You’re a freshman at Monmouth College, and it’s 11 a.m. on a Tuesday morning. For most, you’re strolling in to another class of Introduction to Liberal Arts (ILA). For some though, you enter the room to the sounds of “Are You Going to San Francisco” and prepare yourself for a once in a lifetime opportunity.

This is what associate professor of mathematics and computer science Marjorie Bond’s ILA class may have felt when they had the privilege of interviewing Tom Brokaw, former NBC “Nightly News” anchorman, over the phone on Friday, Nov. 2 to discuss the theme for their class: was the 1960s an exemplary time period?

Bond said the students were very excited to have the chance to talk to someone who was not only alive as a citizen during the sixties, but also at the forefront of reporting the news at the time.

Brokaw was seen, or at least heard, as being a very knowledgeable, highly respected and experienced man and reporter. Joe Angotti, visting distinguished professor of communication and former NBC executive producer, who worked with Brokaw, said, “It was ‘absolutely impossible’ to rattle Brokaw while he was on the air.”

The students asked Brokaw questions they had prepared on topics such as the civil rights movement, the ’64 and ’68 Democratic National Conventions, the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, technology, the space race and Vietnam in order to gain insight on whether or not the sixties were exemplary. He concluded by defining exemplary as “more good than bad, more progress than retreat. It’s complex” and claimed that there were exemplary aspects of the sixties, but there were also many things which would sway him otherwise.

This class session came to be when Bond was asked to teach a section of ILA and was  required to choose a sub theme to “exemplary lives.” When she saw that “Thirteen Days,” a book on the Cuban Missile Crisis, was one of the texts they would be reading, along with a biography, Bond felt that the topic of the sixties as exemplary would be a perfect fit to her class.

Brokaw recently released a book on his views of the sixties with parallels to today, another topic that Bond’s class had discussed with the legendary reporter. The book is entitled Boom! Personal Reflections on the Sixties and Today and is already in stores.

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