By 1960, Hersey turned his efforts to education, racism, and the disenchantment of 1960's students. He wrote The Child Buyer in 1960, a novel that reflected some of the educational thinking of that time. Hersey was keenly aware of the movement to produce more scientists, technicians, mathematicians, and engineers at the expense of schools that foster individual fulfillment. Returning to his theme of survival, Hersey wrote Here to Stay in 1963, a series of articles about people who survived in the face of natural disasters. A history of the African American in the U.S. titled White Lotus, written in 1965, is an ambitious book that tells the story of racial history in America by paralleling the enslavement of Caucasians by the Chinese. The disenchantment of the mid-1960s is the subject of Too Far to Walk, published in 1966.
During the period from 1965 to 1970, Hersey returned to Yale as Master of Pierson College. There he taught, mentored, and wrote books that dramatized and personalized issues such as fascism, racism, and the Holocaust. He spent 1970 to 1971 on leave from Yale at the American Academy in Rome. His relationship with Yale continued as an adjunct professor of English until his retirement in 1984.
