Adult leadership remembered

A loyal reader and MIT ’68 alum writes from Brussels to draw our attention to this letter in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal about what he calls “the raging madness on US campuses.” Here is the letter:

Regarding your editorial “Bonfire of the Academy” (Nov. 11): The editors lament the lack of “adult leadership” at today’s universities. It wasn’t always so. I was at MIT in the late 1960s, and we had our fair share of protests and sit-ins. Most dealt with the Vietnam War but there were other more mundane issues, like tuition increases. At one such protest, MIT Dean Kenneth Wadleigh showed up unexpectedly and delivered the line: “Anyone here five minutes from now won’t be here tomorrow.” It was refreshing to see how quickly the room emptied.

Jim Hahn
Scottsdale, Ariz.

Professor Wadleigh died in 1994. MIT posted a brief obituary here.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses