James Sleeper – 50th Reunion Essay

James Sleeper

jimsleep@aol.com

Spouse(s): Seyla Benhabib, (1998–present), Rachel Gorlin, (1988–1996)

Child(ren): stepdaughter Laura (1986)

Education: Yale BA, Harvard EdD (1977)

National Service: Alternative-to-Military Service, 1971–1973

Career: writer, journalist (Newsday, New York Daily News); college instructor (Harvard, Yale, Queens College, New York University)

Avocations: Reading and writing about American civic-republican traditions, including old New England.

College: Davenport

Maybe it was Woolsey Hall’s acoustics, but mostly it was immaturity that kept me from understanding Kingman Brewster when he told us, on September 13, 1965, “[T]his place has detected and rejected the very few who have worn the colors of high purpose falsely,” thanks to a “pervasive ethic of student and faculty loyalty and responsibility…which lies deep in our origins and traditions.” (His speech is in our 25th Reunion Class Book). He wanted us to know true leadership from false. Only five years later, during the Black Panther trial, the “origins and traditions” he mentioned had lost so much credibility that both Jerry Rubin and Richard Nixon would have derided Brewster’s observation as a snob’s boast about an in-crowd. Even in 1969, when Dean Acheson (Class of 1915) published his Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department, some of us felt ourselves on the Eve of Destruction. And now we’ve all but lost the republic, its demise hastened by a very few among us who’ve worn the colors of high purpose falsely.

Easy for me to say, I know, because I’ve spent decades as a blowhard columnist. But it’s heartbreaking, too, not least because so many of us have tried to uphold Brewster’s civic-republican values and virtues, yet it wasn’t enough. This is no place to argue about why or point fingers of blame. I’m evoking the circumstances under which I take stock of my own life and of the “old” Yale that we entered in 1965. After earning a doctorate in education at Harvard and two years of alternative-to-military service, as a conscientious objector, to stressed teens in an affluent suburb (I’m writing a book about it), I went to inner-city Brooklyn and spent 30 years in journalism about racial politics, urban affairs, and American civic culture. In 1999 I began teaching Yale undergraduates part time as a lecturer in political science and married Seyla Benhabib, then at Harvard, who’s now Yale’s Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy. Thanks to Seyla, I’ve kept afloat, seen more of the world than I would have otherwise, and have a stepdaughter of whom I’m as much in awe as I am of her mom. I’ve defended Yale vigorously against the lavishly funded, brilliantly orchestrated, deeply duplicitous national campaign that blames America’s woes on campus political correctness. I’ve lambasted Yale for its joint venture with Singapore. Google “Jim Sleeper” and “Yale” to find that and more. My best podcast, on the value of a liberal education and the risks in Yale’s venture, is linked in an essay, “Innocents Abroad: Liberal Educators in Illiberal Societies.” Like many public scribblers, I hoped to be Tom Paine and rouse the people in righteous anger against greed and domination. “The people” have become so diffused and distracted by economic and technological riptides (and by greed and demagoguery) that I’ve written fewer manifestos than jeremiads at jimsleeper.com and sometimes found myself wearing the colors of high purpose falsely.