Stories
The physiology of Nickolai Bernstein
Evolution of
the brain
and social behavior
Learning languages
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For my first few years at Wesleyan, most of my political activism was still located in New Haven, rather than on campus, as I continued working on Modern Times. But that did not shield me from political danger. When I first came up for tenure, the department chairman called me into his office and said that he knew that I had worked with the Black Panther Party and he would therefore make sure that I did not get tenure. As he put it, "You'll get tenure over my dead body!" At the subsequent department meeting he said,
I just want to remind you that in making decisions on tenure and reappointment, not only do we consider teaching and scholarship, as we have always done, but also, you must get along with the tenured members of the department. If you don't you can worry about it yourself and you can always leave and go somewhree else. It's not my problem to get along with you. It's your problem to get along with me.In fact, the first time I went up for tenure, it was denied. And a second year it was denied as well even though I had the best publication record in the history of the department, and the stress was so great that I got shingles on half of my face and was lucky not to lose my eyesight on that side. The third year I went away to the Soviet Union and did not stay around to see what would happen. Fortunately for me, the Department Chairman became so sick psychologically that he was hospitalized and never returned to academics! And I did get tenure, being, as far as I know, the only person ever to come up for tenure three times and still get it.
I became involved with the chapter of the American Association of University Professors and sometimes was the principle negotiator with the administration for our benefits. And I was active in many cases of unjust denial or threat of denial of tenure. The worst was in my own department which had never tenured a woman in its history. While I was there, six consecutive cases of tenure for women were denied or else ended when the woman left in the belief that tenure would be denied. All were on sexist and hypocritical grounds. For example, two woman was denied tenure with claims they had committed adultery with male students, and the primary accuser in one case was her husband, also in the department, who was having an affair with a student. Alice Gold, with whom I worked on our studies of human estrus, was denied tenure on the basis of claims by some students that she allowed students to contradict her. I defended her without success, pointing out that most male professors put down their students rather than listening to them and that should be considered as worse.
In the fall of 1982, Professor Hope Weissman and I took the leadership of the Women Studies Program and taught the women's studies courses. We decided to do this after the University denied tenure (in its typical sexist fashion) to Professor Joan Hedrick who had run the program, apparently thinking that they could then abolish it. When no one else would come forward, Hope and I took charge and taught the courses. Afterwards, others came forward and the Women's Studies Program was saved. This wasn't without its painful aspects, however, as many in the increasingly gay student community did not like what they considered to be my "biological" approach to sex and behavior.
It is ironic that the students considered my approach too "biological", because of all the faculty in psychology at Wesleyan, I was the most opposed to the dominant ideology of biological determinism. One prominent Psychology professor, for example, taught that there is a genetic determination of higher IQ in Whites than Blacks (as if he could guarantee a scientific measure of IQ that was not confounded with class and income factors!). It was especially ironic that his wife was Black! I was able to demonstrate the effects of Wesleyan's teaching of biological determinism in the study we did for the meeting in Seville in 1986 which showed that Wesleyan students were more likely than students from community college and nursing schools to believe that war is biologically determined.
After getting tenure, I got involved in support of student activists in solidarity with the great social movements of the United States, including the Nuclear Freeze, protest against the American invasion of Grenada, protest against the US-led Contra War in Nicaragua, and divestment from the apartheid regime of South Africa.
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| Student demonstration at Wesleyan for divestment from South Africa. See if you can find me in the crowd. Click on the photo to enlarge. |
The photo here is one for which I am especially proud. It was taken during the days of the student activism in 1988 for divestment from South Africa. Here was a case where the students actually played a pivotal role in history. Bitterly resisted by the University Administration and Board of Trustees, and given little support from the faculty, the students forced Wesleyan to sell its investments in companies doing business with the Apartheid regime in South Africa. It turns out in retrospect that Wesleyan divestment came at a key moment which inspired other universities and institutions to divest, and the divestment campaign played a major role in forcing the Apartheid regime to enter into talks with Nelson Mandela, leading eventually to his freedom and the allowing of free elections.
Several years later I taught a small seminar about the divestment campaign and the students wrote excellent historical papers documenting what had happened in detail.
Almost always, mobilizations were student-led and inspired, but sometimes I was able to mobilize faculty support for the students, which was helped by my consistent support for faculty benefits in the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors.
In the last few years before leaving Wesleyan for the UN, the students in my courses of Psychology of War and Peace organized major student conferences on the campus, one consisting of a US-Soviet Student Summit, and another dedicated to solidarity with the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio.
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Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme