Dr. John R. Seeley
1913-2007
Thursday, January 31, 2008
by DICK FLACKS
During the ‘50s and ‘60s, Jack Seeley was one of the leading intellectuals, the author of classic works in sociology, an eloquent critic of authoritarian institutions, and an outspoken advocate of the youth revolt’s potential for social change. For those of us who were then young rebels, especially those of us trying to figure out how to fuse social activism and academic work, he was a voice and a model.
Born in England in 1913, Jack escaped from a cruel family situation by emigrating, penniless, to Canada. As a youth, he was a farm laborer and a printer in Canada, and he read voraciously. He saved enough to enter the University of Chicago at age 27. He served in the Canadian Army during World War II, where he worked to reform human relations in the Canadian military. After returning to Chicago for graduate studies, he spent several years immersed in developing community mental health in Canada. He never got a PhD, but this seems not to have prevented him from embarking on a very distinguished teaching and research career. He chaired the sociology departments of the newly formed York University in Toronto, and then at Brandeis.
Jack left Brandeis to live and work in Santa Barbara in the second half of the 1960s. He came here to serve as dean of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, the world-famous think tank Robert Hutchins founded. The center was an intellectual home to a circle of “permanent fellows” joined by a stream of visitors, whose common task was to try to rethink American institutions. Its beginnings, during the dark days of McCarthyism, were bold and courageous; the center’s work on many issues proved widely influential. One of Seeley’s accomplishments, for example, was the convening, in Geneva, of a “Pacem in Terris” conference attended by many notables, an important peace intervention at the height of the Vietnam War.
During those years, Jack’s voice was much heard in defense of the student movement. A local instance was the afternoon of February 25, 1970, when Jack introduced William Kunstler-a lawyer for the Chicago Eight-to speak to the thousands of students assembled inUCSB’s stadium. It was after Kunstler’s appearance that police treatment of students leaving the stadium precipitated the riot in Isla Vista during which the Bank of America burned.
Seeley and others of the more politically active fellows were forced out of the center prior to those events. The UCSB Sociology Department wanted to give him a visiting position. The fact that he had published some 400 articles and several major books, and was a widely renowned figure in the field, led us to assume that such an appointment would routinely be approved. Its main benefit for Jack was some office space and library access, as well as the chance to interact with engaged scholars and students. One day, however, the parking service demanded the return of his faculty parking sticker. This led to the news that his appointment had been rejected by the chancellor.
When you look at Jack Seeley’s life story, these Santa Barbara experiences turn out to be rather typical. A few years later, he wrote in his entry in Who’s Who in America:
“I have tried to understand.
I have tried to understand in order to change.
I have had to change in order to understand.
It has been very rewarding-
and very costly.
Pain and joy have been
nicely proportioned and inextricably intertwined.
That is the nature of life.
The life-task is to say ‘yes’-and then live it.”
What he was referring to was a series of significant experiences he undertook to try to foster community, democracy, and humane practices at major academic institutions. He was one of the founders of York University, whose vision involved creating a community of faculty and students based on one-to-one teaching relationships and democratic governance. University trustees soon aborted that vision. He also tried at Brandeis, becoming chair just after the free speech movement explosion at Berkeley. Brandeis sociology faculty and students tried to create democratic community. This effort foundered when Brandeis’s administration refused to withhold students’ grades from Selective Service. Jack left for Santa Barbara, attracted by the chance to work in a self-proclaimed intellectual community. He worked to make the center live up to its claims, pushing for democratic governance and for inclusion of junior as well as senior fellows.
While litigating over the failure of the center to live up to its legal and moral promises, Jack became an active participant in another effort to create a new kind of academic institution-the Disney-funded California Institute of the Arts. CalArts’s design included the creation of a school of critical studies; Jack joined this effort, again hoping to make something that was intellectually and humanly groundbreaking. Again, as in all his other experiments, those who controlled the institution squelched the promise.
There was something quixotic about Jack’s many efforts to foster radical institutional change. But the quote above suggests that the appearance of failure, though painful, conceals a positive lesson: One way to create the basis for change is to try to make institutions live up to their moral claims. Instead of becoming cynical-that is, deciding in advance that all such claims are phony-Jack chose throughout his life to try to hold institutions accountable, to grasp possibility, and “try to live it.”
For John by Peter Marin
Now you return,
vivid in absence, filling the emptiness,
shining among the dead
like the Ideas of Plato
made bright by the Good.
As I write, a gentle rain
sets my garden gleaming with aliveness,
with Becoming,
with all that comes near in the drawing-away
of what, though gone, stays forever.
Walk with me, John. Let us pause
under the dripping of trees
as if washed clean by love.
Ahead of us, here, lie the mysteries,
the Good hidden, but blazing, above.
by DICK FLACKS
During the ‘50s and ‘60s, Jack Seeley was one of the leading intellectuals, the author of classic works in sociology, an eloquent critic of authoritarian institutions, and an outspoken advocate of the youth revolt’s potential for social change. For those of us who were then young rebels, especially those of us trying to figure out how to fuse social activism and academic work, he was a voice and a model.
Born in England in 1913, Jack escaped from a cruel family situation by emigrating, penniless, to Canada. As a youth, he was a farm laborer and a printer in Canada, and he read voraciously. He saved enough to enter the University of Chicago at age 27. He served in the Canadian Army during World War II, where he worked to reform human relations in the Canadian military. After returning to Chicago for graduate studies, he spent several years immersed in developing community mental health in Canada. He never got a PhD, but this seems not to have prevented him from embarking on a very distinguished teaching and research career. He chaired the sociology departments of the newly formed York University in Toronto, and then at Brandeis.
Jack left Brandeis to live and work in Santa Barbara in the second half of the 1960s. He came here to serve as dean of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, the world-famous think tank Robert Hutchins founded. The center was an intellectual home to a circle of “permanent fellows” joined by a stream of visitors, whose common task was to try to rethink American institutions. Its beginnings, during the dark days of McCarthyism, were bold and courageous; the center’s work on many issues proved widely influential. One of Seeley’s accomplishments, for example, was the convening, in Geneva, of a “Pacem in Terris” conference attended by many notables, an important peace intervention at the height of the Vietnam War.
During those years, Jack’s voice was much heard in defense of the student movement. A local instance was the afternoon of February 25, 1970, when Jack introduced William Kunstler-a lawyer for the Chicago Eight-to speak to the thousands of students assembled inUCSB’s stadium. It was after Kunstler’s appearance that police treatment of students leaving the stadium precipitated the riot in Isla Vista during which the Bank of America burned.
Seeley and others of the more politically active fellows were forced out of the center prior to those events. The UCSB Sociology Department wanted to give him a visiting position. The fact that he had published some 400 articles and several major books, and was a widely renowned figure in the field, led us to assume that such an appointment would routinely be approved. Its main benefit for Jack was some office space and library access, as well as the chance to interact with engaged scholars and students. One day, however, the parking service demanded the return of his faculty parking sticker. This led to the news that his appointment had been rejected by the chancellor.
When you look at Jack Seeley’s life story, these Santa Barbara experiences turn out to be rather typical. A few years later, he wrote in his entry in Who’s Who in America:
“I have tried to understand.
I have tried to understand in order to change.
I have had to change in order to understand.
It has been very rewarding-
and very costly.
Pain and joy have been
nicely proportioned and inextricably intertwined.
That is the nature of life.
The life-task is to say ‘yes’-and then live it.”
What he was referring to was a series of significant experiences he undertook to try to foster community, democracy, and humane practices at major academic institutions. He was one of the founders of York University, whose vision involved creating a community of faculty and students based on one-to-one teaching relationships and democratic governance. University trustees soon aborted that vision. He also tried at Brandeis, becoming chair just after the free speech movement explosion at Berkeley. Brandeis sociology faculty and students tried to create democratic community. This effort foundered when Brandeis’s administration refused to withhold students’ grades from Selective Service. Jack left for Santa Barbara, attracted by the chance to work in a self-proclaimed intellectual community. He worked to make the center live up to its claims, pushing for democratic governance and for inclusion of junior as well as senior fellows.
While litigating over the failure of the center to live up to its legal and moral promises, Jack became an active participant in another effort to create a new kind of academic institution-the Disney-funded California Institute of the Arts. CalArts’s design included the creation of a school of critical studies; Jack joined this effort, again hoping to make something that was intellectually and humanly groundbreaking. Again, as in all his other experiments, those who controlled the institution squelched the promise.
There was something quixotic about Jack’s many efforts to foster radical institutional change. But the quote above suggests that the appearance of failure, though painful, conceals a positive lesson: One way to create the basis for change is to try to make institutions live up to their moral claims. Instead of becoming cynical-that is, deciding in advance that all such claims are phony-Jack chose throughout his life to try to hold institutions accountable, to grasp possibility, and “try to live it.”
For John by Peter Marin
Now you return,
vivid in absence, filling the emptiness,
shining among the dead
like the Ideas of Plato
made bright by the Good.
As I write, a gentle rain
sets my garden gleaming with aliveness,
with Becoming,
with all that comes near in the drawing-away
of what, though gone, stays forever.
Walk with me, John. Let us pause
under the dripping of trees
as if washed clean by love.
Ahead of us, here, lie the mysteries,
the Good hidden, but blazing, above.
Stop torture now
A long, long time ago, some nineteen hundred and seventy-three years, so they tell me, a most remarkable man from backwoods Galilee died by torture at Roman hands, real hard torture: stripping, whipping, slow suffocating over many hours. He has many friends and followers to this day. I would like to be counted as one. Today our head of state and his deputy want a free hand to practice torture with impunity and, in effect, in our name. Of course, this torture, even to death, is to be reserved for “enemies.”
I have spent a lot of time recently trying to get some of the tortured Galilean’s followers to speak out against the practice now before more are dead thus at “our” hands. But I am refused anything so simple, direct and immediate. It will take time and more dead or broken human beings. So I must speak alone. I do. I say that torture or any cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of anyone is wrong, ungodly and unallowable. For God’s sake, for a memorial to the slain Galilean, stop it. Stop it now!
Dr. John R. Seeley
Los Angeles
I have spent a lot of time recently trying to get some of the tortured Galilean’s followers to speak out against the practice now before more are dead thus at “our” hands. But I am refused anything so simple, direct and immediate. It will take time and more dead or broken human beings. So I must speak alone. I do. I say that torture or any cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of anyone is wrong, ungodly and unallowable. For God’s sake, for a memorial to the slain Galilean, stop it. Stop it now!
Dr. John R. Seeley
Los Angeles
The Fool of Sociology
A Professional Biography of John R. Seeley
by Michael Rossman
Source: http://www.mrossman.org/uncollectedessays/seeley1.html
[A belated introduction (2007)]
In 1976, I was invited to contribute to a special double-issue of Sociological Inquiry [Vol. 46, No. 3-4], honoring the life-work of the eminent, aberrant sociologist John R. Seeley. By then, Seeley was 63, and I was 36, having known him eleven years. Though never his student in a formal sense, nor trained in sociology as such, I had come to admire and adore him while working as a younger colleague in the broader field of educational reform. So I drove to Los Angeles and spent a week taping thirty hours of intense interview and discussion about his life, his work, and themes of mutual interest. To make coherent sense of this took three months of writing; I couldn’t quite bring it up to date before publication deadline.
In a sense, this essay is more nearly Seeley’s autobiography “as told to” than his biography – for though I had some background knowledge, and perspectives of my own, I made no use of other sources, either friendly or critical. In this light, my account is neither objective nor balanced. Careful reading will recognize the ways in which I maintained critical distance; but even so, this may be regarded mainly as Seeley’s presentation of himself in most favorable light to a credulous junior. Though hostile minds may well dismiss it on this basis, even such work may serve worthy purposes, and I would be content with this.
Yet reading it at my age now, what strikes me instead is how much I made Seeley’s story my own. To some extent this was inevitable: for despite his explicit emphases in innumerable stories, I of course selected mainly what struck me as significant; and could draw him out further by only the questions I knew to ask. But such personal biasing was hardly automatic and unconscious. Instead, it was sharply purposeful. In effect, I used Seeley’s life, used his professional career as material for an essay on active social practice, elaborating themes that had occupied me for half my adult life. For my purposes, his life was ideal; for his purposes, my take on it was nearly so. In this sense, this document is an intimate collaboration, a soft missile couched in biographic form.
[Preface]
It is every boy's dream to have fathers worthy of honor, or to make them so in legend. How then can l know how "realistic" my assessment is of a man who has been fatherly to me, being one of my two mentors, the men whose special welcome of me as a younger peer marked my ritual of entrance into a deviant intellectual community? Others in this issue have testified to the remarkable warm force of Jack Seeley's personality and the character of his moral influence, to the breadth of his learning and influence, and to the importance of his work and the conceptual and methodological issues it has raised. If this were all, Seeley would be simply a remarkable man or, as some see him, a remarkable nuisance. But I think there is more.
Each man's life is a gesture of meaning in the social cosmos, and Seeley's life provides one definition of sociology -- a definition in the flesh rather than the word, as true definitions are, grown in the day's circumstance rather than inherited. Above all, a definition radically at odds with the customary definition of sociology. If this be so, then there could be no more important task for a festschrift essay than to make a case for this -- not so much to justify Seeley, as to illuminate a profession in a painfully changing time.
A basic theme of Seeley's work is to recognize the integrity of the way the personal and the social nestle together, in intimate conjugation, in each human circumstance. A proper study of Seeley's sociology as a lived practice would be sympathetic in a precise sense: it would honor the terms of that sociology, attempting to understand integrally the full spectrum of personal and social meanings encoded in his life and the dimensions of purpose and tragedy; it would be fully critical and advocative, an agency of loving justice. There is no short way to do this which does not reduce the organic sense of Seeley's work to a summary resume of his many complex engagements. Yet his is a sociology of engagement; and there is no better way to portray it intelligibly in operation than through the detail of the issues at stake in each instance.
Here then is a broken-field run through the terrains of Seeley, not to adequately survey them but to indicate a path. And if I myself appear in the later footprints, as a minor influence in the development of his sociology as well as an influencee, this is again in sympathy with one of its tenets: that the observer irrevocably perturbs what he observes by the act of observing, and therefore has no moral choice but to act in consciousness of this, entering into a loving and purposeful intercourse.
[Youth]
John Ronald Seeley was born in London in 1913 to an upper-class family, and schooled erratically in England and Germany until 1928. His childhood was a Gothic tragedy whose main characters included an absent father, a too-present and –abusive mother, a grandmother who fed him emotionally and physically on the sly, and a forbidding schoolmaster who introduced him to Euclid.
It showed him the world as a mad disaster, against all reason and justice, save for certain precious and quite precarious supports. It left him with a permanent passion to champion justice and the oppressed, and a keen sensitivity to the double message and the contradiction between social facade and reality, exercised not only in his rather schizophrenic family but in the social field as he watched the early stages of Fascism's rise. From his childhood deprivation came a life-long charge: to be the kind of father and create the kind of family he had not had. From its nourishment came the personal mythologies, born of his grandmother's tales of David, Joseph and Moses, which were to guide the gesture of his life; and an image, rooted in his own explosive growth after Euclid, of what the demeaned human spirit could be if freed.
******
At sixteen, by choice, Seeley found himself in Canada, a penniless immigrant, and worked as a farmhand for two years. His reaction to the farmboys' exploitation became his first experience at meliorative social organizing, and set a bipolar pattern of style that was to develop throughout his life. One pole was to work among the oppressed, raising consciousness by leading them to share information, feelings and ideas, his interests one with theirs. The other pole was to function as an ancillary of conscience among the managers, informing those (in this case, the local Presbyterian Minister) with moral or functional authority to undo wrong.
The successful influence of the Minister whom Seeley advised may have given him unrealistic expectations about how readily wrong would yield to reason in the world, but Seeley gained strength and purpose from associating with this surrogate father, who took him as son and fed him philosophy. If Seeley did not formally accept the invitation to inherit the clerical mantle, neither did he reject it.
From the minister, Seeley drew his first validation that the task of struggle against injustice was more than personal -- that the human task is to make a better world through perceiving moral issues and taking a stand, and that life derives its deepest meaning in service. The same sense of task and meanings informs Seeley's sociology. It does not reduce his writings to remark that most of them are sermons of one sort or another. In an age of spiritual crisis, for Seeley sociology was not simply a detached intellectual pursuit or a tool for the managers, but a ministry.
During this period, Seeley struggled with the question of how to make use of the rich insights into cruelty and domination which his childhood had provided. In seeing his choice as between becoming a master of criminality in society or making sure that his experience never happened to even one other child, Seeley committed himself to a task of redemption on a scale whose impossibility he did not fully face until he was forty. His early infection by the image of Christ as the suffering servant was reinforced by the writers he now explored, who spoke of turning suffering to good account; though he later came to see this as sometimes literary trickery, its influence persisted through his life, inhibiting his willingness to deal adequately with his own needs. Yet to account Seeley's career as a neurotic product of early experiences and compensations is inviting, but too easy; what matters is rather how he chose to modify them in himself, and to engage and articulate them in the world.
Still, his choice to be an educator, and the reasonable thrust of his teachings, were influenced in part by his failure to fully grasp his personal rage against the horrors of his upbringing. It left him trying to believe his victimization had been simply the product of ignorance, which led him to imagine that justice would be served if only a new generation of parents were brought up to understand what children were about, and what was good and bad for them. This worthy imagination guided his approach to the social family as well, long after he had realized the truth of his private case. As a teacher, Seeley remained the apostle of Reason, sensitive to the faintest consequence of human bestiality, yet always somehow surprised by its presence, and perhaps never fully grasping its dimensions.
Struggling with these concerns, Seeley stumbled one night upon a campfire of preadolescents, an idyll of the life he had not had. Their circle drew him in and invited him night after night to tell his grandmother's stories and invent his own. This liaison, continuing, became for him a living demonstration of how the young might be moved in the realms of delight and ecstasy; it was also his first indication that anything he had to offer might matter deeply to another's growth, and sealed his fate to be a teacher. Jack was intoxicated by the children's love, and by the Minister's, and returned it. Suspended between them, he was redeemed by his new roles in a community which ministered to his own deepest needs. If in later life Seeley became so indefatigable a source of validation for others, young and old, it was perhaps from realizing fully what validation had meant to him -- a metabolic, rather than ideological, awareness.
[Toronto]
At 18, the conditions of his passage fulfilled, Seeley came to Toronto where he worked in a printing factory. During his nine years there, he became assistant to the sales manager, and then export manager, and might well have risen further. He came away with practical knowledge of the world of work and administrative systems, and with Margaret, whom he came to love on the job in 1935 and married the classic seven years later when he returned from Chicago.
In 1937, Seeley joined the Society of Friends on a non-creedal basis. The Clerk of the Meeting took a shine to him, and invited his participation in an "ecumenical council" of leading priests, rabbis and ministers, which met weekly to discuss the social problems of the day and town. Their subsequent delivery of major sermons in parallel was a major force for change. This was Seeley's first experience in what became one favorite modality of work -- the convening of small, high-level groups to organize approaches to psychosocial problems. Earlier, he had taken on the Toronto YMCA, inciting the reorganization of its governance with the novel idea that, since it was a young men's association, young men should sit on the Board. In this milieu, he was arguing from Christian presuppositions for the justice they implied; and such early successes confirmed his perhaps naive ideal, that one could reliably appeal from men's low behavior to their higher professions, and win adherence to the latter.
But Seeley's richest work in Toronto was familial. He organized a Wolf Cub pack of two dozen boys, and led the same group for eight years, through scouting and into manhood. In addition to the chance to fulfill himself as paterfamilias, it gave him a rare opportunity to study (pre)-adolescent development. In character with his later work, his study was subordinate to purpose -- which, in the bleak Protestant setting of then-provincial Toronto, was to awaken the youths to the full potentials of their own lives and abilities, as he had been awakened by the Euclidean schoolmaster, So as not to tear the scouts between loyalties, he worked intensively with their parents, engaging for the first time the task of helping them learn new ways of relating to their children. The entire venture was an amalgam of education and therapy, permanently defining this aspect of his working style.
During this period, Seeley read a great deal of Freud, and the library's books on child development -- and then went on to Marx, knowing that that what the parents did was a function not only of their fears but of how they had to live. Ever since the farm, he had been studying for Canadian university matriculation and trying to save money for this, When his surrogate children turned 18 and left to lead their lives, a cycle more familiar now was completed as Seeley himself went back to school, with $2,000 saved to supplement his scholarship from the University of Chicago.
[The University; the Army]
At 27, Seeley found himself a college undergraduate, free at last to enjoy full-time the love of learning and the luxury of letting his curiosity roam, It took him as well into the rich underlife of Chicago, to run with juvenile gangs and hang out with the lower echelons of the Mafia, enlarging his perceptions of youth and criminality, and perhaps preparing his own career as adult delinquent. Campus itself was golden, for the university was still in the early flush of its Hutchins era, which made the school a legend of the day in American higher education. In its attempt at a comprehensive and synthetic curriculum, Seeley found his eyes opened to the full circle of human knowledge, as sport and glory. He found also, in the relative autonomy granted students there, his first model for an educational institution that would treat students as they deserved, at least in this respect.
Perhaps no school of that time could better have prepared Seeley for one main thrust of his work: to dissolve the barriers which artificially divide the many branches of learning and knowledge. But if the University was thus undermining its Aristotelian heritage, in other ways it reinforced this with a vengeance. Through his studies in its general scholasticism and in the Chicago School of sociology, Seeley's mind became partially a prisoner of conventional academicism, of the most morally crippling kind, which he was not fully to recognize or escape for a decade, until his Forest Hills Village experience led him to turn his critique to the tools of knowledge, and then to the Academy itself.
Too new yet to be voiced with its later precision and subtlety, Seeley's reaction to imprisonment took the form of a simpler moral statement, a sermon of action addressed to his fellow intellectuals as men, rather than (yet) to their very professions. Since his boyhood in Germany, he had watched the rise of Fascism with a concern that the war's outbreak ripened to anguish. He delayed barely, to finish his B.A., and then left what seemed a greased-skids career towards faculty appointment at Chicago to enlist in the Canadian Army in 1942. His behavior was an earnest of the later irritation he would provoke in many schools when he said, in effect and explicitly, “How can you manage to stay at your customary work while all this is going on around you, and not raise heads and hands to do something in response? How can you know a society in whose agonies you refuse to take part?”
Seeley believed that for those who cared about and understood what they claimed they did, there was a special task for the intellect -- not only to assist in the struggle against Fascism, but to keep from becoming totally infected by the same disease in the process of opposing it. For him, this program took first the shape of an attempt to humanize the Canadian, and later the British and American armed services, by minimizing the damage to the human potential and spirit of the soldiers, and making their experience maximally useful to themselves and to the war effort. As an Officer Selection Specialist, Staff Captain and finally scientific advisor to the Director of Personnel Selection, he worked with a small, tight group to individuate and humanize selection procedures, and to some extent to reform the service job-lines themselves, as well as such military sub-institutions as training camps, brigs, courts martial, and recreational and medical services.
[The Forest Hills Village Project]
Demobilized in 1945, Seeley refused high office in the Canadian government, and returned to graduate work at Chicago, where he served as research assistant to Ernest Burgess and Louis Wirth, taught Social Science in the University College, and worked at his theory and thesis. Despite the brilliance of the university surround and his welcome into association, it was a strained time, due both to the miserable life forced on him and Margaret by their poverty, and to the continuing serious illness of their first son, John Jr. Put aside when he went to work for the Canadian Mental Health Association in 1947, his thesis was never finished.
As executive director of CMHA, Seeley came together with his colleagues in the attempt to humanize the military, to try to continue into civilian life the program they had envisioned: to use the insights of psychology and the social sciences and common decency, to transform society. Thinking to focus on the children and to begin via the schools, they had the outline of a project, and soon found a medium in which to execute it. In 1948 Seeley moved his base to the University of Toronto to be a clinical teacher in psychiatry and an associate professor of sociology. His main work, however, was as director of the Forest Hills Village Project, a five-year “community study.”
The fraction of the Forest Hills work reported out in Crestwood Heights (*) was Seeley's first major publication, and established his professional presence. Crestwood Heights was the first full-scale sociological study of a suburban community, and the first psychologically-oriented anthropological study of a community as such. Its political novelty, in bringing the tools of social science to bear upon the home lives of the managers of society rather than the managed, escaped notice at the time. But many professionals were disturbed by the study's departure from a structural-functional perspective and by its methodology, and felt it to be unduly psychological.
A deeper professional perturbation is reflected in the book's introduction:
“So intertwined, in fact, is the research with the community that this book gives the impression that its authors are still stuck in the tar-baby; their moral intensity about their task and their responsibilities both as researchers and as reporters is, in all its humorlessness and intensity, rare and admirable ... though the authors have a keener eye for moral impasse and arabesque than for the material culture or for the merely sociable ...”
Twenty years later, the concerns of conscience which prompted this mixed praise from David Riesman have become central issues for social research: they were always the most important ones.
For the Forest Hills Village Project was not a detached academic study of the established sort, but a major educational and therapeutic venture, begun by a staff of nine and in time taken up by those it affected, which aimed at transforming the life of the community. As such it was a distinct style of socio-logos, active, practical and self-conscious, whose epistemological foundations Seeley was later to write about at length. Conceived precisely in a moral spirit, this way of knowing could not escape accounting for the moral dimensions of its intervention and consequence.
Into this upper-middle-class “bedroom” suburb came Seeley and his staff, contracting with the School Board to study the schools to improve them. It was characteristic of Seeley's later approach to education, as well as to social research, that they did not commit themselves to the project until they had appeared before each of the schools' 5,000 students to explain the faint prospect of its future usefulness, and to ask the students' agreement to participate.
The schools were indeed the community's central institution, connecting the researchers with the intimate life of each family and with their formal associations, and enabling the scope and depth of their academic study. Beyond its specifics, this reflected Seeley's early-formed analytic bite in the social world, in being a stripping-off of the polite mask of the family, to reveal the contradictions beneath, the complexity of motives and unmet needs and the precarious balance of it all.
The several dimensions of their practical study and intervention went largely unreported. The first dimension included a series of “human relations” classes given weekly in each of the seven schools for five years. The classes were open spaces, to which the children came voluntarily, free to talk about the things that mattered to them -- a gift as much to them as to the researchers. The teachers observed, and were surprised and instructed by the complete absence of “discipline problems.” This second dimension of work, bringing teachers and parents to new understandings of the children and their potentials, proceeded as the researchers were invited to raise questions with teachers in their classrooms and at meetings, and to offer seminars in the village. Changing the perspectives of the agencies that dealt with children entailed, for Seeley's crew, the dual responsibility of helping staff create and adjust to their own changed roles. This principle was not confined to institutions, and they pursued the parents' eventual requests for “human relations” classes as well as they could.
The third dimension involved making of Forest Hills Village a demonstration of how simple humane methods might be used to work radical transformation in education and ultimately the full community. Each year, twelve eminent teachers from all over Canada were invited to intern there, to observe and absorb all they could of the new human sciences which bore upon education. The intent was to initiate a new sub-profession of teachers committed to transforming their own schools through new approaches in the classroom. Instead, nearly all of the 60 interns went on immediately to become principals, superintendents of school systems, Provincial directors of mental health, and the like -- if lost to the classroom, then amplifying tremendously in society the ideas they had gathered. Fifteen years later, Seeley found in widespread practice in Toronto open classrooms, mobile education centers and other ideas the project had helped introduce -- more developed there than in Berkeley, which was just starting to move out of the classroom lockstep.
There was a fourth dimension to this project of intervention, a thrust to redefine the profession and practice of community mental health in preventive and positive terms. It merged, I think, with the broader task of reconstructing the practices of psychological and social sciences to which Seeley was led inexorably by the Forest Hills Village experience.
In the goals and methods of the entire Forest Hills Village project may be seen the influence of Seeley's earliest years and dedications blown large. But society is conjugate to persons, and the social meaning of the project was to provide a model of socio-logos, a model for the way that knowledge of society might be brought to exist in society. If the model was yet incomplete in a crucial way -- in its belief that the tools of knowledge being passed on and used were themselves “objective” -- in its several dimensions it was still much more coherent than the single dimension of professional publication which it incorporated.
Facing the fact that the existence of knowledge is inherently an active intervention in human life, and recognizing and accepting the implied potentials for action and responsibility, Seeley and his co-workers generated a remarkably full-fleshed example of sociological practice. If it might equally be considered an essay in educational, therapeutic or political practice (as any effort to find a lever to change society must be), that is in the nature of the human world -- and of knowledge, as Seeley had learned. From any of these perspectives, one integrity of the project is striking: it took care to deal equally with discrete individuals and with higher systems of organization and thought, and managed this in an integrated format.
[Digestion and reformulation]
For Seeley, Forest Hills Village was a shattering experience. Between the deeper questionings of sociology's nature to which it led him, and his own concurrent psychoanalysis whose implications deepened them, his world was stood on its head. For the next three years he worked, for economic reasons, as executive director of Community Surveys, Inc. in Indianapolis, on a study of Community Chests which led him to studies of giving, and of slum redevelopment and services. He recalls it as a barren time; I think it was more a latent period, or digestive. After this came the long series of ethical, epistemological and methodological papers, addressed equally to the social and psychological sciences, that tore away at the myth-structure of their professions in the course of asking what might be the foundations of a sociology, a psychology, a social psychology, that made sense, conceptually as well as morally.
His literature was a thorn in the side of the sociological establishment. It was received, in general, or neglected, with irritation for the elegant and bewildering complexities it uncovered. Beneath the irritation was anger, and beneath this, I believe, fear, for these complexities implied the destruction of the known roles of sociology -- and perhaps a birth, for Seeley's essays constituted a political attack and prospectus which in time intrigued and influenced an eclectic group of students.
Beyond its manifest outer uses, the inner process of producing this literature was an act of re-integration for Seeley, commingled with his psychoanalysis and extending it to the full reaches of his social person and then into the world. It was his most intimate instantiation of the therapeutic task which figures in all his work: to make integral, to heal the division of the personal-psychological and the social. The rich details would make a remarkable case study in meta-psychiatry, and themselves suggest a radical reconception of therapy, but that is another long story.
The full constructive and reconstructive process, the reintegration of the sociologist and the man, took as long to unfold as did the writing. Standing back from it, Seeley's life sorts into periods. In the thirteen years from Chicago on, he had been preparing a particular perspective of sociology which surfaced its incompleteness even in the success of its Forest Hills Village employment. Recovering and reconstructing, he turned his work to reformulation of the tool of social knowledge itself, and from working on communities to working in them, and creating them. It took a decade for these two lines of his work to merge fully, for it took as long for Seeley to grow to be able fully to accept the commitments of self that his deepened vision of sociology implied, and to enter the next phase of attempting to redeem his profession, When he finally did, in the turbulent politics of mid-sixties America, it made him in some ways a pariah of his profession with heavy personal costs, but it put him in the heart of a larger family, as a whole man.
******
Seeley had come to Forest Hills Village to put the tool of “objective” knowledge in people's hands to enable them to change their lives. He came away questioning the tool itself, the moral dimensions of how we come to know and what it means to know, and the role of the knower. For to understand, say, juvenile delinquency as the product of familial psycho-pathology, or of institutional dysfunction, is to assign to one set of people a responsibility and shift it from another set, and in time to restructure society to reflect this assessment. Social research then is a judicial process, assessing and assigning responsibilities; and a species of political practice, whose effect, if not intent, is always to transform society.
This argument brought Seeley full circle back to Marx, who held that the object of understanding is to recreate the world; and brought him to face fully the human contradiction of the intellectual perspective in which he had been schooled at Chicago. The dominant myth held that sociological theory and practice were objective processes performed from some higher vantage, that the student of society stood outside the struggle to describe it. Yet the tool of “value-free” sociology could be applied to itself, through the meta-sociology of knowledge, to reveal this sociology itself as the product of social particulars, inexorably partisan in its provenance and consequences. Likewise with the notion that there exists a “scientific,” disengaged viewpoint from which to carry on psychological investigation: as Seeley learned through his own experience, psychology turned on itself into meta-psychology revealed even the abstract concepts which psychologists (and sociologists) use to be choices complexly motivated by practitioners' most private histories, and their employment of these concepts to be an integral function of their private dramas.
Where then was that detached vantage point from which a meliorative sociologist or therapist might still choose to descend, with objective tools forged there, to treat society or the person? Rather, there was no philosophical basis for the separation of the sociologist and the person: one was wholly ensnared in the human and social condition, fully the subject and creator of what one studied. In the absence of detached vantage, there was left only moral purpose to inform one's professional action. The whole enterprise was political, its ethical problems inescapable; one was either totally confused about its nature, or in it for a purpose. From this time on, Seeley strove to convince his sociological fellows, against all fashion, that the “value-free” foundation of their profession was either nonsense or deception, and either way ruinous: and to lead them to take responsibility for what they studied, how they studied it, and how and whom their studies served.
This did not make him popular.
By the terms of his own analysis, Seeley's attack on the foundations was not from a detached position, though he was not to realize the depth of his commitments for a decade. Involved in an arena of men and women in struggle, aware that his every action and inaction was a matter not separate from his sociology, Seeley took sides constantly in increasing consciousness -- if still rather within the Christian framework of Good and Evil, yet with a deepening appreciation of how these were entwined in every human circumstance.
No longer a neutral tool, in the political world sociology was a weapon. In whose service should it be employed, and how? In the next twenty years, Seeley made his choices increasingly clear, casting his lot with the managed of society rather than the managers, and for democratic freedom as the ground of justice. He chose also to try to assume responsibility for the deepest consequences of the existence of sociology itself in society, in terms that define the immense human stakes involved.
For the dry proposition that the practice of socio-logos works to recreate society in its image had a disquieting corollary for the sociology of the day, divorced from the psychological dimensions of personhood, conceiving functionality with no moral dimensions, and evading the personal responsibility of its own actors. “The direction I see events taking,” Seeley wrote,
“is toward a much-diminished notion of individual responsibility for personal acts -- the notion in turn then altering the facts -- [which demands] a much increased individual responsibility for the collective acts [e.g., segregation] which furnish the conditions and limits (or causes) of personal acts. If, as seems entirely possible, such individual responsibility for collective acts cannot be borne or adequately responded to by individuals, the likeliest outcome seems to be highly increased centralization, no doubt benign in intent, going toward an autocratic sort of society, with still further consequences for the idea and possibility of personal potency and responsibility.******
This was in 1963. Seeley was not quite able yet, or perhaps not yet despairing enough of his profession, to say outright what he was later to maintain: that, by its nature, mainline sociology had become an agency of totalitarianism, a tool of a creeping “Velvet Fascism” which furthered itself through the consequences of such uses of knowledge.
The young who would voice such crude sentiments were to appear the next year, in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. In embracing them, Seeley embraced the directness of their vision, which brought to light an ugly, explicit catalogue of the ways in which social research was being put to totalitarian service in the suppression of rebellion and social change among colonized peoples, foreign and domestic. If Seeley saw more subtly into the consequences of the very nature of this research, he saw its uses as starkly from 1964 on when he was anguished to watch the orthodox tools of social psychology used to dismiss and contain the “student rebellion,” with which Seeley had identified as the proximate agency of hope for American society; and to avoid the immense questions of justice and purpose it raised, in favor of contributing to the mechanization of social control.
In response to this betrayal, Seeley cast himself at last fully against the dehumanizing character of the science he had grown beyond, identifying the betrayal in a spate of papers and interactions that revealed him increasingly to many as a traitor to the profession. But a social juggernaut was indeed in motion, and Seeley's quoted foreboding was being rapidly realized as the social climate heated up and unrest increased. By 1973, this line of Seeley's work came to one climax as he found himself fighting a desperate rear-guard action, orchestrating a complex attempt to abort the proposed UCLA Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence – which, more clearly than any institution before it, had been designed virtually to serve as an advance base for the employment of behavioral science as a tool of authoritarian social control, an agency of Velvet Fascism indeed.
In this engagement of socio-logos against the Violence Center's version of it, Seeley came full circle, reaffirming and deepening the continuities of his life. The boy had watched Fascism's rise; the young man had enlisted to oppose it, mobilizing the hopeful weapons of knowledge. Even then, under Goebbel's direction, the social and psychological scientists of the Third Reich were harnessing their ingenuity in vilest service. It took a decade for the middle-aged man to recognize that his tools and the effects of their use by the roles of their employment were not different in kind from theirs, and a decade more to forge the tools and their user anew. Now, at sixty years of age, he found himself again a soldier against Fascism, in a covert war that permeated society most subtly, engaged in a vanguard action.
But how the terms of battle that he recognized had changed since he witnessed in Heidelberg the street-fights of a people hurt, lost and seeking an authoritarian salvation! Confronting this new salient of benign social engineering, fresh from his late 1960's experience of being at one with the children in the street, for Seeley it was as if his mother, who had taught him the meaning of authoritarian domination, had bought, from a child psychologist who would serve her intents, the knowledge of how to control him in new and subtle ways, which afforded the same power and even the same satisfactions as the whip without the problem of its public display, Or so I imagine, believing with Seeley that the events of family and of society are writ large and deep within each other, within each person and beyond, Whatever the truth of the metaphor, Seeley had, as in childhood, only the tool of sweet reason to use with the power of his rage, and he used it strategically, despite the growth of the perception he had refused to recognize fully as a child: that there were madmen in charge.
[Psychoanalysis]
The upheaval of thought about social science that Seeley experienced and chronicled did not spring like an abstract Minerva from a Jovian brow of intellect, merely the product of a keen observer pondering a scene. Rather, it was born from his involvement with and commitment to the people he “studied” at Forest Hills Village. Accepting the dimensions of his intervention in their lives, he found himself an intimate member of the community, struggling with the contradictions of his professional role brought thus home among his own kind.
Seeley detailed some of the functional and moral complexities of this conflict in the portions of Crestwood Heights that deal with the interaction of social researchers and researched. The questions continued to brood in him, and animate his later papers, which reflect his understanding of his own experience.
This understanding was in part enabled and furthered by Seeley's psychoanalytic experiences, first as analysand, later as practitioner and teacher. He had wanted analysis since reading Freud and had decided upon it in discussion with Bettelheim at Chicago, regarding it as an essential educational experience. The occasion came not by academic schedule but in response to live need. By 1951, in Forest Hills Village, Seeley was in a quandary. As it seemed to him, he had in effect become the father of some thousands of children, and at least the paterfamilias of all their mothers, who had become actively dependent on him for sagacious counsel. If the “objective” problems of this relationship could be written up as meta-sociology, the subjective ones could not be so dryly handled.
For Seeley now found himself face to face with the image of himself as his missing, nutritive father which he had pursued since the campfire and scout pack -- but here blown all out of human proportion, casting him back in the role of Wiseman/Messiah, involving him in a messianic feedback of contradiction which he would spend the rest of his social working life trying to undo. In Jung's terms, he had gone the night journey to reach a strange place where all was reversed, end in beginning: he had become the wise one teaching mothers how to mother, and fathers how to father or at least how to refrain from brutalizing and corrupting the children.
All the defenses re-organized by Seeley in adolescence into a career of socially useful activity were all but overwhelmed by the demands they had created. As much as his prior intellectual decision, this decided the timing of his long-sought analysis which he pursued during the years at Toronto, dismantling the dynamic which used the energy of rage to do good deeds that protected against the consequences of rage's expression.
Analysis gave Seeley a much richer sense of the complexity of motives which underlie the practices of scholarship, and an integral sense of the relation between private and public drama, which came increasingly to be reflected in his work. A decade later in Boston, he undertook a second round of analysis primarily for didactic purposes, to acquire analytic skills and to deepen his understanding of psychoanalytic approaches to education. But also it came right after he had attempted at York to stand as a father to the world again, to students and faculty alike, for the first time since Forest Hills Village and in a new way, and during the very time when he was making, through his response to the FSM, the final full commitment of himself as man and sociologist in the human community.
Analysis made Seeley aware of his feelings in an undulled way, enabling him to experience the largest dimensions of his anger and love. It left him able to express face-to-face his rage at the betrayal he felt at York, and free to respond in depth to the surprising events at Berkeley, which brought him to attack at last directly the accredited representatives of the dominant order and to realize and declare another allegiance.
For Seeley as man, as socio-logist facing the mystery of the actions of men amongst each other, psychoanalysis was a tool, an education, a therapy, an integral influence in his life's work of tending to society. If a crucial therapy of our age is to heal the division between the person and society, in the academy phrased as the division of psychology and sociology, then Seeley has been an exemplary agent of this therapy, beginning in his own person. The customary practices of psychotherapy work to bind people's conceptions and energy to the private domain, away from their true integration with society in history. In contrast, despite and because of his Freudian and later Jungian grounding, Seeley found himself refuting those who used Freudian reductionism to explain away the meaning of the thrust of the young on the campuses; and after his second didactic analysis did not turn away from political expression, but instead stood for the first time fully as a political actor in the full arena of society, empowered by his awareness of underlying motives.
[Educational community]
For the decade after the Forest Hills Village Project, Seeley turned his critical energy to speaking to his colleagues, in behalf of their profession's redemption; for the decade after this, begun by Berkeley, to speaking to the world out of the lived profession. But the heart of his work went to the building of family and community, no longer from some detached vantage, but as a committed actor within, his own being staked on the effort. Each of the five major engagements that followed in the next fifteen years may be seen as an essay in this task, in the general medium of education, as may his work with his own family and the community engendered around it. In this, I believe, he was attending to the most important task of sociology, of loving socio-Iogos, today: not to describe the breakdown of the most intimate glue binding persons together in society, but to inspire and guide its re-creation. And if many of his institutional ventures came to ill fate and what seemed painful failure, taken together, 1 think, they were admirable.
Gathering his conclusions about him, Seeley turned to act with such companions as he could find. Beginning in 1953, he participated in a unique collegium funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, which brought together two dozen remarkable people from a wide range of disciplines (the “Space Cadets” as they called themselves) to consider the question of mental health as involving everything that affected human well-being in society. Meeting bi-annually for a decade, it was an “invisible college” of unusual duration -- an example, and perhaps an accelerating factor, in the breakdown of the artificial fragmentation of human studies. For its participants it was an experience which enlarged both the vision and ambit of their action.
For Seeley, in addition, it served a vital need: it was a nurturing forum, a place where he could bring the questions he then was raising and the ideas with which he struggled, and find them greeted, if not necessarily with agreement, always with interest and respect. It was an ideal teaching/learning situation, a community of peers opening each other's horizons; and in it also Seeley could play what was always a favorite role -- the universal translator making the various tongues coherent to one another. For six years more, at the Center for Advanced Study and the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, he had such a forum for his base; and when in 1969 he was left without one in the Center's moral collapse, he was indeed bereft of an important support.
In 1957, Seeley returned to Toronto as Research Director of the Alcoholism Research Foundation of Ontario, a post he held for three years. He found in this a fairly new field, open perhaps to fundamental interventions in its conceptualization, a place to ground the notions he had been developing. The papers he wrote on this are interleaved with others concerned with the reconceptualization of a dozen fields, from social work and mental retardation to legal philosophy, stemming from his re-examination of the foundations of social science. As his concerns led him to urge, for the treatment of alcoholic addiction, the diversification of interventions, so in response to the other addictions of society Seeley was led to diversify his own interventions, working to organize against the insanity of the bomb-shelter boom, and against the persistence of corporal punishment and the inculcation of religion in the public schools.
The most important product of these years was the research staff which Seeley brought together at A.R.F. A non-hierarchical ensemble with uniquely open mechanisms for sharing thought, which were reflected in many joint papers, it was another venture in educational community, compact and focused, with Seeley as the catalytic agent. More nearly then the Space Cadets, it was a mode of family in which Seeley stood again as paterfamilias, more modestly and integrally than at Forest Hills Village, sharing with his mind his warmth. And surely the brotherly quality of its interaction transcended Seeley's part in it and survived his departure, for many of the staff still work together in this way to this day.
[York University]
Meanwhile, a new venture was brooding, a next step in the attempt to build educational community. Since his YMCA days, Seeley had been close friends with Murray Ross with whom he shared the development of educational ideas and ideals, and who currently was a Vice-President of the University of Toronto. Canada was just then waking to the higher education boom, and Toronto had only one public university. Together, Ross and Seeley secured a charter for a second, York University, with guarantees for a free hand in its development from both the provincial and federal governments.
There was always, in Seeley's working dreams, a tension: simultaneously, they represented reasonable responses to historical social circumstances and unreasonable idealism. York was Seeley's first chance to play with the task of starting a new educational institution from scratch and it unbound his imagination. He hoped to bring to bear on higher education all that had been learned about human beings since the Middle Ages, to produce an exemplary model for a different age with different problems.
More realistically, York was to be a tutorial college, emphasizing one-to-one relationships. It was also to provide for students a place and power in the processes of institutional decision-making, though the details of this remained to be worked out. Opening in 1960 with about ten faculty and 75 students, its growth was to be gradual, towards an eventual limit of 2,000,
The first year at York was idyllic for Seeley, his energy fully invested in building a dream. But already the seed of its promise was deteriorating, as the larger and meaner forces which shape institutions came into play in conflicting visions of empire, The chairman of the trustees' board, a truly big businessman, was also a leading figure in the Liberal Party, with Prime Ministerial ambitions; York was a political staging area for him, in which slow processes of building worked against his immediate interests. Ross himself had recently been passed over for the Presidency of the University of Toronto and had his own ambitions. Under their lead, the tutorial relationship of York was redefined to include dealing with several students at once, and then to all sorts of classes. In the month that U.T. set a limit of 24,000 to its own growth, President Ross declared York's intention to absorb 27,000 students in the next decade.
To build a big university was easier than to grow a great one. York's fate was determined by the fourteenth month when crucial decisions about size, planning, curriculum and the distribution of power came down from above, and when Ross came to student meetings to persuade them, in what Seeley saw as a fundamental corruption of the original agreements about the democratic place of students in governance, to accept what was happening. Tensions mounted during this second year and flared into open conflict in the third. York's original students and faculty felt strongly that the President had betrayed the dream that had brought them there, and at one point 19 of the 25 faculty considered petitioning the Board to fire him.
It was too late. When it came to a showdown, no real powers at all had been delegated to the students, despite the initial vision. Within the campus itself, the realities of power were dictated not by legislation but by social process. For rapid growth was not simply pernicious to the spirit of York's original aim; it destroyed even the power to defend that spirit. Disrupting the promised slow growth of shared values and commitments that bond community, it diluted any possibility of resistance and left no obstacle to the absolute power of the Administration.
The strategy is standard in the control of populations; its benign intention easily evades the moral scrutiny of its consequence. For Seeley, though he had chronicled such matters as a “sociologist” before, it was his first real introduction to how power actually works in a university. What struck him was the utter functional contempt for persons, the merely instrumental way in which parties “of good will” saw and used each other and those they had power over, free of the moral dimensions of mutual commitment.
There was also another problem, at once functional and moral, that dizzied Seeley as he sought to understand why the original contracts with students and faculty were not being honored. No one, no person, could be found to take responsibility for what was happening -- not even Ross, who claimed to be only transmitting, through the bottleneck of his role, the multiple pressures bearing upon him. If Seeley felt distressed by this, it was not only because he had sought to incarnate a piece of dream but because of his friendship with Ross. This gave him what he had already had with himself -- a rich opportunity to observe the complex of forces acting upon the social actor from without and from within: he was privy to Ross's dreams, watched him return from his first meeting with the Board transformed, like an English boy first blooded with the fox. But to explain was not to explain away, nor to excuse, and Seeley's personal grief at the betrayal he felt was inseparable from the objective situation. For persons, not sociological or psychodynamical constructs, are the substances of social life and the referents of meaning within it, and the “diminished notion of individual responsibility for personal acts ... [and failure to bear adequately] responsibility for collective acts” of which Seeley wrote in a different context as underwriting the growth of a soft totalitarianism, had here a most personal face.
Again and again during his major engagements of the next decade, Seeley was to be devastated by this sense of personal betrayal by specific persons -- betrayal not of abstract ideas, but of specific substantive and procedural contracts and of the moral purposes incarnated in them. He took such matters so seriously, so personally that his reactions brought him a reputation as quixotic, A more “realistic” man might well have grown used to the process or insulated himself from it emotionally, but Seeley had gone a long journey to dissolve the division between his private self and his social persona, and was no longer desirous or capable of reversing it. For the rest of his life, Seeley was to continue to find such betrayals unforgivable, for they struck at the foundation of the chance to create an order of humane justice in the world, and rendered the community he sought for himself and others impossible because unbelievable.
Still they kept happening to him, as if he went looking [or them. His work alone was bound to set them up, but so perhaps was the way he went about it. Despite his socio-analytic grounding, he often misjudged the complexities of motive and the strength of the binding forces which constrain human decision; and assumed too readily that others shared his understanding of the understandings they professed, and were committed to the action implications. Still he persisted in taking people at their best word. This was often a means either of provoking them to act on their high pretensions or to reveal their difference from their word, in ways which left him feeling abused and righteous, as if to justify a childhood script. It was equally a consistent style of public pedagogy, as much an attempt to create a civilizing truth as to reveal its betrayal.
[Brandeis, M.I.T.]
A battle had been lost. In contrast with Seeley's later experience there was yet no active purging of the losers; but like others, Seeley had lost the heart to invest himself further in that particular arena, and at the end of the third year he took a leave of absence, and subsequently resigned after many of the faculty, also formally protesting, had done so.
It was 1963. Seeley went with his family to Brandeis as a visiting professor in the sociology department. He enjoyed a simultaneous appointment as sociologist in the Medical Department of M.I.T. Here his main work was with Ben Snyder, pursuing the ideas they had developed together in the Space Cadets. They undertook a psychoanalytic-oriented study of the “hidden curriculum” of M.LT., attempting to recognize afresh what and how students actually learned there. They discovered, in every influence of architecture and each professor's gesture, a world of meaning with significant implications for educational policy and practice; but Seeley's written output dealt less with this richness than with critique of the inadequate perspectives on ego development that had been revealed by the depth-interview processes of their study.
At M.l.T., Seeley found himself again the consultant who could bridge the gaps between the domains of sociology, psychology and the statistical or “positive” sciences. Indeed, he had become reasonably skilled in this latter domain since encountering Euclid. Perhaps his sharpest accomplishment was his use of logical algebra and attribute analysis to demonstrate that the “Jellinek formula” upon which all contemporary estimations of alcoholism were based was not simply unreliable, but demonstrably logically false. Here again, with customary perversity, Seeley was troubling the justification of orthodox socio-therapeutic strategies, and it drew the customary reaction. He found it hard even to get the results published, and ever after watched the papers of the field refer to it in dutiful footnotes, but persist in using the disproven methods of estimation anyway.
Seeley's main engagement in Boston was with Brandeis, where he found himself welcomed by the faculty of both his fields. The pressure to keep him there grew to match his liking of the place, and led President Sacher to secure the funds for a perpetually endowed chair in Seeley's name. When an invitation came to spend time as a Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences, he was torn. Sacher bade him go, assuring him that the chair was assured -- as indeed it was, for he returned to Brandeis as the Philip Klutznick Distinguished Professor of Sociology. Reassured, Seeley moved across the country to California in 1964, where he meant to spend a year writing meta-sociology.
[The Berkeley Free Speech Movement]
Early in 1966, shortly after my review of the books on the Berkeley Free Speech Movement had appeared inRamparts, I received a letter from the chairman of the sociology department at Brandeis, asking,
"Did you mean it literally when you said that all the essays explained nothing? I thought I was closer to the movement than that, and that I had caught at something which Savio and others had communicated face to face. Perhaps not. But if that really is your considered opinion, the implication for me would be that I should do a great deal more study, since I regard the events at Berkeley as the most important to happen in American higher education in the last ten or twenty years. “My warmest good wishes in any case,
"John R. Seeley" His letter was itself of sociological interest, as it is not the custom for sociologists to solicit judgment of their understandings from the people they study. Indeed, the question of to whom the students of society ought be responsible was one of a cluster of moral issues raised by the FSM, and sidestepped by the faculty as they detoured from their accustomed lunchtime routes to avoid the congestion of our rallies. Even the customary academic virtues failed the conflict: despite this convenient placement of a unique historical event and social laboratory, not one faculty member attempted the responsibility of direct, systematic study of the FSM's process. All this was an intellectual betrayal in some ways deeper than the differences of politics that divided the campus, and I took it personally. If soon after, in leaving the house which did not honor its purposes, I felt somewhat an orphan in the absence of fathers I could respect, it was as young men often do, and for good reason.
So I was curious about this perverse sociologist Seeley, and wrote him the truth, that I had not had space to detail the few exceptions, and that his essay indeed spoke to what I thought was the core issue: the moral legitimacy of authority as deriving from the genuine consent of the governed. He wrote back,
“I had begun to say that only that deserves recognition as authority which authenticates itself from moment to moment in terms of the living experience ... even where it is in one place for any length of time, it is only there for limited purposes. It therefore lies all around us more particularly as we legitimate and authenticate and in a sense bring into existence each other's authorities.“I am sorry this sounds probably all very square. I should tell you, however, that we are so desperately engaged here in a war to give at least partial effect to these ideas, that it is almost " my power to write anything. Indeed my capacity to teach and think in the ordinary and theoretic sense is substantially invaded. As soon as I can get down off our version of the police car, I will try to write you more fully.“Meanwhile, if I may put it so, I draw strength from the fact of your very existence.
“Sincerely, (etc.)."******
When the Free Speech Movement exploded on the Berkeley campus in October 1964, Seeley was thirty miles away and naked to its impact. His engagement with the Brandeis students had brought him into contact and sympathy with the Civil Rights movement in America as it swept the northern campuses; and the Berkeley administration's attempt to suppress its campus movement, which touched off the FSM, offended him deeply, coming as it did not out of mistaken yet principled decisions but from simple pliancy to outside pressure.
The issue of how far student political involvement should be allowed to penetrate the campus was subsumed in larger issues of educational governance, raised by the FSM and echoed on a thousand campuses during the next few years. Who was to decide what learning should be furthered and by whom, how it should be undertaken and how judged, in whose service it should be, and what was of service to it, and how were these to be decided? Fresh from his York experience, Seeley was swept by a more than intellectual compassion as we struggled with the same issues of governance, of how power would be distributed and whether its use would be democratic, moral and truthful, or authoritarian and immoral; as the bureaucracy paraded deceits and betrayed crucial agreements, and we sought fruitlessly for persons who would take responsibility for their acts; and as we finally took responsibility for our own, as the York students had been too polite and unready to do, creating the first campus sit-in and strike and securing what Seeley himself was not to manage for a decade or more -- one small clear temporary moment of victory in a moral cause.
And there was a larger issue yet, which struck Seeley more deeply in mind and heart. The FSM was a watershed: in it, for the first time, members of the privileged and dominant class in America came to recognize en masse their own oppression at the hands of the institutions that favored them, rebelled on their own behalf, and began the struggle to develop new institutions to reform the mainstream of their society. Elsewhere (*), I have discussed the way the FSM's impulse manifested in the Haight-Ashbury, the subsequent broadening of the political movement to the "counter-culture," and the present legacy of alternative political and institutional effort. Two observations seem pertinent to Seeley's perception of the event. First, it was no accident that the FSM occurred among the best students of what was then accounted the best all-round university in America; it was rather a deep contradiction come to surface, an announcement of our starvation in the midst of apparent plenty.
Second, the university was indeed our parent institution, inculcating and monitoring the final stages of our preparation for adult citizenship. To turn our anger against its benevolence was shocking to many, who dismissed us mainly as ungrateful children, and shocking to us as well, for in our action we endured a profound psycho-social transition. Within the family, the adolescent's break with the parents is partly an assertion of independent identity. For many individuals, and for us collectively, the FSM was a similar rite of passage. And if, alone and together, we have not fully passed on to anything, and in many ways have fallen back, it is because no completion for the passage yet exists. For as the university was our surrogate parent, then the other institutions of society, which it so deeply resembled, governed us paternally also. Truly to leave the family, to see ourselves no longer as the dependent extension of their personalities, was to enter an unknown space -- to face the task of creating a new adulthood in a changed society, without ritual, tradition or example to guide us, nor any supporting structures.
For Seeley, the FSM and its quick evolution made it seem as if the world had been set afire by the children he had dreamed of, whose energy would. spring unbounded from humanized families and schools. He had never expected them in his own day, Yet here they were, moving spontaneously and en masse, with style, humor and joy in the midst of suffering; attentive to the realities he had come to perceive, seeking to deal with their inner dynamics as well as the external situation, and fiercely and appropriately moral. Moved partly by wish and partly by recognition, and fully by love, he thought that history had been short-circuited: not simply that the war he had foreseen some generations after his death had been declared and engaged, which may be true, but that these struggles would so shock the conscience of the nation that there would come a massive de-legitimizing, and perhaps an overturning, of those who had claimed power on a moral basis but were now to be shown as morally naked. Time since has reminded him, with us, that it is a long march with no assurance; but I think it is still better to be staggered by hope than by weariness, even, or especially, in one's fifty-first year.
Some decisive success seemed to hang in the balance; for a moment Seeley believed there were more adults hanging on the verge of redemption than there were, and that our actions would help many in forcing their decision. Later he was to recognize those who were held by the moment's crisis in the shell of their perceptions yet opened to slow kinds of growth in the years that followed. At the time, he was most furious not with the Feuers who used their intellectual gifts as open enemies, but with those of his colleagues who stood on the sidelines, whom he saw in transformed light as cowards, thinking only of their own security and a narrow vision of preservation of social life as it stood.
To dismiss his anger as partisan is to evade its line of thought and the evolution of his socio-logos; for he had come to ask now of them, "The students betrayed and beaten in the streets are your friends and colleagues; how then does that inform the meaning of what it is to study society?" and to tell them that an academic who studies institutions and does not then act on what he finds is a counter-model to hold up to students, and one who chooses not to understand what he is involved in is worse.
This line of thought, transposed to educational governance, led Seeley to see as atrocious the refusal of Clark Kerr, then President of the University of California, to make any comment on the students' rough arrest after inflaming the press with remarks about their "Communist domination" and keeping mute on the genuine educational issues at stake. Seeley's opinion was amplified on learning from me that, after three months and our arrests, Kerr still had not taken the trouble to understand precisely the substantive issue of advocacy, but had to have it explained again by his lawyers. A mediator in a quite different modality than Seeley, concerned with brokering among power-groups and serving a different class interest in his mediation, Kerr seemed consumed in a mini-max game, seeking the saddle-point of least risk. That Kerr would not perceive the issues as moral, even to justify himself, did more than infuriate Seeley: it opened his eye to a vision of how deeply a merely Eichmanesque mentality reigned in high places.
******
The FSM was a Rubicon for Seeley, Before 1964 he had spoken mainly to his colleagues; after, he tried to speak to the world. Earlier, he had come to understand and say that social science is concealed advocacy; now he became an overt and. deliberate advocate, understanding this as the only just role for a social scientist in our time and attempting to translate to colleagues and world alike the brief, not simply of the FSM, but of the many-branched movement for social justice that was rising in America -- not as a mere propagandist, but as one who could interpret what was latent and still undeveloped in its message.
In polite quarrel after polite quarrel, as he tried to bring home to his colleagues the intrinsic relevance of the movement's brief to their deepest concerns, Seeley threw away his academic assets, the substantial material security and the respect and acceptance as "one of us" that he had retained even while he was troubling the meta-sociological foundations. His lifetime base of association was undermined as old associates accused him of trying to contaminate with ideology a science that was settling down to peace, and implied that Seeley had made himself the enemy of order and ally of Fascism as well as a traitor to the profession. The irony of the imputation lay not simply in Seeley's coming to a kindred vision of them in turn, albeit a subtler one, but in his having come to understand that only a passionate commitment to genuine democracy as the frame of advocacy could render advocacy just, once the illusion of an "objective, value-free" frame had been discarded.
Against this chosen disfavor, Seeley enjoyed the friendship and loyalty of an eclectic, growing circle, which was to him a family, of cohorts, colleagues and students, of people with whom he worked in service, and who trusted the meaning of his words. This circle had been growing slowly for a decade in Seeley's professional world. Now it grew explosively, as he cast himself into broader service, and as the growth of his own blood family, which he had tended until this time with all the quiet fierce devotion one might expect from a man so dedicated to reversing the unhappy circumstance of his childhood, swept him up in return, as the adolescence of his four sons led him into a thousand places and lives.
For as Seeley had felt himself joined by the children of his dream in the FSM, so he joined them in return. As much as his children's studier and tutor, correcting the world's misinterpretation of them and advising their growth, he became their student in turn, the educator integral at last. He had lost the intimate defense of paternalistic authority, which protects the self from change by enforcing the protocol that the older, the teacher, the empowered, be above learning from the younger, the student, the subject. Unconcerned with his dignity, and for the sake not of educational ideology but of his naked self, he followed his children into all the experiences and cultural byways of the time, and a great joy opened in him as his vision altered.
[Stanford, Brandeis]
The quiet year Seeley had planned at the Center for Advanced Study was perturbed by the FSM. He went up to Berkeley at times to hang out around high circles and low, from Kerr and Glazer to Mario Savio, and brought the issues back to chew with his colleagues. Still more of his energy was bound in the unsanctioned organizing he was engaged in with Christian Bay and the Graduate Student Organizing Committee on the Stanford campus. This was the first dedication of his mature socio-logos to political issue, and the shape of its intervention had a characteristic integrity.
Seeking to help catalyze a supportive and parallel response to the FSM, Bay and Seeley initiated the Association of Stanford Scholars to create a forum to explore the genuine differences and similarities of interest among the subgroups of student, grad student, TA, faculty, in preparation for the political issues that were coming up and to bring the Administration to account. The A.S.S charter was precisely to the time's point, and yet Bay and Seeley were surprised when seventeen eminent faculty joined in their call.
At the first meeting, 700 students showed up, and during that Spring the A.S.S. was a major force in energizing the Stanford campus. One project was to study the whole of the process by which a given plot of grass came to be turned into a parking lot for the faculty's convenience, tracing the structures of power behind each step of decision. When the Scholars invited the university's planning officer to instruct them on how such things were done, the president grew nervous.
Such active sociology has considerable potential, but takes discipline to pursue; the A.S.S. fell apart after Seeley left, yet it had a broader influence in the society of the campus. An awakening energy had found in the A.S.S. a form to rouse itself more and to focus consciousness on values, interests and issues; and moved on -- in the first student election in memory at Stanford that was not just a popularity contest -- to elect David Harris and crew as president on a platform emphasizing government's reorientation to the educational and social issues of the day. Harris went on to local anti-war organizing in the fertilized climate and was the key organizer of The Resistance, which soon spread to become the major nonviolent vehicle of the national anti-war movement. Such distant reflections of small interventions were a frequent grace of Seeley's work.
When Seeley returned to Brandeis in 1965 as chairman of the sociology department, he called a meeting of the department -- inviting students before faculty -- to discuss the issues phrased by the FSM and attempt a different approach to educational community. The issues were vital, their resolution unclear. Seeley insisted that nothing in the nominal status of any person should exclude him or her from entering into their determination, and that the test of authority should be people's agreement as to who bore the burden of wisdom on each given matter at each given moment. All structures, all processes of mutual resolution were possible: common meetings, scholarly exchange, arenas of fair fight. What mattered was that what they did together should be determined not a priori, but by the unfolding history of their relationship.
Seeley recalls it as his most joyous year in academia. The department went wild, becoming in effect an educational commune. As one group's demonstration of what could happen when relations were freed for motion, six paid graduate assistants began meeting to consider their relative exploitation. They soon got down to the heavier issue of the peculiar responsibilities of the persons who could learn by teaching in their niche on the career ladder, and to what happened to this impulse as people attained professorship. In time their regular meetings came to involve voluntarily almost all the department's faculty and graduate students and then as many undergraduates, and began producing excellent reflective documents on educational issues.
Seeley encouraged his faculty to receive these student papers as serious scholarship and to write scholarly responses and followed a strict protocol himself in relation to this group, as to others. When any policy issue came up that related to any of its concerns, he sent them notice and questions or wrote papers to which he asked them to respond. In this way, after the group had begun struggling with the question of whether and how students should grade professors, Seeley triggered the events that led Brandeis to become the first university in the nation to struggle with the question of its relation to the Selective Service System.
For Seeley, attentive to anything that would compromise the moral foundations of educational relations, the issue was luminous. Only custom compelled the university to furnish grades to the Selective Service System; the university had never provoked public debate on the issue, nor court test. Yet by what right was such private information published without student's free and genuine consent? The faculty could not safely offer the opinions students needed for their growth, for to do so increased the probability that the students would become either corpses or murderers. Seeley drew the conclusion that the faculty should cease to issue grades, and offered his notions to the study group in a paper.
Such interventions are not the work of supermen, but elements of field situations, yet surely Seeley had good taste in picking his occasions. Soon the group issued its own study paper and brought about a meeting of most of the student body, which published alternative formulations of what the university should do, and issued a call to the faculty to meet and discuss the matter. A quarter of the faculty responded immediately, a majority soon after, reaching the conclusion that grading was impossible in the circumstance and that the university should at least provoke a court test.
By the time the engaged faculty could bring the matter before the Faculty Council, the higher levels of administration were able to respond. President Sacher ruled not only that a decision was not within the faculty's power, but that the matter itself was inappropriate for the faculty even to discuss, and ordered it struck from the agenda. Seeley simply circulated the correspondence among the entire faculty, observing that the issue had now shifted to the President's illusion that there were things a faculty should not discuss. Sacher sent Seeley a delegation to tell him that, though he might be right on the issue, it would be disastrous for Jewish relations in America if the only Jewish university should appear to take a disloyal stance. Seeley publicly quoted Sacher's declaration that Brandeis was not a "Jewish university" but a Jewish gift to the nation. It was the routine operation of his style, to take people's high rhetoric seriously and try to hold them to it; this was in many cases the most one could do, and at times had a powerful organizing effect.
As usual, Seeley's moral suasion was outgunned. The administration parliamentarian succeeded at the senate meeting in sidetracking the matter into committee for six weeks. During this more leisurely time Sacher was able to put teeth in the thought that university policy was beyond scholarly purview, in part by convincing senior faculty that irresponsible action would lead the local bankers to call the major, short-term notes and thus plunge Brandeis into fiscal disaster. Despite continuing student pressure, the issue was dead -- although the raised issues of faculty power and student rights continued to reverberate on campus -- and the project of testing the SS regulation's justice was left to another university to attempt.
******
Seeley recalls his decision to leave Brandeis as clean; he had announced to his colleagues at the year's beginning that he had a competing potential engagement, and that if their united efforts to democratize the department and university were sufficiently successful he would stay, and otherwise leave to pursue the general rather than the particular battle, Had his efforts been confined within the department, he might well have stayed to enjoy its familial life. But beyond the rich lesson in institutional power which the SS coflict afforded Seeley, I think it struck him in deep ways. He still identified with the faculty, who through his efforts had been led by and led the students to a pitch of expectation, and to challenge the mother-institution's brutalization of family. The effort failed, owing to what he saw again as the cowardice of his colleagues. How then could the faculty, or he, continue to be seen as credible defenders of the young? Surely the ghost of his own father, who had returned at times to object weakly to his mother's reign of injustice and then departed without effecting change, worked live within Seeley at this time, inclining him to flee the painful recreated scene and, in fleeing it, in some ways to recreate it yet again.
The question of Seeley's exits involves not only such childhood roots but also the issue of how the sociologist should continue to relate with the community he serves, once he has lost the safe separation of profession and man which permits him to sever relations surgically.
In general, Seeley left when he perceived his major opportunity as catalytic agent to be blocked, to serve this function elsewhere. Only in Toronto, where his various engagements led him to help train a whole generation of applied social scientists inhabiting several institutions, did he pursue his involvement in any one place for more than a few years. Yet the true place in which he worked had no one location, and in its decentralized familial enfoldment, the continuity and persistence of his effort was remarkable. As for local staying power, I myself watched what happened as Seeley stayed on at Cal Arts after the purge in 1970, to salvage what humanity was possible in the scene and cover the retreat of those he loved, and know it cost him dearly.
[The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions]
During his first stay in California, Seeley had visited the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara. There he returned in 1966, to accept Robert Hutchins' offer of a tenured, lifetime post as the Center's Dean. Retirement was on Hutchins' mind; he intended Seeley to inherit leadership of the moral and political thrust of the enterprise, and for the next three years Seeley, in consultation with him, oversaw the entire non-business operation, from staff organization to the choice of Center topics and collegial invitees.
Seeley had come to conclude that there was little point in losing, or even winning, local battles. He wanted to stand at a distance to strategize the general social war. He saw in the Center not only an ideal base for himself, but an enterprise that might live up to its name in the terms in which he had come to understand "study" and "democratic institution" -- that might become internally a genuine community of learning rather than a debating society, and externally a place of passionate advocacy, an organizing focus for perspectives that might enable revolution.
To this end, as Dean he worked to lower the age of the Center's Fellows, to bring into their discussion a great array of minorities, the young and other subjects and deviants of society, and to focus attention on the issues affecting them, which the Center had scanted. Beyond fresh directions of intellectual thrust, he wanted the Center to become a place that would legitimize lives which, like his, oscillated between thought and activism in an integral way. His pet internal project was to generate the constitution that would make a genuine self-governing institution rather than what Hutchins himself saw as a house of democratic centralism or, less politely, an autocracy. Ironically, the penultimate stage of this process produced the occasion for the purge of Seeley and most of the "Permanent Senior Fellows."
The role of distant advocate and intervener, for which Seeley chose the Center, in some ways contradicted the understandings he had come to and threatened to recreate the split between person and professional. But by now many such splits in Seeley's life had been dissolved beyond redemption, and even the flow of his writing bespoke his inability to contain himself. The constant stream of his in-house essays, which focused largely on the metaphor of education and through it on institutional structure, function and governance, spilled out into his series of publications on his professions' foundations, into encyclopedias, yearbooks, Our Generation and other issue journals, the local town press and campus paper, etc., in a running polemic on schools and students. Seeley also went abroad as advocate, speaking on some fifty campuses -- spreading his institutional analysis and indictment, and discussing the range of issues which together he saw as configuring the collapse of Western civilization, failing the prevailing of certain terms he saw sketched in the various branches of the Movement. And he moved out informally, to explore the nature, warmth and tribulations of the broader family whose member he had found himself.
[Seeley afield]
During 1966, our correspondence developed; at Thanksgiving, Karen and I drove to Santa Barbara to meet him in family. How can I recall the progression of mutual love? We found a small man, with a scrawny beakish face above a surprisingly strong body, who did not fear, as most men do, to share a true embrace, The civilized arabesques of his prose had been misleading, disguising rather than gilding the force of his personality: he was present, tender, and surpassingly sweet. His conversation was shaped by the intellectual's impulse to play in the heights of abstraction, and the raconteur's to digress in Chaucerian anecdote, yet was instantly ready to respond to the hint of another's feelings or needs. Above all, perhaps, he met one genuinely as an equal, with an active caring.
To meet Jack in his immediate family was to witness the intimate core of love that surrounded and sustained him. The boys were as quick with their affection as he was, and became independently our friends over the years. Together they were a formidable troupe, unusually close and mutually respectful, and we saw in the family as a whole a reasonable approximation to the commonwealth of mutual nourishment and growth and autonomy within a framework of shared governance that Seeley sought in the world.
As for Margaret herself, the mysteries of conjugal love are too delicate to treat here. She deserves full share of credit for the boys, not only for accomplishing the herculean tasks of base-making and coping to which our sexist culture assigns women (a division far from reconstructed in the Seeley family) and for the imprint of her person in them, but because she had a unique impression and perception of Jack that functioned as corrective for his own and others'.
In later years, I came to appreciate more broadly the uniqueness of Seeley's character. He had, among my fairly broad acquaintanceship, quite the most sensitive and penetrating understanding of the young and what was happening to them in our society, a capacity to stretch ideas to their abstract limits and to take them absolutely personally, and a sense of delicacy and tact which led him to be unfailingly civilized even in his bitterest disputes, to the point, I sometimes thought, of self-defeat.
Indeed, Seeley was perverse, the sort of man who, at a routine meeting to decide whether classroom chairs should be red or blue, would insist on asking what was meant by "red" and "blue" and whether there should be classrooms at all. The quirk of his mind led him consistently to recognize the distance between what people thought they were doing and what they did, and the effects of the contradictions. Beyond his grasp of the articulation of values, he had a stunning knack of choosing issues, cognitive and social, with a therapist's or psychotic's sensitivity to the presence of buried charge, and an equal knack of choosing the intervention that would bring out the true resistances and feelings beneath them. All in all, it was easy to see why trouble and violent polarizations surfaced wherever Seeley meddled, and why many who had not faced his personal. displeasure found him nonetheless a danger to society -- an evil, nagging, petulant gnome, the agent of chaos.
I came to see him instead as the Fool of Sociology, as over a decade I watched him return battered from engagements and each time sally forth again, with not his optimism but his innocence and wonder undaunted. In perpetual naivete, he sought to extend justice and reason in a world in which, though he grasped the facts of malice and insanity and despite his experience of them, he could never quite comprehend their nature and force. The cowardice and betrayal of his colleagues continued to surprise him; time and again he foretold the routine bureaucratic disaster, yet was always amazed when it came. Totally involved in cultivating an integral sensibility, he could not grasp how others not so committed could escape the obviousness of its conclusions, nor what a genuine rarity was his way of being in the moral world.
******
Seeley came to our tiny cottage in Berkeley in return, not once but many times; it was always like having some marvelous fragile butterfly descend to sip from our garden, even when his wings were crumpled and torn, Always there beat in the space between us the sense of wonder, appreciating impartially the qualities of ideas and herbal teas, of our kinships and crazy friends, and of the social dynamics of struggle and atrocity as the war went on and the decade ground our lives in its turbulence.
As the Haight-Ashbury blossomed in San Francisco in 1967, I brought Jack into its swirl. The Haight was besieged with social researchers as well as journalists, and paranoid about their parasitism; yet this old imp found himself accepted without question among the weird children, not simply for the receptive grace of his presence, but because he had lost the safe distance of the observer to become, as we were, a person living on the existential edge, open to all its passion and terror. He made perhaps twenty visits to the Haight, disappearing for days at a time, passed along from friend to friend in the communes and enterprises of an extending family, and following its movers as they dispersed to seed the small towns and foothills of California, He was also, during this period, involved with Joan Baez, Ira Sandperl, and circles of non-violence and community action in Palo Alto, as well as with the growth of the Isla Vista community in Santa Barbara and all the "counter-cultural" involvements of his sons.
I often wondered how he kept his balance; for to see him at the Center was to see him in a different world, urbane and vaporous, a Platonic academy where old men sat at table to chew as dry abstraction the profoundest human suffering, with never a tremble of rage or anguish in their voices. However ideal the post may have been, Jack had too much juice in him to deserve its mummification, and would likely have exploded or withered there had he lacked the outlet of richer engagements. As it was, the remarkable range of his associations among the younger movers of politics and culture enriched at least the mental life of the Center, and brought the breath of passion at times to the dry deliberations where it was received not always with gratitude.
When Karen and I finally married in rich ceremony among our people in the foothills of the Sierras, the Spring of 1969, Jack was there. With him and the few others of his generation and the children in the meadows, we felt ourselves completed as a people in the time of generations. Some weeks later, as the protests spread in Berkeley over the People's Park, he shared with me the equally rare experience of standing under a government helicopter as it began its gassing run.
As he was received in the intimate ceremonies of our lives, so Seeley shared in their public cusps. In 1967, as the anti-war movement spread East, he joined the March on the Pentagon. For a quarter century, since his army days, he had been an advisor to high seats, spending even more time in Washington than in Ottawa, and declining offers to serve as an executive assistant to the Director of the Peace Corps and the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity, But by now he had cut tie after tie, excluding himself from the charmed circles of policy and power, ceasing to be in any sense even nominally a loyal American. The day before the March he went to stand outside the huge federal buildings, tiny and alone in a space that seemed both prison and free, realizing how thoroughly he had become an outsider and that there was no way back, no forgiveness. Then a car pulled up, disgorging a horde of hippies from the Haight who embraced him in the glad recognition of lost children and whirled him off to spend the night at a meeting of underground press people that grew into the founding of the Liberation News Service, before they marched, together in the morning.
The next summer 1 stopped in Santa Barbara en route to the Democratic Convention. We walked on the beach as I salvaged the skeletons of pelicans killed by oil and we shared reports on the proliferation of our network of alternative institutions and our dread of what was gathering in the dark air of a culture that had come to be terrified by its children. When I saw Jack again, it was at 3 A.M. outside the Hilton Hotel in the streets of Chicago. If we cried as we embraced, it was not alone from the teargas and terror. He had brought a friend to bear witness in the moral commune of our presence; my slides of the occasion record the ritual. Arc-lights glint off the barbed wire and serried ranks of rifles; the Episcopal Bishop looms resplendent in gold miter and scarlet cassock, in one hand staff raised high, in the other the thin, wine-dipped wafer of communion he and Jack offer in turn to guardsman after guardsman who refuse, their boyish faces uncertain and grim beneath the helmets, until at last one accepts and is led away to jail by his officers; and at the Bishop's elbow the small figure of Seeley the meddling gnome, Seeley the farmboy dragging the minister by his conscience, Seeley the Fool still believing in the face of evil evidence that one gesture of moral meaning might resonate in the heart of society and lead the parents to redeem themselves.
[Seeley exiled]
The purge called "reorganization" came at the Center in 1969 when a multi-million dollar windfall brought to a climax the strains accumulating from Seeley's effort, with a few others, to turn the Center to a less academic relevance. Unable fully to recognize himself for the irritant he was, or to expect skullduggery in the community of ideals, Seeley courteously consented to the business manager's veto of the planned open election among the Center's Fellows, and agreed to a proposal that the permanent staff be chosen instead by an expanding consensual process, beginning with Hutchins, who chose the business manager, who blackballed Seeley and others of the Center's core of twenty.
Seeley had been careful about tenure from York on, for it gave him the freedom to further or to oppose, as justice demanded, even the administration that granted it. Yet what devastated him now was not so much the loss of an unassailable lifetime base, but Hutchins' conscious acquiescence in the process of the purge, which involved in the deepest sense the breaking of a paternal oath of fealty as well perhaps as outright fraud, Another purgee took the Center to court for the breaking of a lesser contract and obtained a whopping six-figure settlement out of court. For Seeley, the dimensions of betrayal were too complex for him to contest the matter on this superficial ground, or even to counter the Center's public whitewash of the affair.
With the loss of a base went collapse of the support system which had enabled Seeley to publish over 440 books and articles. During the next five years, the thrust of his work was fragmented between three major involvements and a dozen minor lectureships, consuItantships and tutorial relations as he drifted looking for a home. The frequency of his being asked to stand as candidate for college presidencies dropped from four times yearly to one, and the schools grew more obscure. His wide net of respect and kinship continued to surface other likely engagements; yet most of these were far from the West Coast which his children came to inhabit, and he and Margaret were loathe to leave them.
Nor were even these potential engagements unembattled; for by now Seeley's habit of conducting relations with those beneath and above him in power as he saw proper, rather than by the rules of the trade, had earned him enmity in many quarters. Perhaps the most interesting case was in Toronto where, during his several teaching engagements, Seeley had attempted to create systems in which students and younger staff were not ritually degraded in the processes and as the condition of their acceptance. By 1973, some people remembered his efforts one way, some another: when he was invited by the search committees of the Sociology departments at the University of Toronto and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, the invitations to accept professorship were over-ruled, through threat and outright veto, by higher administrations, determining the real limits of departmental "autonomy." The flap extended to high governmental levels, as the Minister of Education revealed that he had "passed on" negative information to OISE's director clandestinely concerning Seeley, in an extraordinary impropriety. Indeed Seeley, even in absentia, had become a kind of charged particle, energized in the cyclotron sixties and revealing the hidden structure of social matter, the hierarchy of its tensions and forces, in the reactions attending his every penetration.
[The California Institute of the Arts]
There remain three main engagements to complete this present sketch of Seeley's career and purposes; limitations of time and space keep me from dealing adequately with them here. From 1969 to 1972 he worked to help design and establish the California Institute of the Arts, and the School of Critical Studies within it. This next and bolder venture in educational institutions extended the line of praxis of educational governance and community which Seeley had developed through Forest Hills Village, York and Brandeis; it was also a compact and painful case study in failed change, particularly interesting for its light upon the psychodynamics of management of open educational processes.
To say that Seeley moved on from the Center purge to design' a memorial for Walt Disney portrays him perhaps as fool indeed. Yet the attempt to found a new kind of school of the performing arts on $35,000,000 of Disney money had some real promise and was in the direct line of Seeley's work as educator; and the contradictions which undid it were, despite their madcap aspects, commonplace and instructive. The trustees of the California Institute of the Arts wanted a memorial involving not just a collection of autonomous Schools of Drama, Art, Dance, Music, Media and Design, in a high-quality version of the usual arts-school model, but also some way of giving the institution a unique character and cohesiveness. They promised a free hand in this to Maurice Stein, who had succeeded Seeley to the sociology chairmanship at Brandeis and was to head CIA's School of Critical Studies, and to Seeley, who was to help organize not only the planning for the entire institution, but the crucial organizing process within Critical Studies itself.
Critical Studies was to be the vital core of CIA -- not simply a "general education" division to satisfy accreditation requirements, but a place where the most gifted of the culture's young dream-makers and prophets would be brought to confront the critical. thought of the social and behavioral sciences, and through this the human problems of the day, as a condition of their art. To accomplish this, Critical Studies was to involve not only a superior faculty, headed by Stein, Seeley, Herbert Marcuse and Carl Oglesby, and its own student body, but an innovative organizing process in which faculty and students jointly, as a self-governing educational community, would evolve both the content core and the process of its teaching. In this may be seen the progression of Seeley's educational thought: from York where he had tried to combine orthodox notions of content and classical teaching modes with a more democratic governance, to Brandeis where such governance had begun to be successful within a department, to CIA where such governance was to be integral to the entire institution and where, within Critical Studies, every aspect of educational content and process was to be radically open to experiment.
I worked with CIA, both as a consultant in its design and within Critical Studies, drawn there by the confluence of my work with Seeley's. In their thirty faculty, mostly younger, Stein and Seeley had brought together a rich and eclectic array of scholars, the fruit of the excitement of thought of the sixties -- altogether, as strong and interesting an ensemble of talent as I have known to be convened in a new institution. In the following months I observed, and shared in, their first developments of curriculum and cooperation. The space of design and governance was genuinely open; given the canonical problems involved in Stein's handing over his titular powers to a community growing to receive them, and the problems of integrating the sheer energy and diversity of their efforts, the evolutionary process of self-governance went reasonably well, and might in time have realized the vision which brought its people together.
But in truth, the trustees and president of CIA, and the deans of its other Schools, had had no real understanding of the implications of what they had consented to, nor commitment to its principles. The tone of conflict, at once absurd and fundamental, was established early on when the Trustees, on learning that Marcuse was not just an eminent political scientist but the controversial mentor of the black Communist Angela Davis, reneged on his appointment -- leading Oglesby to resign in sympathy. By the first week of school, a senior official of this Eden of the Arts, outraged by the bright mural someone had painted on a waIl of CIA's temporary quarters, had gotten the President to issue an edict forbidding such unapproved activities -- without a direct word of displeasure to the painter, who was not only on the Faculty, but who had been appointed explicitly on the basis of his work as a painter of public walls.
After this, matters went downhill into conflict, as each functioned after his or her kind. The main pressure came not from the Trustees, but from the President and other Deans, who had each day to face not only the considerable tasks of organizing their own domains efficiently, but the existential demands of life in a crucible. Dogs, skinny-dipping, child care, women's liberation -- the issues multiplied, as will happen in any open social space without prior conclusion and constraint, subjecting them to strains they found intolerable. Had Critical Studies offered an orthodox curriculum of strict requirements, it might have passed muster. But many students of the other Schools, accustomed to educational dependence, were disoriented at first by its variety and presumptions of autonomy, and by the slowness of its evolvement into coherence; and the Deans and President, beset not only by the strains intrinsic to founding a school, but by the tensions of mutual competition for funds in a situation of remarkable fiscal mismanagement, found Critical Studies a convenient place to park their anxieties. They could not accept a course for women in car repair as a legitimate embodiment of social thought; and saw, in the choosing of the Critical Studies governing council by means of zodiacal birth signs, not a mere device for the rotation of representative governance, but a lewd gesture of chaos.
The pressure focused on Stein, to shape up his School. When he and they persisted in doing precisely what he had been hired to do, he was fired; the President's aide took over the School's governance; and a substantial number of the faculty were dismissed as of the year's end. This took six months, but from the start the denouement had been in the air. Faced with constant pressure from outside, rather than the unhurried time and open space needed for building, the faculty and students of Critical Studies found the organization of their own work increasingly strained and disrupted which redoubled the outside pressures. The bonds of community and mutual purpose were far too young to permit of effective resistance; in the end they could only huddle together, like a band of lost children adrift in the craziness of Los Angeles, awaiting the sweep of the wave that would carry their brief friendships and cross-fertilizations on to other engagements.
Often during those months I walked with Jack away from the scenes of conflict and betrayal, and into the waiting hills, where we could digest our experience together. There was no narrow political point at stake in the conflicts, but rather an elemental one: it was indeed anarchy and chaos against the forces of "order." The chaos was the complexity which opens when new perceptions and old needs are allowed genuinely to surface; the anarchy was the condition of self-respecting autonomy and democracy necessary to govern such chaos justly; and the "order" was not an ideological conviction that some particular rigid way of ordering matters was ideal, but rather a metabolic reaction to the emotional strain and cognitive dissonance of this existential freedom: a low-tolerance response demanding the immediate security and release of dependable control, and foreclosing the development of a different kind of control, as well as of the social potentials which may go with it. The lesson, from CIA and many other places, is not simply that a constitutional tolerance must protect open social experiment, but that to carry it through there needs be a sufficiently high tolerance among its participants, gained from prior experience, of the peculiar and characteristic stresses and ambiguities of such situations -- else relapse into authoritarian forms is assured, not from without but from within.
[Further engagements]
Following this, Seeley worked as director of the evaluation project for a massively-funded program of alternatives in the Berkeley public school system, and then as a special assistant to the director of the Neuropsychiatric Institute of U.C.L.A.
I have mentioned the proposed Center for the Study of Violence, which the Neuropsychiatric Institute was to have spawned with federal funds from the Law Enforcement Assistance Agency, as a focus for the escalation of the uses of behavioral science in social control. The politics of this, and of the Center's temporary derailment by a process which Seeley helped orchestrate, deserve an essay by themselves, This engagement was in several ways a climax to the logics of Seeley's career. His critique of the psycho-sociology whose totalitarian implications the Center would extend had prepared his position as pivot-man for the resistance against the Center, even as the importance of the issues he had devoted himself to, and his intellectual probity, had earned him a key advisory post within the Center's planning group itself. In managing both roles with scrupulous integrity and without contradiction, Seeley brought to a delicate harmony the style of working both sides of the fence which he had cultivated since his adolescence. And in orchestrating the complex collective effort of campus, civic and professional groups and legislators to block the Center's establishment, Seeley found himself at last, after many undergunned and naive defeats, as a victorious journeyman in the rough-and-tumble of full-scale institutional politics.
These three engagements spanned the first half of the seventies and reveal Seeley as a man of his time, incarnating the rhythms of his chosen allegiances in society, He experienced the profound lessons and failure of early experiment in independent alternatives; the retreat within the System and the insufficiency of the alternatives attempted there in response to the sixties; and the return to focus against the organized injustices which have meanwhile been extending themselves powerfully and persistently. This in capsule has been the collective experience of these years for the people of the Movement with which Seeley identified himself. For him, for us, it has been in many ways a rather depressed time, What is less noticed, publicly and in private perception, is the spread and deepening of alternative social vision, and the extent to which low-profile efforts to realize it, within institutions and at their uneasy bounds, have become rooted and ongoing. Working now at the Drew Medical School's Department of Psychiatry in Los Angeles, as well as with several alternative educational ventures, Seeley seems to me sometimes just another face in a patient crowd, a complex gesture still unfolding.
[The state of struggle]
Looking back, it should be clear that more than personal reactions and timeless bureaucratic structures were at issue. During the sixties, North American society came increasingly unglued, as what had been repressed in persons and minorities sought social space for its legitimation, The symbolic theater of Kent State, of the young murdered for protest of an unjust war, ushered in the retrenchment of the seventies. In education as out, the funds and spirit for active experiment in fundamental change diminished abruptly. No social problem exposed had been solved, indeed the state of most continued to worsen, yet institutions and the individuals within them drew generally back from risk. The lines of social control, though strained, had not broken: in the face of alternatives which were more talk than substance and at best yet feebly rooted, the customary structures of reward still cast their charm, however tarnished had become its meaningfulness, and the processes of punishment continued against disorganized, and generally demoralized, local opposition. At almost every campus of significance in America, economic tightening provided the excuse for the dismissal of "radicalized" faculty in education and the social sciences, though many who would not carry their changed consciousness beyond the private fiefdoms of their classrooms were granted stay.
Nor was this diffuse purge the greatest brake to change. The opening of a Pandora's box could not, for the moment at least, be reversed; new notions of people's needs were abroad, demanding response. The design and leadership of responsive meliorative programs came overwhelmingly to be entrusted, not to those who had tested innovation to the point of conflict or "extremity" during the sixties, but to those who had pursued more orthodox apprenticeships of style and content within established structures of power, who were au courant enough to sound plausible yet proven sensible enough to threaten nothing, and to a few of more eccentric credentials who had reentered the fold convincingly enough.
This process of social homeostasis has operated at every organized level of power's exercise, from school to state school district, city council to national government. But it has had a subtle and grim progressive component. As for social structure, so for the social science with which it is always conjoined, even in cultures which do not conceive of "sociology": the reconsolidation of power advances the hegemony of a particular mode of organization and a particular stylistic purpose. In our case the mode is "value-free" and instrumental, and the purpose, I believe, is control in the face of fear. Despite the newly dissident presence, in several professions of social and psychological science, of "beach-head" associations of radical faculty and practitioners -- and at times, indeed, unacknowledged in their very work -- an instrumental perspective continues not only to dominate the application of social and behavioral science to the governance of our society, but through this domination to advance its own development and hegemony.
It is as if the managers of society, threatened by rising chaos, have sought, from those they still trusted, subtler tools, more bloodless and efficient, to reassert control in ways which would not disturb the existing balances of power; as if they have funded the forges of such tools, enabling their refinement, and have directed their use on a wide scale, ensuring their influence, while at the same time inhibiting in many direct and indirect ways the forging and use of alternative tools; and as if the employment of these tools in governing the very places of their provenance -- in track-oriented admissions screening, in hyper-technologized learning styles, in reductionistic and privatistic psychotherapeutic practices, in systems-analytic strategies for managing faculties and curricula, and in a score of other ways whose gestalt effect is to reshape not only those who are so used but their users to reflect the underlying spirit of employment -- has prejudiced conditions to produce more of the same, much as the needles of the pine forest, fallen to a thick blanket of acid humus, inhibit the sprouting of competing species while nourishing one to extend its dominion.
What is at stake in all this, instrumentally, is the shape of human society and perhaps its continued existence on the planet. For the social and behavioral sciences find their place simply as a particular expression of humanity's consciousness of itself, and we are in all age of historical crisis in which the application of this consciousness self-consciously to its incarnation and further development in society has become necessary, not simply to serve the purposes of the noosphere with de Chardanian optimism, but to respond to the problems with which our social-psychological evolution, or at least its Western version, has confronted itself.
The problems and their underlying contradiction mount towards crisis; what is being tested, most generally, is whether the authoritarian systems and dynamics which have evolved during this past human era and to which we tend to regress in dependence under the gathering strains, and the conceptual and practical. tools which they have fathered and depend on, will be sufficient to cope with the problems and secure at least for a while this era's perpetuation; or whether they will not, and will lead us then either into a disaster whose possible dimensions (beyond simple annihilation) cannot yet be foreseen, or instead into the development of responses of a fundamentally different nature, in their deepest essence and all their details democratic. The nature and use of social science as a tool of social governance has a precise place in this crux, reaching far beyond and yet identical with the question of whether it will be determined by and benefit the managed or the managers of society.
Yet even this instrumental perspective reinforces the tendency it criticizes, for it neglects the moral dimension. People are not objects, to be managed and used, even with the best of intentions. What is going on is not a dispassionate choice between strategies of response to potential and crisis, but a war between irreconcilable senses of the human spirit, fought always in practice on utilitarian grounds but defining the deepest senses of human meaning, which we call "moral." In this arena of human meaning one chooses sides perforce through one's actions. And as we are all socio-logists, actively creating society through our understanding of it, perhaps the highest state of (meta) sociology is to choose to be conscious of this process, and morally responsible for the consequenees of each intervention, from personal intercourse to advice of governmental policy.
In this light I see Seeley in the seventies, as just another aging rebel on the run, buffeted by the day's weathers -- suffering demoralization and doubt in his and our abilities to build, and perhaps even in the ultimate efficacy of the buildable; yet still holding to his purpose as the meaning of his life, and attempting to instantiate it so far as energy, opportunity and comradeship can avail. The five major projects he undertook in education, from 1960 through 1973, may each be said to have ended in turbulent failure; yet the failures are of interest for the spirit they sought to incarnate, as Seeley's life is exemplary not only in the way it reveals the nature and dynamic of a conflict of tools and perspectives, but also as a model of praxis, an example of a lived gesture of meaning in society, human enough (despite my description) to be real. Nor were they simply failures, but rather rich experiences which continued after his departure. The story of what happened afterwards at York, Brandeis, etc., becomes the broader story of all those who moved in various response to the impulses of the age, creating the context in which the fate of Seeley's work and life, and of the family of people influenced by him and sharing with him the development of a perspective of social thought and action, is still being decided, as unbalanced sides imagine weapons in an uncertain war.
In 1976, I was invited to contribute to a special double-issue of Sociological Inquiry [Vol. 46, No. 3-4], honoring the life-work of the eminent, aberrant sociologist John R. Seeley. By then, Seeley was 63, and I was 36, having known him eleven years. Though never his student in a formal sense, nor trained in sociology as such, I had come to admire and adore him while working as a younger colleague in the broader field of educational reform. So I drove to Los Angeles and spent a week taping thirty hours of intense interview and discussion about his life, his work, and themes of mutual interest. To make coherent sense of this took three months of writing; I couldn’t quite bring it up to date before publication deadline.
In a sense, this essay is more nearly Seeley’s autobiography “as told to” than his biography – for though I had some background knowledge, and perspectives of my own, I made no use of other sources, either friendly or critical. In this light, my account is neither objective nor balanced. Careful reading will recognize the ways in which I maintained critical distance; but even so, this may be regarded mainly as Seeley’s presentation of himself in most favorable light to a credulous junior. Though hostile minds may well dismiss it on this basis, even such work may serve worthy purposes, and I would be content with this.
Yet reading it at my age now, what strikes me instead is how much I made Seeley’s story my own. To some extent this was inevitable: for despite his explicit emphases in innumerable stories, I of course selected mainly what struck me as significant; and could draw him out further by only the questions I knew to ask. But such personal biasing was hardly automatic and unconscious. Instead, it was sharply purposeful. In effect, I used Seeley’s life, used his professional career as material for an essay on active social practice, elaborating themes that had occupied me for half my adult life. For my purposes, his life was ideal; for his purposes, my take on it was nearly so. In this sense, this document is an intimate collaboration, a soft missile couched in biographic form.
[Preface]
It is every boy's dream to have fathers worthy of honor, or to make them so in legend. How then can l know how "realistic" my assessment is of a man who has been fatherly to me, being one of my two mentors, the men whose special welcome of me as a younger peer marked my ritual of entrance into a deviant intellectual community? Others in this issue have testified to the remarkable warm force of Jack Seeley's personality and the character of his moral influence, to the breadth of his learning and influence, and to the importance of his work and the conceptual and methodological issues it has raised. If this were all, Seeley would be simply a remarkable man or, as some see him, a remarkable nuisance. But I think there is more.
Each man's life is a gesture of meaning in the social cosmos, and Seeley's life provides one definition of sociology -- a definition in the flesh rather than the word, as true definitions are, grown in the day's circumstance rather than inherited. Above all, a definition radically at odds with the customary definition of sociology. If this be so, then there could be no more important task for a festschrift essay than to make a case for this -- not so much to justify Seeley, as to illuminate a profession in a painfully changing time.
A basic theme of Seeley's work is to recognize the integrity of the way the personal and the social nestle together, in intimate conjugation, in each human circumstance. A proper study of Seeley's sociology as a lived practice would be sympathetic in a precise sense: it would honor the terms of that sociology, attempting to understand integrally the full spectrum of personal and social meanings encoded in his life and the dimensions of purpose and tragedy; it would be fully critical and advocative, an agency of loving justice. There is no short way to do this which does not reduce the organic sense of Seeley's work to a summary resume of his many complex engagements. Yet his is a sociology of engagement; and there is no better way to portray it intelligibly in operation than through the detail of the issues at stake in each instance.
Here then is a broken-field run through the terrains of Seeley, not to adequately survey them but to indicate a path. And if I myself appear in the later footprints, as a minor influence in the development of his sociology as well as an influencee, this is again in sympathy with one of its tenets: that the observer irrevocably perturbs what he observes by the act of observing, and therefore has no moral choice but to act in consciousness of this, entering into a loving and purposeful intercourse.
[Youth]
John Ronald Seeley was born in London in 1913 to an upper-class family, and schooled erratically in England and Germany until 1928. His childhood was a Gothic tragedy whose main characters included an absent father, a too-present and –abusive mother, a grandmother who fed him emotionally and physically on the sly, and a forbidding schoolmaster who introduced him to Euclid.
It showed him the world as a mad disaster, against all reason and justice, save for certain precious and quite precarious supports. It left him with a permanent passion to champion justice and the oppressed, and a keen sensitivity to the double message and the contradiction between social facade and reality, exercised not only in his rather schizophrenic family but in the social field as he watched the early stages of Fascism's rise. From his childhood deprivation came a life-long charge: to be the kind of father and create the kind of family he had not had. From its nourishment came the personal mythologies, born of his grandmother's tales of David, Joseph and Moses, which were to guide the gesture of his life; and an image, rooted in his own explosive growth after Euclid, of what the demeaned human spirit could be if freed.
******
At sixteen, by choice, Seeley found himself in Canada, a penniless immigrant, and worked as a farmhand for two years. His reaction to the farmboys' exploitation became his first experience at meliorative social organizing, and set a bipolar pattern of style that was to develop throughout his life. One pole was to work among the oppressed, raising consciousness by leading them to share information, feelings and ideas, his interests one with theirs. The other pole was to function as an ancillary of conscience among the managers, informing those (in this case, the local Presbyterian Minister) with moral or functional authority to undo wrong.
The successful influence of the Minister whom Seeley advised may have given him unrealistic expectations about how readily wrong would yield to reason in the world, but Seeley gained strength and purpose from associating with this surrogate father, who took him as son and fed him philosophy. If Seeley did not formally accept the invitation to inherit the clerical mantle, neither did he reject it.
From the minister, Seeley drew his first validation that the task of struggle against injustice was more than personal -- that the human task is to make a better world through perceiving moral issues and taking a stand, and that life derives its deepest meaning in service. The same sense of task and meanings informs Seeley's sociology. It does not reduce his writings to remark that most of them are sermons of one sort or another. In an age of spiritual crisis, for Seeley sociology was not simply a detached intellectual pursuit or a tool for the managers, but a ministry.
During this period, Seeley struggled with the question of how to make use of the rich insights into cruelty and domination which his childhood had provided. In seeing his choice as between becoming a master of criminality in society or making sure that his experience never happened to even one other child, Seeley committed himself to a task of redemption on a scale whose impossibility he did not fully face until he was forty. His early infection by the image of Christ as the suffering servant was reinforced by the writers he now explored, who spoke of turning suffering to good account; though he later came to see this as sometimes literary trickery, its influence persisted through his life, inhibiting his willingness to deal adequately with his own needs. Yet to account Seeley's career as a neurotic product of early experiences and compensations is inviting, but too easy; what matters is rather how he chose to modify them in himself, and to engage and articulate them in the world.
Still, his choice to be an educator, and the reasonable thrust of his teachings, were influenced in part by his failure to fully grasp his personal rage against the horrors of his upbringing. It left him trying to believe his victimization had been simply the product of ignorance, which led him to imagine that justice would be served if only a new generation of parents were brought up to understand what children were about, and what was good and bad for them. This worthy imagination guided his approach to the social family as well, long after he had realized the truth of his private case. As a teacher, Seeley remained the apostle of Reason, sensitive to the faintest consequence of human bestiality, yet always somehow surprised by its presence, and perhaps never fully grasping its dimensions.
Struggling with these concerns, Seeley stumbled one night upon a campfire of preadolescents, an idyll of the life he had not had. Their circle drew him in and invited him night after night to tell his grandmother's stories and invent his own. This liaison, continuing, became for him a living demonstration of how the young might be moved in the realms of delight and ecstasy; it was also his first indication that anything he had to offer might matter deeply to another's growth, and sealed his fate to be a teacher. Jack was intoxicated by the children's love, and by the Minister's, and returned it. Suspended between them, he was redeemed by his new roles in a community which ministered to his own deepest needs. If in later life Seeley became so indefatigable a source of validation for others, young and old, it was perhaps from realizing fully what validation had meant to him -- a metabolic, rather than ideological, awareness.
[Toronto]
At 18, the conditions of his passage fulfilled, Seeley came to Toronto where he worked in a printing factory. During his nine years there, he became assistant to the sales manager, and then export manager, and might well have risen further. He came away with practical knowledge of the world of work and administrative systems, and with Margaret, whom he came to love on the job in 1935 and married the classic seven years later when he returned from Chicago.
In 1937, Seeley joined the Society of Friends on a non-creedal basis. The Clerk of the Meeting took a shine to him, and invited his participation in an "ecumenical council" of leading priests, rabbis and ministers, which met weekly to discuss the social problems of the day and town. Their subsequent delivery of major sermons in parallel was a major force for change. This was Seeley's first experience in what became one favorite modality of work -- the convening of small, high-level groups to organize approaches to psychosocial problems. Earlier, he had taken on the Toronto YMCA, inciting the reorganization of its governance with the novel idea that, since it was a young men's association, young men should sit on the Board. In this milieu, he was arguing from Christian presuppositions for the justice they implied; and such early successes confirmed his perhaps naive ideal, that one could reliably appeal from men's low behavior to their higher professions, and win adherence to the latter.
But Seeley's richest work in Toronto was familial. He organized a Wolf Cub pack of two dozen boys, and led the same group for eight years, through scouting and into manhood. In addition to the chance to fulfill himself as paterfamilias, it gave him a rare opportunity to study (pre)-adolescent development. In character with his later work, his study was subordinate to purpose -- which, in the bleak Protestant setting of then-provincial Toronto, was to awaken the youths to the full potentials of their own lives and abilities, as he had been awakened by the Euclidean schoolmaster, So as not to tear the scouts between loyalties, he worked intensively with their parents, engaging for the first time the task of helping them learn new ways of relating to their children. The entire venture was an amalgam of education and therapy, permanently defining this aspect of his working style.
During this period, Seeley read a great deal of Freud, and the library's books on child development -- and then went on to Marx, knowing that that what the parents did was a function not only of their fears but of how they had to live. Ever since the farm, he had been studying for Canadian university matriculation and trying to save money for this, When his surrogate children turned 18 and left to lead their lives, a cycle more familiar now was completed as Seeley himself went back to school, with $2,000 saved to supplement his scholarship from the University of Chicago.
[The University; the Army]
At 27, Seeley found himself a college undergraduate, free at last to enjoy full-time the love of learning and the luxury of letting his curiosity roam, It took him as well into the rich underlife of Chicago, to run with juvenile gangs and hang out with the lower echelons of the Mafia, enlarging his perceptions of youth and criminality, and perhaps preparing his own career as adult delinquent. Campus itself was golden, for the university was still in the early flush of its Hutchins era, which made the school a legend of the day in American higher education. In its attempt at a comprehensive and synthetic curriculum, Seeley found his eyes opened to the full circle of human knowledge, as sport and glory. He found also, in the relative autonomy granted students there, his first model for an educational institution that would treat students as they deserved, at least in this respect.
Perhaps no school of that time could better have prepared Seeley for one main thrust of his work: to dissolve the barriers which artificially divide the many branches of learning and knowledge. But if the University was thus undermining its Aristotelian heritage, in other ways it reinforced this with a vengeance. Through his studies in its general scholasticism and in the Chicago School of sociology, Seeley's mind became partially a prisoner of conventional academicism, of the most morally crippling kind, which he was not fully to recognize or escape for a decade, until his Forest Hills Village experience led him to turn his critique to the tools of knowledge, and then to the Academy itself.
Too new yet to be voiced with its later precision and subtlety, Seeley's reaction to imprisonment took the form of a simpler moral statement, a sermon of action addressed to his fellow intellectuals as men, rather than (yet) to their very professions. Since his boyhood in Germany, he had watched the rise of Fascism with a concern that the war's outbreak ripened to anguish. He delayed barely, to finish his B.A., and then left what seemed a greased-skids career towards faculty appointment at Chicago to enlist in the Canadian Army in 1942. His behavior was an earnest of the later irritation he would provoke in many schools when he said, in effect and explicitly, “How can you manage to stay at your customary work while all this is going on around you, and not raise heads and hands to do something in response? How can you know a society in whose agonies you refuse to take part?”
Seeley believed that for those who cared about and understood what they claimed they did, there was a special task for the intellect -- not only to assist in the struggle against Fascism, but to keep from becoming totally infected by the same disease in the process of opposing it. For him, this program took first the shape of an attempt to humanize the Canadian, and later the British and American armed services, by minimizing the damage to the human potential and spirit of the soldiers, and making their experience maximally useful to themselves and to the war effort. As an Officer Selection Specialist, Staff Captain and finally scientific advisor to the Director of Personnel Selection, he worked with a small, tight group to individuate and humanize selection procedures, and to some extent to reform the service job-lines themselves, as well as such military sub-institutions as training camps, brigs, courts martial, and recreational and medical services.
[The Forest Hills Village Project]
Demobilized in 1945, Seeley refused high office in the Canadian government, and returned to graduate work at Chicago, where he served as research assistant to Ernest Burgess and Louis Wirth, taught Social Science in the University College, and worked at his theory and thesis. Despite the brilliance of the university surround and his welcome into association, it was a strained time, due both to the miserable life forced on him and Margaret by their poverty, and to the continuing serious illness of their first son, John Jr. Put aside when he went to work for the Canadian Mental Health Association in 1947, his thesis was never finished.
As executive director of CMHA, Seeley came together with his colleagues in the attempt to humanize the military, to try to continue into civilian life the program they had envisioned: to use the insights of psychology and the social sciences and common decency, to transform society. Thinking to focus on the children and to begin via the schools, they had the outline of a project, and soon found a medium in which to execute it. In 1948 Seeley moved his base to the University of Toronto to be a clinical teacher in psychiatry and an associate professor of sociology. His main work, however, was as director of the Forest Hills Village Project, a five-year “community study.”
The fraction of the Forest Hills work reported out in Crestwood Heights (*) was Seeley's first major publication, and established his professional presence. Crestwood Heights was the first full-scale sociological study of a suburban community, and the first psychologically-oriented anthropological study of a community as such. Its political novelty, in bringing the tools of social science to bear upon the home lives of the managers of society rather than the managed, escaped notice at the time. But many professionals were disturbed by the study's departure from a structural-functional perspective and by its methodology, and felt it to be unduly psychological.
A deeper professional perturbation is reflected in the book's introduction:
“So intertwined, in fact, is the research with the community that this book gives the impression that its authors are still stuck in the tar-baby; their moral intensity about their task and their responsibilities both as researchers and as reporters is, in all its humorlessness and intensity, rare and admirable ... though the authors have a keener eye for moral impasse and arabesque than for the material culture or for the merely sociable ...”
Twenty years later, the concerns of conscience which prompted this mixed praise from David Riesman have become central issues for social research: they were always the most important ones.
For the Forest Hills Village Project was not a detached academic study of the established sort, but a major educational and therapeutic venture, begun by a staff of nine and in time taken up by those it affected, which aimed at transforming the life of the community. As such it was a distinct style of socio-logos, active, practical and self-conscious, whose epistemological foundations Seeley was later to write about at length. Conceived precisely in a moral spirit, this way of knowing could not escape accounting for the moral dimensions of its intervention and consequence.
Into this upper-middle-class “bedroom” suburb came Seeley and his staff, contracting with the School Board to study the schools to improve them. It was characteristic of Seeley's later approach to education, as well as to social research, that they did not commit themselves to the project until they had appeared before each of the schools' 5,000 students to explain the faint prospect of its future usefulness, and to ask the students' agreement to participate.
The schools were indeed the community's central institution, connecting the researchers with the intimate life of each family and with their formal associations, and enabling the scope and depth of their academic study. Beyond its specifics, this reflected Seeley's early-formed analytic bite in the social world, in being a stripping-off of the polite mask of the family, to reveal the contradictions beneath, the complexity of motives and unmet needs and the precarious balance of it all.
The several dimensions of their practical study and intervention went largely unreported. The first dimension included a series of “human relations” classes given weekly in each of the seven schools for five years. The classes were open spaces, to which the children came voluntarily, free to talk about the things that mattered to them -- a gift as much to them as to the researchers. The teachers observed, and were surprised and instructed by the complete absence of “discipline problems.” This second dimension of work, bringing teachers and parents to new understandings of the children and their potentials, proceeded as the researchers were invited to raise questions with teachers in their classrooms and at meetings, and to offer seminars in the village. Changing the perspectives of the agencies that dealt with children entailed, for Seeley's crew, the dual responsibility of helping staff create and adjust to their own changed roles. This principle was not confined to institutions, and they pursued the parents' eventual requests for “human relations” classes as well as they could.
The third dimension involved making of Forest Hills Village a demonstration of how simple humane methods might be used to work radical transformation in education and ultimately the full community. Each year, twelve eminent teachers from all over Canada were invited to intern there, to observe and absorb all they could of the new human sciences which bore upon education. The intent was to initiate a new sub-profession of teachers committed to transforming their own schools through new approaches in the classroom. Instead, nearly all of the 60 interns went on immediately to become principals, superintendents of school systems, Provincial directors of mental health, and the like -- if lost to the classroom, then amplifying tremendously in society the ideas they had gathered. Fifteen years later, Seeley found in widespread practice in Toronto open classrooms, mobile education centers and other ideas the project had helped introduce -- more developed there than in Berkeley, which was just starting to move out of the classroom lockstep.
There was a fourth dimension to this project of intervention, a thrust to redefine the profession and practice of community mental health in preventive and positive terms. It merged, I think, with the broader task of reconstructing the practices of psychological and social sciences to which Seeley was led inexorably by the Forest Hills Village experience.
In the goals and methods of the entire Forest Hills Village project may be seen the influence of Seeley's earliest years and dedications blown large. But society is conjugate to persons, and the social meaning of the project was to provide a model of socio-logos, a model for the way that knowledge of society might be brought to exist in society. If the model was yet incomplete in a crucial way -- in its belief that the tools of knowledge being passed on and used were themselves “objective” -- in its several dimensions it was still much more coherent than the single dimension of professional publication which it incorporated.
Facing the fact that the existence of knowledge is inherently an active intervention in human life, and recognizing and accepting the implied potentials for action and responsibility, Seeley and his co-workers generated a remarkably full-fleshed example of sociological practice. If it might equally be considered an essay in educational, therapeutic or political practice (as any effort to find a lever to change society must be), that is in the nature of the human world -- and of knowledge, as Seeley had learned. From any of these perspectives, one integrity of the project is striking: it took care to deal equally with discrete individuals and with higher systems of organization and thought, and managed this in an integrated format.
[Digestion and reformulation]
For Seeley, Forest Hills Village was a shattering experience. Between the deeper questionings of sociology's nature to which it led him, and his own concurrent psychoanalysis whose implications deepened them, his world was stood on its head. For the next three years he worked, for economic reasons, as executive director of Community Surveys, Inc. in Indianapolis, on a study of Community Chests which led him to studies of giving, and of slum redevelopment and services. He recalls it as a barren time; I think it was more a latent period, or digestive. After this came the long series of ethical, epistemological and methodological papers, addressed equally to the social and psychological sciences, that tore away at the myth-structure of their professions in the course of asking what might be the foundations of a sociology, a psychology, a social psychology, that made sense, conceptually as well as morally.
His literature was a thorn in the side of the sociological establishment. It was received, in general, or neglected, with irritation for the elegant and bewildering complexities it uncovered. Beneath the irritation was anger, and beneath this, I believe, fear, for these complexities implied the destruction of the known roles of sociology -- and perhaps a birth, for Seeley's essays constituted a political attack and prospectus which in time intrigued and influenced an eclectic group of students.
Beyond its manifest outer uses, the inner process of producing this literature was an act of re-integration for Seeley, commingled with his psychoanalysis and extending it to the full reaches of his social person and then into the world. It was his most intimate instantiation of the therapeutic task which figures in all his work: to make integral, to heal the division of the personal-psychological and the social. The rich details would make a remarkable case study in meta-psychiatry, and themselves suggest a radical reconception of therapy, but that is another long story.
The full constructive and reconstructive process, the reintegration of the sociologist and the man, took as long to unfold as did the writing. Standing back from it, Seeley's life sorts into periods. In the thirteen years from Chicago on, he had been preparing a particular perspective of sociology which surfaced its incompleteness even in the success of its Forest Hills Village employment. Recovering and reconstructing, he turned his work to reformulation of the tool of social knowledge itself, and from working on communities to working in them, and creating them. It took a decade for these two lines of his work to merge fully, for it took as long for Seeley to grow to be able fully to accept the commitments of self that his deepened vision of sociology implied, and to enter the next phase of attempting to redeem his profession, When he finally did, in the turbulent politics of mid-sixties America, it made him in some ways a pariah of his profession with heavy personal costs, but it put him in the heart of a larger family, as a whole man.
******
Seeley had come to Forest Hills Village to put the tool of “objective” knowledge in people's hands to enable them to change their lives. He came away questioning the tool itself, the moral dimensions of how we come to know and what it means to know, and the role of the knower. For to understand, say, juvenile delinquency as the product of familial psycho-pathology, or of institutional dysfunction, is to assign to one set of people a responsibility and shift it from another set, and in time to restructure society to reflect this assessment. Social research then is a judicial process, assessing and assigning responsibilities; and a species of political practice, whose effect, if not intent, is always to transform society.
This argument brought Seeley full circle back to Marx, who held that the object of understanding is to recreate the world; and brought him to face fully the human contradiction of the intellectual perspective in which he had been schooled at Chicago. The dominant myth held that sociological theory and practice were objective processes performed from some higher vantage, that the student of society stood outside the struggle to describe it. Yet the tool of “value-free” sociology could be applied to itself, through the meta-sociology of knowledge, to reveal this sociology itself as the product of social particulars, inexorably partisan in its provenance and consequences. Likewise with the notion that there exists a “scientific,” disengaged viewpoint from which to carry on psychological investigation: as Seeley learned through his own experience, psychology turned on itself into meta-psychology revealed even the abstract concepts which psychologists (and sociologists) use to be choices complexly motivated by practitioners' most private histories, and their employment of these concepts to be an integral function of their private dramas.
Where then was that detached vantage point from which a meliorative sociologist or therapist might still choose to descend, with objective tools forged there, to treat society or the person? Rather, there was no philosophical basis for the separation of the sociologist and the person: one was wholly ensnared in the human and social condition, fully the subject and creator of what one studied. In the absence of detached vantage, there was left only moral purpose to inform one's professional action. The whole enterprise was political, its ethical problems inescapable; one was either totally confused about its nature, or in it for a purpose. From this time on, Seeley strove to convince his sociological fellows, against all fashion, that the “value-free” foundation of their profession was either nonsense or deception, and either way ruinous: and to lead them to take responsibility for what they studied, how they studied it, and how and whom their studies served.
This did not make him popular.
By the terms of his own analysis, Seeley's attack on the foundations was not from a detached position, though he was not to realize the depth of his commitments for a decade. Involved in an arena of men and women in struggle, aware that his every action and inaction was a matter not separate from his sociology, Seeley took sides constantly in increasing consciousness -- if still rather within the Christian framework of Good and Evil, yet with a deepening appreciation of how these were entwined in every human circumstance.
No longer a neutral tool, in the political world sociology was a weapon. In whose service should it be employed, and how? In the next twenty years, Seeley made his choices increasingly clear, casting his lot with the managed of society rather than the managers, and for democratic freedom as the ground of justice. He chose also to try to assume responsibility for the deepest consequences of the existence of sociology itself in society, in terms that define the immense human stakes involved.
For the dry proposition that the practice of socio-logos works to recreate society in its image had a disquieting corollary for the sociology of the day, divorced from the psychological dimensions of personhood, conceiving functionality with no moral dimensions, and evading the personal responsibility of its own actors. “The direction I see events taking,” Seeley wrote,
“is toward a much-diminished notion of individual responsibility for personal acts -- the notion in turn then altering the facts -- [which demands] a much increased individual responsibility for the collective acts [e.g., segregation] which furnish the conditions and limits (or causes) of personal acts. If, as seems entirely possible, such individual responsibility for collective acts cannot be borne or adequately responded to by individuals, the likeliest outcome seems to be highly increased centralization, no doubt benign in intent, going toward an autocratic sort of society, with still further consequences for the idea and possibility of personal potency and responsibility.******
This was in 1963. Seeley was not quite able yet, or perhaps not yet despairing enough of his profession, to say outright what he was later to maintain: that, by its nature, mainline sociology had become an agency of totalitarianism, a tool of a creeping “Velvet Fascism” which furthered itself through the consequences of such uses of knowledge.
The young who would voice such crude sentiments were to appear the next year, in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. In embracing them, Seeley embraced the directness of their vision, which brought to light an ugly, explicit catalogue of the ways in which social research was being put to totalitarian service in the suppression of rebellion and social change among colonized peoples, foreign and domestic. If Seeley saw more subtly into the consequences of the very nature of this research, he saw its uses as starkly from 1964 on when he was anguished to watch the orthodox tools of social psychology used to dismiss and contain the “student rebellion,” with which Seeley had identified as the proximate agency of hope for American society; and to avoid the immense questions of justice and purpose it raised, in favor of contributing to the mechanization of social control.
In response to this betrayal, Seeley cast himself at last fully against the dehumanizing character of the science he had grown beyond, identifying the betrayal in a spate of papers and interactions that revealed him increasingly to many as a traitor to the profession. But a social juggernaut was indeed in motion, and Seeley's quoted foreboding was being rapidly realized as the social climate heated up and unrest increased. By 1973, this line of Seeley's work came to one climax as he found himself fighting a desperate rear-guard action, orchestrating a complex attempt to abort the proposed UCLA Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence – which, more clearly than any institution before it, had been designed virtually to serve as an advance base for the employment of behavioral science as a tool of authoritarian social control, an agency of Velvet Fascism indeed.
In this engagement of socio-logos against the Violence Center's version of it, Seeley came full circle, reaffirming and deepening the continuities of his life. The boy had watched Fascism's rise; the young man had enlisted to oppose it, mobilizing the hopeful weapons of knowledge. Even then, under Goebbel's direction, the social and psychological scientists of the Third Reich were harnessing their ingenuity in vilest service. It took a decade for the middle-aged man to recognize that his tools and the effects of their use by the roles of their employment were not different in kind from theirs, and a decade more to forge the tools and their user anew. Now, at sixty years of age, he found himself again a soldier against Fascism, in a covert war that permeated society most subtly, engaged in a vanguard action.
But how the terms of battle that he recognized had changed since he witnessed in Heidelberg the street-fights of a people hurt, lost and seeking an authoritarian salvation! Confronting this new salient of benign social engineering, fresh from his late 1960's experience of being at one with the children in the street, for Seeley it was as if his mother, who had taught him the meaning of authoritarian domination, had bought, from a child psychologist who would serve her intents, the knowledge of how to control him in new and subtle ways, which afforded the same power and even the same satisfactions as the whip without the problem of its public display, Or so I imagine, believing with Seeley that the events of family and of society are writ large and deep within each other, within each person and beyond, Whatever the truth of the metaphor, Seeley had, as in childhood, only the tool of sweet reason to use with the power of his rage, and he used it strategically, despite the growth of the perception he had refused to recognize fully as a child: that there were madmen in charge.
[Psychoanalysis]
The upheaval of thought about social science that Seeley experienced and chronicled did not spring like an abstract Minerva from a Jovian brow of intellect, merely the product of a keen observer pondering a scene. Rather, it was born from his involvement with and commitment to the people he “studied” at Forest Hills Village. Accepting the dimensions of his intervention in their lives, he found himself an intimate member of the community, struggling with the contradictions of his professional role brought thus home among his own kind.
Seeley detailed some of the functional and moral complexities of this conflict in the portions of Crestwood Heights that deal with the interaction of social researchers and researched. The questions continued to brood in him, and animate his later papers, which reflect his understanding of his own experience.
This understanding was in part enabled and furthered by Seeley's psychoanalytic experiences, first as analysand, later as practitioner and teacher. He had wanted analysis since reading Freud and had decided upon it in discussion with Bettelheim at Chicago, regarding it as an essential educational experience. The occasion came not by academic schedule but in response to live need. By 1951, in Forest Hills Village, Seeley was in a quandary. As it seemed to him, he had in effect become the father of some thousands of children, and at least the paterfamilias of all their mothers, who had become actively dependent on him for sagacious counsel. If the “objective” problems of this relationship could be written up as meta-sociology, the subjective ones could not be so dryly handled.
For Seeley now found himself face to face with the image of himself as his missing, nutritive father which he had pursued since the campfire and scout pack -- but here blown all out of human proportion, casting him back in the role of Wiseman/Messiah, involving him in a messianic feedback of contradiction which he would spend the rest of his social working life trying to undo. In Jung's terms, he had gone the night journey to reach a strange place where all was reversed, end in beginning: he had become the wise one teaching mothers how to mother, and fathers how to father or at least how to refrain from brutalizing and corrupting the children.
All the defenses re-organized by Seeley in adolescence into a career of socially useful activity were all but overwhelmed by the demands they had created. As much as his prior intellectual decision, this decided the timing of his long-sought analysis which he pursued during the years at Toronto, dismantling the dynamic which used the energy of rage to do good deeds that protected against the consequences of rage's expression.
Analysis gave Seeley a much richer sense of the complexity of motives which underlie the practices of scholarship, and an integral sense of the relation between private and public drama, which came increasingly to be reflected in his work. A decade later in Boston, he undertook a second round of analysis primarily for didactic purposes, to acquire analytic skills and to deepen his understanding of psychoanalytic approaches to education. But also it came right after he had attempted at York to stand as a father to the world again, to students and faculty alike, for the first time since Forest Hills Village and in a new way, and during the very time when he was making, through his response to the FSM, the final full commitment of himself as man and sociologist in the human community.
Analysis made Seeley aware of his feelings in an undulled way, enabling him to experience the largest dimensions of his anger and love. It left him able to express face-to-face his rage at the betrayal he felt at York, and free to respond in depth to the surprising events at Berkeley, which brought him to attack at last directly the accredited representatives of the dominant order and to realize and declare another allegiance.
For Seeley as man, as socio-logist facing the mystery of the actions of men amongst each other, psychoanalysis was a tool, an education, a therapy, an integral influence in his life's work of tending to society. If a crucial therapy of our age is to heal the division between the person and society, in the academy phrased as the division of psychology and sociology, then Seeley has been an exemplary agent of this therapy, beginning in his own person. The customary practices of psychotherapy work to bind people's conceptions and energy to the private domain, away from their true integration with society in history. In contrast, despite and because of his Freudian and later Jungian grounding, Seeley found himself refuting those who used Freudian reductionism to explain away the meaning of the thrust of the young on the campuses; and after his second didactic analysis did not turn away from political expression, but instead stood for the first time fully as a political actor in the full arena of society, empowered by his awareness of underlying motives.
[Educational community]
For the decade after the Forest Hills Village Project, Seeley turned his critical energy to speaking to his colleagues, in behalf of their profession's redemption; for the decade after this, begun by Berkeley, to speaking to the world out of the lived profession. But the heart of his work went to the building of family and community, no longer from some detached vantage, but as a committed actor within, his own being staked on the effort. Each of the five major engagements that followed in the next fifteen years may be seen as an essay in this task, in the general medium of education, as may his work with his own family and the community engendered around it. In this, I believe, he was attending to the most important task of sociology, of loving socio-Iogos, today: not to describe the breakdown of the most intimate glue binding persons together in society, but to inspire and guide its re-creation. And if many of his institutional ventures came to ill fate and what seemed painful failure, taken together, 1 think, they were admirable.
Gathering his conclusions about him, Seeley turned to act with such companions as he could find. Beginning in 1953, he participated in a unique collegium funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, which brought together two dozen remarkable people from a wide range of disciplines (the “Space Cadets” as they called themselves) to consider the question of mental health as involving everything that affected human well-being in society. Meeting bi-annually for a decade, it was an “invisible college” of unusual duration -- an example, and perhaps an accelerating factor, in the breakdown of the artificial fragmentation of human studies. For its participants it was an experience which enlarged both the vision and ambit of their action.
For Seeley, in addition, it served a vital need: it was a nurturing forum, a place where he could bring the questions he then was raising and the ideas with which he struggled, and find them greeted, if not necessarily with agreement, always with interest and respect. It was an ideal teaching/learning situation, a community of peers opening each other's horizons; and in it also Seeley could play what was always a favorite role -- the universal translator making the various tongues coherent to one another. For six years more, at the Center for Advanced Study and the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, he had such a forum for his base; and when in 1969 he was left without one in the Center's moral collapse, he was indeed bereft of an important support.
In 1957, Seeley returned to Toronto as Research Director of the Alcoholism Research Foundation of Ontario, a post he held for three years. He found in this a fairly new field, open perhaps to fundamental interventions in its conceptualization, a place to ground the notions he had been developing. The papers he wrote on this are interleaved with others concerned with the reconceptualization of a dozen fields, from social work and mental retardation to legal philosophy, stemming from his re-examination of the foundations of social science. As his concerns led him to urge, for the treatment of alcoholic addiction, the diversification of interventions, so in response to the other addictions of society Seeley was led to diversify his own interventions, working to organize against the insanity of the bomb-shelter boom, and against the persistence of corporal punishment and the inculcation of religion in the public schools.
The most important product of these years was the research staff which Seeley brought together at A.R.F. A non-hierarchical ensemble with uniquely open mechanisms for sharing thought, which were reflected in many joint papers, it was another venture in educational community, compact and focused, with Seeley as the catalytic agent. More nearly then the Space Cadets, it was a mode of family in which Seeley stood again as paterfamilias, more modestly and integrally than at Forest Hills Village, sharing with his mind his warmth. And surely the brotherly quality of its interaction transcended Seeley's part in it and survived his departure, for many of the staff still work together in this way to this day.
[York University]
Meanwhile, a new venture was brooding, a next step in the attempt to build educational community. Since his YMCA days, Seeley had been close friends with Murray Ross with whom he shared the development of educational ideas and ideals, and who currently was a Vice-President of the University of Toronto. Canada was just then waking to the higher education boom, and Toronto had only one public university. Together, Ross and Seeley secured a charter for a second, York University, with guarantees for a free hand in its development from both the provincial and federal governments.
There was always, in Seeley's working dreams, a tension: simultaneously, they represented reasonable responses to historical social circumstances and unreasonable idealism. York was Seeley's first chance to play with the task of starting a new educational institution from scratch and it unbound his imagination. He hoped to bring to bear on higher education all that had been learned about human beings since the Middle Ages, to produce an exemplary model for a different age with different problems.
More realistically, York was to be a tutorial college, emphasizing one-to-one relationships. It was also to provide for students a place and power in the processes of institutional decision-making, though the details of this remained to be worked out. Opening in 1960 with about ten faculty and 75 students, its growth was to be gradual, towards an eventual limit of 2,000,
The first year at York was idyllic for Seeley, his energy fully invested in building a dream. But already the seed of its promise was deteriorating, as the larger and meaner forces which shape institutions came into play in conflicting visions of empire, The chairman of the trustees' board, a truly big businessman, was also a leading figure in the Liberal Party, with Prime Ministerial ambitions; York was a political staging area for him, in which slow processes of building worked against his immediate interests. Ross himself had recently been passed over for the Presidency of the University of Toronto and had his own ambitions. Under their lead, the tutorial relationship of York was redefined to include dealing with several students at once, and then to all sorts of classes. In the month that U.T. set a limit of 24,000 to its own growth, President Ross declared York's intention to absorb 27,000 students in the next decade.
To build a big university was easier than to grow a great one. York's fate was determined by the fourteenth month when crucial decisions about size, planning, curriculum and the distribution of power came down from above, and when Ross came to student meetings to persuade them, in what Seeley saw as a fundamental corruption of the original agreements about the democratic place of students in governance, to accept what was happening. Tensions mounted during this second year and flared into open conflict in the third. York's original students and faculty felt strongly that the President had betrayed the dream that had brought them there, and at one point 19 of the 25 faculty considered petitioning the Board to fire him.
It was too late. When it came to a showdown, no real powers at all had been delegated to the students, despite the initial vision. Within the campus itself, the realities of power were dictated not by legislation but by social process. For rapid growth was not simply pernicious to the spirit of York's original aim; it destroyed even the power to defend that spirit. Disrupting the promised slow growth of shared values and commitments that bond community, it diluted any possibility of resistance and left no obstacle to the absolute power of the Administration.
The strategy is standard in the control of populations; its benign intention easily evades the moral scrutiny of its consequence. For Seeley, though he had chronicled such matters as a “sociologist” before, it was his first real introduction to how power actually works in a university. What struck him was the utter functional contempt for persons, the merely instrumental way in which parties “of good will” saw and used each other and those they had power over, free of the moral dimensions of mutual commitment.
There was also another problem, at once functional and moral, that dizzied Seeley as he sought to understand why the original contracts with students and faculty were not being honored. No one, no person, could be found to take responsibility for what was happening -- not even Ross, who claimed to be only transmitting, through the bottleneck of his role, the multiple pressures bearing upon him. If Seeley felt distressed by this, it was not only because he had sought to incarnate a piece of dream but because of his friendship with Ross. This gave him what he had already had with himself -- a rich opportunity to observe the complex of forces acting upon the social actor from without and from within: he was privy to Ross's dreams, watched him return from his first meeting with the Board transformed, like an English boy first blooded with the fox. But to explain was not to explain away, nor to excuse, and Seeley's personal grief at the betrayal he felt was inseparable from the objective situation. For persons, not sociological or psychodynamical constructs, are the substances of social life and the referents of meaning within it, and the “diminished notion of individual responsibility for personal acts ... [and failure to bear adequately] responsibility for collective acts” of which Seeley wrote in a different context as underwriting the growth of a soft totalitarianism, had here a most personal face.
Again and again during his major engagements of the next decade, Seeley was to be devastated by this sense of personal betrayal by specific persons -- betrayal not of abstract ideas, but of specific substantive and procedural contracts and of the moral purposes incarnated in them. He took such matters so seriously, so personally that his reactions brought him a reputation as quixotic, A more “realistic” man might well have grown used to the process or insulated himself from it emotionally, but Seeley had gone a long journey to dissolve the division between his private self and his social persona, and was no longer desirous or capable of reversing it. For the rest of his life, Seeley was to continue to find such betrayals unforgivable, for they struck at the foundation of the chance to create an order of humane justice in the world, and rendered the community he sought for himself and others impossible because unbelievable.
Still they kept happening to him, as if he went looking [or them. His work alone was bound to set them up, but so perhaps was the way he went about it. Despite his socio-analytic grounding, he often misjudged the complexities of motive and the strength of the binding forces which constrain human decision; and assumed too readily that others shared his understanding of the understandings they professed, and were committed to the action implications. Still he persisted in taking people at their best word. This was often a means either of provoking them to act on their high pretensions or to reveal their difference from their word, in ways which left him feeling abused and righteous, as if to justify a childhood script. It was equally a consistent style of public pedagogy, as much an attempt to create a civilizing truth as to reveal its betrayal.
[Brandeis, M.I.T.]
A battle had been lost. In contrast with Seeley's later experience there was yet no active purging of the losers; but like others, Seeley had lost the heart to invest himself further in that particular arena, and at the end of the third year he took a leave of absence, and subsequently resigned after many of the faculty, also formally protesting, had done so.
It was 1963. Seeley went with his family to Brandeis as a visiting professor in the sociology department. He enjoyed a simultaneous appointment as sociologist in the Medical Department of M.I.T. Here his main work was with Ben Snyder, pursuing the ideas they had developed together in the Space Cadets. They undertook a psychoanalytic-oriented study of the “hidden curriculum” of M.LT., attempting to recognize afresh what and how students actually learned there. They discovered, in every influence of architecture and each professor's gesture, a world of meaning with significant implications for educational policy and practice; but Seeley's written output dealt less with this richness than with critique of the inadequate perspectives on ego development that had been revealed by the depth-interview processes of their study.
At M.l.T., Seeley found himself again the consultant who could bridge the gaps between the domains of sociology, psychology and the statistical or “positive” sciences. Indeed, he had become reasonably skilled in this latter domain since encountering Euclid. Perhaps his sharpest accomplishment was his use of logical algebra and attribute analysis to demonstrate that the “Jellinek formula” upon which all contemporary estimations of alcoholism were based was not simply unreliable, but demonstrably logically false. Here again, with customary perversity, Seeley was troubling the justification of orthodox socio-therapeutic strategies, and it drew the customary reaction. He found it hard even to get the results published, and ever after watched the papers of the field refer to it in dutiful footnotes, but persist in using the disproven methods of estimation anyway.
Seeley's main engagement in Boston was with Brandeis, where he found himself welcomed by the faculty of both his fields. The pressure to keep him there grew to match his liking of the place, and led President Sacher to secure the funds for a perpetually endowed chair in Seeley's name. When an invitation came to spend time as a Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences, he was torn. Sacher bade him go, assuring him that the chair was assured -- as indeed it was, for he returned to Brandeis as the Philip Klutznick Distinguished Professor of Sociology. Reassured, Seeley moved across the country to California in 1964, where he meant to spend a year writing meta-sociology.
[The Berkeley Free Speech Movement]
Early in 1966, shortly after my review of the books on the Berkeley Free Speech Movement had appeared inRamparts, I received a letter from the chairman of the sociology department at Brandeis, asking,
"Did you mean it literally when you said that all the essays explained nothing? I thought I was closer to the movement than that, and that I had caught at something which Savio and others had communicated face to face. Perhaps not. But if that really is your considered opinion, the implication for me would be that I should do a great deal more study, since I regard the events at Berkeley as the most important to happen in American higher education in the last ten or twenty years. “My warmest good wishes in any case,
"John R. Seeley" His letter was itself of sociological interest, as it is not the custom for sociologists to solicit judgment of their understandings from the people they study. Indeed, the question of to whom the students of society ought be responsible was one of a cluster of moral issues raised by the FSM, and sidestepped by the faculty as they detoured from their accustomed lunchtime routes to avoid the congestion of our rallies. Even the customary academic virtues failed the conflict: despite this convenient placement of a unique historical event and social laboratory, not one faculty member attempted the responsibility of direct, systematic study of the FSM's process. All this was an intellectual betrayal in some ways deeper than the differences of politics that divided the campus, and I took it personally. If soon after, in leaving the house which did not honor its purposes, I felt somewhat an orphan in the absence of fathers I could respect, it was as young men often do, and for good reason.
So I was curious about this perverse sociologist Seeley, and wrote him the truth, that I had not had space to detail the few exceptions, and that his essay indeed spoke to what I thought was the core issue: the moral legitimacy of authority as deriving from the genuine consent of the governed. He wrote back,
“I had begun to say that only that deserves recognition as authority which authenticates itself from moment to moment in terms of the living experience ... even where it is in one place for any length of time, it is only there for limited purposes. It therefore lies all around us more particularly as we legitimate and authenticate and in a sense bring into existence each other's authorities.“I am sorry this sounds probably all very square. I should tell you, however, that we are so desperately engaged here in a war to give at least partial effect to these ideas, that it is almost " my power to write anything. Indeed my capacity to teach and think in the ordinary and theoretic sense is substantially invaded. As soon as I can get down off our version of the police car, I will try to write you more fully.“Meanwhile, if I may put it so, I draw strength from the fact of your very existence.
“Sincerely, (etc.)."******
When the Free Speech Movement exploded on the Berkeley campus in October 1964, Seeley was thirty miles away and naked to its impact. His engagement with the Brandeis students had brought him into contact and sympathy with the Civil Rights movement in America as it swept the northern campuses; and the Berkeley administration's attempt to suppress its campus movement, which touched off the FSM, offended him deeply, coming as it did not out of mistaken yet principled decisions but from simple pliancy to outside pressure.
The issue of how far student political involvement should be allowed to penetrate the campus was subsumed in larger issues of educational governance, raised by the FSM and echoed on a thousand campuses during the next few years. Who was to decide what learning should be furthered and by whom, how it should be undertaken and how judged, in whose service it should be, and what was of service to it, and how were these to be decided? Fresh from his York experience, Seeley was swept by a more than intellectual compassion as we struggled with the same issues of governance, of how power would be distributed and whether its use would be democratic, moral and truthful, or authoritarian and immoral; as the bureaucracy paraded deceits and betrayed crucial agreements, and we sought fruitlessly for persons who would take responsibility for their acts; and as we finally took responsibility for our own, as the York students had been too polite and unready to do, creating the first campus sit-in and strike and securing what Seeley himself was not to manage for a decade or more -- one small clear temporary moment of victory in a moral cause.
And there was a larger issue yet, which struck Seeley more deeply in mind and heart. The FSM was a watershed: in it, for the first time, members of the privileged and dominant class in America came to recognize en masse their own oppression at the hands of the institutions that favored them, rebelled on their own behalf, and began the struggle to develop new institutions to reform the mainstream of their society. Elsewhere (*), I have discussed the way the FSM's impulse manifested in the Haight-Ashbury, the subsequent broadening of the political movement to the "counter-culture," and the present legacy of alternative political and institutional effort. Two observations seem pertinent to Seeley's perception of the event. First, it was no accident that the FSM occurred among the best students of what was then accounted the best all-round university in America; it was rather a deep contradiction come to surface, an announcement of our starvation in the midst of apparent plenty.
Second, the university was indeed our parent institution, inculcating and monitoring the final stages of our preparation for adult citizenship. To turn our anger against its benevolence was shocking to many, who dismissed us mainly as ungrateful children, and shocking to us as well, for in our action we endured a profound psycho-social transition. Within the family, the adolescent's break with the parents is partly an assertion of independent identity. For many individuals, and for us collectively, the FSM was a similar rite of passage. And if, alone and together, we have not fully passed on to anything, and in many ways have fallen back, it is because no completion for the passage yet exists. For as the university was our surrogate parent, then the other institutions of society, which it so deeply resembled, governed us paternally also. Truly to leave the family, to see ourselves no longer as the dependent extension of their personalities, was to enter an unknown space -- to face the task of creating a new adulthood in a changed society, without ritual, tradition or example to guide us, nor any supporting structures.
For Seeley, the FSM and its quick evolution made it seem as if the world had been set afire by the children he had dreamed of, whose energy would. spring unbounded from humanized families and schools. He had never expected them in his own day, Yet here they were, moving spontaneously and en masse, with style, humor and joy in the midst of suffering; attentive to the realities he had come to perceive, seeking to deal with their inner dynamics as well as the external situation, and fiercely and appropriately moral. Moved partly by wish and partly by recognition, and fully by love, he thought that history had been short-circuited: not simply that the war he had foreseen some generations after his death had been declared and engaged, which may be true, but that these struggles would so shock the conscience of the nation that there would come a massive de-legitimizing, and perhaps an overturning, of those who had claimed power on a moral basis but were now to be shown as morally naked. Time since has reminded him, with us, that it is a long march with no assurance; but I think it is still better to be staggered by hope than by weariness, even, or especially, in one's fifty-first year.
Some decisive success seemed to hang in the balance; for a moment Seeley believed there were more adults hanging on the verge of redemption than there were, and that our actions would help many in forcing their decision. Later he was to recognize those who were held by the moment's crisis in the shell of their perceptions yet opened to slow kinds of growth in the years that followed. At the time, he was most furious not with the Feuers who used their intellectual gifts as open enemies, but with those of his colleagues who stood on the sidelines, whom he saw in transformed light as cowards, thinking only of their own security and a narrow vision of preservation of social life as it stood.
To dismiss his anger as partisan is to evade its line of thought and the evolution of his socio-logos; for he had come to ask now of them, "The students betrayed and beaten in the streets are your friends and colleagues; how then does that inform the meaning of what it is to study society?" and to tell them that an academic who studies institutions and does not then act on what he finds is a counter-model to hold up to students, and one who chooses not to understand what he is involved in is worse.
This line of thought, transposed to educational governance, led Seeley to see as atrocious the refusal of Clark Kerr, then President of the University of California, to make any comment on the students' rough arrest after inflaming the press with remarks about their "Communist domination" and keeping mute on the genuine educational issues at stake. Seeley's opinion was amplified on learning from me that, after three months and our arrests, Kerr still had not taken the trouble to understand precisely the substantive issue of advocacy, but had to have it explained again by his lawyers. A mediator in a quite different modality than Seeley, concerned with brokering among power-groups and serving a different class interest in his mediation, Kerr seemed consumed in a mini-max game, seeking the saddle-point of least risk. That Kerr would not perceive the issues as moral, even to justify himself, did more than infuriate Seeley: it opened his eye to a vision of how deeply a merely Eichmanesque mentality reigned in high places.
******
The FSM was a Rubicon for Seeley, Before 1964 he had spoken mainly to his colleagues; after, he tried to speak to the world. Earlier, he had come to understand and say that social science is concealed advocacy; now he became an overt and. deliberate advocate, understanding this as the only just role for a social scientist in our time and attempting to translate to colleagues and world alike the brief, not simply of the FSM, but of the many-branched movement for social justice that was rising in America -- not as a mere propagandist, but as one who could interpret what was latent and still undeveloped in its message.
In polite quarrel after polite quarrel, as he tried to bring home to his colleagues the intrinsic relevance of the movement's brief to their deepest concerns, Seeley threw away his academic assets, the substantial material security and the respect and acceptance as "one of us" that he had retained even while he was troubling the meta-sociological foundations. His lifetime base of association was undermined as old associates accused him of trying to contaminate with ideology a science that was settling down to peace, and implied that Seeley had made himself the enemy of order and ally of Fascism as well as a traitor to the profession. The irony of the imputation lay not simply in Seeley's coming to a kindred vision of them in turn, albeit a subtler one, but in his having come to understand that only a passionate commitment to genuine democracy as the frame of advocacy could render advocacy just, once the illusion of an "objective, value-free" frame had been discarded.
Against this chosen disfavor, Seeley enjoyed the friendship and loyalty of an eclectic, growing circle, which was to him a family, of cohorts, colleagues and students, of people with whom he worked in service, and who trusted the meaning of his words. This circle had been growing slowly for a decade in Seeley's professional world. Now it grew explosively, as he cast himself into broader service, and as the growth of his own blood family, which he had tended until this time with all the quiet fierce devotion one might expect from a man so dedicated to reversing the unhappy circumstance of his childhood, swept him up in return, as the adolescence of his four sons led him into a thousand places and lives.
For as Seeley had felt himself joined by the children of his dream in the FSM, so he joined them in return. As much as his children's studier and tutor, correcting the world's misinterpretation of them and advising their growth, he became their student in turn, the educator integral at last. He had lost the intimate defense of paternalistic authority, which protects the self from change by enforcing the protocol that the older, the teacher, the empowered, be above learning from the younger, the student, the subject. Unconcerned with his dignity, and for the sake not of educational ideology but of his naked self, he followed his children into all the experiences and cultural byways of the time, and a great joy opened in him as his vision altered.
[Stanford, Brandeis]
The quiet year Seeley had planned at the Center for Advanced Study was perturbed by the FSM. He went up to Berkeley at times to hang out around high circles and low, from Kerr and Glazer to Mario Savio, and brought the issues back to chew with his colleagues. Still more of his energy was bound in the unsanctioned organizing he was engaged in with Christian Bay and the Graduate Student Organizing Committee on the Stanford campus. This was the first dedication of his mature socio-logos to political issue, and the shape of its intervention had a characteristic integrity.
Seeking to help catalyze a supportive and parallel response to the FSM, Bay and Seeley initiated the Association of Stanford Scholars to create a forum to explore the genuine differences and similarities of interest among the subgroups of student, grad student, TA, faculty, in preparation for the political issues that were coming up and to bring the Administration to account. The A.S.S charter was precisely to the time's point, and yet Bay and Seeley were surprised when seventeen eminent faculty joined in their call.
At the first meeting, 700 students showed up, and during that Spring the A.S.S. was a major force in energizing the Stanford campus. One project was to study the whole of the process by which a given plot of grass came to be turned into a parking lot for the faculty's convenience, tracing the structures of power behind each step of decision. When the Scholars invited the university's planning officer to instruct them on how such things were done, the president grew nervous.
Such active sociology has considerable potential, but takes discipline to pursue; the A.S.S. fell apart after Seeley left, yet it had a broader influence in the society of the campus. An awakening energy had found in the A.S.S. a form to rouse itself more and to focus consciousness on values, interests and issues; and moved on -- in the first student election in memory at Stanford that was not just a popularity contest -- to elect David Harris and crew as president on a platform emphasizing government's reorientation to the educational and social issues of the day. Harris went on to local anti-war organizing in the fertilized climate and was the key organizer of The Resistance, which soon spread to become the major nonviolent vehicle of the national anti-war movement. Such distant reflections of small interventions were a frequent grace of Seeley's work.
When Seeley returned to Brandeis in 1965 as chairman of the sociology department, he called a meeting of the department -- inviting students before faculty -- to discuss the issues phrased by the FSM and attempt a different approach to educational community. The issues were vital, their resolution unclear. Seeley insisted that nothing in the nominal status of any person should exclude him or her from entering into their determination, and that the test of authority should be people's agreement as to who bore the burden of wisdom on each given matter at each given moment. All structures, all processes of mutual resolution were possible: common meetings, scholarly exchange, arenas of fair fight. What mattered was that what they did together should be determined not a priori, but by the unfolding history of their relationship.
Seeley recalls it as his most joyous year in academia. The department went wild, becoming in effect an educational commune. As one group's demonstration of what could happen when relations were freed for motion, six paid graduate assistants began meeting to consider their relative exploitation. They soon got down to the heavier issue of the peculiar responsibilities of the persons who could learn by teaching in their niche on the career ladder, and to what happened to this impulse as people attained professorship. In time their regular meetings came to involve voluntarily almost all the department's faculty and graduate students and then as many undergraduates, and began producing excellent reflective documents on educational issues.
Seeley encouraged his faculty to receive these student papers as serious scholarship and to write scholarly responses and followed a strict protocol himself in relation to this group, as to others. When any policy issue came up that related to any of its concerns, he sent them notice and questions or wrote papers to which he asked them to respond. In this way, after the group had begun struggling with the question of whether and how students should grade professors, Seeley triggered the events that led Brandeis to become the first university in the nation to struggle with the question of its relation to the Selective Service System.
For Seeley, attentive to anything that would compromise the moral foundations of educational relations, the issue was luminous. Only custom compelled the university to furnish grades to the Selective Service System; the university had never provoked public debate on the issue, nor court test. Yet by what right was such private information published without student's free and genuine consent? The faculty could not safely offer the opinions students needed for their growth, for to do so increased the probability that the students would become either corpses or murderers. Seeley drew the conclusion that the faculty should cease to issue grades, and offered his notions to the study group in a paper.
Such interventions are not the work of supermen, but elements of field situations, yet surely Seeley had good taste in picking his occasions. Soon the group issued its own study paper and brought about a meeting of most of the student body, which published alternative formulations of what the university should do, and issued a call to the faculty to meet and discuss the matter. A quarter of the faculty responded immediately, a majority soon after, reaching the conclusion that grading was impossible in the circumstance and that the university should at least provoke a court test.
By the time the engaged faculty could bring the matter before the Faculty Council, the higher levels of administration were able to respond. President Sacher ruled not only that a decision was not within the faculty's power, but that the matter itself was inappropriate for the faculty even to discuss, and ordered it struck from the agenda. Seeley simply circulated the correspondence among the entire faculty, observing that the issue had now shifted to the President's illusion that there were things a faculty should not discuss. Sacher sent Seeley a delegation to tell him that, though he might be right on the issue, it would be disastrous for Jewish relations in America if the only Jewish university should appear to take a disloyal stance. Seeley publicly quoted Sacher's declaration that Brandeis was not a "Jewish university" but a Jewish gift to the nation. It was the routine operation of his style, to take people's high rhetoric seriously and try to hold them to it; this was in many cases the most one could do, and at times had a powerful organizing effect.
As usual, Seeley's moral suasion was outgunned. The administration parliamentarian succeeded at the senate meeting in sidetracking the matter into committee for six weeks. During this more leisurely time Sacher was able to put teeth in the thought that university policy was beyond scholarly purview, in part by convincing senior faculty that irresponsible action would lead the local bankers to call the major, short-term notes and thus plunge Brandeis into fiscal disaster. Despite continuing student pressure, the issue was dead -- although the raised issues of faculty power and student rights continued to reverberate on campus -- and the project of testing the SS regulation's justice was left to another university to attempt.
******
Seeley recalls his decision to leave Brandeis as clean; he had announced to his colleagues at the year's beginning that he had a competing potential engagement, and that if their united efforts to democratize the department and university were sufficiently successful he would stay, and otherwise leave to pursue the general rather than the particular battle, Had his efforts been confined within the department, he might well have stayed to enjoy its familial life. But beyond the rich lesson in institutional power which the SS coflict afforded Seeley, I think it struck him in deep ways. He still identified with the faculty, who through his efforts had been led by and led the students to a pitch of expectation, and to challenge the mother-institution's brutalization of family. The effort failed, owing to what he saw again as the cowardice of his colleagues. How then could the faculty, or he, continue to be seen as credible defenders of the young? Surely the ghost of his own father, who had returned at times to object weakly to his mother's reign of injustice and then departed without effecting change, worked live within Seeley at this time, inclining him to flee the painful recreated scene and, in fleeing it, in some ways to recreate it yet again.
The question of Seeley's exits involves not only such childhood roots but also the issue of how the sociologist should continue to relate with the community he serves, once he has lost the safe separation of profession and man which permits him to sever relations surgically.
In general, Seeley left when he perceived his major opportunity as catalytic agent to be blocked, to serve this function elsewhere. Only in Toronto, where his various engagements led him to help train a whole generation of applied social scientists inhabiting several institutions, did he pursue his involvement in any one place for more than a few years. Yet the true place in which he worked had no one location, and in its decentralized familial enfoldment, the continuity and persistence of his effort was remarkable. As for local staying power, I myself watched what happened as Seeley stayed on at Cal Arts after the purge in 1970, to salvage what humanity was possible in the scene and cover the retreat of those he loved, and know it cost him dearly.
[The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions]
During his first stay in California, Seeley had visited the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara. There he returned in 1966, to accept Robert Hutchins' offer of a tenured, lifetime post as the Center's Dean. Retirement was on Hutchins' mind; he intended Seeley to inherit leadership of the moral and political thrust of the enterprise, and for the next three years Seeley, in consultation with him, oversaw the entire non-business operation, from staff organization to the choice of Center topics and collegial invitees.
Seeley had come to conclude that there was little point in losing, or even winning, local battles. He wanted to stand at a distance to strategize the general social war. He saw in the Center not only an ideal base for himself, but an enterprise that might live up to its name in the terms in which he had come to understand "study" and "democratic institution" -- that might become internally a genuine community of learning rather than a debating society, and externally a place of passionate advocacy, an organizing focus for perspectives that might enable revolution.
To this end, as Dean he worked to lower the age of the Center's Fellows, to bring into their discussion a great array of minorities, the young and other subjects and deviants of society, and to focus attention on the issues affecting them, which the Center had scanted. Beyond fresh directions of intellectual thrust, he wanted the Center to become a place that would legitimize lives which, like his, oscillated between thought and activism in an integral way. His pet internal project was to generate the constitution that would make a genuine self-governing institution rather than what Hutchins himself saw as a house of democratic centralism or, less politely, an autocracy. Ironically, the penultimate stage of this process produced the occasion for the purge of Seeley and most of the "Permanent Senior Fellows."
The role of distant advocate and intervener, for which Seeley chose the Center, in some ways contradicted the understandings he had come to and threatened to recreate the split between person and professional. But by now many such splits in Seeley's life had been dissolved beyond redemption, and even the flow of his writing bespoke his inability to contain himself. The constant stream of his in-house essays, which focused largely on the metaphor of education and through it on institutional structure, function and governance, spilled out into his series of publications on his professions' foundations, into encyclopedias, yearbooks, Our Generation and other issue journals, the local town press and campus paper, etc., in a running polemic on schools and students. Seeley also went abroad as advocate, speaking on some fifty campuses -- spreading his institutional analysis and indictment, and discussing the range of issues which together he saw as configuring the collapse of Western civilization, failing the prevailing of certain terms he saw sketched in the various branches of the Movement. And he moved out informally, to explore the nature, warmth and tribulations of the broader family whose member he had found himself.
[Seeley afield]
During 1966, our correspondence developed; at Thanksgiving, Karen and I drove to Santa Barbara to meet him in family. How can I recall the progression of mutual love? We found a small man, with a scrawny beakish face above a surprisingly strong body, who did not fear, as most men do, to share a true embrace, The civilized arabesques of his prose had been misleading, disguising rather than gilding the force of his personality: he was present, tender, and surpassingly sweet. His conversation was shaped by the intellectual's impulse to play in the heights of abstraction, and the raconteur's to digress in Chaucerian anecdote, yet was instantly ready to respond to the hint of another's feelings or needs. Above all, perhaps, he met one genuinely as an equal, with an active caring.
To meet Jack in his immediate family was to witness the intimate core of love that surrounded and sustained him. The boys were as quick with their affection as he was, and became independently our friends over the years. Together they were a formidable troupe, unusually close and mutually respectful, and we saw in the family as a whole a reasonable approximation to the commonwealth of mutual nourishment and growth and autonomy within a framework of shared governance that Seeley sought in the world.
As for Margaret herself, the mysteries of conjugal love are too delicate to treat here. She deserves full share of credit for the boys, not only for accomplishing the herculean tasks of base-making and coping to which our sexist culture assigns women (a division far from reconstructed in the Seeley family) and for the imprint of her person in them, but because she had a unique impression and perception of Jack that functioned as corrective for his own and others'.
In later years, I came to appreciate more broadly the uniqueness of Seeley's character. He had, among my fairly broad acquaintanceship, quite the most sensitive and penetrating understanding of the young and what was happening to them in our society, a capacity to stretch ideas to their abstract limits and to take them absolutely personally, and a sense of delicacy and tact which led him to be unfailingly civilized even in his bitterest disputes, to the point, I sometimes thought, of self-defeat.
Indeed, Seeley was perverse, the sort of man who, at a routine meeting to decide whether classroom chairs should be red or blue, would insist on asking what was meant by "red" and "blue" and whether there should be classrooms at all. The quirk of his mind led him consistently to recognize the distance between what people thought they were doing and what they did, and the effects of the contradictions. Beyond his grasp of the articulation of values, he had a stunning knack of choosing issues, cognitive and social, with a therapist's or psychotic's sensitivity to the presence of buried charge, and an equal knack of choosing the intervention that would bring out the true resistances and feelings beneath them. All in all, it was easy to see why trouble and violent polarizations surfaced wherever Seeley meddled, and why many who had not faced his personal. displeasure found him nonetheless a danger to society -- an evil, nagging, petulant gnome, the agent of chaos.
I came to see him instead as the Fool of Sociology, as over a decade I watched him return battered from engagements and each time sally forth again, with not his optimism but his innocence and wonder undaunted. In perpetual naivete, he sought to extend justice and reason in a world in which, though he grasped the facts of malice and insanity and despite his experience of them, he could never quite comprehend their nature and force. The cowardice and betrayal of his colleagues continued to surprise him; time and again he foretold the routine bureaucratic disaster, yet was always amazed when it came. Totally involved in cultivating an integral sensibility, he could not grasp how others not so committed could escape the obviousness of its conclusions, nor what a genuine rarity was his way of being in the moral world.
******
Seeley came to our tiny cottage in Berkeley in return, not once but many times; it was always like having some marvelous fragile butterfly descend to sip from our garden, even when his wings were crumpled and torn, Always there beat in the space between us the sense of wonder, appreciating impartially the qualities of ideas and herbal teas, of our kinships and crazy friends, and of the social dynamics of struggle and atrocity as the war went on and the decade ground our lives in its turbulence.
As the Haight-Ashbury blossomed in San Francisco in 1967, I brought Jack into its swirl. The Haight was besieged with social researchers as well as journalists, and paranoid about their parasitism; yet this old imp found himself accepted without question among the weird children, not simply for the receptive grace of his presence, but because he had lost the safe distance of the observer to become, as we were, a person living on the existential edge, open to all its passion and terror. He made perhaps twenty visits to the Haight, disappearing for days at a time, passed along from friend to friend in the communes and enterprises of an extending family, and following its movers as they dispersed to seed the small towns and foothills of California, He was also, during this period, involved with Joan Baez, Ira Sandperl, and circles of non-violence and community action in Palo Alto, as well as with the growth of the Isla Vista community in Santa Barbara and all the "counter-cultural" involvements of his sons.
I often wondered how he kept his balance; for to see him at the Center was to see him in a different world, urbane and vaporous, a Platonic academy where old men sat at table to chew as dry abstraction the profoundest human suffering, with never a tremble of rage or anguish in their voices. However ideal the post may have been, Jack had too much juice in him to deserve its mummification, and would likely have exploded or withered there had he lacked the outlet of richer engagements. As it was, the remarkable range of his associations among the younger movers of politics and culture enriched at least the mental life of the Center, and brought the breath of passion at times to the dry deliberations where it was received not always with gratitude.
When Karen and I finally married in rich ceremony among our people in the foothills of the Sierras, the Spring of 1969, Jack was there. With him and the few others of his generation and the children in the meadows, we felt ourselves completed as a people in the time of generations. Some weeks later, as the protests spread in Berkeley over the People's Park, he shared with me the equally rare experience of standing under a government helicopter as it began its gassing run.
As he was received in the intimate ceremonies of our lives, so Seeley shared in their public cusps. In 1967, as the anti-war movement spread East, he joined the March on the Pentagon. For a quarter century, since his army days, he had been an advisor to high seats, spending even more time in Washington than in Ottawa, and declining offers to serve as an executive assistant to the Director of the Peace Corps and the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity, But by now he had cut tie after tie, excluding himself from the charmed circles of policy and power, ceasing to be in any sense even nominally a loyal American. The day before the March he went to stand outside the huge federal buildings, tiny and alone in a space that seemed both prison and free, realizing how thoroughly he had become an outsider and that there was no way back, no forgiveness. Then a car pulled up, disgorging a horde of hippies from the Haight who embraced him in the glad recognition of lost children and whirled him off to spend the night at a meeting of underground press people that grew into the founding of the Liberation News Service, before they marched, together in the morning.
The next summer 1 stopped in Santa Barbara en route to the Democratic Convention. We walked on the beach as I salvaged the skeletons of pelicans killed by oil and we shared reports on the proliferation of our network of alternative institutions and our dread of what was gathering in the dark air of a culture that had come to be terrified by its children. When I saw Jack again, it was at 3 A.M. outside the Hilton Hotel in the streets of Chicago. If we cried as we embraced, it was not alone from the teargas and terror. He had brought a friend to bear witness in the moral commune of our presence; my slides of the occasion record the ritual. Arc-lights glint off the barbed wire and serried ranks of rifles; the Episcopal Bishop looms resplendent in gold miter and scarlet cassock, in one hand staff raised high, in the other the thin, wine-dipped wafer of communion he and Jack offer in turn to guardsman after guardsman who refuse, their boyish faces uncertain and grim beneath the helmets, until at last one accepts and is led away to jail by his officers; and at the Bishop's elbow the small figure of Seeley the meddling gnome, Seeley the farmboy dragging the minister by his conscience, Seeley the Fool still believing in the face of evil evidence that one gesture of moral meaning might resonate in the heart of society and lead the parents to redeem themselves.
[Seeley exiled]
The purge called "reorganization" came at the Center in 1969 when a multi-million dollar windfall brought to a climax the strains accumulating from Seeley's effort, with a few others, to turn the Center to a less academic relevance. Unable fully to recognize himself for the irritant he was, or to expect skullduggery in the community of ideals, Seeley courteously consented to the business manager's veto of the planned open election among the Center's Fellows, and agreed to a proposal that the permanent staff be chosen instead by an expanding consensual process, beginning with Hutchins, who chose the business manager, who blackballed Seeley and others of the Center's core of twenty.
Seeley had been careful about tenure from York on, for it gave him the freedom to further or to oppose, as justice demanded, even the administration that granted it. Yet what devastated him now was not so much the loss of an unassailable lifetime base, but Hutchins' conscious acquiescence in the process of the purge, which involved in the deepest sense the breaking of a paternal oath of fealty as well perhaps as outright fraud, Another purgee took the Center to court for the breaking of a lesser contract and obtained a whopping six-figure settlement out of court. For Seeley, the dimensions of betrayal were too complex for him to contest the matter on this superficial ground, or even to counter the Center's public whitewash of the affair.
With the loss of a base went collapse of the support system which had enabled Seeley to publish over 440 books and articles. During the next five years, the thrust of his work was fragmented between three major involvements and a dozen minor lectureships, consuItantships and tutorial relations as he drifted looking for a home. The frequency of his being asked to stand as candidate for college presidencies dropped from four times yearly to one, and the schools grew more obscure. His wide net of respect and kinship continued to surface other likely engagements; yet most of these were far from the West Coast which his children came to inhabit, and he and Margaret were loathe to leave them.
Nor were even these potential engagements unembattled; for by now Seeley's habit of conducting relations with those beneath and above him in power as he saw proper, rather than by the rules of the trade, had earned him enmity in many quarters. Perhaps the most interesting case was in Toronto where, during his several teaching engagements, Seeley had attempted to create systems in which students and younger staff were not ritually degraded in the processes and as the condition of their acceptance. By 1973, some people remembered his efforts one way, some another: when he was invited by the search committees of the Sociology departments at the University of Toronto and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, the invitations to accept professorship were over-ruled, through threat and outright veto, by higher administrations, determining the real limits of departmental "autonomy." The flap extended to high governmental levels, as the Minister of Education revealed that he had "passed on" negative information to OISE's director clandestinely concerning Seeley, in an extraordinary impropriety. Indeed Seeley, even in absentia, had become a kind of charged particle, energized in the cyclotron sixties and revealing the hidden structure of social matter, the hierarchy of its tensions and forces, in the reactions attending his every penetration.
[The California Institute of the Arts]
There remain three main engagements to complete this present sketch of Seeley's career and purposes; limitations of time and space keep me from dealing adequately with them here. From 1969 to 1972 he worked to help design and establish the California Institute of the Arts, and the School of Critical Studies within it. This next and bolder venture in educational institutions extended the line of praxis of educational governance and community which Seeley had developed through Forest Hills Village, York and Brandeis; it was also a compact and painful case study in failed change, particularly interesting for its light upon the psychodynamics of management of open educational processes.
To say that Seeley moved on from the Center purge to design' a memorial for Walt Disney portrays him perhaps as fool indeed. Yet the attempt to found a new kind of school of the performing arts on $35,000,000 of Disney money had some real promise and was in the direct line of Seeley's work as educator; and the contradictions which undid it were, despite their madcap aspects, commonplace and instructive. The trustees of the California Institute of the Arts wanted a memorial involving not just a collection of autonomous Schools of Drama, Art, Dance, Music, Media and Design, in a high-quality version of the usual arts-school model, but also some way of giving the institution a unique character and cohesiveness. They promised a free hand in this to Maurice Stein, who had succeeded Seeley to the sociology chairmanship at Brandeis and was to head CIA's School of Critical Studies, and to Seeley, who was to help organize not only the planning for the entire institution, but the crucial organizing process within Critical Studies itself.
Critical Studies was to be the vital core of CIA -- not simply a "general education" division to satisfy accreditation requirements, but a place where the most gifted of the culture's young dream-makers and prophets would be brought to confront the critical. thought of the social and behavioral sciences, and through this the human problems of the day, as a condition of their art. To accomplish this, Critical Studies was to involve not only a superior faculty, headed by Stein, Seeley, Herbert Marcuse and Carl Oglesby, and its own student body, but an innovative organizing process in which faculty and students jointly, as a self-governing educational community, would evolve both the content core and the process of its teaching. In this may be seen the progression of Seeley's educational thought: from York where he had tried to combine orthodox notions of content and classical teaching modes with a more democratic governance, to Brandeis where such governance had begun to be successful within a department, to CIA where such governance was to be integral to the entire institution and where, within Critical Studies, every aspect of educational content and process was to be radically open to experiment.
I worked with CIA, both as a consultant in its design and within Critical Studies, drawn there by the confluence of my work with Seeley's. In their thirty faculty, mostly younger, Stein and Seeley had brought together a rich and eclectic array of scholars, the fruit of the excitement of thought of the sixties -- altogether, as strong and interesting an ensemble of talent as I have known to be convened in a new institution. In the following months I observed, and shared in, their first developments of curriculum and cooperation. The space of design and governance was genuinely open; given the canonical problems involved in Stein's handing over his titular powers to a community growing to receive them, and the problems of integrating the sheer energy and diversity of their efforts, the evolutionary process of self-governance went reasonably well, and might in time have realized the vision which brought its people together.
But in truth, the trustees and president of CIA, and the deans of its other Schools, had had no real understanding of the implications of what they had consented to, nor commitment to its principles. The tone of conflict, at once absurd and fundamental, was established early on when the Trustees, on learning that Marcuse was not just an eminent political scientist but the controversial mentor of the black Communist Angela Davis, reneged on his appointment -- leading Oglesby to resign in sympathy. By the first week of school, a senior official of this Eden of the Arts, outraged by the bright mural someone had painted on a waIl of CIA's temporary quarters, had gotten the President to issue an edict forbidding such unapproved activities -- without a direct word of displeasure to the painter, who was not only on the Faculty, but who had been appointed explicitly on the basis of his work as a painter of public walls.
After this, matters went downhill into conflict, as each functioned after his or her kind. The main pressure came not from the Trustees, but from the President and other Deans, who had each day to face not only the considerable tasks of organizing their own domains efficiently, but the existential demands of life in a crucible. Dogs, skinny-dipping, child care, women's liberation -- the issues multiplied, as will happen in any open social space without prior conclusion and constraint, subjecting them to strains they found intolerable. Had Critical Studies offered an orthodox curriculum of strict requirements, it might have passed muster. But many students of the other Schools, accustomed to educational dependence, were disoriented at first by its variety and presumptions of autonomy, and by the slowness of its evolvement into coherence; and the Deans and President, beset not only by the strains intrinsic to founding a school, but by the tensions of mutual competition for funds in a situation of remarkable fiscal mismanagement, found Critical Studies a convenient place to park their anxieties. They could not accept a course for women in car repair as a legitimate embodiment of social thought; and saw, in the choosing of the Critical Studies governing council by means of zodiacal birth signs, not a mere device for the rotation of representative governance, but a lewd gesture of chaos.
The pressure focused on Stein, to shape up his School. When he and they persisted in doing precisely what he had been hired to do, he was fired; the President's aide took over the School's governance; and a substantial number of the faculty were dismissed as of the year's end. This took six months, but from the start the denouement had been in the air. Faced with constant pressure from outside, rather than the unhurried time and open space needed for building, the faculty and students of Critical Studies found the organization of their own work increasingly strained and disrupted which redoubled the outside pressures. The bonds of community and mutual purpose were far too young to permit of effective resistance; in the end they could only huddle together, like a band of lost children adrift in the craziness of Los Angeles, awaiting the sweep of the wave that would carry their brief friendships and cross-fertilizations on to other engagements.
Often during those months I walked with Jack away from the scenes of conflict and betrayal, and into the waiting hills, where we could digest our experience together. There was no narrow political point at stake in the conflicts, but rather an elemental one: it was indeed anarchy and chaos against the forces of "order." The chaos was the complexity which opens when new perceptions and old needs are allowed genuinely to surface; the anarchy was the condition of self-respecting autonomy and democracy necessary to govern such chaos justly; and the "order" was not an ideological conviction that some particular rigid way of ordering matters was ideal, but rather a metabolic reaction to the emotional strain and cognitive dissonance of this existential freedom: a low-tolerance response demanding the immediate security and release of dependable control, and foreclosing the development of a different kind of control, as well as of the social potentials which may go with it. The lesson, from CIA and many other places, is not simply that a constitutional tolerance must protect open social experiment, but that to carry it through there needs be a sufficiently high tolerance among its participants, gained from prior experience, of the peculiar and characteristic stresses and ambiguities of such situations -- else relapse into authoritarian forms is assured, not from without but from within.
[Further engagements]
Following this, Seeley worked as director of the evaluation project for a massively-funded program of alternatives in the Berkeley public school system, and then as a special assistant to the director of the Neuropsychiatric Institute of U.C.L.A.
I have mentioned the proposed Center for the Study of Violence, which the Neuropsychiatric Institute was to have spawned with federal funds from the Law Enforcement Assistance Agency, as a focus for the escalation of the uses of behavioral science in social control. The politics of this, and of the Center's temporary derailment by a process which Seeley helped orchestrate, deserve an essay by themselves, This engagement was in several ways a climax to the logics of Seeley's career. His critique of the psycho-sociology whose totalitarian implications the Center would extend had prepared his position as pivot-man for the resistance against the Center, even as the importance of the issues he had devoted himself to, and his intellectual probity, had earned him a key advisory post within the Center's planning group itself. In managing both roles with scrupulous integrity and without contradiction, Seeley brought to a delicate harmony the style of working both sides of the fence which he had cultivated since his adolescence. And in orchestrating the complex collective effort of campus, civic and professional groups and legislators to block the Center's establishment, Seeley found himself at last, after many undergunned and naive defeats, as a victorious journeyman in the rough-and-tumble of full-scale institutional politics.
These three engagements spanned the first half of the seventies and reveal Seeley as a man of his time, incarnating the rhythms of his chosen allegiances in society, He experienced the profound lessons and failure of early experiment in independent alternatives; the retreat within the System and the insufficiency of the alternatives attempted there in response to the sixties; and the return to focus against the organized injustices which have meanwhile been extending themselves powerfully and persistently. This in capsule has been the collective experience of these years for the people of the Movement with which Seeley identified himself. For him, for us, it has been in many ways a rather depressed time, What is less noticed, publicly and in private perception, is the spread and deepening of alternative social vision, and the extent to which low-profile efforts to realize it, within institutions and at their uneasy bounds, have become rooted and ongoing. Working now at the Drew Medical School's Department of Psychiatry in Los Angeles, as well as with several alternative educational ventures, Seeley seems to me sometimes just another face in a patient crowd, a complex gesture still unfolding.
[The state of struggle]
Looking back, it should be clear that more than personal reactions and timeless bureaucratic structures were at issue. During the sixties, North American society came increasingly unglued, as what had been repressed in persons and minorities sought social space for its legitimation, The symbolic theater of Kent State, of the young murdered for protest of an unjust war, ushered in the retrenchment of the seventies. In education as out, the funds and spirit for active experiment in fundamental change diminished abruptly. No social problem exposed had been solved, indeed the state of most continued to worsen, yet institutions and the individuals within them drew generally back from risk. The lines of social control, though strained, had not broken: in the face of alternatives which were more talk than substance and at best yet feebly rooted, the customary structures of reward still cast their charm, however tarnished had become its meaningfulness, and the processes of punishment continued against disorganized, and generally demoralized, local opposition. At almost every campus of significance in America, economic tightening provided the excuse for the dismissal of "radicalized" faculty in education and the social sciences, though many who would not carry their changed consciousness beyond the private fiefdoms of their classrooms were granted stay.
Nor was this diffuse purge the greatest brake to change. The opening of a Pandora's box could not, for the moment at least, be reversed; new notions of people's needs were abroad, demanding response. The design and leadership of responsive meliorative programs came overwhelmingly to be entrusted, not to those who had tested innovation to the point of conflict or "extremity" during the sixties, but to those who had pursued more orthodox apprenticeships of style and content within established structures of power, who were au courant enough to sound plausible yet proven sensible enough to threaten nothing, and to a few of more eccentric credentials who had reentered the fold convincingly enough.
This process of social homeostasis has operated at every organized level of power's exercise, from school to state school district, city council to national government. But it has had a subtle and grim progressive component. As for social structure, so for the social science with which it is always conjoined, even in cultures which do not conceive of "sociology": the reconsolidation of power advances the hegemony of a particular mode of organization and a particular stylistic purpose. In our case the mode is "value-free" and instrumental, and the purpose, I believe, is control in the face of fear. Despite the newly dissident presence, in several professions of social and psychological science, of "beach-head" associations of radical faculty and practitioners -- and at times, indeed, unacknowledged in their very work -- an instrumental perspective continues not only to dominate the application of social and behavioral science to the governance of our society, but through this domination to advance its own development and hegemony.
It is as if the managers of society, threatened by rising chaos, have sought, from those they still trusted, subtler tools, more bloodless and efficient, to reassert control in ways which would not disturb the existing balances of power; as if they have funded the forges of such tools, enabling their refinement, and have directed their use on a wide scale, ensuring their influence, while at the same time inhibiting in many direct and indirect ways the forging and use of alternative tools; and as if the employment of these tools in governing the very places of their provenance -- in track-oriented admissions screening, in hyper-technologized learning styles, in reductionistic and privatistic psychotherapeutic practices, in systems-analytic strategies for managing faculties and curricula, and in a score of other ways whose gestalt effect is to reshape not only those who are so used but their users to reflect the underlying spirit of employment -- has prejudiced conditions to produce more of the same, much as the needles of the pine forest, fallen to a thick blanket of acid humus, inhibit the sprouting of competing species while nourishing one to extend its dominion.
What is at stake in all this, instrumentally, is the shape of human society and perhaps its continued existence on the planet. For the social and behavioral sciences find their place simply as a particular expression of humanity's consciousness of itself, and we are in all age of historical crisis in which the application of this consciousness self-consciously to its incarnation and further development in society has become necessary, not simply to serve the purposes of the noosphere with de Chardanian optimism, but to respond to the problems with which our social-psychological evolution, or at least its Western version, has confronted itself.
The problems and their underlying contradiction mount towards crisis; what is being tested, most generally, is whether the authoritarian systems and dynamics which have evolved during this past human era and to which we tend to regress in dependence under the gathering strains, and the conceptual and practical. tools which they have fathered and depend on, will be sufficient to cope with the problems and secure at least for a while this era's perpetuation; or whether they will not, and will lead us then either into a disaster whose possible dimensions (beyond simple annihilation) cannot yet be foreseen, or instead into the development of responses of a fundamentally different nature, in their deepest essence and all their details democratic. The nature and use of social science as a tool of social governance has a precise place in this crux, reaching far beyond and yet identical with the question of whether it will be determined by and benefit the managed or the managers of society.
Yet even this instrumental perspective reinforces the tendency it criticizes, for it neglects the moral dimension. People are not objects, to be managed and used, even with the best of intentions. What is going on is not a dispassionate choice between strategies of response to potential and crisis, but a war between irreconcilable senses of the human spirit, fought always in practice on utilitarian grounds but defining the deepest senses of human meaning, which we call "moral." In this arena of human meaning one chooses sides perforce through one's actions. And as we are all socio-logists, actively creating society through our understanding of it, perhaps the highest state of (meta) sociology is to choose to be conscious of this process, and morally responsible for the consequenees of each intervention, from personal intercourse to advice of governmental policy.
In this light I see Seeley in the seventies, as just another aging rebel on the run, buffeted by the day's weathers -- suffering demoralization and doubt in his and our abilities to build, and perhaps even in the ultimate efficacy of the buildable; yet still holding to his purpose as the meaning of his life, and attempting to instantiate it so far as energy, opportunity and comradeship can avail. The five major projects he undertook in education, from 1960 through 1973, may each be said to have ended in turbulent failure; yet the failures are of interest for the spirit they sought to incarnate, as Seeley's life is exemplary not only in the way it reveals the nature and dynamic of a conflict of tools and perspectives, but also as a model of praxis, an example of a lived gesture of meaning in society, human enough (despite my description) to be real. Nor were they simply failures, but rather rich experiences which continued after his departure. The story of what happened afterwards at York, Brandeis, etc., becomes the broader story of all those who moved in various response to the impulses of the age, creating the context in which the fate of Seeley's work and life, and of the family of people influenced by him and sharing with him the development of a perspective of social thought and action, is still being decided, as unbalanced sides imagine weapons in an uncertain war.