On the Cusp

Daniel Horowitz has written a fascinating personal and public history that uses his Yale University class of 1960 as a prism through which to view the transition between the consensus-oriented students of the 1950s and student activists in the 1960s. The Yale that Horowitz attended was strikingly homogeneous. Nearly half of the students were “preppies” (having attended elite preparatory schools) or were graduates of excellent suburban high schools. (Despite its fame and academic excellence, the multiethnic Bronx High School of Science had no students in his class.) Horowitz's peers were affluent, Republican (only 17 percent were Democrats) and predominantly Protestant. There were only five African Americans in his entire class; Jews were only 10 percent of the student body. The vast majority of participants in elite campus clubs, high-level fraternities, and members of Yale's “accapella” singing groups were “preppies” and “legacies” (the offspring of Yale graduates). Yet somehow change began to happen in these years. Why? How does an elitist, white, Republican campus begin to envision the possibility of social activism? Horowitz answers these questions primarily through telling his own story. The memoir is by far the most effective part of the book, particularly the story of his relationship with his parents, his travels to Africa, and his courtship of Helen (who would become his wife

Art history · Elite · Media studies · Memoir · Middle class · Political science · Politics · Sociology · White (mutation · Wife · Academic Freedom and Politics · Gender Studies · History · Law

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