The seventy-five-page interview with Lionel Trilling conducted
in May 1968, which I recently discovered in the Oral History Research
Office at Columbia, reveals for the first time his role in the dramatic
and sometimes violent uprising at the university.
A
brilliant teacher, influential critic, and major figure in
American intellectual life, Trilling suddenly moved from
difficult books and disturbing ideas to confrontations with
revolutionary students. During the most important political
engagement of his life, he tested his ideas in the cauldron of
reality. Diana Trilling, in her long account of the crisis
called “On the Steps of Low Library” (1968), focused on her own
reaction, ignored Lionel’s role in these events, and said:
“my husband was still at the University, doing whatever it was
that the faculty was then doing, or trying to do.”
The unpublished Oral History interview explains what he did.

The crisis began with student demonstrations on April 23, 1968
and ended with a police bust in the early hours of April 30. It
took place during a volatile and often explosive period in
American history: between the Berkeley Free Speech Movement
(September 1964) and the student riots in Paris (May 1968),
between the assassinations of Martin Luther King in Memphis
(April 4, 1968) and of Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles (June 5,
1968), between the March on the Pentagon (October 1967) and the
bloody protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago
(August 1968), between the Tet Offensive (February 1968) and the My
Lai