Wordsworth, not a poet with whom I ordinarily connect, conveys the wonder of that time and place. This is a book about the transformation of minds, my own and many others’. In 1964 the dawn of change cast splendor and excitement over all it touched, however rough or silly a cooler eye might have pronounced our acts of desire, protest, and expectation.

Smith College, where I taught in 1964–65, had arranged a brilliant schedule for faculty: we had classes on three consecutive days, Monday to Wednesday for me, and then did whatever we did on the other four. I began speaking, fundraising, and carrying out a variety of tasks for Friends of SNCC, in New York, Washington, Poughkeepsie, and many places in between. I learned how to use a mimeograph machine and to write leaflets people could actually read. I joined others at Smith in circulating a statement proclaiming resistance to the Vietnam War, and in organizing a teach-in on that subject. I helped establish and sustain a Smith-Amherst SDS chapter. I traveled to Montgomery with a couple of my students during the Selma-Montgomery march and got arrested. In short, for a wonderful academic year, I experienced many of the pleasures of an undergraduate education at a fancy liberal arts college.

And this, too: as a single man of thirty-two, I was set loose among exceptionally smart and attractive young women at a moment when having a fling with one’s professor was becoming part of the educational program. It would take a few years for the just-stirring feminist revolution to challenge that perfidious mentality. Smith actually had a reputation for hiring gay men—a number from Yale—presumably because they offered no threat to its young women. That practice had come to a disastrous end in 1960 when the Northampton Post Office had opened a packet of what they designated gay “pornography” addressed to Professor Newton Arvin. In fact, the material was what we might today call “beefcake” photography—scantily-clothed muscled guys—hardly sexual in content, much less pornographic.