The death of Walter Berns, part of a clique of reactionary professors who quit the Cornell faculty in 1969 after the campus movement against institutional racism failed to conform to their academic protocols, recalls an era when scholars of his brand grew fantastically out of touch with the world beyond the ivy. (Sam Roberts, who wrote the Times obit, graduated in 1968 and thus missed the story. He appears to rely on Donald Downs’s Bernsian history of the events. That he went from the Cornell Daily Sun to the NY Daily News perhaps hints at the kind of lens he looks backwards through.) The so-called Straussian faction at Cornell, who were oblivious enough to try transplanting the stodgy elitism of their master at the University of Chicago to the transcendental hills of Ithaca, tended to attract the undergraduates who couldn’t dance, as we used to quip. While the greatest youth rebellion in American history took place beyond Goldwin Smith Hall, they worshiped Aristotle. The widespread reaction to the departure of Berns and colleagues? Good riddance, as I recall.
They had become “irrelevant,” many would believe–or hope. This proved to be wrong, alas. In fact, they simply gathered other ice crystals and rolled themselves into the big snowball called neo-conservatism, which would help spawn the Reagan-Bush era. Anyone who misses those Presidents will miss Walter Berns. Everyone else will think good riddance to the lot.
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