Custer at Mannakee

Custer at Mannakee
by Howard T. Wickert

In the anarchic sixties, when I was on the front lines teaching the writing of English (the good paragiraffe) to the shocked and shocking freshman of Dear Old Montgomery, I forbade their usage of the pronouns, “I”, “me,” “my,” “you,” “your,” etc. All was to be in the third person. People, things, events, ideas! “This is a course in exposition: it’s not letters home or diary-keeping!”

But time’s revenges have o’ertaken me, and this small reminiscence is, almost totally, couched in the vertical pronoun “I.” I entreat the reader not to think it as boasting, beating the drum for self, or least of all, setting the self up as any paragon of anything. (We emeriti are beyond—or above—or below—such things!)

I (ouch!) am, I confess, of the old, old school. Born and bred in the Regular Army, educated in hard old West Point, I had a career of four wars plus the horrors of peace, including teaching at West Point, and then teaching for four years at The Catholic University of America after retirement. I was accustomed to docility, almost ornate, almost courtly courtesy on the part of other ranks toward “superiors,” or ranking seniors.

Little prepared was I for the, shall we say, informality of “Montgomery Junior College” in 1968! Its then five ugly buildings and duck pond were aswarm with seventeen-nineteen year olds who KNEW THEY OWNED THE UNIVERSE! They had originated it! They had, all by themselves, invented the cosmos!

Today’s reader who has no acquaintance with the 60’s will totally miss the point of this. The world then was full of—was made of—seventeen to twenty-year-old barbarians. They dictated speech, taste, dress, language, morality, mores, religion, the national grand strategy, and even the weather. “Trust nobody over thirty!” “If it feels good, do it!” “Let it all hang out.” All that was old, customary, or traditional was evil. The archenemy in all things was “The Establishment!”

Now, Montgomery was not Berkeley. Its students, then as now, were usually rooted in reality, holding down jobs, aware of the real, hard world; they were not the spoiled excrescence of ease and affluence who worshipped Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, and their ilk in California; but still, they bore no resemblance, inside or out, to college students of earlier days—or of today. They were, true or pseudo, “rebels without a cause,” particularly in manner and dress.

Out of pragmatic accommodation or of the well-known axiom of politics (“If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em”), most of the faculty out-studented the students! It was not unusual at all to see an instructor in blue jeans, a scruffy shirt unbuttoned to the navel, asprawl on the grass, talking to his students in the bordello-ghetto jive that was de rigueur then. (“Are you into Joyce? Oh wow! Far out! Neat! He says it like it is!”)

Is this the place for me? I asked. The answer was, I shall be the “different drummer”! So, I came to class, always, in shined shoes, well-creased trousers, coat, tie, cuff links, and—mirabile dictu—closely-cropped hair. I would come in, one-half second late (so there would be no pre-class colloquy) and close and lock the door on the hour’s stroke. I would bow, very low, from the waist (the “West Point bow”). Then I would lecture. Rarely, rarely would I pose a query or invite some slight discussion. (This was the age of discussion. The most banal or insipidly superficial discussion intra-pares was thought far preferable to any detestable, outmoded, barren lecture.) I heaped scorn on the sensory, the physical world. I taught the world as Will and Idea. As God’s gym.

If, rarely, I called on a student, it was “Mr. Roe” or “Miss Doe”—never “Ricky” or “Debbie.” If their comment or answer were, as was usual, off-target or juvenile, I would say, “You, sir, cannot have grasped what the subject is. You could not, had you tried, been further off the mark!”

This, in those days, was cataclysmic! All that these goodly youngsters had ever heard in the public schools was, “That’s very good, Ricky; now let’s hear what some other kid has to say. . . .”

Any student nodding (unthinkable as it be!) or whispering in my class was summarily banished from the room, with comments on his raiment. During office hours, when a student came to see me, he or she always stood, never sat. He or she was “Mister” or “Miss.” No tears or “how-hard-I-worked-on-this” were allowed. Many a lovely girl (dressed in harlot’s get-up) and honest young man (dressed for septic-tank work) came to my office hours door with a cherry “Hi!”

“You do NOT say ‘Hi’ to me!” I would bristle. “Go away, and come back when you have learned to say a proper salutation to a professor in a college!” Such, such were the joys.

Did I enjoy this? Yes. Was it play-acting? Yes. A lot of leadership is play-acting. The serene, unflappable C.O. who, with all in chaos, the phone-lines out, and incoming artillery raining down, looks like he’s going to a tea; that’s what I wanted to appear as being.

I didn’t, of course, succeed. I am certain that in those days, now gone, thank God, I was thought a campus nut. The word got round. Soon my repute had kept the worst students, the “fringe,” away. They told each other “Don’t get HIM!” “Go at night; drop the course. But don’t get HIM!”

I think I paid a price, too, in collegial camaraderie. Many a colleague, going with the times, dismissed or shunned me as a kook, an eccentric, a troglodyte, or, worst of all, A Military Mind!

I wasn’t any hero. I wasn’t trying to reform academe. I was not fighting alone, or anything great. But I showed them something else.

Love is what propels a college. The faculty does not have to be—maybe better not be—loved. The students do have to be; not selectively but in toto, as a race. Above all, the college has to be loved. Maybe not in medias res, but certainly in retrospect. They have to love their college, afterwards. They have to say Alma Mater—the Mother of my Soul. Else all’s for naught.

Many a student of then, today in his late thirties, laden with responsibilities and debts, now knows how to greet the boss, how to write a good paragraph, and how to dress right; learnt however tangentially.

But YOU, Montgomery College (may you ever flourish!), you are what you say you are! You are not “Loser U,” not a prep school for “the Big Thing” in College Park, not a remedial institution for the lacks and lacunae of the high schools. You are the first two years of a—of any—great university, and better! Here, our students are not “taught” in amphitheatres by graduate assistants, who do not know their names.

Oh no! Our beloved students, whom well we know, are taught by instructors, of whatever rank, who have no other care than for Montgomery College to “live on, far away . . . woven into the stuff of [their] lives.”

Rockville Campus: Department of English and Philosophy, 1968–1980; Professor Emeritus.