Actually, it turned out to be another instance of university people blithely deceiving each other and everyone in the audience -- at least, I heard no complaints. I might have if I stayed for the whole potlatch, but I tired from all the cloying self-reverence and the many howlers. To take the assembled at their word, segregation was such an obvious wrong so easily uprooted, some in the audience might have wondered why these clerks from yesterday did not just go down South and announce the practice suspended forthwith.
The most blatant deception practiced that night was by the panel's moderator, whom I later discovered is also one of the campus' most egregious left-wingers, a paradigmatic left-winger among left-wingers. He beamed with pride and introduced panelist Charles Reich, author, the moderator told us, "of 'The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef.'" But wait. Reich's most famous book was that 1970 classic of failed prophecy and foolish analysis, "The Greening of America." Why was Reich not introduced as the author of that stupid book? Why mention "Sorcerer"? As I heard more nonsense from the other panelists, the answer became apparent. The world has turned out to be an utterly different place from the hippie paradise Reich had prophesied in 1970.
Thus it was prudent to identify the distinguished prof only with this minor book, "Sorcerer," which hardly anyone had read and which would cause Reich no embarrassment. Actually I read both books. The minor book is worse than "Greening." Reich -- he who in the late 1960s celebrated libidinous excess, drugs and hippie youth -- had lived a monkish life before "Greening" appeared, a life made dull by an abstemious diet and nerve-wracking celibacy right into middle age. Then he discovered that his male member was not meant solely for urination. It was actually, as we say these days, a dual-use technology. Eee-yow what a midlife crisis he had after that, and he was foolish enough to write all about it. In fact, many of us from the 1960s thought the old boy had croaked in a haze of controlled substances and perspiration. But no, he has returned to an Ivy League law school faculty and dresses like a salesman at Brooks Brothers, an establishment he once associated with Rotary Club fascism.
There were other absurdities on "reunion" weekend, but already I have been too rude. I may never again be allowed on any campus in North America. My picture may appear on campus bulletin boards, right next to the warnings about the campus rapist and CIA recruiters. And I do so like to visit a campus at least once a decade, about as often as I visit zoos.
(Note: The name of the university I visited has been withheld to protect the innocent.)