NYU tried to take my NDEA title IV fellowship. They said since I was under induction order I wouldn’t be able to complete my graduate studies. I told them I wasn’t going. It was a rather tense time and I don’t know why the administration gave in. Maybe it was the way I looked.
The Dean of the graduate school of Public Administration was an economist named Dick Netzer. He was a straight arrow. Bow tie man as I remember. Someone referred to him as an English prig. I didn’t know what that meant but he told me once that they needed to have a separate entrance for me at the Graduate School. Most of the students were either New York City officials or UN staffers. They were part time students, but always suit and tie. I had given up suits and ties when I left the seminary in 1961. I was in my army surplus coat, wore long hair, a beard, a leather peace sign on my chest and some indication of protest, a button or an arm band. After Netzer made that comment about me, I signed up for his class on Urban Economics and got an “A.” He became an ally.
I had a wonderful time at NYU. I took classes and wrote papers on all kinds of subjects. I wrote on Urban Social Policy. I wrote a huge paper on Chinese bureaucracy and how Mao extended the mobilization of that bureaucracy to the peasant class. I even read articles about Yemen in Arabic and wrote a paper on its civilization and bureaucratic accomplishments. All of this was fun, but it didn’t get my dissertation done.
The steps to a Ph.D were doctoral orals, doctoral writtens and a dissertation. I signed up for my doctoral orals in the spring of my second year. It was a two hour examination. If you passed this examination, you became an official doctoral candidate. I knew that given my appearance and my penchant for participating in building takeovers to protest the war, racism or the ROTC my stogy professors of public administration would not be predisposed toward making me a doctoral candidate. I asked my friend Professor Herman Berkman what he thought. He said wait until fall and he would get on the team of professors who were going to examine me.
This was great advice and it also gave me more time to prepare. There was a list of 100 books that a doctoral candidate was supposed to be familiar with. I don’t know if anyone else ever did this, but all throughout the spring and summer I read, outlined and summarized those books. I knew this literature so well I could relate damn near anything to “The Theory and Practice of Public Administration.” In fact, when other doctoral candidates needed to relate their dissertation topics to “the theory and practice of public administration” some of them would come to me for advice on how to do it.
In the fall I was ready for the two hour examination. Herman walked past me as I waited to be invited into the conference room. He said, “Hey, Dan, sit and enjoy.”
Herman lived up in the 70s on Manhattan’s west side. I went there once for dinner. When I came down the hallway to his apartment, I noticed two “Dylan type” boots outside his door. They were obviously art objects. It looked like someone had sawed off the legs inside the boots so that you saw the boot, the sox and the bone. What was really odd was that there were two small American flags stuck in the middle of the each boot. I asked Herman what they were. He said the boots were a piece of art that he liked, but that other tenants had objected to them. In order to make the boots more acceptable he placed an American flag in each one. That was Herman.
I sat at the head of a conference table facing five professors. Herman was sitting just to my left. As Herman waited for the other professors to get seated around the conference table, he took out a half smoked stogie from his suit jacket pocket, lit it up, brushed the falling debris down the front of his now smudged white shirt, shifted his chair ever so slightly so that he too was facing the other professors and said, “Let’s get going.”
One of the professors asked me a question. I talked for 20 minutes, unloading 100 books’ worth of citations. They called a recess and then called me back in the room. I was an official doctoral candidate. Herman said it was the quickest doctoral oral on record.
A year later I took my doctoral writtens. They were written examinations in five areas over five days. It was a “blue book” examination. The major difficulty was avoiding cramps in your hands. My major field was Urban Social Policy and I knew the guy who would be reading this was S.M. Miller, a great professor at NYU and one from whom I learned a great deal. I passed these too.
Just after I passed this five day ordeal the graduate school changed the requirements for obtaining an Masters in Public Administration. The new requirement now said you could write a thesis or you take an examination. I went to see Dick Netzer. I told him I wanted to take the Masters examination. He said I just got through passing the doctoral examination. I said I wanted to pick up an MPA. He said okay I’ll just give you the Masters. That’s how I got my Masters.
I wrote my dissertation at my desk in our studio apartment in Park Slope. Herman said you could write a dissertation in two ways. You could start out with a thesis and see if you can verify it or you can do a bunch of research and see if you can come up with a thesis. I opted for the later approach since I could not come up with the former. I had all those files from the NWRO office in Washington, D.C. and a lot of articles about the initial campaigns of the welfare rights movement. I wrote about this history, the NWRO as an organization and the various campaigns that George Wiley and his organizers conducted. It was purely descriptive.
I never came up with a thesis; I don’t know why. There were plenty around for me to see. Maybe all real theoretical questions were outside the field of public administration. Maybe I didn’t know how to characterize them or put them into an academic language consistent with all my reading over four years. Or, maybe I just wanted to get to organizing my neighborhood that was just outside my window.
One of the arguments was about what poor people could do themselves to change their situation. This argument was between George Wiley, the organizer, and movement theorists, Cloward and Piven. Cloward and Piven argued that poor people could only be heard in disruption, that their power resided in their ability to disrupt normality. This only made sense to me if there was someone in power who, upon seeing the disruption, would act in a positive way to reform the situation. Most of the time, though, I thought simple disruption by the poor themselves would lead to more repression.
Contrary to Cloward and Piven, Wiley was more in the style of Saul Alinsky. He believed poor people’s power resided in a formal organization with membership, dues, formal leadership that had both lobbying credibility and the capacity for direct action campaigns. The assumption here was that if you made yourself visible through organization to a liberal social order you would get a piece of the surplus. This assumption, that there is a surplus available to the organized, is key to all Alinsky styled organizations.
There was another argument about the basis upon which you could mobilize poor people. It had to do with how the organizer defined “we.” Wiley obviously believed you could organize people based on their identity as welfare recipients. He publicly beat up Martin Luther King, Jr. for not supporting this identity. King and others did not believe that this identity was strong enough to mobilize people and definitely not the right identity to gain allies with. King was, however, shifting from civil rights to economic rights and he was focused on “poor people” just not welfare moms.
There was another argument that was around when I was doing my dissertation. This was the argument about whether you could build a permanent or effective organization of poor people based on a single issue, i.e. welfare. One of Wiley’s most effective critics on this issue came from his Arkansas chapter organized by Wade Rathke. Wade would go on to implement his idea of a multi-issue organization by transforming his Arkansas chapter into a national poor peoples organization called ACORN.
I certainly didn’t use my dissertation to interrogate these arguments, as perhaps I should have. It has certainly become clear that in the absence of a liberal state with disposable social surplus disruption by poor people or issue demands from an Alinsky-styled organization are still borne, but I don’t think I was there yet.
Ralph Abernathy led the Poor People’s Campaign to Washington, D.C. after King was assassinated in Memphis. I was there in D.C. when it arrived and set up its “city” in front of the White House. I still have the old campaign button. The encampment was called Resurrection City. The federal government let that encampment of poor people sink in its own mud, rain and despair before kicking them out. Poor people are an ideological embarrassment to the liberal order. The War on Poverty did what most Alinsky organizations did, hire staff, but that was it.
Nevertheless, I learned a lot in the process of doing my dissertation. I observed the role a particular set of foundations play in the formation of social movements in the US. The same foundations that funded Wiley’s Poverty Rights Action Center were those involved in organizing the national Citizens Party ten years later. I also met and watched some of the nation’s best young organizers associated with the NWRO and its successor the Movement for Economic Justice (MEJ): people like Wade Rathke, Bert Deleuw, Bruce Thomas, Wretha Wiley Hanson, Tim Sampson and others. I worked directly with Wade, Bert and Wretha as we tried to construct the Citizens Party.
After producing a 167 page document, I took it to my dissertation advisor. He was a young and progressive faculty member in the Graduate School. I barely knew him and had never taken a class from him. He said he would look at it. I went back a couple of months later to see what he had to say. He had a hard time finding it in his cramped office full of books and papers. He finally did see it on the floor behind his door. He had not read it. I said fuck you and never went back.
