The Philosopher

Jeanne Rasche Delloff was a student of philosophy at the University of Illinois in Chicago three years ago and, by her own account, "reading Kant, Plato, Mao, Marx and Nietzsche until 3 a.m. every night." On May 6, 1970, inspired partly by her readings, she joined some 1,500 other students in a sit-in at the university's R.O.T.C. building to protest the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the shootings of students on two U.S. campuses. Arrested for criminal trespass on state-supported property--a misdemeanor--she was urged to plead guilty. "I thought about it from all angles," she says, "and I decided to refuse. I suppose that can be seen as Kantian: if copping a plea is universalized, we would not have a system of law."

Jeanne was duly convicted and fined $20, and she returned to her studies. The following December, when she was already in graduate school, university officials abruptly revoked the $1,500 due her under a National Defense Education Loan. They cited a federal law barring such aid to any student convicted of a "serious" crime that disrupts a university.

Kant also teaches--as does Mao--that unjust laws should be opposed and so Jeanne Rasche, a slender blonde with no legal background, sued for the reinstatement of her loan. After two years, a panel of federal judges has finally ruled 2 to 1 that the law was unconstitutionally vague and "overbroad."

But Jeanne, now eligible once again for her federal loan, has long since dropped out of her studies in philosophy. "Getting back to Plato," she says "would be sort of difficult." At 27 she is married to a sailmaker named Mitchell Delloff and is the mother of a daughter. She works as a secretary in a Chicago restaurant and takes only weekend courses at Chicago State University. "Once I saw school as a real alternative to the ordinary American life, and I lived differently from other people," she says. "Now I go to work every day. I'm not unreflective, but I'm not as self-righteous as I was."

By next year she hopes to have taken enough education courses to get her teaching certificate. "I don't want to teach philosophy any more," she says. "I'm hooked on the teaching of reading. Three years ago, my scope was the universe. I was going to change the whole world. Now I just want to teach children how to read. Three years ago I thought that what we needed was a complete upheaval in our government Now I see that it isn't possible. We just have to work for the best we can get."

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