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In his own effort to "open up alternatives for making it," Reich started one of the nation's first "free universities," offering anyone in the Dartmouth area no-tuition, no-credit courses otherwise unavailable at the university. Some 600 students are now enrolled. Although he served last summer as an intern in Robert Kennedy's Senate office, Reich this year plunged into the cross-country McCarthy campaign, recruiting students in five states for the cause. The key to his class, Reich says, is its accent on "a new kind of humanism —not a selfish kind of humanism, but a kind of privatism—and a new ethic of simply being extremely sensitive to other people rather than loyal to an abstract group." And, as applied to world politics, such an ethic means that "oldfashioned patriotism or chauvinism—my country right or wrong—is extremely dangerous. We have to get over our fear of Communism or any other isms." Domestically, it means "putting the political decisions back down where people are—making more room for self-initiative and creativity." Reich contends that there are two reactions to a "society geared to inhumanity—creation or destruction. Destruction is the choice when creation is impossible. That's what I see the Class of '68 choosing in Paris and at Columbia." He hopes to work for change creatively through either law or teaching, but worries about getting sidetracked by comforts and conformity "I certainly hope that all of my class doesn't end up with Mustangs at Shaker Heights or Scarsdale. But it's really tough, when you have a mass culture to carve out new life styles."
BERKELEY: Machine with Feelings
Brian Patrick McGuire, a slim, in tense history major at Berkeley, lived through the clamor of the Free Speech Movement, noted the "joy and excitement in the air," but remained confused and aloof. "It was like seeing it through a glass window." No activist then or now, he nevertheless registered his own personal protest against impersonal education in poignant terms last month. "I have been informed that I have the highest grade-point average of any graduating senior in the College of Letters and Science," he said in a speech to Berkeley's chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. "The first thing I would like to say to you is that it was not worth it."