THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, September, 25, 1995 TAG: 9509230033
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 252 lines
FATHER AND SON reunion: Some catching up, a little small talk and then the typical parental nagging.
But this time the question isn't: Why haven't you called? Or: Where's your money going? It's more like: What political activism have you gotten involved in lately?
Father: ``At some point, you have to organize to do something about it.''
Son: ``My record's spotty.''
Father: ``You haven't been in a picket line since you were 6.''
Son: ``Picket line, shmicket line.''
Meet Maurice and Michael Berube, father and son academics.
Mo, 62, is an old-time unionist, former socialist, eminent professor of education at Old Dominion University. Michael, 33, is an English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who's making a name writing about political correctness and black authors in popular periodicals like the New Yorker and the Village Voice.
Last month, while Michael was in Virginia Beach with his wife and sons for his annual visit home, the two professors went out to lunch.
Together, they're like a '90s version of ``My Dinner With Andre,'' two men delighting in a rich stew of mile-a-minute discussion that darts through issues and intellectuals - affirmative action and health care, Cornel West and Lynne Cheney, Irving Howe and Charles Murray.
Along the way, they're not averse to some friendly family-style needling. But it never obscures the love and admiration they feel for each other.
Mo on Michael: ``He's the brightest guy in the family. We all defer to him because of his intelligence.''
Michael on Mo: ``One of the things I got from him is the conviction that you judge a society by how it treats its most unfortunate - not how it treats its top 10 percent. . . . What I'm impressed by with both my parents is their commitment to the culture of critical discourse. Ideas are important. That's an important way to bring up kids.''
They're two generations of lefties with slightly different interests - Mo is more into unions, Michael more into hip-hop.
In the '60s, Mo was venting in liberal journals, sometimes attacking old cronies, like socialist Michael Harrington and union leader Albert Shanker, for betraying the cause. Since he got to ODU in 1979, he has ``mellowed'' out, writing dispassionate books on such subjects as the waves of school reform in America and teachers unions.
Now Michael's the one in all the magazines.
His articles in mainstream publications - assessing black intellectuals, defending colleges from the anti-PC crowd - led the Chronicle of Higher Education to dub him a ``nimble advocate for the left'' in a complimentary profile earlier this year.
But Michael shrugs off any pretensions to fame. ``A couple hundred people know my name. Now, Camille Paglia,'' he said, referring to the anti-feminist ``bad girl'' of academia, ``she's famous.''
Mo admits that he had to adjust a bit to his son's soaring celebrity. ``Now he's no longer my son; I'm his father. Initially that bothered me, but that passed very quickly. I'm proud of what he's doing. He's continuing the tradition I was involved in.'' And he's bumping into some of the old gang, which makes Mo happy.
``A year ago, he ran into an old guy I knew'' - Nat Hentoff, the longtime writer and free-speech advocate for the Village Voice. ``He said, `Are you Mo Berube's son? He was a firebrand in the '60s.' ''
They may think alike on abortion and gay rights, but Mo and Michael don't even pronounce their names the same way. Father calls himself BEH-ruh-bee, and Son, sticking closer to the exact French, goes by BEH-ruh-bay - with accent marks over both e's.
Mo says he dropped the accents because they seemed too pretentious. Michael tried to keep everything exact because of the way his name got mangled when he was growing up in New York City. ``It was Beruba or Boobie or Beroobie. I just got tired of the mispronunciation.''
They also write differently. Mo, a former journalist, prides himself on his straightforward, unconvoluted style - simple sentences, no razzmatazz. ``You're not going to find humor in a piece I've written. Michael has a much more elaborate style, with a lot of humor.''
In his essay ``Discipline and Theory,'' Michael wrote: ``Even to the enemy of our enemies, it seems, we look something like a cross between Johnny Rotten and Cotten Mather: Just take the Sex Pistols' political tact and respect for authority, toss in the Puritans' good cheer and sense of rhythm, and presto, you've got Rotten Mather, assistant professor of English, 30 years old and not to be trusted. How did I let myself in for this?''
Oh, and the music. Don't expect them to attend the same concerts.
Michael lists his favorites: Green Day, the Gin Blossoms, Nirvana (``they breathed a lot of life back into music''). Mo, impatient, interjects: ``You like Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday.''
``Back in my day,'' Mo says, ``we had Parker, Coltrane. They were geniuses. Now you've got Ice T.'' He pauses in disgust. ``Punks.''
But their similarities outweigh their differences. Listen to the way they talk - zooming through every point as if they had only two minutes left for their lecture. ``I grew up in a house where if you didn't speak quickly, you couldn't finish your sentence,'' Michael says.
Both also have short fuses, says the woman who knows them best, wife and mother Anne Berube. ``They're quick to get angry, but they're hot-heads. That may have to do with their lack of patience.''
On a deeper level, Berube Sr. and Jr. are professors who are devoted to teaching and research - and not just any type of research. At a time when professors are facing heat for frittering away time on arcane topics for arcane journals, both are writing about relevant issues in an accessible style. ``I see the kind of writing I do as a form of teaching,'' Michael says.
And both have won the top honors for their work at the schools. Michael was named a university scholar at Illinois last year. Mo got double kudos this year: He was named an eminent scholar at ODU and he got the university's Tonelson Faculty Award for excellence in teaching and research.
``I majored in Berube,'' says Forrest ``Hap'' White, the Norfolk school system's budget director, who recently received his Ph.D. from ODU. ``He is just a tremendous teacher. Every one of his courses was current, entertaining and challenging'' - and, White says, free of the jargon that sometimes bogs down education classes.
Another thing: Though both fit the classic liberal mode, neither is doctrinaire. Both are willing to admit mistakes in their camp.
Michael, for instance, acknowledges that the right may have a point when it criticizes leftist professors for not appreciating their homeland: ``The standard charge of knee-jerk anti-Americanism - I think it's souped up, but there's a degree of truth to it. We have liberties here that you don't have in Chile.''
And Mo is having some second thoughts lately about how well affirmative action has been working. He thinks it's done next to nothing for low-income blacks, and maybe the focus should be on income. He tries out his ideas on Michael.
Mo: ``As Cornel West points out, in the book you reviewed, the problem is the black poor. They're letting them swim out there.''
Michael: ``I think the problem for many black and Hispanic poor is reverse affirmative action.''
Mo: ``It's not an easy policy. Someone always gets hurt. You can't just knee-jerk it. And you can't let the black poor swim alone anymore.''
Michael: ``I agree with that. But last year, as you know, Harvard University reported that more people attended Harvard as legacies (children of alumni) than through affirmative action.''
Mo Berube grew up in Maine and moved to New York in the '50s to attend Fordham University. He stayed in the city and hooked up with the Catholic trade union movement, editing the Labor Leader. He was arrested once for picketing the Teamsters (they had just signed a ``sweetheart deal'' with a bunch of car washes that Berube's group thought gave the workers short shrift).
In 1964, he moved over to Shanker's union, the United Federation of Teachers, to help edit its twice-a-month magazine. After a year as an aide to liberal Republican mayor John Lindsay, Berube moved to Queens College as a researcher and teacher.
In the late '60s, he latched onto the movement for ``community control,'' which married his deepest interests - civil rights and education. With Lindsay's blessing, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district in Brooklyn was selected for a pilot program: Parents in the black area would help select the principal, who, in turn, could choose which teachers stayed and which left.
But the experiment collapsed over charges of black anti-Semitism. Many of the teachers who were forced out were Jewish and said they had been harassed. And copies of an anti-Semitic harangue were found in the school mailboxes, though the black administrators disavowed it.
Berube, who helped advise the movement while at Queens College, admits there were strains of anti-Semitism, but says Shanker blew it out of proportion to kill the plan, which threatened to reduce the union's power. He publicly denounced Shanker, making Berube forevermore persona non grata with the union leader, and broke with the socialists, who opposed ``community control'' as bourgeois tinkering.
In the socialist journal New Politics in 1969, he wrote: ``Democratic socialism reached its moral nadir in the racial confrontation in the New York City schools. This tiny band of socialists put up one of the most brilliant displays of polemics against a black community movement to reform public schools.''
Michael is still proud of his father for being ``on the right side on Ocean Hill-Brownsville. The socialists were saying: `This isn't empowering parents, this is corporate liberalism. That's the kind of lefter-than-thou stuff'' that makes the son cringe even today.
The father suffered another blow in 1976, when his position was eliminated because of New York budget cuts. When he got to ODU, he decided his rabble-rousing days were over and got more interested in straight scholarship. ``I'm a Catholic radical, not a Communist, but I've been red-baited everywhere I've been. I was quite concerned when I came here.''
Yet his more scholarly, less polemical works these days still carry hints of the old firebrand. In ``American School Reform,'' published this year, he criticized the current ``excellence reform movement'' as ``retrograde'' and complained that it has ``shifted the focus from educating the poor to educating the best and the brightest.''
Michael Berube grew up in Queens, N.Y. He remembers being shuttled by his father from Queens to Long Island to play hockey. His father remembers their talk before college. Michael was good in both math and English and was thinking about engineering.
Mo said no. ``I sat down with him and said, `You're not an engineering type; you're going to have a midlife change. . . . He didn't seem to have the personality (to be an engineer); he got a big temper from his Irish mother.''
Michael took his advice. He went to Columbia University and then to the University of Virginia for his Ph.D. in English. His dissertation, which later became a book, was on the experimental novelist Thomas Pynchon and an obscure black writer, Melvin Tolson.
He went to Illinois in 1989, the year he graduated from U.Va. He continued writing lit crit, but he increasingly felt a need to partake in the ``culture wars.''
Conservatives were casting colleges as hotbeds of radicalism, teeming with gays and Afrocentrics, burying dead white males, tolerating not a word of dissent - and no one was rising up to offer a biting counterargument.
So he argued the colleges' case in places like the Voice - that multiculturalism has hardly wiped out Shakespeare, that even the debate over speech codes reflected a healthy give-and-take on campus. ``Universities have a lot of house-cleaning to do,'' he says, ``but the idea that we're being overrun by Stalinist hoods. . . .''
Richard Rorty, university professor of the humanities at U.Va., who is considered one of today's leading philosophers, says: ``He's done as good a job as anybody has managed so far. He has a good nose for what's going on both in politics and the academy.''
Michael's gotten some criticism - and not always as good-natured as his father's - that he ought to get more political. His response: He's getting involved in local elections, but ``who's going to listen to me on single-payer health plans?''
He knows that in academe, ``you've got a bunch of folks more adept at deconstructing Madonna than policy.'' OK, so that may not have much bearing on the next presidential election, but they do address some interesting questions. ``Like what are those fake gospel singers doing in that video'' of Madonna's song ``Like a Prayer''?
Do they exchange manuscripts before they're published? ``I get his opinion - he doesn't get mine,'' Mo complains.
There could be a reason for that. Mo can be a tough critic.
During lunch, Mo started early with his critique of Michael's writing: ``You're too easy on the social Democrats, and you're too critical of identity politics.''
(Translation for non-intellectuals: Michael lets some old-time liberals off the hook for supporting the Vietnam War and opposing community control. And he should understand why ethnic groups would vote in blocs.)
Michael, in a stage whisper: ``He's got that academic habit of leaving all the points of agreement unspoken.''
But Mo is even tougher on one of Michael's critics, Sean Wilentz, a Princeton professor, who, in the current issue of Dissent magazine, skewered the New Yorker piece on black intellectuals as the ``grandest puff.''
``When I read it, I was really upset,'' Mo says. ``It's killing the messenger to get at someone else. It's sort of a convoluted, tortured analysis of it, and he says some awful things about Michael.''
And by the way, Mo adds, Wilentz's father, who owned one of New York's most famous bookstores, closed it just when his workers were starting to organize. Not that he holds it against the son. Wilentz, who died over the summer, had said he closed the store because his children weren't willing to take it over. Both Berubes are taking new directions. Michael is working on a book on his son, James, who has Down syndrome. His piece in Harper's on his son's first few weeks of life drew strong reactions, and Michael is growing worried about proposed funding cuts in special education. ``The culture wars will be with us in '96, '97, '98, but this is really getting kind of urgent.''
Mo, shaken by a car accident this summer, says, ``I feel like doing more social action than I have been doing in recent years.'' Maybe he'll hook up with the liberal Catholic Workers group, maybe he'll let loose his opinions once more in his writings. ``I've got to do more than write these little books that go to libraries and the academic profession.''
Each has the other's vote of approval. Michael: ``I'm pleased and surprised.''
Mo: ``He always amazes me in the direction he's going to take.''
Just like their conversation. ILLUSTRATION: Color staff photo by Vicki Cronis
Maurice Berube, left, and his son, Michael are both university
professors. Maurice teaches at Old Dominion, and Michael at the
University of Illinois.
by CNB