Directory of Black Owned Businesses in America. I wrote a letter of appeal and actually got Archbishop Tutu's signature on it. Out went the letter to more than five hundred businesses, but not a single one made a donation. I sent a second round of letters to the membership of a few more academic associations, and that did expand my list of donors somewhat. But for the most part, I have continued to go back, year after year, to my faithful supporters. The fundamental rule of all fund-raising, I guess, is that those who give, give. That is to say, the people most likely to donate to one cause are the people who donate to other causes. That rule probably does not hold for donations to religious organizations. In that case, the donor populations are discrete and particular. But if I wanted to raise money for an environmental cause or to fight world poverty, I think my best bet would probably be to go to my South African scholarship donor base.

From the outset, I imposed strict guidelines on the selection of recipients of the USSAS bursaries, which have, with one revision, continued to the present day. There are six principles:
1. All recipients must be Black, which in South African terms means African, Indian, or Coloured. At Durban-Westville, an historically Indian school in transition to a majority African student population, we made an effort to balance the races, but there were very few Coloured students attending UDW.
2. We must strive for gender balance. This has been rather easy to accomplish, and in fact over time, a slight majority of women over men have received awards.
3. We should try to strike a balance between urban and rural students. This has proved very difficult to achieve, and because of the bizarre distortions of population distribution imposed by the apartheid regime has proved impractical.
4. We are NOT trying to identify the very best students. This is not a merit based program. In light of the stringent filter of the Matric system, I assume that every student who is eligible for admission to a university is capable of succeeding, given a decent chance. One sees here the influence of my American experience, and my long-standing hostility to the elitist system of university admissions in this country. [For an extended defense of this prejudice, see http://people.umass.edu/rwolff/esther.pdf ] With our limited funds, we support the first students who apply, so long as they fit the guidelines and genuinely cannot continue in school without our help. Unfortunately, there is never a shortage of students who fit this profile.
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5. If one of our bursary recipients manages to do well enough in the end of year examinations to be permitted to return the next year, he or she will automatically receive a bursary, assuming that I am successful in raising the necessary money. This is one of the most important decisions I made in setting up USSAS, and seems to have played a very large role in the striking success of our USSAS scholars. I shall talk about it more below.

I am the official head of USSAS, having conferred upon myself the title of Executive Director. In fact, I am really the only person on the staff of USSAS, although for governmental purposes I maintain the fiction that we have a Board of Directors, so I guess I am the head and the tail and everything in between. Since I go to South Africa infrequently, I have very little direct hands on contact with what is happening there. For that reason, whenever I go, I make sure to spend as much time as I can with the students USSAS is helping. These meetings at Durban-Westville, then at Cape Technikon, UWC, MEDUNSA [The Medical University of South Africa, the only Black medical school], and the Qwa Qwa Campus of the University of the North, are always the high points of my South African trips. I learn more from them than I do from my meetings, however enjoyable, with Rectors and Vice-Rectors and Ministers of Education.

The most important thing I have learned is that the students, scorned by the faculty as unprepared and even stupid, are in fact bright, lively, able young men and women. These are people, remember, who are fluent in three, four, five or six languages. Now, I must explain that I am, as we say delicately, linguistically challenged. I have, I flatter myself, a complete mastery of English, but my French is execrable despite my many trips to Paris, and my German is almost non-existent [a painful admission for a Kant scholar who has also written two books about Karl Marx.] Consider one typical USSAS student, Benedict Zhivani, a very serious young woman at UDW. Ms. Zhivani, when I met her, was studying for the LL. B. degree. We were chatting in English, needless to say, when I asked her what languages she spoke. "English," she replied with a smile, "and Afrikaans [which, incidentally, was required by anyone seeking to argue before a South African court], and French, and Zulu, oh, and Latin." In the United States, this alone would have been enough to earn her admission to Harvard, but at UDW, she was considered a marginal student at best because her English was a little rusty. A young man, asked the same question, replied "English, and Zulu, and Sotho, and of course. Xhosa." "Why of course?" I asked. "Well," he replied, "Zulu and Xhosa are almost the same language." I must have looked a trifle surprised, because he undertook to demonstrate the fact. He pronounced a word in Zulu. He then pronounced a word in Xhosa that to my untutored ear sounded utterly different. "You see?" he said, as though talking to an idiot or a child. "They are the same."

These were some of the rewarding moments of my visits, but there were less happy moments, enough to bring me to tears. Prem came to me during one visit with a special case -- a young woman who had applied for a USSAS bursary after all of our regular money had been allocated. Her mother was the sole support of an extended family, working as a household maid for pathetic wages. The young woman had no money at all for food or lodging, and had somehow put together enough for the registration fee. [Keep it in mind that she had earned a Matric Exemption, placing her in perhaps the top 2% of her age cohort. Without it, she would never have come to our attention at all.] She was sleeping on the floor of a friend's room, and subsisting on scraps of food brought back from the student dining room. Could we find the money to pay enough of her remaining tuition fees so that she could stay in school? Of course I said yes. She didn't make it, flunking out at the end of the year. But as I explained to Prem, that was perfectly all right. We had done the right thing. The purpose of USSAS was to give young men and women like her a chance, not to restrict ourselves to students who were sure to succeed.

As USSAS was getting started in 1990 and 1991, the situation on the ground in South Africa with regard to higher education was changing rapidly, and we were forced to alter our guidelines and procedures to adjust to that change. The first response of the historically Black universities to liberation was to expand their intake enormously, in an effort to meet the pent-up demand. UDW, Western Cape, Zululand, Venda, Transkei, Fort Hare all began taking many more students. On the opening day of term [which in South Africa is January or February, of course, because the country is in the Southern Hemisphere], young men and women would show up at the doors of the university, sometimes with nothing more than the clothes they were wearing, having walked hundreds of miles from the rural areas. They would put down the small registration fee and begin classes, with little or no idea of where they would get the remainder of the tuition. So long as the students were passing their exams, the universities would do everything possible to carry them on the books while they and their families tried to get loans from local banks for the unpaid fees. But those who did not pass -- and there were many, thanks to the punitive grading practices of even the HBU's -- simply walked away at the end of the year, leaving their accounts in arrears and uncollectible.

Very quickly, the HBUs fell into deep financial trouble. At first, a few large American foundations bailed them out with multi-million dollar grants. The Mellon Foundation gave a grant to UWC, huge by South African standards, to balance their books. But the situation was unsustainable, and in response, the universities changed their rules by raising the registration fee, so that it came to represent half or more of the year's tuition charges. At the same time, the new government, which came to power in 1992, created a national student loan scheme, called TEFSA [Tertiary Education Fund of South Africa -- you see why I say all the acronyms sound alike]. But the catch was that in order to be eligible for a TEFSA loan, a student had to be registered, which meant coming up with the very large registration fee. Incidentally, it is worth noting that this new enlarged registration fee was on the order of 5000 Rand, which, at the exchange rate of those days, was only about $500.

Prem and I discussed this new problem, and decided that the best way we could stretch the bits of money I was able to raise was to offer bursaries sufficient to cover the registration fee, and then let students apply to TEFA for the remainder. That is what we have done for almost fifteen years now. Each $10,000 I can raise in the United States translates into twenty students able to register and study for another year.

USSAS has never been a big money operation. In a really good year, I might raise $50,000 or more, but in a typical year, I raise between $35,000 and $45,000. Most of my donations fall in the range of $50 to $100, but there have been a few astonishing and welcome surprises. One December, early on, I was in Johannesburg, visiting Debra Nails at Wits, when a fax came in from Susie back in Pelham. Someone had just sent a check for $14,000. What should she do? "Deposit it!" I faxed back. The donor, I eventually learned, was a retired Professor of Eighteenth Century English Literature, not on my list of previous donors. He made comparable donations for many years, the check always arriving just about on the last day of the year. I sent lavish thank you letters, of course, but never heard from him personally [the money came from something called a Unitrust in his name -- some sort of tax device], and were it not for the internet and the fact that he has a rather unusual name, I would not even know that he is a retired professor.

Since the only costs incurred by USSAS are the printing and postal charges, a dedicated fax line, and some money to help pay for my trips to South Africa, almost everything I raise can be sent over to our South African bank account and used for bursaries. Over the years, USSAS has given perhaps 1500 awards, so there are hundreds and hundreds of South African men and women who have earned university degrees as a result of our efforts. Each year, when I come to South Africa, I explain to the students we are supporting that I have no idea whether anyone will send money next year, but that if they do, and if the students pass their exams, they will once again get bursaries. The evidence from our experience at UDW shows that this simple promise, combined with the personal attention paid to them by Prem, and later by Tania Vergnani and Frida Rundell and others, has resulted in a startling improvement in the pass rate of our bursary recipients, by comparison with students generally. It is, for me, one more confirmation of my long-standing conviction that virtually all of the students who make it to university are capable of doing well enough to earn their degrees.

The one big change in my guidelines for the selection of bursary recipients came about in response to the horrific HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa [the latest figures are that 20% of the population is HIV positive] I shifted the focus of USSAS, and decided to require that bursary recipients be involved in the struggle against HIV/AIDS in some way or other. In practice, this has meant supporting a group of students in the Child and Youth Development Program at Durban University of Technology who are being trained to work with street children and other young people who are HIV positive or have been affected by the epidemic [for example, by losing a parent to the disease], and also requiring the students I support at the University of the Western Cape to be involved in the extraordinary HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention program run on that campus by Dr. Tania Vergnani -- arguably the best such program in the country.

During my years working at UDW, I got involved in a variety of other activities there, in addition to the USSAS scheme. The United States Agency for International Development [USAID] launched a program called the Tertiary Educational Linkages Program [TELP], and invited the HBUs to submit proposals for grants. For those who have not had experience with USAID, I should explain that USAID programs, although designed to assist underdeveloped economies, characteristically spend most of their money hiring Americans to travel abroad on comfortable per diems, to tell the benighted locals how to run their affairs. In a typical USAID grant, maybe 90% of the money will be paid to Americans, and only 10% will find its way into the local economy. Well, the South Africans were awash in American experts of all sorts, South Africa in the early nineties being very much the flavor of the month in American academic circles. Since there are four thousand American institutions of higher education as contrasted with maybe thirty of the same in South Africa, and since every American academic wanted to spend at least a few weeks on a South African campus, the last thing the HBUs needed was another flood of American experts paid by a grant supposedly designed to help them. I went to a wonderful meeting chaired by the expensively paid TELP coordinators and attended by the Rectors of all the HBUs [most of whom, incidentally, were manifestly better educated than the Americans who were there to lead them by the hand into the world economy], and in no uncertain terms, they stated that they wanted the preponderance of the funds to come to their institutions, to be spent as they thought best. Since Nelson Mandela was then possibly the most widely respected person on the planet, USAID caved.

UDW really had no one at the middle management level capable of writing grant proposals. The lack of second tier academic administrators, as a consequence of the apartheid policies, was one of the signal weaknesses of the South African HBUs. By then, I had been rather successful on my home campus with some grants I had managed to secure for a school to college program I was running for minority high school students in Springfield, MA, so I volunteered to try my hand at the TELP opportunity. In the end, I wrote five TELP proposals, four of which were funded. One of them was for a "modularization" conference, to begin the process of restructuring the UDW curriculum. The idea, which seems second nature to an American academic, was to break the big, unwieldy year long sequenced courses into modules of eight or twelve or sixteen weeks. This would allow students who could handle part of the year's work to get credit for it nailed down, even if they weren't up to meeting the pass standard for a module farther along. Students would also be able to accumulate partial credits, for perhaps half a year of work, and then leave the university to work or look for money to continue their studies. Simple and self-evident as this may seem, it was a revolution in South Africa, and met with considerable resistance.

My visits to South Africa weren't all work, of course. Three experiences in particular stand out in my memory. The first was a weekend trip to a resort in the Drakensberg Mountains, west of Durban, where I read a paper I had written attacking the concept of culture as an ideological construct. After a solemn afternoon of intellectual discussion, we all turned our attention to the real purpose of the outing, a true South African Braai. The Drakensberg is hauntingly beautiful, with springbok and impala grazing on the slopes of the hills.

The second event was what is called a Midlands Ramble. The Midlands in South Africa is the area between the lowlands around Durban on the coast and the Drakensberg, which though not of Rockies stature, is still a pretty decent range of mountains running down the center of the country. Tucked away, at the end of dirt roads and little hollows, are countless artists' and craftspersons' studios where pottery, painting, woodworking, basket weaving, glass blowing, and jewelry making flourish. They may live in rural isolation, but these folks are no rubes. They sell into the world market, and know quite well the value of what they make. The ramble, with half a dozen friends from UDW, was an all day affair, broken for lunch at an impossibly quaint inn called -- I kid you not -- Granny Mouse's House. I think I bought a necklace for Susie, but it is long ago, and I am no longer sure.

But far and away the most extraordinary experience of my entire twenty year involvement with South Africa was the night I spent at the Beatrice Street Y in downtown Durban, attending, and filming, an isicathamiya contest. Isicathamiya [it is a Zulu word, the first syllable of which is actually a sibilant click] is a contest of male Zulu a cappella singing groups. The most famous of these groups is Ladysmith Black Mambazo [which means, roughly, the black horned bull from the town of Ladysmith], though as I discovered during that remarkable night, Hugh Masakela's group does a prettified version of isicathamiya, suitable for White audiences. The tradition of male a capella singing is rooted in Zulu history, but has been strikingly influenced by African American musical styles, including the Cake Walk.

At a contest, groups of men who have practiced under the leadership of the group director, strut their stuff. The groups, usually ten to twenty strong, all affect the same uniform -- black pants and shirts, white socks, and black shoes, for example. They sing Zulu songs about life, love, work, and family, achieving keening, penetrating harmonies, to which they join fancy dance steps, a bit like the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes. There are very strict rules for the competitions, which are held all night in an available venue. [All night because the pass control laws made it illegal for the participants to be on the streets of the White cities after dark, so they would start when the work day ended, and keep going until dawn the next day.] Each group pays a small fee to enter the contest, and the pot thus accumulated goes to the winners. A random passerby is recruited to act as judge, and his decision is taken as final, even if he falls asleep during the contest! The audience, which for the most part consists of the girl friends and wives of the singers, is forbidden to applaud or cheer, save for a small designated claque for each group, who get up periodically, applaud, and in general show their approval of their heroes. Each group warms up in the rear of the room until their leader decides they are ready. They then dance in, singing as they come, do two or three numbers, and dance out again. The sounds are piercing and hauntingly beautiful, as only African singing can be. I spent all night filming with a video camera I had bought, and later on, wove selections of the isicathamiya contest into the half hour video I produced [myself!] as a fund-raising device for USSAS.

MEMOIR VOLUME THREE CHAPTER THREE FIRST INSTALMENT

Volume Three Chapter Three
University Scholarships for South African Students

Let me begin with a systematic account of the history and structure of South African higher education, which is very different from the American variety, so that you can understand exactly why USSAS was needed, and what it does. The South African higher education system is a typical colonial educational system, on to which have been imposed two distorting influences: the existence of two dominant colonial languages, Afrikaans and English, rather than one, and the complex system of racial segregation and domination known by its Afrikaans name, apartheid. When the two colonizing populations, one from Holland and the other from England, combined to form the modern Republic of South Africa, two groups of universities were established, one using Afrikaans as its language of instruction, the other using English. The first institution established was The University of South Africa, or UNISA, which was, and remains today, a correspondence or distance learning institution. The other universities started life as campuses associated with UNISA, although fairly quickly they gained independent status. Virtually all of the educational institutions in South Africa, until very recently, have been state supported, though the historically White universities, both Afrikaans and English, have very sizeable endowments. With the exception of UNISA, which now has more than 100,000 students, South African universities are small by American standards -- six or seven to fifteen thousand students, more or less.

In addition to the English and Afrikaans universities, one university was established very early on to educate Black students -- Fort Hare University, in what used to be called the Ciskei [meaning, literally, "this side of the Kei River -- the other side of the river being Transkei.] Nelson Mandela was educated there, as were many of the men who eventually become leaders of sub-Saharan African nations after the post World War II wave of liberations.

The entire university system is not large, by American standards -- sixteen universities or so. The University of the Witwatersrand, or Wits, and the University of Cape Town, or UCT, are the leading English language historically White universities, and the University of Pretoria and Stellenbosch University are the principal Afrikaans language historically White universities. There is considerable competition among them to determine which is the academically best campus, with all of them fervently and mistakenly believing that they are the equivalents of Oxford and Cambridge, or Harvard and Berkeley. In fact, the strongest universities in South Africa can plausibly be compared with second tier State Universities in the United States -- UMass, UConn, maybe Ohio State, but probably not Michigan State, and certainly not UCLA or Berkeley.

In 1949, the Nationalist Party came to power in South Africa, and a wide-ranging system of racial laws was put into effect formalizing, and also very much complicating, the segregation and exploitation that already existed somewhat more informally. Underlying the laws was a pseudo-philosophical theory of racial identity, claiming to find its intellectual rationale in the phenomenological school of thought established by Edmund Husserl. The people of South Africa, it was claimed, formed a collection of racial, cultural, linguistic, and intellectual unities that ought to be kept separate and permitted to develop, each in its own unique manner. In addition to the Afrikaans and English-speaking Whites, twelve other groups were identified. The first was the large number of descendants of the Indian workers who had been brought to South Africa in the nineteenth century to work in the sugar plantations on the Indian Ocean coast of Southeastern South Africa. This population, numbering more than one million, is native English speaking, and has maintained relatively few ties with the old country. The second group were the descendants of intermarriage between the Dutch settlers and the indigenous population of the Western Cape area. This population, called Coloured in South Africa, was [and remains to this day] Afrikaans speaking, and is located primarily in and around Cape Town. The other ten groups are indigenous African people, differentiated primarily by their languages -- Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana, Venda, Ndebele, and so forth.

A vast and extremely cruel program of relocation was undertaken to sort the African peoples into their "natural homelands." Ten quasi-independent nations were created, with puppet governments and ostensibly traditional lands carved out of the agriculturally least valuable farmlands and rural areas of South Africa. Individuals were classified by official Boards, set up to determine their "true" ethnicity, and were then required to relocate to those areas, in many cases tearing families apart. In 1986, when I first visited South Africa, it was still the case that each year people were re-classified, from White to African, or from African to Coloured, or from Coloured to White, and then forced to relocate. The Indian, Coloured, and African persons not consigned to the Homelands were forced into townships separate from the White cities in which they served as pools of cheap labor. Stringent Pass Laws and Group Areas Acts made it a crime for a non-White person to be found within a White city after sundown, forcing the people who performed menial labor in the cities to travel long hours each day to and from the townships. Since huge numbers of African men were required in the mines and the factories on which South Africa's growing wealth depended, single-sex hostels were built near the work sites, and the men were permitted several times a year to return to the Homelands to see their wives and children.

At first, Africans were permitted to work only in menial jobs for which they needed no more than minimal formal education, and an ideological justification was developed according to which they were intellectually incapable of work requiring more sophisticated understanding, or even literacy. A national system of Bantu schools, so called, was created to provide primary education for Black children, and Teachers' Colleges were set up to train the Black women who would serve as teachers in the Bantu schools. Drawing yet again on distorted and corrupted versions of Continental Philosophy, the Afrikanns intellectuals who served as rationalizers for the apartheid system developed an educational theory, called Fundamental Pedagogics, to justify the stringent discipline and rote learning imposed on the students in the Bantu schools.

Eventually, however, as the economy grew, and the White population shrank as a proportion of the total population, it became clear that some sort of higher education was going to be required to prepare the non-White population for jobs that there were too few Whites to fill, and so a number of new universities were created, along strictly racially segregated lines. By this time, there were thirteen separate Departments of Education in South Africa -- one for White schools, one for Indian schools, one for Coloured schools, and one in each of the ten Homelands. The Whites already had their universities. For the Indian students, the University of Durban-Westville was created, with a White Rector, of course, but eventually with some Indian as well as White academics. For the Coloured students, the University of the Western Cape was established in Bellville, a community not far outside of Cape Town itself. For the Black students, a number of universities were created in the Homelands, ostensibly funded by the puppet Homeland governments, but actually supported by the central government. Thus, there came into being a University of Zululand, a University of the North, a University of Venda, and so forth. Inasmuch as the entire South African governmental system was a vast works project for otherwise idle White South Africans, not surprisingly the Homelands university system became a place to locate politically connected Whites with marginal claims to academic qualifications.

Along with this now quite complex system of universities, there was created a system of Technikons, modeled on the Continental rather than British system, in which a cross between technical and vocational subjects were taught. Parallel to the White Technikons, there now came into existence a number of racially segregated Technikons for Indian, Coloured, or Black students. This, in somewhat simplified form, was the situation with regard to tertiary education in 1990, when the ANC was unbanned, Nelson Mandela and his colleagues were freed from Robben Island, and the process of transition to a free South Africa began. It is the situation I found when I first travelled to South Africa in 1986.

South African university education is organized on the English model: a three year B. A. degree, followed by a one year honors degree, if one has done well enough. A student can then earn a Master's Degree, by writing a Master's Thesis, and a doctorate by writing a doctoral dissertation. Normally, there is no further course work associated with either the MA or the Ph. D., although that is changing, and there are now what are called "coursework Masters."

Typically, students are admitted not simply to a university but to a faculty, thus having already chosen their field of study. The undergraduate course offerings are heavily dominated by lock-step full year courses -- Philosophy 1, Philosophy 2, Philosophy 3, that sort of thing. Until quite recently, it was standard for the entire year's work to be evaluated by a single end-of-year written examination, or "script." Fail that exam, and lose all credit for the year's work. Also until quite recently, it was in practice impossible to transfer credits from one university to another, even if one had earned the credits at one of the elite institutions. Even now, it is quite unusual for a student to complete a B. A. at one university and do an Honors Year at another, and it is even very unusual for a student to transfer at the Master's or Doctoral level.

As in Great Britain, many of the university faculty hold only the M.A. degree. Also as in the old-fashioned Continental and English universities, only one person in each field or department holds the title of Professor, and is referred to as THE Professor of Chemistry, or History, or Education. That person is also typically the Head of Department.

To an American visitor in 1986, the South African educational system seemed hopelessly rigid and inflexible. Practices and arrangements that have long been customary and unquestioned in the United States were viewed with a suspicion verging on horror by even the most politically radical academics. A few examples will illustrate the gulf between the two systems. There was almost no room for choice of courses in the South African curriculum. There was no room at all for students to change their fields of concentration midway through an undergraduate education. If you started in Public Administration, you finished in Public Administration. Transferring from one university to another was unheard of. It could be done, but it required a vote of the full Faculty Senate. Taking time off from one's studies was unheard of, which in practice meant that only those from families that could support a student through the entire degree had a chance at earning a B. A. It was impossible to transfer from a Technikon to a University, let alone from a Teachers College to either a Technikon or a University. Courses typically were a year long, and were graded by a final examination, so that the American system of accumulating partial credits toward a degree was unknown.

The result of these practices and proscriptions was paradoxical in the extreme to an American visitor. On the one hand, South African academics espoused a social and political philosophy that was unimaginably radical by American standards. As I remarked earlier, even I, with my far left convictions, found myself surrounded by academics who viewed me as mainstream. But on the other hand, the actual administrative and pedagogical practices of South African higher education appeared to me utterly medieval. I quickly became aware of the baleful effect of these practices on the Black students who were now my primary concern.

Typical of colonial educational systems around the world, the faculty and administration I met were obsessed with MAINTAINING STANDARDS, a goal that they sought to achieve by means of an extremely high failure rate. Even at the Historically Black Universities, or HBUs, and even when those grading the examinations were themselves Black [or perhaps especially because they were Black], the failure rates, from an American perspective, were and continue to be appalling. These failure rates are bad enough for White students from privileged backgrounds [which is to say, virtually all of the White students]. For Black students, whose parents, extended families, and even communities have cobbled together the money for tuition at extraordinary cost to themselves, the failure rate is catastrophic. One story will illustrate the point. Very early in my travels to South Africa, I visited the University of the Transkei, in Umtata. I was told of a young man whose father had sold his stock to come up with the first year tuition charges, only to see his son flunk out. In my blind American fashion , I imagined this meant that he had sold shares of GM, but of course what it really meant was that this peasant farmer had sold his few cattle, thereby condemning himself and his family to utter poverty, all so that one member of the family could have some chance of escaping from their village.

I have spent twenty years fulminating and arguing and protesting against this punitive and destructive grading practice, to virtually no effect. The faculty tend to view the Black students as stupid, because English is not their first language [even though it is, typically, their third or fourth or fifth language], and consider themselves to bear no responsibility for the success of those in their classes. They, after all, are maintaining standards. One year, while on the campus of the University of Durban-Westville, I managed to obtain a huge computer printout of the results in all the final examinations given in the entire university the previous year. I asked to see the Chair of the Economics Department, a young White English speaking man clearly very pleased with himself. I pointed out that in the previous year, in which he had taught the First Year course, only 11% of the students had passed. [That is not a typographical error. It was eleven percent.] Yes, he said sadly, they really are unprepared for Economics. "What makes you think that you are a teacher?" I asked him. "If you were a doctor running a hospital and only 11% of your patients left the hospital alive, you would be brought up on charges of malpractice." He looked at me uncomprehending and unrepentant. I simply did not understand how badly prepared the students were. There was, as far as he was concerned, no more to be said. It had never occurred to him that he bore any responsibility for helping his students to succeed.

Admission to universities is also problematic in the extreme. At the end of each secondary school year, the students in the highest grade are required to take a battery of school leaving examinations called Matriculation Examinations, or The Matric. The Matric is administered nationally, and under apartheid, four examinations were given -- one each for Whites, Indians, Coloureds, and Africans. Students seeking to go on to university must take a certain mixture of parts of the examination, including some at a more advanced level [for which, as you will easily imagine, the Bantu system hardly prepared the African students], and must achieve a certain level of performance. The results of the Matric exams are awaited each year with bated breath and rate front page stories in the press, because unless one does sufficiently well to earn what is called, for mysterious reasons, a "full university exemption," one is simply not permitted to go to university. [I think the phrase refers to an entrance examination that was once administered, from which one could be exempted if one did well enough on the Matrics, but I could be wrong. No one I asked could ever give me a straight answer.] If the university chooses to admit a student without a Matric Exemption, the state funding formula did not allocate any money to the university for that student, and regardless of how well he or she does, the university in general was not permitted to award the degree.

There are two exceptions to this draconian rule, and during my many years with USSAS I have encountered both of them. First of all, students who take the Matrics several times and fail to achieve a Full University Exemption can apply for a Mature Age Exemption and, in some circumstances, win the right to enter a university [if one can be found to admit them] with somewhat weaker Matric scores. Second, there is some room for the Faculty Senate of a university to allow students without a proper Exemption to enroll and study for a degree, under a provision called the "Senate Discretionary Rule." Such students can in fact earn degrees, but under the system that was in place when I first arrived in South Africa, students admitted in that fashion did not count in the Funding Formula used by the State to decide the amount of the university's annual allocation. In effect, the university had to underwrite the education of those students out of its own funds.

The grading of the African Matrics was haphazard, corrupt, and unpredictable. Only a small fraction of each age cohort of African students actually managed to finish secondary school and sit the exams, and only perhaps 1-2% of the entire age cohort earned an Exemption, and thus was eligible to apply to university. Making it into this select company did not guarantee admission. Far from it. Each university was free to impose its own admissions standards, more rigorous than those required for an Exemption, and there was in general nothing resembling financial aid.

At one point shortly after his appointment, Jakes Gerwel, the radical new Rector of the the University of the Western Cape [the University for Coloureds] announced with great fanfare that he was adopting a policy of Open Admissions -- first come, first served. Familiar as I was with the practice of open admissions at the old CCNY in New York, it took me a while to realize that this revolutionary policy only applied -- indeed could by law only apply -- to the tiny group of non-White students who had managed to obtain an Exemption. Later on, after Jakes had gone into Mandela's government, UWC announced an experimental program under the Senate Discretionary Rule to admit students without Matric Exemptions. I was very excited by this revolutionary move, and underwrote it with USSAS funds as much as I was able. The results were exactly as I had expected. There was no discernible difference between the academic performance of students entering with a Matric Exemption and students entering under the Senate Discretionary Rule, but even though Mandela was now President of South Africa and Kadar Asmal was Minister of Education, UWC could not get the Ministry of Education to adjust the funding formula so as to recognize the legitimacy of the several hundred students in the experimental program.

MEMOIR VOLUME THREE CHAPTER TWO SECOND INSTALLMENT

As we took possession of our dream house, there were darker storm clouds gathering than merely an under-appreciated book. In keeping with standard UMass procedures, the Dean appointed an outside Visiting Committee to evaluate the department. Robison, Gettier, Feldman, Sleigh and the rest got the Dean to appoint a committee dominated by their buddies, who apparently subscribed to G. E. Moore's theory of organic unities. After a careful examination of the departmental doctoral program [which was pretty much all anyone cared about], the Committee announced that the "analytic" program was a distinguished operation, deserving of its splendid national reputation, but that the mere presence of the Alternative Track diminished the overall value of the program and threatened so to discredit the entire department as to undo the magnificent work the majority were carrying out. Bob Sleigh had put in some time in Loren Baritz's office as an Associate Provost, and he must have learned enough to know that the original threat to place the department in receivership had been a bluff. Since the existence of the AT was the product of nothing more than a departmental vote [albeit one taken under duress], it could be terminated by nothing more than another vote. By now, Baritz had moved on, to be replaced by Richard O'Brien, a scientist who neither knew nor cared about what was happening in Philosophy. So the boys called a meeting and summarily voted the Alternative Track out of existence, effective the end of the academic year 1987-88.

The program was grandfathered, of course. Any students who had started in the AT would be permitted to finish in the AT. Furthermore, in an effort to avoid bloodshed, they threw Bob and me a bone. Each of us would be permitted to serve for one year as GPD of the entire graduate program. Apparently, Fred Feldman had concluded that we would not be able to do irretrievable damage to his carefully managed operation in that brief a time span.

I was beside myself with anger, and uncharacteristically depressed both by the abrupt murder of a program into which I had poured so much energy and by the lack of response to my latest book. I reacted by turning away from scholarship and teaching, making a series of efforts to channel my energies into various forms of administration. My first move involved HRAAA. The organization was falling into debt, and though the amount was not very great -- sixteen thousand dollars or so -- we had always run on a shoestring. Dot Benz, the wonderful young woman who had served for some years as a paid Executive Director [and as my co-defendant in our show trial], wanted to do graduate work under Frances Piven at CUNY. During one of our many Board conference calls, I volunteered to serve as unpaid Executive Director and see whether I could turn things around.

I threw myself into the job with all the energy that now had no other outlet, and pretty quickly managed to put us in the black. Since I was running the organization out of my home without salary, our only expense would be the annual write-in campaign for the Board of Overseers. While I was in our circular shower one morning, it occurred to me that Archbishop Desmond Tutu would be the perfect HRAAA candidate. To be sure,Tutu's degrees were all from UNISA, the huge distance learning university with its headquarters in a large brooding building on a hillside in Pretoria. But it is an odd thing about the Harvard Board of Overseers. It is rather like the Vatican. Just as you don't have to be a priest to be Pope [or to be a Cardinal, for that matter], so you don't actually have to be a Harvard or Radcliffe graduate to serve on the Board of Overseers. The rest of the HRAAA board thought it was a great idea, and as you can imagine, it was going to be no trouble at all to collect signatures on a petition to nominate Tutu. The trickiest part of the whole operation was getting Tutu's agreement to stand as a candidate.

Tutu had won the Nobel Peace Prize four years earlier. After Mandela, who was, of course, still on Robben Island, he was the best known South African in the world. You didn't just call him up. I made some calls to South Africa, and managed to get the name and phone number of his assistant, a young Episcopal priest. I explained what we were proposing, and after a few days, he called back to say that His Grace would be pleased to be a candidate. I swung into action and started working to elect Tutu to the Overseers. How could Harvard say no if Archbishop Desmond Tutu made a personal appeal to the Board? We thought we had found the secret to success. After an all-out campaign in '88-'89 that combined mailings, phone calls, and as much publicity as the name Tutu could get us, we succeeded in electing the Archbishop. When the new academic year started in the Fall of 1989, he would officially be a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers. Harvard did not react by divesting, unfortunately. Instead, The Harvard Alumni Association changed the rules for electing Overseers in an effort to guarantee that nothing like that would ever happen again.

Meanwhile, I looked around for any administrative job I could find. I certainly did not want to leave the house we had just built, but the Pioneer Valley is unusually well endowed with institutions of higher education. Hampshire College was looking for a President, so I threw my name in the hat. A student called me from Wesleyan University in Connecticut to ask whether I would consent to be a candidate for the Presidency of that institution. I hope I am not shocking any of my readers when I report that neither of those ideas went anywhere. But Amherst College was looking for a Dean of the Faculty, and I thought I might actually have shot at that job, so I applied. Somewhat to my surprise, I made the first cut, and was asked to meet the Search Committee for a formal interview. Things seemed to be going pretty well until someone on the Committee asked me what new ideas I would like to bring to Amherst, if I were chosen.

Now, I need to explain something about the curious relationship between faculty members of UMass and Amherst College. Since we all worked in the same little town, lots of us knew one another and showed up at the same parties. On almost any subject of conversation you could imagine, we were quite compatible, and as this was well after the Sixties, when dress codes went all to hell, if you didn't know who was whom, you probably couldn't have told us apart. Except when it came to gossiping about salaries. UMass is a state university, so all the salaries are public. You can actually go to the UMass library and take a look at a big computer printout that lists the salary of everyone from the Chancellor on down to part-time secretaries. But Amherst College is a private institution, and people do not know what their colleagues are making. At one of Shulamith Oppenheim's parties, if the conversation turned to who was making what, the UMass folks there would rattle on happily while the Amherst types would fall silent. It always seemed to me that the UMass way was healthier.

When the Search Committee asked me what innovations I might like to introduce as Dean, I thought of that curious fact and said that I thought it would be a nice idea to make everyone's salary at Amherst College public. The temperature in the room dropped abruptly about ten degrees, and I realized that I had lost any chance of becoming Amherst's next Dean. They picked a nice man named Rosbottom who taught French Lit. His wife wrote cookbooks.

An even likelier prospect opened up closer to home in '90-'91. Murray Schwartz left the Deanship of Humanities and Fine Arts at UMass to go to Emerson College in Boston, and Provost O'Brien decided to conduct an internal search. A bunch of us from HFA put our names in. A formal Search Committee was named and each of us got to make a pitch to our colleagues. [Since the search was internal, it would have been tacky to make a first cut, so everyone who expressed an interest had his or her day.] In the end, two people were on the short list that the Committee forwarded to the Provost. One was Lee Edwards, a Professor of English who specialized in nineteenth century British fiction and had played a very important role in the creation of the quite successful Women's Studies Program. I was the other one. We both had interviews with O'Brien, who then picked Lee. So far, I was 0 for 4.

While this search was going on, however, we all got the joyous news that South African President de Klerk had agreed to release the Robben Island prisoners and lift the ban the African National Congress. A bit of background is called for here, including some things that even careful readers of the news may not have picked up on. The original manifesto of the South African liberation movement was a document issued by the ANC called The Freedom Charter. This document contained an extraordinary vision for a new South Africa. In addition to proposing the complete elimination of all distinctions and legal disabilities based on race, the Freedom Charter called for a sweeping return of agricultural lands to the displaced and disinherited Black majority and at the same time for State ownership of South Africa's industrial means of production. Land Reform and Nationalization, more than racial liberation, were the truly controversial elements of the ANC program.

Land reform was a direct attack on the economic base of the Afrikaaner population, because it was the Boers who had seized the good farmland and built their wealth on it. Nationalization was a threat to the economic base of the English segment of the White elite, for all that a good many of the most important companies [such as the diamond giant, De Beers,] were in Afrikaner hands. Some of my friends in the Mass Democratic Movement [the wing of the Liberation Movement that had stayed in the country rather than go into exile] had bootlegged to me a copy of a revision of the Freedom Charter then being circulated in the leading circles of the movement. The key change in the revised document was that land reform and nationalization had been dropped in return for full-scale democracy, one person one vote. Secret negotiations had been going on between de Klerk and the imprisoned Nelson Mandela. The revised charter was the basis of the deal being struck.

In left circles in South Africa, there was considerable dismay over a deal of this sort, and some of the people I had come to know in the Natal Province area believed strongly that it would be better to reject the deal and continue fighting than to bargain away what they [and I, I must confess] believed to be central to the Movement's vision for South Africa,. But leaving to one side the fact that I had no skin at all in this game, and was quite free to return to my comfortable home in Pelham after each brief trip, there were facts on the ground that dictated the compromise. For all the brave talk about "one Boer, one bullet," the armed struggle being carried on from neighboring states was not going at all well. The liberation forces were totally outgunned and outmanned by the South African military, and nobody thought there was the slightest chance of an armed overthrow of the Pretoria regime.

But why would de Klerk even consider one person one vote, which, whatever else it might accomplish, would certainly bring to an end White control of the state? I puzzled over this quite a lot, and finally, with the help of my friends in the Movement, achieved at least some insight into what might be the thinking of the de Klerk government. Briefly, the Black opposition was split. In the Black areas of Natal Province north of Durban, a Zulu-based organization called The Inkatha Freedom Party, or IFP, had been for a long time engaged in a struggle with the ANC for supremacy in the Black community. The leader of the IFP was Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who had entered into a devil's bargain with the de Klerk regime in return for supplies of weapons. de Klerk deliberately fomented violent confrontations between IFP and ANC supporters in the single-sex hostels, on the trains bringing workers from the townships, and elsewhere. He then figured to position himself as the neutral party able to maintain peace between the warring factions. Implausible though it may seem in retrospect, de Klerk seems actually to have believed that he could prevail in a three way electoral contest over Mandela and Buthelezi.

All of that was in the future, however. First, Mandela had to be released and the ANC unbanned. In early February 1990, the news broke that Mandela was to be released. As luck would have it, Archbishop Tutu was in Cambridge for a meeting of the Board of Ovcrseers. The Board meeting was scheduled for Sunday, February 4th. I was granted a meeting with Tutu at the Charles Hotel in Brattle Square on Saturday, February 3rd. It was my one and only meeting with one of the great figures of the modern age.

Tutu was warm and quite informal. He thanked me for my work in getting him elected to the Board[he had been briefed], and then went on to speak movingly about the need for reinvestment in the new South Africa that was about to be born. Reflecting on the meeting during my drive back to Pelham, I realized that the divestment struggle was over. Once Mandela was released, an entirely new stage in the evolution of South Africa would begin. I was not sure what all of this meant for HRAAA, save that we could not simply go on reflexively doing in the future what we had been doing in the past.

As luck would have it, just at that time, the new Chair of the Philosophy Department at Durban-Westville, Mala Singh, wrote to me with an urgent appeal. Her graduate students had no money to pursue their studies. Was there anything I could do to help? Very quickly, I sent an appeal to some hundreds of philosophers at American colleges and universities, and managed to raise enough money to enable Mala's students to continue their studies. It occurred to me that this might be the shape of my new effort. I had learned how to raise money by mail, using my computer. Perhaps I could start a charitable organization to offer scholarship aid to poor Black students going to historically Black universities in South Africa. The idea would be to support them there, not bring them to the United States [which would have been prohibitively expensive.] If I worked out of my home and paid myself nothing, I could send virtually everything I raised to the students.

To create a scholarship organization that could help poor Black students in South Africa to get a university education, I needed to do four things: Choose a name for the organization, get it declared a tax-exempt charitable organization by the IRS, find someone in South Africa who was willing to select the scholarship recipients and look after them, and then RAISE SOME MONEY. Susie and I mulled over a good name for the new organization. During our trips to South Africa, we had noticed that many of the pro-liberation groups had similar sounding acronyms, because they all had the letters "SA" in them: NUSAS, COSATU, SASCO, and so forth. We finally came up with University Scholarships for South African Students, or USSAS, which had a very South African ring to it. One of the lawyers who had given us informal advice during our Fogg Art Museum trial led me through the paperwork involved in applying for tax-exempt status under Section 501(c)(3) of the Tax Code [hence the familiar phrase, "a 501(c)(3) organization."] I intended to do all the work myself, but the law required that I list a Secretary and a Treasurer, in addition to myself as President, so I put down Susie's name as Secretary and an old HRAAA comrade, Joel Krieger, as Treasurer. Very quickly, I received a letter from the IRS granting USSAS provisional status as a tax-exempt organization. Permanent status would not come for several years.

It was clear to me that I needed someone in South Africa to select the students and look after them, someone who would also do this pro bono. On my next trip, I decided to travel around the country, looking for an academic who would be willing to take on this essential, but rather burdensome, task. I made a grand circle of the country, starting in Johannesburg, and moving on to Cape Town, Alice [home of Fort Hare], Umtata, Durban, and back to Johannesburg. It was in Durban that I found my in-country coordinator, Prem Singh. Prem, a slender Indian man of forty or so, was deeply committed to the well-being of his students, and he was willing to take on the responsibility of managing the South African side of USSAS, assuming that I could raise some money. Prem died some years ago, very suddenly, of a heart attack, and I have not, until now, had the opportunity to testify publicly to the absolutely essential role he played in the growth and success of USSAS. It was not merely a matter of choosing the scholarship recipients, although that was obviously crucial. Prem had to negotiate the Byzantine complexities of the South African banking system to set up the account into which the money would be transferred, and --equally tricky -- to get it out again at the appropriate time and transfer it to the proper account at the University. Prem served as the unofficial Mentor and Advisor to the student bursary recipients, who quickly came to number well over one hundred a year. He put me up in his home each time I came to Durban, and took me in charge as I visited the students, the new Rector, Jairam Reddy, members of the faculty, and also the townships surrounding Durban. My relationship with the students, inevitably, was distant and episodic, but Prem's was intimate and daily. As my story unfolds, it will become clear how central his role was over the early and middle years of USSAS.

USSAS has played a central role in my life for twenty years now, and I would like in these Memoirs to render a full account not only of how it came into existence but also of how it has evolved over two decades. To do that, I need my readers to know a good deal more about South African higher education than they are likely to have been able to learn from the occasional newspaper or television report. Rather than scatter information intro the narrative of my life and career as it unfolded year by year, I have chosen to gather all the information into a coherent story and set it here, in my Memoir, even though much of what I say will relate to events still many years down the line. The best way to do this is to devote a separate chapter to USSAS, which, if anything in my life, qualifies as "my onion."

MEMOIRS VOLUME THREE CHAPTER TWO FIRST INSTALLMENT

Volume Three Chapter Two
Newlyweds

I had accumulated so many frequent flyer miles during my repeated trips to North Carolina that we flew to London free. After taking a fast train to Edinburgh, we rented a car and set out on a honeymoon trip around the British Isles. It was a trip right out of the tourist books. We visited Loch Ness [no monster]. We toured the Isle of Skye [lots of one lane roads there -- I mean, one lane, period, with little turnoffs every so often in case you meet someone coming the other way]. We drove down to Wales, where I bought some cashmere sweaters. I found my way to a pre-booked hotel in Bristol [stumbled on a spectacular Greek restaurant]. Then we flew home.

Our house was nowhere near finished, and this created a problem. Susie had two pets: a big, friendly black standard poodle named Jacques, and her cat. But I had been completely unable to find someone who would rent us an apartment short term in Amherst if we insisted on bringing our pets. Don Grose promised us that we would be in the house before Christmas, so that meant we had to find somewhere to stay for four months.

The only thing I could think of was to rent a trailer and park it on the construction site. We owned the land, so no one could say no. Don Grose was clearly not amused. The last thing he wanted was the client on site twenty-four seven, watching every move his workmen made. But he could not refuse, so we flew back to Chapel Hill, rented a U-Haul trailer, loaded it with Susie's clothes and her scores of plants, including a ten foot tall cactus, and drove north to our building site in Pelham. The trailer I had rented was no luxury double wide. It had a sleeping area no bigger than the bed, a tiny kitchen, a sitting area, and a bathroom attached to a tank that had to be pumped out once a week. We ran an electric line from the building site, and even managed to get the phone company to pull a line in from the street to give us service. Then we settled in with Jacques and kitty.

We were two fifty-somethings with four grown sons and four failed marriages between us, but we felt like kids, and the whole thing was an adventure. Susie cooked dinners on the tiny stove. I took charge of having the sewage tank emptied periodically. I drove into Amherst to teach, and we wandered over every day to see how they were coming with our house. It was just as well we were there. One day, after the workmen had left, we lifted the corner of a tarpaulin and discovered that someone had delivered the wrong siding. We managed to alert Don to the mistake before the men started nailing it up. In a way, it was a typical Pioneer Valley operation. The site boss was a big young man named John Sackrey whose mother had started the Valley Women's Center, a focus of early Northampton radical feminism.

As an outgrowth of my South African trip and protest participation, I had gotten myself on the Board of HRAAA. The Board meetings were always telephone conference calls, and I can still see myself crouching over the phone in the trailer sitting area trying to hear what people were saying. TheBoard of Overseers write-in campaign was showing some signs of success. In addition to Gay Seidman, we also managed to elect the distinguished Duke University historian of South Carolinian slavery, Peter Wood. But of course, Harvard was obdurate. I don't think the Corporation was pro-apartheid. I just think they didn't like anyone telling them what to do with their huge endowment.

Among the people I had met during my South African adventure was Mark Orkin, a Johannesburg based sociologist who was working for a research organization. Mark organized a conference on sanctions against South Africa, and invited me to give a paper. I jumped at the chance, even though I knew precious little about the subject, and on November 3rd, after putting Jacques and Kitty in a kennel, Susie and I flew off to Harare, Zinbabwe [it was, of course, out of the question to hold the conference in South Africa itself.] No sooner did we arrive in Harare than we learned that the Zimbabwean government had withdrawn its permission to hold the conference in their country. At the last minute, we arranged to transfer the conference to the gambling resort, Sun City, in Gabarone, Botswana. Using my American Express credit card, I bought tickets for a bunch of folks and off we flew. For the next several days, while Susie disported herself at the pool and in the casino, I sat at a square table and talked sanctions.

One of the things I love about South Africa is that it is really a rather small country with a tiny elite. I have been a professor in American universities for fifty years, and in that time, I have never met a single person from the U. S. Department of Education, nor even from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Department of Education. The only member of the House of Representatives I have met is John Olver, and that is just because he sold me some land. I was a Harvard classmate of Teddy Kennedy, but I never met him, either as an undergraduate or after he became a senator. In South Africa, on the other hand, I have met Two Ministers of Education, many of the Rectors of the universities, and all manner of people who played a significant role in the liberation movement,. The people gathered at that table were, or became, major players in the transformation of South Africa into a democratic state.

Seated next to me for most of the conference was Tom Lodge, a thin, dour Wits historian who is the leading chronicler of the African National Congress. He played Eeyore to my Tigger. Alec Erwin, later Minister of Public Enterprises, and a leading theoretician of transformation, was there, as was Jakes Gerwel, who became the first non-White Rector of a South African university and went on to serve as Mandela's right hand man in the first post-apartheid government. Hillary Joffe, later a well-known journalist, was there, and so was John Dugard, then a Professor of International Law but later a distinguished Judge. My contribution to the conference, and the volume that came out of it, was forgettable; the experience was, for me, anything but.

Since we had come ten thousand miles for those few days, Susie and I had made plans to continue on to South Africa. Once again, we stayed with Debra and Berendt in Melville. Debra rounded up a Wits archeologist who took us all to Makapansgat, a famous site one hundred miles north of Pretoria. The entire Makapan valley is filled with digs from which valuable bones and artifacts have been recovered, but the cave called Makapansgat is of special interest because until the nineteenth century, it had been uninterruptedly inhabited for more than twenty thousand years. The walls and cave floor had of course been elaborated excavated, so we had to be careful walking through the site. As we were about to leave, I saw a microlith half projecting from one of the cave walls. It was a tiny arrowhead, perhaps many millennia old. When no one was looking, I put out my hand, plucked it from the wall, and put it in my pocket. I do hope the statute of limitations has run on illegally importing archeological artifacts into the United States.

Even though on my first visit I had been to Johannesburg, Soweto, Pretoria, Durban, Bophutatswana, Lebowa, and Gazenkulu, I had not yet been to South Africa's most beautiful city, Cape Town, so when the Philosophy Department of the University of Cape Town invited me to give a talk, I jumped at the chance. Susie and I flew down for a quick visit. Susie, who has all her life been a dedicated botanist and gardener, very much wanted to visit the Botanical Gardens of Cape Town, so she went off to see it while I gave my talk. The Department was rather strange, I must say. The premier scholarly effort then under way by one of the senior members was a collection of jokes and anecdotes contributed by famous philosophers from around the world. Quine had contributed a joke, as I recall. When the time came for my talk, the Chair of the Department rose to introduce me. As he launched into an effusive welcome, everyone in the room froze. He apparently thought I was Richard Rorty. I must say, he had some very nice things to say about Dick, whom I had known, as the saying goes, since before he became Richard Rorty. It was a little hard to figure out just exactly what to say when my turn came, so I just launched into my talk.

Susie was as taken with South Africa as I had been, and on the long trip home, we agreed to return soon. We even saw a West End performance of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead as we passed through London on our way back to the States. We were eager to see whether Don and his crew had made any progress on our house, but when we got to our trailer, I found that I had a more pressing problem. There had been an early November cold snap, not that unusual in rural New England, and the slender pipes in the trailer were frozen solid. Unless I could get them unfrozen, we would have no toilet, so I climbed under the trailer with Susie's hairdryer, an extension cord out one window, and blew hot air on them until they let loose.

Six days after we got home, all four of our sons -- Patrick and Tobias, Lawrence and Jon -- came to visit us and take part in a celebratory Thanksgiving dinner at the Old Deerfield Inn. They arrived at different times from different corners of America, and as each one entered our little home, he said the same thing: "YOU LIVE HERE?" We had quite gotten used to the trailer, and were a bit offended that they could not see its charm, but it occurred to me that although we felt like a couple of kids, we were, after all, their fifty-five year old parents.

Don Grose had promised that we would be in our new house by Christmas, and so we were, but only just. On December 23, 1987, we abandoned the trailer that had been the first home of our married life, and moved grandly into our splendid new house. At first, we tended to crouch defensively in one corner of a room, as though we did not believe that there was so much space, but little by little we ventured into the living room, the den, the sun-lit glass enclosed breakfast room, and even up to the second floor. In no time at all, we had appropriated the space as our own.

The recounting of the happy events of that time has momentarily driven from my memory the fact that I was then about to publish another little book, the second volume of what I still hoped would be a trilogy on the thought of Karl Marx. In the Spring of '86, while my first marriage was coming to an end, I had delivered a series of three public lectures at UMass, the Romanell-Phi Beta Kappa Lectures. In those lectures, I finally came to grips with a question that had fascinated and puzzled me from my first encounter with Das Kapital: Why had Marx chosen to write what he himself conceived as his greatest work in a language and style utterly different from any that had previously been adopted either by economists or by philosophers? The language of Capital is highly inflected, shot through with witty ironies and literary allusions. Commentators, especially those from England, have tended to view the language of Marx's hauptwerk as a sign of incapacity on his part, as though the author of The Communist Manifesto could not say it straight when he wanted to. I thought otherwise.

I took the title of my lectures from a wonderful passage in the chapter on "The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power." The original English translation, overseen by Engels himself, perfectly captures the mocking tone of the original:

"In order to be able to extract value from the consumption of a commodity, our friend, Moneybags [Geldbesitzer], must be so lucky as to find, within the sphere of circulation, a commodity, whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption, therefore, is itself an embodiment of labour, and, consequently, a creation of value. The possessor of money does find on the market such a special commodity in capacity for labour or labour-power." The original has Geldbesitzer twice, first where Aveling and Moore render it as "Moneybags" and second where they give the more literal "possessor of money." But even "possessor of money" misses the dead metaphor in the original. The image conjured up by the German is, or ought to be, of someone sitting atop a pile of money, and "Moneybags" captures that sense perfectly.

I have always believed that these lectures, published in 1988 by the University of Massachusetts Press under the title Moneybags Must Be So Lucky, are pound for pound, word for word, the best thing I have ever written, but the world seems to have a very different view. The book went unnoticed, unreviewed [save for a very lovely review by George Scialabba in, of all places, The Village Voice], and unsold. All these years later, UMass Press has yet to unload a thousand copies. My little book, in the immortal words of David Hume [who was, after all, talking about the greatest work of philosophy ever written in the English language], "fell still-born from the presses."

Since these are my memoirs, I should like, one last time, to take a moment to explain what I was doing in those lectures, before they are consigned to "the dust heap of history." Some of Marx's work is a conscious debate with, critique of, and extension of the Classical Political Economy of the Physiocrats, Adam Smith, and David Ricardo. My first book on Marx, Understanding Marx, had explicated that debate in an attempt to identify what was new, revolutionary, and defensible in Marx's economic theories. But unlike his predecessors, Marx believed that capitalist economy and society is deeply mystified, concealing its true exploitative nature beneath a surface appearance of tranquil, unproblematic equal exchange in a marketplace supposedly, but not actually, cleansed of the superstitions and mystifications of feudalism and Christianity. Since Marx believed that all of us are embedded in those mystifications, suffering from what, in another context, would be called false consciousness, he sought some way simultaneously to give voice to and to debunk the ideologies of the capitalist market. The epiphany of which I spoke earlier in these Memoirs was the realization that the extraordinary language of the opening chapters of Capital is Marx's deliberate attempt to accomplish this task.

I concluded that a full and deep grasp of the insights of Capital would require, at one and the same time, an engagement with the formal economic theory of the Classical Political Economy tradition and an understanding of the psychology of mystification and a literary analysis of Marx's language. If Marx is right that the social reality of capitalism is thus complicatedly multi-dimensional, then some way would have to be found to read the irony into the equations and the equations into the irony. Moneybags was my attempt to complete the second stage of the process that I had begun in Understanding Marx.

The quirks of my mind being what they are, I sought to show this idea rather than to explain it, by voicing in my lectures something of the irony and humor that I had found in Capital. In the third lecture, which is, I believe, the first successful attempt actually to explain the famously obscure disquisition on "the relative form and the equivalent form of value" that mystifies the readers of Chapter One, I chose to begin with an old Jewish joke about Mrs. Feinschmeck's blintzes. I think it is fair to say that no one who has ever read my book [and that cannot be many people] has ever understood the deep and complicated purpose behind that apparently facetious literary choice.

So be it. UMass Press did a lovely job designing the little book, with a splendid Daumier caricature of a top hatted banker counting his money on the cover. If the writing of this Memoir accomplishes nothing else, perhaps it will send a curious reader or two to that neglected book.

MEMOIR VOLUME THREE CHAPTER ONE THIRD INSTALLMENT

I fell completely and permanently in love with South Africa. The political atmosphere was intoxicating. In left-wing academic circles, there was serious talk of completely transforming higher education, of instituting formal accreditation for what Black men and women had learned outside of classrooms, on the job, in the streets, in the Townships. Communities like Soweto were effectively governed by unofficial committees chosen from within their confines. Over the years, Black men and women had acquired administrative skills at least as impressive as those that could be learned in the classroom while taking a degree in Public Administration at Wits or Cape Town or Rhodes. Just as the stately mansions of the Old South were built, and sometimes designed, by slaves, so the Black population, which was, after all, five-sixths of the population of South Africa, had built the road I drove in on from the airport, and indeed the airport itself. Men like Enver Motala, who later became a good friend, had labored for years in worker education programs sponsored by the labor unions, and they believed fervently in breaking down the gulf between head work and hand work.

The people I was meeting were alive, engagé, ready to risk jail and worse to achieve the liberation of their nation. In America, one could know someone for years and have only the vaguest notion of his or her politics. In South Africa, people wore their politics on their sleeve. I had read about what it had been like for those deeply involved in the American Civil Rights Movement, the Socialist Party of my grandfather, or the Spanish Civil War, but despite my efforts in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the anti-Viet Nam War protests, I had never known anything like the South Africa of the mid-eighties.

Besides, South Africa is an exquisitely beautiful country. There is something about the soil, the vegetation, the landscapes that feels ancient. With my childhood fascination for archeology and physical anthropology, I could feel that this was where the human race had begun its long journey. One day, I took a hike with some Wits friends on the High Veldt, where I could almost imagine the small bands of hominids hundreds of thousands of years earlier. We even had a braai.

The Braai is a distinctive South African institution. A braai, quite simply, is a barbecue, an outdoor meal cooked over an open fire or a grill. It is an Afrikaner institution, not at all English, and one of the Boer's greatest contributions to world culture. To an Afrikaner, a balanced meal is four different kinds of roasted meat. A typical braii consists of an arrangement of steaks and chops on a grill, circled round by a long string of sausages, and washed down with beer or wine. The braii has spread from the Boers throughout the heterogeneous South African population, so that some years later, when a group of us went from UDW to a resort in the Drakensberg Mountains for an intellectual weekend of sociological debate, the centerpiece of our two-day seminar was a huge braai.

I returned to Watertown from South Africa in time for Patrick's graduation from Belmont High School on June 8, 1986. Patrick had been admitted to Yale, but he wanted to take a year off from school to travel and play chess. My fond memories of my wanderjahr twenty years earlier persuaded me to support his plan, and I offered to help underwrite the year off. Very quickly, Patrick won his third and final IM norm in Biel, Switzerland, becoming an International Master at the age of eighteen. He was now officially part of the international chess firmament. Somewhat later that year, I got an international call from him. "Dad, I am traveling in Italy." "That is very nice," I replied. "Italy is beautiful." "So I have always found it." 'The Italian food is great." "Yes, I have always liked it." "I have fallen in love with a French girl." "That," I said, "is news."

So off he went to Paris to be with Isabel. He played some chess, but mostly he hung out in cafés, drinking coffee and picking up the language the way you do when you are in love. He even got a job for a bit as an au pair, looking after a little American boy. I confess I did not see Patrick as a nanny, but it paid the bills. When he returned, he was ready to tackle college.

The really important twists and turns in my life seem always to occur more or less by accident. Had Swarthmore not been so skittish about a boy who had been in psychotherapy, I might never have gone to Harvard. Had I not driven in from Ft. Devens to visit Adair Moffat in Whitman Hall, I would never have met Cindy. Had Mac Bundy not gone off to Washington to work for Jack Kennedy, I might still be at Harvard. And if I had not been dining with Dick Sens, I might never have managed to get arrested.

Richard Sens is a Boston area psychiatrist who, like me, was a regular at the BU Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science. In '86, Dick was also going through a difficult divorce, and the two of us fell into the habit of having dinner once a week so that we could commiserate and swap horror stories about lawyers. Usually we met at a tapas place on upper Massachusetts Avenue, but on August 11th, we switched to Thai food. Dick brought along a friend who thirty years earlier had been a student in one of my Philosophy 1 sections at Harvard. She was Jean Anderson then, but she had been married for a while to Juan Alonso, who later became a professor of Romance Languages and Literature. Now, Jean Alonso was working at Raytheon, where she was a union organizer. Jean was a member of an organization called Harvard/Radcliffe Alumni and Alumnae Against Apartheid, or HRAAA, that was working to persuade Harvard to divest.

In those days, the anti-apartheid struggle in America was fought along two fronts -- disinvestment and divestment. Disinvestment meant persuading corporations to pull their capital investments out of South Africa. Since South Africa had far and away the most advanced economy in Southern Africa, it badly needed capital investment, and disinvestment, if carried out on a large enough scale, could bring the economy to a standstill. Divestment was really a symbolic act at best. It meant getting institutions like universities to sell their holdings in companies that continued to do business in South Africa. Every share of stock sold on an exchange is bought by someone, of course, so divestment had no concrete economic effect on the companies. It made no difference to them who owned their shares. But big American corporations are very sensitive about their public image, and they did not like having large institutional shareholders put them on a no-buy list. A number of universities had already divested, including UMass [whose portfolio, needless to say, was tiny], and it would have been a big deal for Harvard, the richest and most prestigious university in the world, to divest. So far, they had steadfastly refused.

HRAAA [or Hurrah, as they rather exuberantly called themselves] had two arrows in their quiver. Their major effort was to try to elect write-in candidates to the Harvard Board of Overseers, chosen annually by all of Harvard's graduates. They had actually succeeded in electing Gay Seidman, daughter of a well-known anti-apartheid activist. But in addition, HRAAA from time to time tried its hand at some direct action. Nineteen Eighty-six was the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Harvard College, and President Derek Bok had organized a big celebration. Even Prince Charles was coming. One of the premier events was to be a black tie and evening gown dinner at Memorial Hall for Harvard's biggest donors. The event was scheduled for Thursday, September 4th. When Jean heard that I had just returned from South Africa, she asked whether I would like to join the protest. "Is there a chance that we will be arrested?" I asked. "Yes," she replied. "O.K., then I'm in," I said. I had always been rather embarrassed that I had not been arrested during the Sixties. Although neither Patrick nor Tobias would ever say so, I suspected they looked down on me a little because of my lack of a record. I thought this might be a chance to redeem myself in their eyes.

Thursdays were one of my teaching days, with a 10 a.m. class in Intro Phil and a late afternoon Kant seminar, but the 4th was the first meeting of the seminar, and I figured I could cut it short. That day, I raced home from class to meet my co-conspirators at a house near Harvard Square. Along the way, I stopped at a pay phone and called Susie to tell her that I was about to get arrested. "All right," she said. We all drifted casually toward Mem Hall by twos and threes. When we got there, maybe half an hour before the dinner was scheduled to start, we joined up, locked arms, sat down on the pavement, and blocked both entrances. Pretty soon, rich Harvard alums dressed to the nines started to arrive. We tightened our blockade and chanted slogans. Since it was a dinner, our premier chant was "If you wanna digest, you gotta divest." Now, to be honest, I don't much like protests and demonstrations. I always feel like a fool, shouting slogans at people five feet from my face. Most of our group were young, although there were a few old hands, grizzled veterans of a hundred causes. Some of the dinner guests looked as though they might be my classmates, and when they saw me sitting on the cold pavement [my rear end was getting frozen], I could tell that they were thinking, "What on earth are you doing sitting there like a teenager?" We stood our ground, or more accurately sat our ground, and Bok was so totally taken by surprise that he never called the police. In the end, he donated the top of the line food to a homeless shelter [say what you will, Harvard has class], and fed his guests pizza in Fogg Art Museum.

So I didn't get arrested. But I got another chance. A donors' dinner was arranged at the Fogg Art Museum for November 21st, and we decided to have a go at interrupting their meal. We showed up on Quincy Street, across the street from Harvard Yard, and divided into two groups. One group walked up the steps to the front door of the Museum and jammed themselves into the entryway, blocking access. I went with the other group, marching up and down the sidewalk in front of the Museum, holding placards. This time Bok was ready for us, and as soon as we appeared, the police were all over us. In no time at all, we had been arrested, and paddy wagons parked down Quincy pulled up to take us to the Central Square police station for booking. Some of the people in our group had been part of the 1969 Harvard student uprising, and some of the cops had been there to arrest them that time too. They greeted one another as old friends and gossiped about the good old days on the way to the station. We were all fingerprinted, booked, and released on our own recognizance.

Now, I realize that in the grand sweep of American protest movements and direct action, this is pretty small potatoes, but these are my Memoirs, and this is the only time in seventy-six years that I managed to get arrested, so you are going to have to let me go on about it for a while. The story has a pretty good punch line, so wait for it. The group in the doorway were charged with trespass, since it was technically Harvard property. Those of us on the sidewalk were charged with disorderly conduct, "loitering on the common without legitimate purpose." The specific claim was that our picketing was forcing passersby to step into the street, thereby putting them in danger from traffic.

This was not exactly the most serious piece of court business before the Commonwealth that Fall and Winter. The arraignment did not take place until February 3, 1987, two and a half months after our arrest. At the arraignment, Judge Arthur Sherman offered us a deal -- cop a plea, pay a small fine, and everyone would forget about it. If we tried to do anything pushy like offering a "necessity defense," he would hit us with contempt charges. A Necessity Defense, for those of you not familiar with the ins and outs of protest politics, is a plea that the act committed, though technically against the law, was necessary in order to prevent a greater harm. The idea is that if you rush into a burning house to save a child, and then get charged with breaking and entering, you can say that although technically you were breaking and entering, it was the only way to save the baby. Protesters sometimes get a sympathetic judge who lets them put on witnesses to testify that the harm being prevented -- apartheid, the Viet Nam War, Jim Crow -- justifies the trespassing or disorderly conduct. Judge Sherman was having none of it.

Seven of us turned down the deal and decided to go to trial. Besides myself, there were Chris Tilly, then an MIT grad student and now Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA, Dorothee Benz, then the Executive Director of HRAAA and now Director of Communications for the CUNY Professional Staff Congress, or union, Margaret Schirmer, a life-long activist for peace and justice who died earlier this year at the age of eighty-nine, Abigail Schirmer [her daughter, I think], Joel Reisman and Jeffrey Weinberger.

Even though we were acting pro se [i.e., being our own lawyers], we were coached by some sympathetic leftie attorneys, and following their lead, we filed a motion calling upon Sherman to recuse himself. Somewhat to our surprise, on May 3rd, Sherman said ok. "Although I find no impropriety on my part," he wrote in his own hand on the document I had submitted for the other six who had decided to go to trial, "I can reasonably understand the defendants' apprehension of impropriety. Allowed." The trial was set for May 27th, roughly six months after the protest.

All Spring, we met at my Watertown apartment to plan strategy and prepare for the trial. This being Massachusetts, our opponents were not exactly bad guys. The DA was Scott Harshbarger, who had started his career as a civil rights lawyer, and later on, after narrowly losing the Governorship as the Democratic candidate, headed up Common Cause for three years. Like everyone else in the affair on all sides, he was a Harvard grad. The Assistant DA to whom the case had been handed was young Peter Bellotti, son of Francis X. Bellotti, former Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General of the Commonwealth. [In Massachusetts, there are only about seven family names. It is sort of like Korea, where half the population is named Kim.]

We had pretty grandiose plans for our necessity defense, at one point thinking of calling Harry Bellefonte and Jesse Jackson as witnesses, but in the end, our star witness was Mel King, long time Black Boston political activist who had spent nine years as a State Rep. The original group had numbered sixteen, so on a lark, I had a bunch of T-shirts made up that read "Free the Fogg Sixteen." When we got to trial, we found that the new judge assigned to the case was a woman whose son was at that very moment a Harvard undergraduate. Oh well. It was Boston, after all. Sitting prominently in the front row were two men wearing the most expensive suits I had ever seen. Harvard had sent the B-team from its legal staff to observe the proceedings.

At this point, I need to get something off my chest that has rankled for twenty-five years. Technically, I was not guilty. Here is why. The charge against me and the other picketers was that by blocking the sidewalk we were endangering pedestrians. But because Bok had been waiting for us, the police had actually blocked off both ends of Quincy Street before our protest started. So there was no traffic that could endanger pedestrians forced to step into the street. Since I am naturally combative, I brought this up during one of our planning sessions, but the group decided not to go with that defense. The problem was that if some of us got off, the solidarity of the group would be destroyed. I recognized the political wisdom of this point of view, and agreed not to offer my defense, but I really hated having to sit there and let the police claim something that just was not true.

We tried out our necessity defense line on the judge, and during the voir dire, we presented our witnesses, each of whom said what he or she would testify if allowed to appear. After each potential witness, she denied our request. My favorite moment in the trial came after Mel King had given a brief summary of his proposed testimony. The judge said, in a sad voice, "Mr. King, I would be happy to hear you speak on the subject of justice in any venue in the world except this court." Pretty clearly, we were going down.

The trial itself took almost no time at all, and the six jurors [our offenses were misdemeanors] brought in a verdict of Guilty. Then came the sentencing phase. Peter Bellotti proposed that each of us be required to perform one hundred and ten hours of community service [as though our protest was not itself community service.] When it came my turn to propose an alternative penalty for myself, I bethought myself of The Apology. "Your Honor,." I said, "I have for sixteen years served the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as a Professor at the State University. In light of my long public service, I propose that the State give me a pension." The Judge, who despite having a son at Harvard was obviously not up on her Plato, looked at me as though I were crazy, and sentenced each of us to a fine of $72.50, or an equivalent amount of community service.

We decided to appeal, but it turned out that the tape recorder serving as court stenographer was so old that no one could get a reasonable transcript from it, and in the end the case dropped into a black hole and was never heard from again.

Despite the terrible legal jeopardy we all were in, the trial was not actually my primary concern that Fall and Winter. The divorce negotiations had finally been concluded, and Cindy and I were scheduled to be formally divorced on December 31, 1976. As soon as I knew I was going to be a free man, I pressured Susie about marrying me, and she agreed. We decided that we would pool our resources -- the proceeds from her house in Chapel Hill, and my half of the proceeds from the house in Belmont -- and build our dream house in the Amherst area. I found two adjacent building lots on Buffam Road, a rural road in the little town of Pelham on the eastern edge of Amherst. The State Senator for that area, a former Amherst College professor named John Olver, owned land in Pelham, and had put up four lots for sale. Behind the four lots was a huge swath of woods that Olver had been unable to develop because he could not gain access to it from town roads, so for tax purposes he had donated it to the State as conservation land. That meant that although the two lots only totaled a bit more than four acres, they were really the front part of a hundred acres or more that could never be built on. I bought lots three and four. Lot two did not perk, which meant we would be protected on all sides. [For you big city dwellers, when you build in the country far from town water and sewer, you have to put in a well and a septic system. To guarantee that the sewage will not back up, the land must be tested to see whether water percolates down into the ground at an acceptable rate. This is called a "perk test."]

Four years later, Republican Silvio Conte, who had represented the huge First Congressional District for more than thirty years, died in office. When Conte had first been elected, the Massachusetts First was as safely Republican a district as you could find, but the entire area had been moving steadily leftward for two decades, Conte with it, and everyone knew that once he left the scene, the action would be in the Democratic primary. Olver announced for the job, as did Jim Collins, the only member of the State Legislature who had actually attended UMass. Olver was farther to the left, but he had cut down all the deciduous trees on Lots 1-4 before putting them on the market, and I was so mad at him that I voted for Collins. At least in Massachusetts, all politics really are local.

We found a local builder named Don Gross, who headed up a little construction company called Sundance Associates. Don put us on to an Amherst architect, Steve Woolf, who told Susie and me to make up a scrap book of pictures from magazines showing the sort of look and features we wanted in a design. Susie was a real estate agent in Chapel Hill, and had once seen a master bathroom with a circular shower that she loved, so she asked Steve to put that in. I had always wanted a vaulting ceiling, so Steve designed a living room with a twenty-two foot ceiling. For me, there would be a study with built in book shelves. For Susie, an octagonal study off the bedroom with a tray ceiling. We found some lovely tile in Chapel Hill, and had it shipped up. I found some more tile in Watertown and almost broke the springs on my car hauling it out to Pelham.

Well in advance, we set our wedding date for August 25th, as late as possible before the new school year to give Gross time to finish building our house. To no one's surprise except mine [I had never had a house built before], Sundance Associates were nowhere near finished as August approached. So Susie boarded her standard poodle, Jacques, and her cat, Kitty, and came north for the wedding. On Tuesday, August 25, 1987 [which, as it happens, was that year the Islamic New Year], we stood before the County Clerk in the Northampton Town Hall and swore our vows. Thirty-seven years after I wrote home from Harvard to tell my parents that Susie and I planned to be married, "but not right away," we were finally husband and wife.

INSIDE DOPE

Yesterday evening, Susie and I had dinner with two old friends, Anne and Philip, both of whom are professional simultaneous translators. Philip told us that a day or so ago, he served as the translator of President Sarkozy on a phone call with President Obama. Needless to say, he could not tell us anything either one of them said, but he assured me that Sarkozy is quite fluent in French, and that Obama's English is also quite good. That is more than anyone could have said for our last President. If I get any more inside information, I will be sure to pass it along.