Poughkeepsie Journal

Sunday, April 4, 2004

New Paltz: Home of the free ... thinkers
By John W. Barry
Poughkeepsie Journal

Less than two hours from New York City, New Paltz -- the village, town and state university -- attracts wide diversity in social makeup, sexual orientation and ethnic heritage. On the fringe where New York state's rural divide meets a Manhattan-infused, metropolitan and suburban sprawl, New Paltz maintains a frontier spirit that over centuries has not lost its edge.

You may or may not agree with New Paltz Mayor Jason West's controversial decision on Feb. 27 to solemnize dozens of same-sex marriages, a move which prompted the Ulster County district attorney to charge him with 24 misdemeanors for doing so without being presented with a marriage license.

Independent spirit

But less controversial than his bold move on marriages would be the labeling of this 27-year-old member of the Green Party as another in the long line of independent thinkers who have passed through, set up shop or settled for good on the banks of the Wallkill River in the community of New Paltz.

West's independent streak sliced through New Paltz in May of 2003, when he and two running mates shook up this country's two-party political system by winning election to the New Paltz Village Board. The board's Green Party majority is only one of two in the nation.

But more than three centuries earlier, another band of independent thinkers crossed the Atlantic Ocean and ended up establishing the settlement of New Paltz. Protestants fleeing religious persecution in what is now northern France and southern Belgium -- who had resettled in Germany -- made their way to the New World in search of religious independence and economic opportunity.

The Huguenots in 1677 signed a treaty with the Esopus Indians that gave them 40,000 acres of land between the Shawangunk Mountains and the Hudson River, settling the land a year later. Their culture has been meticulously maintained and their community remains on display on Huguenot Street, under the watchful eye of the Huguenot Historical Society.

''Look at the 'Gunks, the sense of the majesty of the mountains and the openness of the plains leading up to it,'' said former SUNY New Paltz President Roger Bowen, whose viewpoints while in office, at times, couldn't have been more independent of those held by members of the SUNY administration.

''It's an atmosphere and environment that are conducive to the feelings of freedom. I think humans are attracted to it -- not everybody, and good that they aren't. People who appreciate beauty, raw, natural beauty, will always be taken with New Paltz. ... The mountains on the west and the Hudson on the east create a sense of community. You've got natural boundaries. It feels like you've arrived and you're home.''

Unlike West, Bowen never ran up against the law. But he did take on the SUNY Central establishment and like West, his stance gained a tremendous amount of attention.

Bowen faced harsh criticism after allowing a controversial conference, ''Revolting Behavior: The Challenge of Women's Sexual Freedom,'' to take place on the campus in 1997. The forum included workshops on lesbian sex, use of sex toys and sadomasochism.

In 1998, another forum, ''Reconfiguring the Body: Artistic Views of the Human Body,'' also drew criticism.

In 1999, SUNY New Paltz College Council Trustee Candace de Russy called unsuccessfully for Bowen to be fired after allowing ''The Vagina Monologues,'' which included explicit references, to be staged on campus.

''All three were controversial, not in New Paltz, but in the outside,'' said Bowen, who served as SUNY New Paltz president from 1996-01 and is preparing to assume office as general secretary of the Washington based-American Association of United Professors. ''That was the issue, whether the university should enjoy academic freedom and some said yes and some said no. I think there are some principles that you cannot betray and still live with yourself.''

Bowen said he enjoyed the backing of more than 90 percent of the faculty when embroiled in this controversy, a stand taken by the college community that in some respects echoed, if spirit if not in numbers, a period of independent thinking on campus in the early 1970s.

''The war protesting was at its worst in 1970,'' said Al Marks, a retired SUNY English professor who taught from 1953-85 and is now the historian for the town and village of New Paltz. ''That was a time when the campus was taken over by the students ... students took over for several days.''

Students during this period occupied the building now known as Old Main for about a week, Marks said. On one occasion, he had to petition the president's office to have his classroom cleared of students and their sleeping bags so he could teach. Outside, students had set up microphones and were delivering speeches, protesting the Vietnam War and the U.S. invasion of Cambodia.

Irwin Sperber, a sociology professor at SUNY New Paltz since 1973, earned his doctorate at what many surely consider the epicenter of 20th-century independent thinking, the University of California at Berkeley. Sperber was enrolled at Berkeley from 1961-70 and was a member of the Union of Radical Sociologists, helping to organize demonstrations in the San Francisco Bay area that attracted tens of thousands of people.

Sperber said opposition to the Vietnam War that fomented at SUNY New Paltz in the early 1970s can be traced to the cold war.

The Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik into space left some feeling that the United States' cold war adversary placed a higher emphasis on science at the university level.

As a result, American educators deemed it foolish and even unpatriotic for students to glide through college with low grades, as members of fraternities and sororities, enjoying beer bashes, Sperber said.

Academic standards by the late 1950s and early 1960s were raised, Sperber said. At universities like Berkeley and Columbia, this stricter academic environment inspired students to work at improving society at large, focusing on what they considered to be violations of rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

Many students traveled into the deep South to help blacks in their battle for civil rights. Many, Sperber said, grew suspicious of those in authority after witnessing complicity among whites with positions of authority working to prevent blacks from exercising their civil rights.

This perception was emboldened, Sperber said, when these students returned to their campuses to recruit classmates in their undertakings. Once back at school and organizing more trips to the South, the students were told by administration officials wary of the threat of McCarthy-era subversive activity that they had no right to put up signs or set up tables to rally support for their causes.

''They felt threatened because what students were doing seemed more and more out of the control of the university administration,'' Sperber said. ''And many of these university administrators were appointed to their positions during a climate of right wing Cold War ideology ... if you questioned the government, you could lose your job. You were either on the communist payroll or a communist sympathizer. During the McCarthy era, it didn't take much to get thrown out of college.''

Sperber added, ''The whole strategy of trying to educate other students, they were told they were forbidden to do so. That led to what became known as the free speech movement.''

The battle then spread from the South to include the college campuses, a development which left students questioning many aspects of authority, including college administrators, the U.S. government and the Vietnam War. Sympathy for struggles at Berkeley and elsewhere sprung up on college campuses around the country and students were given a concrete, tangible link to this movement when their draft notice or that of someone they knew arrived in the mail.

That, Sperber said, brought the debate to colleges around the country, including New Paltz.

''This kind of thing led students all across the country to become not just anti-war activists, but sympathetic to what the students in Berkeley had originally been maintaining, that you needed to fight for the protection of the U.S. Constitution and that when the students fought against the war escalation in Vietnam, they needed to fight for rights on their own campus.''

Sperber, who lives in Gardiner, said traces of the spirit of those days of protest can be found ''not just in New Paltz, in the surrounding communities like Rosendale and Gardiner. You have a more and more substantial political base, really a voting constituency and a popular sentiment in favor of environmental justice and in fact, you see that people who in earlier decades would not have even bothered to vote, are not only voting but voting for truly progressive candidates who are speaking the truth to power.''

West, a SUNY New Paltz graduate, said colleges are intended to be places where people are encouraged to think for themselves.

''At its best, that's what a college is for,'' West said.

SUNY New Paltz President Steven G. Poskanzer viewed the college's legacy of independent thinking in terms of academic environments that stimulate the intellect, rather than the college's legacy of war protests and the commandeering of a campus building.

''Over the last 30 years, SUNY New Paltz has really become one of the most academically-rigorous and selectively-academic and strongest academic institutions in the SUNY system,'' Poskanzer said. ''I think it's inaccurate to characterize the institution with an outdated stereotype.''

SUNY New Paltz spokesman Eric Gullickson said the college has received the highest number of freshman enrollment applications ever, for the fall 2004 semester -- more than 11,250. The mean academic average of those applications was more than 90 percent and the mean SAT average was more than 1160.

Marks, however, said New Paltz's legacy is closely tied to the college's days of liberal social philosophies and student activism.

He also believes the wave of independent thinking that swept West's administration into Village Hall was directly related to the presence of a university in New Paltz.

''I think any university town can go that way,'' he said. ''When it blows up, it has no place to go except outside in the community.''

Tom Hegeman of Gardiner, 57, said the makeup of New Paltz -- independent minded or not -- is ''artificial,'' because the college attracts a large number of people who might have never come to New Paltz. He added that the town's proximity to New York City makes it an attractive place for those looking to relocate.

''It's more of a melting pot than it ever has been,'' Hegeman said Friday while smoking a cigarette on Main Street.

West said the size and setup of New Paltz plays a role in the spread of independent thinking throughout the community.

The layout of downtown New Paltz encourages walking rather than driving, he pointed out, and those shopping at stores and eating at restaurants are more likely to bump into their neighbors and interact with them, whether they choose to or not and whether they share lifestyles and values or not. This in turn, he continued, increases exposure to different lifestyles and fosters tolerance.

''Those differences become familiar and therefore less and less scary,'' he said.

If you take the example of homophobia, West said, battling it becomes a uniting issue for people of differing sexual orientations if they all recognize that they share the same community.

''When people start threatening gays and lesbians, it's threatening your community,'' he said, adding that the hundreds of people who turned out to show support during his arraignment were not all homosexual.

Of the turnout, he said simply, ''It was support.''