My Favorite 1960s Dragnet #7: D.H.Q.: Night School
This episode takes Joe Friday to college. Friday is studying in Night School when he notices a fellow student in possession of Marijuana. After class, he busts the student who used the famous oregano defense, “”No, man, it’s oregano for a pizza sauce. I’m a gourmet chef.”
Friday’s professor decides he wants Friday removed from class for being a Narc. Friday makes his case but thanks to the influence of the professor he’s yanked from the class. Friday asks the instructor for another chance and the professor agrees, but requires that Friday get a 2/3 majority.
It’s an interesting study in intellectual tyranny, and Friday’s pleas, particularly his second are spot on.
Of course, not everyone is a fan of this episode. Michael Hayde wrote in his book, “We’re asked to believe that Friday, whose job involves protecting young people from themselves, is depressed because he’s incapable of being accepted by them as a peer…Here the immortal seargent, firmly set in his ways, is utterly out of his element.”
In one sense, Hayde has a point. Joe Friday is an iconic figure. It’d be almost like Batman having the same problem. Part of the trouble as well may come from the fact that going back to 1949, Friday was never revealed to have much of an outside life. So seeing him pursuing a college degree is sudden and hard to deal with.
But in a larger sense, I think the episode works in that Friday represents policemen everywhere.
And policemen across the country, including those with a lot of experience have reason to go to college to acquire additional education that can help them be better police officers or to pursue other goals. These officers had a rough time of it in the 1960s and 70s, do to some of the rabid anti-police attitudes on campus. This was also addressed in a somewhat less direct way in an episode of Adam 12.
So, this represents a very unique, but still entertaining, episode of Dragnet.
Taking things in hindsight, having attended college back in the sixties and seventies, the only conclusion I can draw is “Boy was I stupid.” Of course I’ll probably draw the same conclusion if I live to be 100 and look back upon my 60’s. This particular Dragnet episode, like so many others done back in the day, belongs to an era characteristic of such idiocy and leaves me frustrated with the notion that life does not come with do overs.
It was a time when liberal, intellectually based professors like Professor Grant played God with their students, upholding an inherently destructive counter-cultural base that preyed upon certain types of students lacking the skills and life experiences to properly address the fallacies espoused by these counter-cultural philosophies often referenced as “the new morality” and “doing your own thing.” I remember an author by the name of Paul Goodman who, during this era, wrote the book “Growing Up Absurd.” Within the context of the book, Mr. Goodman advocated that the pursuit of an education after high school rested, for the most part, with the school of hard knocks before entry into the ivory towers. If one were to pursue a technical or scientific education, perhaps if might be okay to pursue it after high school. But for purposes of pursuing and education in the social sciences or the humanities, perhaps the aspiring student should wait until after the age of 30 to do so. Back then a familiar mantra was “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” But in a sense what Paul Goodman is saying within the context of his book is “Don’t trust yourself or rely upon your own understanding when going up against the leviathan that is higher education until you have acquired the wherewithal to address what it will throw your way.
The character of Joe Friday in this episode is portrayed as such a man, and what better profession to be a part of than law enforcement for purposes of acquiring such savvy. But even Joe Friday, with all the life experience he has acquired in his years of law enforcement, still falls prey to the monster leviathan that is academia embodied by the intellectual tyrant personage that is Professor Grant. Even the stalwart Joe Friday needs to be rescued by the even more savvy attorney with the eye patch.
Whether coming from the right end or the left end of the social and political spectrum, you might feel inclined to debate the issues of life that are placed before you, but these issues do harbor the features of absolutism and every one who goes up against said issues must acknowledge the finality of their pronouncements. The attorney articulates such pronouncements as only one of his background can do.
So, looking back to the time this dragnet episode came out, I again hear myself saying “Boy was I stupid,” because I remember back in the seventies, I had a professor attempt to vote me out of a class. And why did I sit by and just take it? Why did I just sit there among my peers allowing them to be the deciders of my fate? After all, the college admissions and records office allowed me to take said course. The college admissions and records office took my money. So why didn’t I put the professor in his place? Why didn’t I confront the professor with my options for recourse? Joe Friday had an advocate in the attorney, yet all the attorney did was state a reality that was always present.
If such a scenario were to be played out today, perhaps a present day Joe Friday, when confronted by the Professor Grant, would add a greater degree of credibility to his persona by simply stating, when threatened with expulsion, “I’ll be seeing you in court.” It doesn’t make for as compelling a drama, but it certainly makes more sense. But, like Joe Friday, at the time it happened to me, I didn’t know that option was open to me. So, here I am, a sixty plus year old man looking back on my late teens and early twenties and once again seeing reason to say “Boy was I stupid.” And I still give myself cause to wonder how much more stupidity remains inherent in my nature with one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.