So what's the lesson here? Get "hippie" and you can screw a teacher? Who of us really cares about that event at Lakeside 40 years later except an uptight school desperate to protect its reputation and the alumni wallowing in the past? The real story was the sexual predator who killed himself after preying on Lakeside students, and that's old and still deplorable news. Equally deplorable was, as you describe, Lakeside's ass-covering. That they would send you the current letter is laughable -- and sad.

By the way, from many historical perspectives, the "hippie" era ended with the 60s. The 70s were the still rippling social reactions to what had been set in place the preceding decade.

Two hippie, or rather Neo-Hippie chicks were camped out outside Tullies over the weekend. Both with huge back packs, both with ill-trained six month old German Shorthair Pointers, pricey dogs, both on their cellphones, both extremely self-conscious it strikes me. One is big and wears layers of flayed flouncy skirts, and has dyed green hair; the other is slight and not as exorbitantly attired. Her silly dog makes a lunge at me as I pass by but instantly cowers and its owner reproves it. x

The full content of the Seattle law firm letter as a link would greatly add to this story.

This is a puzzling story. Were I Mr. Berger's editor, I'd have spiked it.

Its only significant fact is the revelation Bill Gates and Paul Allen are to the manor born -- which exposes their self-made-man images as examples of the propaganda by which the capitalist aristocrats typically disguise themselves as of men the people, thus to promote the biggest of the American Big Lies: that anybody can become a billionaire baron, that you too can Strike It Rich.

But if this were Mr. Berger's point, he surely buried his lead – a surprise, since I know him to be an exceptionally competent writer and reporter.

Meanwhile he is telling us he too is a member of the One Percent, else he'd not be a Lakeside alumnus.

But we already know that. Were Mr. Berger not part of the aristocracy – were he not at least considered politically trustworthy by the aristocrats – he would not have a paying job in Ruling Class Media.

Meanwhile his disclosure of teacher-student sex at Lakeside remains perplexing.

Perhaps what he is telling us is Ruling Class kids don't have it as easy as we imagine, that in fact they too have burdens, that we should pity them at least as much as we pity the legions of children who are now homeless due to the foreclosure and eviction that resulted from the permanent joblessness inflicted on their parents by predatory capitalists.

Or maybe Mr. Berger's point is that even the aristocracy is afflicted by the definitively USian terror of human sex and sexuality, an expression of self-hatred that is among the topmost impulses in this wretchedly oppressed nation's compensatory drive toward zero-tolerance Christian theocracy.

I have no affiliation with Lakeside. I did know some people who went there in the 1980s, and certainly there were not stereotypical one percenters. My understanding is that Lakeside now offers a lot of financial aid. I don't know the specifics of Mr Allen's family's finances, but his dad was a librarian at the UW, which is hardly "manor born". The attempts to summarize the points of the article seem to be quite a stretch.

To say the least this is not one of Mr. Berger's better articles. Does Crosscut have any editorial standards for regular contributors or will they publish anything they write?

Re your photo... you look like a character on "Welcome Back Kotter" :-)

Actually he looks exactly like my downstairs neighbor!

The more things change...

Currently, to be a member of the one percent, you need an annual income of $516,633. Not assets- but yearly income.
I have known Knute since 10th grade or so, and I can assure you he is not now, nor has he ever been, in that category.

I also received the letter from Lakeside, and I'd like to point out a factual error in Mr. Berger's piece. He writes, "One has to assume that there was damage done in the Lakeside case outlined in the recent letter, if for no other reason than the student came forward nearly 40 years after the fact." Actually, the letter did not indicate in any way that the student himself was the one who notified the school about his sexual relationship with the teacher four decades earlier.

Here is the pertinent sentence in the letter -- I've omitted the teacher's name: "With regret, we inform you that Lakeside School was recently notified in December 2011 that former faculty member, [teacher's name], had an inappropriate sexual relationship with a then 17 year-old male student in the 1970's."

That sentence certainly leaves open the possibility that it was the former student who notified the school, but it's also possible that it was someone else -- perhaps another former student who knew about the relationship at the time or learned about it later, and who now feels very strongly about the issue of sexual abuse. If that happens to be the case, the former student who had the relationship with the teacher so long ago might not feel that it was damaging or regret it at all.

I don't mean to condone what the teacher did, and I understand why our society now considers a zero tolerance policy necessary to prevent the sexual abuse of students by teachers. Even so, I feel there are still moral distinctions to be made in this discussion; and a teacher who had a relationship with a 17-year-old boy forty years ago -- perhaps a single transgression on her part -- is not the same as a serial abuser of younger boys like Gary Little. How much damage an action actually caused is not entirely irrelevant in judging how wrongful the action was. So I feel it matters in this case whether the person who notified Lakeside was the student who had the relationship or someone else. If it was the student himself, that would indeed indicate that he now feels that he was harmed and considers himself a victim. If it was someone else, we don't know how the student himself feels about what happened.

I should acknowledge that -- largely because of societal prejudices that I'm still subject to? -- it's easier for me to suppose that a 17-year-old male student would not later feel damaged by having had a relationship with a female teacher than if it had been a male teacher with either a male or a female student; I guess that's residual homophobia and sexism. (I'm a heterosexual woman.) No doubt my reaction has also been affected by the fact that the teacher in question was a very attractive woman and a terrific teacher who made a difference to me as a teenager. I hope very much that the relationship did not harm the student, but of course it may have.

Anyway, I mainly just wanted to point out that the Lakeside letter did not say that it was the student himself who had come forward 40 years later.

I view this as a commentary. I found it interesting not for the rather unpleasant student teacher interactions but for the comments about high school in the early 70's. I graduated from a public high school in 1972 and then attended a private institution of higer education which was still trying to adjust the admission of women a few years before. This trip down memory lane is important because it describes a slice of our society at the time. My experiences in high school and college were similar to what Mossback describes. For those who are much younger, remember that tidbits like this help with the understanding of history.