In his 72 years, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, who was raised in segregated Richmond, Va., acknowledges that he has seen much change, often for the better, including advances in the 1960s. But in his elegant new memoir, “All Falling Faiths: Reflections on the Promise and Failure of the 1960s,” he explains why today’s distemper was incubated in that “burnt and ravaged forest of a decade.”
He arrived at Yale in September 1963, a year after John Kerry and a year before George W. Bush, “never dreaming that this great university would in many ways set the example of what education should not be.” Everything on campus became politicized, a precursor to the saturation of the larger culture. America was careening toward today’s contentiousness, as “those who rightly challenged the assumptions of others became slowly more indignant at any challenge to their own.”
As the teaching of American history became “one extended exercise in self-flagellation,” historical illiteracy grew, leading to today’s “War on Names.” Wilkinson’s book arrives as Yale, plumbing new depths of shallowness, renames Calhoun College. Yale has chosen virtue-signaling rather than teaching. It should have helped students think about the complex assessments of complicated historical figures, such as the South Carolinian who was a profound political theorist, an anti-imperialist, an accomplished statesman and a defender of slavery, a challenging compound of greatness and moral failure. Yale’s past, as Wilkinson experienced it, was prologue: “Yale itself became less a place for original thought than an intellectual inferno policed for its allegiance to the prevailing alienation.”
Disoriented by the Vietnam War, “Yale became a place of childlike clarity. I arrived at a university that asked questions; I left one that fastened a creed.” We still live with this 1960s legacy — controversy has acquired a “razor’s edge” and “venom and vehemence” have become fashionable.