OK, I blew it. I misread John Castellucci’s excellent piece, referenced below, entirely. Stupid! Mark Rudd is not hanging out in Villefranche-de-Panat. Orest Ranum is! Stupid! I’ve rewritten the piece, to conceal just how stupid I am! Sorry, but it’s my blog, and I have the right to make changes.
John Castellucci, writing in the Chronicles of Higher Education, brings us this long-delayed mea culpa from Mark Rudd regarding the destruction of the personal papers of Orest A. Ranum, associate professor of history at Columbia University, during the once-famous “Battle of Morningside Heights” in 1968. Though he vociferously denied it at the time, it was Mark and forgotten (and now deceased) radical leader John “J.J.” Jacobs who put the torch to ten years of professor Ranum’s research:
“I didn’t know that he [J.J.] was going to target Professor Ranum, but I suspect that he knew exactly whose office he was breaking into,” Rudd wrote to John Castellucci at the Chronicle of Higher Education, here . “J.J. hated hypocritical liberals, and the professor, who had tried to stop the original occupation of Low [Low Memorial Library] by saying he was sympathetic to our ends but not our means, had become an opponent of the strike.”
In an email to Castellucci, former SDS BMOC Rudd regrets, sort of, keeping his mouth shut all these years, and also feels bad about the three people who were later killed in Greenwich Village when an SDS bomb went off prematurely. (It was supposed to kill GIs at Fort Dix, where I had taken Basic Training a few years before.)
According to Rudd, who seems to be displaying all sorts of shit-liberal tendencies in his old age, “I have never, alas, apologized directly to Prof. Ranum or to the families of the three people killed at the town house. I did not want to reraise painful memories for those individuals, especially because to do so would be mostly self-serving.”
Prof. Ranum, who was basically exiled from Columbia for being really mean to spoiled brats like Rudd, managed a graceful segue to Johns Hopkins. In his excellent article, which describes in full measure the banality, mendacity, and heartlessness of the SDS movement at Columbia, Catellucci sums up Ranum’s later career in the following manner:
“Ranum has been a prolific scholar since he left Columbia, producing numerous works on 17th-century French history, including The Fronde: a French Revolution, 1648-1652 (W.W. Norton, 1993), an account of the instability, violence, and war that swept France before the reign of Louis IV. But the textbook on early modern European history that he had been commissioned to produce was never written. It went up in flames on the night the notes he had accumulated since graduate school were set on fire.”
Link from Arts & Letters.
