Bruce Nissen::  Dave, you start.
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  Okay. My name is David Lindblom. I currently live in El Rancho, New Mexico, which is near Santa Fe, and I am a member of the Grinnell class of 1970.
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  My name is Bruce Nissen, I currently live in or very close to, soon to live in, St. Petersburg, Florida, and I’m a member of the Grinnell College class of 1970.
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  David, shall we start around some of these questions?
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  Yeah.
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  -that are on the back...
Bruce Nissen::  I had already said this in a panel today. I came to Grinnell because I knew Grinnell was full of activists and radical activists and kind of the cultural youth revolution kinds of changes and stuff like that, too. So, that’s why I came, that’s what I wanted, that’s what I got and it was, it fulfilled what I was hoping for and what I was looking for, so... My first memory was being put into East Norris Hall, which was one of the crummiest dorms to be stuck in, but I came a little late because I was a transfer student. I came late, even after the orientation period, so it wasn’t a great first memory but the rest of the memories are pretty darn good. What about you, Dave?
David Linblom::  Well, I came here, I wasn’t seeking anything in particular like Bruce was, although I had, at that moment, definitely dissident and even maybe a little bit radical ideas about things but I was just going to college to become, y’know... a scientist, I think, was what I wanted to do, and make money and drive a Corvette. I was very- probably influenced by a culture of- I know we didn’t have fraternities and I was not looking for a fraternity, but I think there was a little bit of that in the culture that I was expecting, or was maybe even looking for, but, of course, that just evaporated immediately.
David Linblom::  My first significant memory, I think was, when I was in high school, the adults would always bring musical groups to the high school that were just, really for adults, not for kids. So I was asking somebody, “Who’s gonna play at homecoming?” and they said, “The Jefferson Airplane.” So I’d never heard of them and I just assumed that that was just one of these stupid, adult trombone bands or something from Des Moines and then I walked into Darby Gymnasium and there was Gracie Slick, singing “White Rabbit,” or s- and this light show on the walls, and, my God, it just... That’s my first interesting memory.
Bruce Nissen::  I’ll talk about the professor. There was a professor, a Jack Worley, John Worley, we knew as Jack Worley, who was a Philosophy professor. As soon as I took a class with him I knew I wanted to major in Philosophy; I took everything I could from Jack Worley. He still is, I just venerate him to this day and think he’s one of the most remarkable human beings I ever met and certainly, probably the best teacher I’ve ever seen in my life. He could explain anything to anybody, and especially if he knew kind of what your interests were, he could relate anybody. I was just telling Dave examples of relating Plato and Aristotle and other early philosophers, to my radical political interests in the 1960s. And he could show me how these things fit into the things I was most interested in. He was just an unbelievable teacher and I still pay homage to him. He’s amazing. So, Jack Worley was an incredible influence in my life.
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  There was a professor here that did have a pretty big impact on me, but in a negative way. There was a professor here, John Crossett, and Bruce actually told me something the other day that has sort of softened my assessment, perhaps, but I just thought it was nearly criminal that the College allowed this professor to teach here. I thought he was such a... He was such a- an intellectual bully and was just, was teaching us not how to think, like this other professor, but just really... It was almost terroristic the way he, intellectually, he sort of…
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  Browbeat?
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  Browbeat, and made everything fit a kind of, a very stringent logic and that’s just not the way.. That's just such a false notion. I mean, there’s reality and there’s ideas and the two don’t match in a mechanical way.
David Linblom::  And he was just so forceful with this, and... And it- there was a student also, I won’t name him, but I mean, I thought he was extremely entertaining and I loved to be around him but he was so deeply cynical and cynicism is very humorous, but it’s absolutely useless and ultimately poisonous and so, that takes you nowhere but I- and, well I guess it opens up. It’s so critical that it sort of breaks things right away and then you can maybe see something else, but it was... I was sort of oppressed by this other, this cynical student as well. I couldn’t, I was sort of suffocated by this.
Bruce Nissen::  I wanted to add to the negative professors. The other classics professor, aside from Crossett was H. G. Apostle, Hippocrates G. Apostle, who I think was a much bigger bully and a professional kind of terroristic person on the faculty. I thought he was awful, and I had very little respect for the man even though he was a very, very learned man because he was not helping students open their mind to grow. He had his dogmas and his right-wing dogmas, and I think he was a disaster, too. So, talk about negative ones. I had my crossed swords with Crossett and stuff too, but I thought Apostle was even worse. But, Jack Worley was fantastic.
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  Do you want to jump in on best memories, Dave, or you want me to take first shot at that?
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  Gosh, I mean there’s so many kinds of memories. There’s sort of, requited and unrequited romances and there’s... oh, gosh. Definitely, it was the palling around with our cohorts... Gosh, I don’t know. Why don’t you take a crack at that, Bruce?
Bruce Nissen::  Well, my best memories all had to do with banding together with a number of other radical political students and strongly, forcefully putting our point of view forward on things and taking all sorts of actions that were trying to better the world as we saw it. So, fight against the war, stop the war in Vietnam, you know, put out an underground newspaper, those kinds of activities. That kind of made seamless my social life and my political life, and I was very very political, kind of at that time.
Bruce Nissen::  And it was also the, on top of that at that time was a complete opening up of youth culture and making really a cultural revolution in terms of the mores and ways of understanding of the way people should relate to each other and all the rest. So, it was an opening up. It was a sexual revolution at that time. There was the.. kind of revolutionary change in the sense of treating students like they were in junior high or something else too, and policing the women and keeping the women in the dorms, and all that type. We challenged all of that forcefully and strongly.
Bruce Nissen::  That whole... it was all one big scene, was what, to me, I really really enjoyed about Grinnell. Grinnell allowed some of that. I think sometimes they wanted to throttle me and people like me, but for the most part they were tolerant and open enough to let us radicals do our thing and to learn from our experiences at Grinnell. That... yeah, that was the good times to me, a lot of it.
David Linblom::  I have- my best memory is really sort of a delayed memory, and that is when the students from our class created the Peace Grove. That was really something to think about, because when I was here, it wasn’t clear to me that very many people were sort of, fellow dissidents or also sort of seeing that there’s something really wrong with the war and the way society’s organized. They were just kind of in a dull way, just sort of going... going along with everything.
David Linblom::  And then- then, I guess maybe it was fifteen years after we graduated, I would say 90% of our class came back or participated in one way or another in creating this Peace Grove. So, it just was... just was such a revelation to me about the depth of, well, you, it’s what we wanted to happen, was to have an influence on larger numbers of people and we weren’t sure that that happened and then all of a sudden, it’s just all there.
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  Question four’s about dorm room. I don’t have anything- interesting things to say about my dorm room or dorm rooms. That was it. Otherwi- if you do, Dave, otherwise I…
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  Not really. It’s just kind of... I don’t know. It’s nondescript, y'know.
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  Wasn’t much to say, I think, about the dorm rooms.
Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  You don’t have to answer all the questions.
Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  Okay. Just go to whatever?
Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  Just- you can choose whatever you want to talk about.
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  Clothes we wear and stuff. I mean, I- we just wore…
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  Bruce, you had a fatigue jacket.
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  Yeah.
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  And I had a long brown winter coat that I got from my father, and blue jeans and... suede boots and that was pretty much it. It was a uniform. You had a fatigue jacket.
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  I’m sure I did.
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  That was your basic-
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  Grew my hair long and, y'know, did all the things to look like a 60s youth culture, countercultural type of person for sure, definitely. I actually had hair back then, unlike now, so I had long hair. We looked like- people could clearly, quickly see we were the....
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  It was a uniform, and if you went to Des Moines and you saw people, you could tell immediately by what- the way people wore their clothes if they were in the same tribe that.. that we were in, and you could- you could connect with them. That’s how it was.
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  Yeah, it was a time where just, instant identification was part of the youth culture. You- I could hitchhike all over the country and get dropped in the middle of some town and pretty soon find some people who looked... had that look and they would usually put you up and things like that. It was really amazing. It was a very communal ethos among us all at that time which really disappeared as the 70s progressed. But, by 1970 when we graduated it was amazing.
Bruce Nissen::  And I didn’t have hardly any money so the way I got around the country, generally speaking, was by hitchhiking and the kindness of strangers, but they weren’t strangers because they were part of my tribe; they were part of the counterculture, the youth culture who put me up. It's.. I mean, there’s just so many of them and it’s hard to prov- explain them all, and things. And... it worked out; I didn’t have hardly any negative experiences, y'know, out of that experience.
Bruce Nissen & Tamara Grbusic::  The only- in New York City the only time I had any sort of basically negative experiences was that some of the people who were so kind and who would put me up, and do this and that, yeah, they're basically- they were after my body. They were men who were after my body because that’s... I guess I made the mistake, I didn’t know this, but I made the mistake of wearing white sneakers while I hitchhiked into New York and white sneakers in New York at that time meant you were gay and maybe a hustler looking for sex with other men, and I was attracting men. And I was a young, nubile young hippie-
Bruce Nissen & Tamara Grbusic::  What?
Bruce Nissen & Tamara Grbusic::  A good-looking guy, I guess, and, man, I had a lot of people hitting on me a lot. Most of them were very nice people, after explaining I just wasn’t interested, but a couple were sort of more pushy and were trying to, y'know, would- had a hard time taking no for an answer and stuff. But that was a minor part, and I never felt... It just felt- it was communal. It was communal in a way that the American society did not feel communal.
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  That pro- I think that went away with Altamont.
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  Yeah.
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  I think. That was-
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  Yeah, the Rolling Stones concert in Altamont, California, when the-
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  Such a dark moment.
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  Yeah, the Hell’s Angels were hired to protect the Rolling Stones at the stage and they went out and killed some people in the audience and stuff like that. It was really really awful. Things turned nasty at the very, very end of the 60s and into the 70s somewhat, but before that it was... it was a sense of belonging to each other. I don’t know how artificial it was but it certainly did make- and I did the same kind of thing. I would run into people and put ‘em up. I didn’t know ‘em, complete and total strangers but they were part of my tribe and I could see it because of their hair or because of their hairstyle and because of these other kinds of things.
Bruce Nissen::  It was- We even had some Grinnell guys who drove down to Interstate 80 almost every night just to see if anybody had gotten stranded hitchhiking across the country, gotten stranded at the local gas station. Y'know, someone would come, take ‘em back, let ‘em sleep in their sleeping bags on the floor in the house that they had rented and things of that sort. So we- It was just a lot of...
Bruce Nissen::  Y'know, I owned a car. We called it the digger car. It was the free car; anybody could, if they put enough gas in the car, they could drive it anywhere and go anywhere. We were pushing very much for a society free from commercial restraints and money-grubbing and things of that sort, so the theory kind of was everything should be for free and it would be free if we could create a cooperative form of society and things. And... so, people used, y’know, my car, until eventually some townspeople... I had fluorescent flowers all over my car so it was really obvious it was a hippie car and it was... And, apparently some townsperson had come and poured sugar into my gas tank and it destroyed my car, so we lost that one because of hostility from people in the- So there was some opposition to us obviously from the mainstream culture at that time.
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  Oh, I- My best memory; I remember what it is. There was the radicals on campus. One of the groups was SDS, and we challenged ROTC to a football game. And for that occasion, half of the football team joined SDS and it was the biggest, toughest guys on the football team, you know, angry and wanting to hurt somebody, and we played the Air Force and we- It was brutal. It was... I just felt bad for our Air Force guys and it was- but it was interesting because again, it’s like, the football team, as far as we knew, they could care less about anything radical.
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  But when the chips were down they joined us.
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  Yeah.
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  They did.
David Linblom::  That’s the big lesson I- to me, was always, I guess, underestimating what people were thinking, or not being sensitive to it and... but always just being so blown away when it manifested itself.
Bruce Nissen::  I want to address that idea, Dave. I think the reason was because the type of movement we created was not an alienating one, I don’t think. Most of what we did did not alienate other students. Very little of what we did on this campus alienated the other students. It was very in line with the changing ethos of the youth culture, kind of, of the time. It was- maybe it was very radical ideas about American society. America was an imperialistic country, and America was a militaristic and a racist and a sexist society that we were fighting against and things. But, we did it... we were reasonable arou- we seem- I think we basically came across as reasonable radicals- as radicals, and people who would, you know, you could have discussion with, and we were just dogmatically gonna- most of us. Most of us- there were a few dogmatists in the crew, which, you mentioned one the other day, David. But for the most part I think that was the reason. So therefore, because of that, we had a much greater influence than I think you realized. I didn’t think I felt that isolated during my Grinnell years.
Bruce Nissen::  I was thinking we were having an impact on most of the students and we did. Not as much as we wanted to; we didn’t turn ‘em all into radicals but we edged ‘em, an awful lot of them, in that direction and made ‘em much more critical and much more, I think- helped... y’know. Most people came out of Grinnell - at least out of that cohort, and I don’t know about you guys, this day, but I don't think it’s changed much - we weren’t just going out to amass the maximum amount of money for ourselves as possible. We wanted more meaningful lives than that, and most Grinnell people went out, and are interesting people to me, you know.
Bruce Nissen::  A banker, you’re not interesting to me. A hedge fund manager, you’re not interesting to me. A corporate lawyer, you’re probably not very interesting to me. You might be, but probably not. But the people- Grinnellians, some of them went off in those directions but most Grinnellians, who could go into those things and could make a ton of money and get extremely rich if they chose to, that’s not their number 1 goal in life. We all want to make enough money to live comfortably and to do well but it’s not the capitalistic goal of maximize your own wealth to the end of the earth until you can become as rich as possible. We kept that very much alive with what we did and what we were about, I think.
Bruce Nissen::  Book. I think the most influential book to me, that- and I will mention, perhaps too, that really hit me hard and helped to turn me more radical in my thinking, one was Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and the other was Baran and Sweezy’s book Monopoly Capital. And after reading that book, Monopoly Capital, I had decided that something was really rotten with the whole system, and we really needed to make some real changes on that front. But, there were a number of them, but those two come to my mind.
David Linblom::  I remember really taking an interest in Milton’s “Paradise Lost” because it was about Satan, and it was Satan as a... kind of a heroic figure and that kind of... I don’t know. I just, it just, it was sort of very provocative to think of... sort of an insurrection by the Devil, and it’s just a interesting… I wasn’t, I was not a religious person but it was kind of interesting that.. to present Lucifer as this sort of heroic character.
David Linblom::  And... at that time, the Rolling Stones came out with a song: “Sympathy for the Devil,” and I don’t know, I was just trying to... I guess it was- sort of fit somehow in... I mean, we were rebelling against the whole set up of life and from all- up to the highest authority, whoever that might be. So, it had this... stories like that had a special resonance. And then another book that I read, or looked at, was a picture book, photographs of... I must’ve looked through it a hundred times at the library. It was photos by a French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson- very famous black and white photojournalist.
Bruce Nissen & Tamara Grbusic::  My memories of the town of Grinnell.. We didn’t- it was pretty much a cocoon here on the campus, and I didn’t have that much interaction with the town of Grinnell, other than, the one nice thing I remember and I think Dave was in on these things was, at two or three in the morning, going down and getting fresh, hot doughnuts at the local bakery.
Bruce Nissen & Tamara Grbusic::  Bakery runs?
Bruce Nissen & Tamara Grbusic::  That was- that was a wonderful little experience. And I did- there were some wonderful people out who ran an- had an organic farm, around Steinhorn, met them and took us out to this organic farm. Really, really wonderful people who were open and liked to talk to college students ‘cause there was a lot of hostility from some of the more straight... the people in town who were more... it seemed to me there was anyway, some at least.
Bruce Nissen::  They weren’t at all and we worried a little about, because they were willing to talk to us. They were farmers, you know. Would their farm neighbors think that they were, you know, hanging out with and visiting with a bunch of commies, which is the way a lot of the local people thought of us, as communists or something like that. And the.., they said, “Oh, no, no, don’t worry about them. We’re happy to have you out here,” and things of that sort. They were very great, nice people.
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  Do you have any town memories, David, or no?
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  Well, I think the town was pretty skeptical of the radical freaks, hippies, and you know, they didn’t really know what to make of us but I- I don’t think they were... I don’t think they were- there might have been some hostility but it was mostly just- not sure...
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  And, we were deliberately trying to freak people out.
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  Provocative.
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  Yeah, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I mean- But, we were... It’s not a bad- You know, Grinnell, the town folk, they can be shaken up from time to time. There’s nothing wrong with that. They probably... they were quite tolerant. They probably thought we were children, you know, young, and to be taken care of on some level. I’m thinking back-
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  You didn't need to grow up.
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  And... I’m- I didn’t have a lot of... experience with that many townspeople.
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom & Tamara Grbusic::  I’m thinking of maybe skipping how Grinnell’s changed. If you wanna say something?
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom & Tamara Grbusic::  Yeah, I can’t think of anything.
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom & Tamara Grbusic::  OK, the next interesting one to me is number 11, which is my favorite place on campus and I think I’ve got two candidates there, but, probably the main one is the Forum. The Forum, because that’s where all things happened.
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom & Tamara Grbusic::  Everybody’s favorite place.
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom & Tamara Grbusic::  Yeah, everything happened at the Forum, and it was the gathering point, the meeting of all the different, everything at Grinnell kind of, so the Forum and the things that happened in the Forum. That was the public space that was really really great.
Bruce Nissen::  And then the private space would’ve been Conference Hall, because, Conference Hall was a gathering point where a lot of the radicals sort of gathered, and my girlfriend at the time, of ’69, ’70, was- lived in Conference Hall and was the President of Conference Hall. And, an awful lot of wonderful things, including putting on our underground newspaper and other kinds of things like that happened over in Conference Hall. Including- and that was where the plot was hatched for the nude day against Playboy and all these other kind of interesting things that also happened. So, that was more of a private gathering space where things- I had great memories in, then the public place would be Forum.
David Linblom::  Yeah, the Forum is, that’s a problem. Is it tha- I get it, that you have to have ADA access, but I don’t know. It seems like sometimes you can make an exception because, I mean it’s like, I’m just thinking, the wealth and effort that went into making that building, and it’s a beautiful result, and... I don’t know. I don’t really s- It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to tear it down. You wouldn’t tear down the Coliseum in Rome. I mean, it’s an important architectural thing. So, I don’t know. It’s, that’s a really... I surely remember that place.
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  I can’t answer ten. I don’t think I have a favorite academic experience... because of the- what I was really interested in was, they weren’t teaching it here, and that was filmmaking. So, I was sort of doing that, or doing photography on my own, so it was separate from the academic experience, and I was not really a very good student, but it’s because there was these other pressing things that needed to be attended to. So, I wish, perhaps, I had been a better student, but I think I survived; turned out okay.
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  Now a university professor, so, you must’ve turned out right, you know, to be a teacher at a college.
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  Well, I applied to go to NYU to go to the film school and I was accepted and that was like, had I, in high school if I had applied to Harvard and got accepted, I would- that’s how I felt on that day. I’m gonna transfer out of Grinnell. I’m gonna go to film school. So, I applied and I got accepted. It was like, I was astonished, but then all of a sudden there’s no financial aid, there’s no scholarship, so I’m not going anywhere. And I- In a way, I think I kinda didn’t want to go. I was pretty happy here, in a way. And I just needed the validation that if I really wanted to, I could go to that film school. But I did end up teaching there, years later, so I thought that was a... an ironic turn.
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  Yes, that’s for sure.
Bruce Nissen::  Question 12’s about what we would’ve done differently.... Not sure I would have done too much differently. I mean, I have a few regrets but they’re pretty small regrets, so it’s my- maybe it’s through a romantic gaze that I’m looking back on my Grinnell years, but... I mean, you know, you could say you’d do things differently but you won’t do things differently because of who you were at the time you went into those experiences, so, of course, you’re not really going to be different, doing those kinds of things.
Bruce Nissen::  I mean, I wish at the beginning I had no- I hadn’t been- had the backward, male chauvinistic kinds of attitudes that I brought into Grinnell, but I came out of the culture that I came out of, and that’s what was around and that’s all I knew, and things. So, it would have been nice not to have to go through the painful experiences of being confronted by various women in the Women’s Liberation Movement including my girlfriend very, most heavily, on a lot of those things, and having to learn the hard way sort of horribly. But, you know, it- you were, you are what you are. You are a product of your background, so I came out of it. So I don’t think that would’ve changed.
Bruce Nissen::  I guess if I was to step back and say one thing I would have liked to have done a little bit differently, I would try to be... a little less.. a little more humble. Although, I don’t know how much more because you get too humble, then you, you know, you get the- the fire in your belly to go out and demonstrate, and... y’know, make a ruckus- to make the changes you want to do, but I do think there was a little bit of arrogance in me, at least, in some of the things that we did do, but I think also that’s part of the arrogance of youth.
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  Youth are always sort of arrogant and think they know everything, kind of all about it, and you always get a lot more measured and fuzzy, I think in your older age. So, as an older-aged person I’m probably a little more fuzzy and less didactic than I was as a young person. But, that’s pretty minor regrets or things that I’d like to change or do much. My experiences at Grinnell, I think, were really positive and great, for the most part.
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  I kind of, more or less, feel the same way. I wish that I had been nicer to some people. I wish I had been less, kind of snobby. I don’t know what I had to be snobbish about but I think I was a little bit that way; sort of...
David Linblom::  But, y’know, on the other hand, I think- I wish that I knew how to confront my peers who really were just full of themselves, and... because I think there was a handful of people that had influential positions that really just kind of took up all the oxygen in the room. I think that young people need to be taught techniques to deal with people like that. I wish that I was better at that. I’m pretty good at it now, I think, but it just, y'know, it’s about, I guess, as asserting yourself against people that are really clever and can dominate a conversation or an event or something like that, because...
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  It was like when I was in high school, I was in the orchestra. There was, there seemed to be a... There were people that felt- that were entitled to have certain positions in the orchestra, not because they were necessarily any good, but because of the family that they came from and it just was.. you didn’t understand it. You just went along with it. I just wish that I could see things like that more clearly and not go along with it. And...
David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  It’s the old slogan: 'Question Authority'.
David Linblom & Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  Yeah, and it- The culture on campus would be a whole lot healthier because there’s,-there were some, I think, some fairly egotistical, dominating types that could’ve been suppressed a little bit and then there would have been more oxygen for everybody else.
David Linblom & Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  It’s always like that, though.
David Linblom & Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  Yeah, I think it probably is always like that. But, I also think Grinnell students are more prone to independence and thinking for themselves and questioning authority, than n- Still, you’re right about it, but it’s worse on a lot of other campuses.
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  I transferred here from a different university-
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  Yeah.
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  -And it was much more there. We didn’t dare speak up and didn’t want to speak up. Grinnell- and just, more assertive students are at Grinnell than at a lot of other places. Part of that, I think is the class basis actually ‘cause currently Grinnell’s- the class basis of Grinnell students is mostly upper-middle and upper-class, whereas the school I transferred from had a whole lot of working-class- And working-class people from the whole school system, everything else had taught them to- that theirs was to listen and obey more than theirs was to challenge authority.
Bruce Nissen & Tamara Grbusic::  In fact, one of the main things the education system taught working – and still teaches working-class kids is to- if you wanna get ahead, obey authority. Obey.
Bruce Nissen & Tamara Grbusic::  Do what you're told.
Bruce Nissen & Tamara Grbusic::  Obey. Obey. Go to s- and do what you’re supposed to- and toe the line, and keep your nose to the grindstone and do what you’re told to do. Not, rebel, and question authority, ‘cause that’s not the way to get ahead, and the only way a lot of us did that a hell of a lot was we didn’t give a shit about giving good, getting hit. I didn’t care. I wasn’t gonna get rich. I didn’t wanna get rich. I didn’t care about what I was gonna- I majored in Philosophy because I didn’t give a good goddamn what I was gonna do after I got out of school. I was arrogant enough to think I was gonna be all right no matter what anyway. And so I just really didn’t care, and therefore I was going to be out there forcefully questioning authority right and left everywhere I possibly could.
Bruce Nissen::  But, y'know, if I was- and you know, you get your.... and I wasn’t really from strictly working-class background although my father did end up being a janitor, but he was college-educated and my mother was college-educated. She was a schoolteacher. So, we had this kind of, even if we- when were living in poverty as we were for some time, semi-poverty. It was very genteel, educated kind of poverty. It wasn’t working-class circumstances. It was not- I was not tracked in the school system to be taught, y’know, 'Yours is to obey. Keep your nose to the grindstone and you’re gonna get all right. You get that factory job and you’re gonna be,' y’know,'That'll take care of you but you better not stop out of line.' That was not- and that’s- most Grinnell students don’t have that kind of attitude, but most Grinnell students did not come from working-class background, either.
Bruce Nissen::  So, that was something of a little bit of a lack, I think, in terms of Grinnell. It would have been better if it reached deeper down into working-class communities and had more of a class mix rather than just merely upper-middle and mostly upper class. But, by having that also it had a lot of these kinds of wonderful things that generally are not given and are not available to institutions that are open to working-class kids, and stuff.
Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  Do you think working-class kids would change that?
Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  Well, if they reached a critical mass and there was more of them, they might, especially in rebellious times like we were in. They might start raising those issues. You know, and the time I was at Grinnell, other than a few of us radicals sort of doing it, there was no raising of class – I still bet there isn’t at Grinnell. I bet it’s mostly invisible to most people at Grinnell. You see some wonderful place, which it is.
Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  It’s usually race and gender.
Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  Yeah, race and gender there’s a sensitivity to, but class?
Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  No.
Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  There is not. I’ll bet you 100 bucks there is not.
Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  But also you can’t really see class differences as much in Grinnell, because it’s so constructed that you can’t.
Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  Well, you- I mean, you could dig it out, though. I mean, it could be dug out.
Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  If you really wanted to.
Bruce Nissen::  And if it was instituted into the policies of the university, their admission policies, so that they set up, y’know.... I know Grinnell makes sure that they get so many from the east coast, the west coast, all those kinds of things. They have criteria to make, it’s not just strictly who’s got the highest scores and that’s who’s gonna go in. They could do the same thing on class background, on people from lower class and working class background and make this much more of a working class college than it is.
Bruce Nissen::  But they don’t do that. Y'know, I’m not dumping on Grinnell, but I would, personally would like it better if there was more of that, and if they got more of a critical mass of them, in an open atmosphere like this, and if there were a few radical sparks or Marxist professors or anarchist professors or y’know, radical professors who- and others who could spark some of that kind of thinking we could have more organizing going on on campus on a class basis that happened. Organizing has been Women’s, African American’s, Gay and Lesbian, all good, you know, struggles for- every one of ‘em are a righteous struggle, but I don’t see much of a struggle on class basis.
Bruce Nissen::  And that’s the great evil, that- right, the really great evil that I think right now underlies our country, is that, now that money can buy and manipulate and control our so-called democracy and undermine much of our democracy. Y’know, the doctrines that corporations are people and that money is speech. Our political system’s now dominated by money in a way that is very, very, very undemocratic I think, and it’s the great evil that could lead us into horrible problems in this country. So, I do think we need to build class understanding and class-based movements in this country and it’s not happening. I don’t think it’s happening even at Grinnell, which is a good place where a lot of good things are happening but I don’t think it is.
Tamara Grbusic & David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?
Tamara Grbusic & David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  I think th... I guess, probably, I can’t think of anything in particular.
Tamara Grbusic & David Linblom & Bruce Nissen::  Oh, I don’t really have much either unless you had any kind of- given what, the nonsense that you’ve heard out of us now so far.  If you had any further questions or things that you thought you wanted to- from somebody that’s weird enough to have the perspectives and opinions that we do, anything else that you’d wanna know?
Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  Just one last question.
Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  Okay.
Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  After you graduated from Grinnell, how did you have a different perspective on your radical years in Grinnell, and all the activism that you did while you were here?
Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  Well, I was- earlier today on the panel on activism back in the 70s, and so I said my piece sort of up there, which is, again about 90% of it, I feel very, very positive about and I wouldn’t do a thing differently. And I’ve already, I think, mentioned what I have some second thoughts somewhat about, which is the, kind of the... I wouldn’t say it was totally dogmatic, but kind of this lack of humility about being... On the other hand I think we just kind of needed that in order to keep pushing away and hammering away at all the things we were fighting against and stuff, so..
Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  Did you continue?
Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  Yeah, Grinnell shaped my life so that I have been an activist all the rest of my life. I definitely have been. I still am, and I’m involving myself with Occupy St. Pete in St. Petersburg, Florida and with a group called Awake the State which is a little bit more conventional but doing the same kinds of progressive things... And several other things I’ve been involved with, immigrant rights work, and unions and worker centers and all sorts of things, so, yeah, it’s stuck with me. It’s given my life a great deal of meaning.
Bruce Nissen::  I have a hard time... I would have a hard time finding my life as meaningful as it should be if I’m not in the struggle against the grain, against the evils that are there in my society. I find it- I wouldn’t find it at all satisfying. I just couldn’t. I mean, I wouldn’t feel very good about my life unless I’m doing that. "Life is struggle," is sort of the way I see it, and the best things in life are struggle. You just have to, you know, mold those struggles so that you can at least win some of them, and that you can develop good, strong relationships with other people in the process of doing that. But that’s my idea of a good life in many respects, is struggle for, to right the wrongs that you see.
David Linblom & Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  What was the last question?
David Linblom & Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  Did you have a different perspective on your activist years in Grinnell after you graduated?
David Linblom & Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  I think everything we did was good, too. I mean, I don’t look back and say, “Oh gosh, why did I do that?” Of course... You think- y'know, I could have done- I have sort of the same- I wish, I would like to have been more... sensitive to, not that I would agree with, but just aware of what people were really thinking, and to be able to perhaps confront it in an even wiser way. You know, a more engaged way, and to… I’m not one of the people who that back to say, “Oh, we did such horrible things.” I think we did great things.
David Linblom & Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  I agree. I agree. Unrepentant radical.
David Linblom::  Yeah, yeah.  You know, they say the greatest generation was the World War II soldiers. I don’t know. I think our generation went up against our very own... our generation confronted the tyranny of our own government, our own culture, our own institutions, everything. And that.. That’s a big deal. It’s not, I'm, you know, I'm just one of many people but that’s a really, really big deal, and it didn’t happen like that before, in the way that it happened. There’s lots to learn from that, and we, I don’t think we were wrong about any of our critiques and observations.
David Linblom::  I think people get confused. They think that because things didn’t turn out in a successful way, necessarily, that "Oh, well, you did something wrong." But that doesn’t make sense. You can fail if you want to say that, for lots of reasons. Because one, because you made a mistake, that’s possible. Or, that things changed and you know, you just…
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  The balance of forces was never with us, in terms of all the things we wanted to do. It just wasn’t there. The conditions just weren’t there. Some of them were, and I think some of the permanent advances that were made were. We grabbed the branch right and got that far along but there’s an awful lot of things we didn’t get that far along on. You just have to have been, you’re too young, but you just have to have lived, growing up in the 1950s, to understand how horrible it was until the cultural, revolutionary changes that occurred because of the peoples of the sixties. Relationships between the sexes, it was terrible. Terrible.
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  You can see that.
Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  And then, y’know women got so much emancipated out of what happened in the 1960s, in the beginnings of it. Also for African Americans were on a racial basis somewhat too. It’s hard for you to- I mean, you probably- It’s just, I lived it and it was really bad.
David Linblom & Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  It’s being depicted in the TV show Madmen. Do you watch that?
David Linblom & Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  I watched it. It’s a really good TV show.
David Linblom & Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  Yeah. It’s really- Do you watch it, Bruce?
David Linblom & Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  I don’t watch TV.
David Linblom & Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  It describes that period right before -
David Linblom & Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  The sixties?
David Linblom & Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  -things explode and they- it’s just-ton-
David Linblom & Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  It’s the marketing world and a woman trying to find her place, but it’s impossible because it’s all run by men. It’s really interesting.
David Linblom & Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen::  Yeah.
Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  Alright.
Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  Well, that’s all I got to say.
Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  Thanks.
Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  Thank you.
Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  Thank you very much for taking this.
Tamara Grbusic & Bruce Nissen & David Linblom::  Yeah.
