The Coffin Course in Ethics

Religion and Social Ethics: The types of ethical thought developed in the first semester will be applied to such problem areas of contemporary society as 1) race & racism; 2) sex & family; 3) economic ethics; 4) political ethics; 5) national ethics. These and similar problems will be studied by reading and analysis of such documents as Myrdal's An American Dilemma, various Papal Encyclicals, and statements of other religious bodies.

Such was the catalogue description of one of the last courses Jeb Stuart Magruder took at Williams College. It was taught by William Sloane Coffin Jr., who became chaplain of Yale later that year. Ordinarily, courses of this kind are soon largely forgotten by student and teacher alike. But 15 years later, this one was injected into national politics. Under tight control for most of his testimony before the Ervin committee, Magruder grew momentarily impassioned when he recalled the experience.

He agreed with Coffin that, because of Watergate, he could be said to have failed the course. But he argued that Coffin's own antiwar activities helped him justify his misdeeds.

In the wake of Magruder's testimony, TIME Boston Bureau Chief Sandra Burton interviewed Coffin. The chaplain does not find Magruder's arguments persuasive and still flunks him on ethics. "There was not very much on civil disobedience in the ethics course I taught," he says, "so poor old Jeb never learned to tell the difference between civil disobedience and violations of the Constitution by the Administration."

He points out that at the placid Williams campus in the 1950s, there were no civil rights or antiwar protests to teach the meaning of ethics. "Values are not so much taught as caught. Without the experience it's pretty hard for the ethics to sink in. Your education is largely a game of intellectual volleyball.

Magruder ended up lumping all lawbreakers together. By that way of thinking, Jesus and Jimmy Hoffa are two of a kind. He has never examined the possibility that sometimes there is no way to test the constitutionality of a law except to disobey it. You could say that however pathetic our [antiwar] efforts were, we were trying to keep the nation under law or under God, whereas

Jeb and his cohorts were trying to keep it under Nixon."

Although Magruder was only a middling student who did not do enough reading, Coffin says he was "very fond" of him. Indeed, he observes, "the real moral of this story may be that to do evil, you don't need to be a Bengal tiger. It is sufficient to be a tame tabby.

That's the way I look at Jeb." Magruder used to babysit for him at Williams, and they had many talks. "He was charming, friendly and good company.

But he was not tough inside. My line to him as to so many students in the 1950s was: 'You're a nice guy but not yet a good man. If you don't stand for something, you're apt to fall for nothing!' " Teacher and pupil corresponded until 1968 when, says Coffin, "Jeb joined forces with Goldwater, and I guess he thought I must have given up on him."

Watergate, Coffin believes, may finally have forced Magruder into an encounter with himself, and he would like to renew the correspondence. "It would be interesting for the two of us to sit down and talk again."

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