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Street, radio, and university professor by William M. Mandel 07 March 2001 01:41 UTC |
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I have just read a sad message, "Farewell to Academe," by a social science professor of 32 years experience. He is retiring because he finds students "increasingly disinterested" and having "a kind of almost wilful ignorance that has to be experienced to be believed." Administrators are "cynical" and even leftist professors are "perpetual conference goers and vita builders, intent on making names for themselves and impressing their more orthodox colleagues." In January I applied to present, wrote and sent off, a paper to a panel titled "Connecting Classroom, Community, and Social Movements" at this year's convention of the American Sociological Association. The very title suggests an attempt to confront the problems the retiring professor describes. My paper was a description of how I personally dealt with them, in a manner that made me feel useful. My offer was turned down (I have presented many papers, and all have later been published.) The nature of the rejection suggests that the professor in charge fits the description of those the quoted retiring academic complains about. I think that what I proposed to say will be of interest to the very diverse group of people to whom I'm sending this, not only the professors on my list. Here it is: THREE-QUARTERS OF A CENTURY OF CONNECTING CLASSROOM, COMMUNITY, AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: A PERSONAL REMINISCENCE by William Mandel My father was a Communist of the pro-Soviet variety. In consequence, at age ten, in 1927, I joined the Young Pioneers, the Communist children's organization, whose activities have just been described in a Columbia University Press book, RAISING REDS, by Paul Mishler of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. A fascinating sub-chapter is titled: "Socialist Education, Proletarian Education, and the Communist Children's Movement." The entire focus of our activity was on connecting classroom, community, and social movements. I do not recall any courses in our own organization, but remember that in the summer camp I attended, with the supposedly Indian-sounding name, Wochica, contracted from "Workers Children's Camp," I learned labor songs of the IWW -- Industrial Workers of the World -- from one of its members who, like its prime leader, Big Bill Haywood, had turned Communist. In the city, we were very strongly involved in school affairs. Overcrowding was horrendous in my junior high school of 3,500 children. The first issue of the monthly paper put out by our Young Pioneer troop carried a cover cartoon with kids popping out of the windows, from under the roof, and even from the chimney. There were morning and afternoon shifts, plus another starting at noon for first and second graders. Although the building was six stories high and a block long, no room was found for a buffet or cafeteria. Kids usually brought lunches from home and ate seated on the floor of the gymnasium, taking in their food along with the odor of sweat. The Pioneers began issuing leaflets demanding that a new school be built nearby to relieve the overcrowding, and also that a cafeteria be opened at my P.S. 61. Young Pioneers' meetings were often devoted to a serious discussion of what student self-government should be like. It was decided to demand the right to vote for seventh-graders, in the student government the principal had established,-- in addition to the eighth and ninth-graders he had endowed with the franchise, to launch a third party with a platform (those the principal had established had none), and to nominate candidates. A founding convention was held in the school auditorium, and the new party was given the name, Progressive. It put forth a three-plank platform: 1) open a cafeteria; 2) reduce overcrowding, and 3) bring that about by building an annex. A coalition was formed with the Tempo Party, which gladly endorsed the platform. Of the seven candidates on the joint slate, five won. [For these details I draw upon the memoir of our leader, Harry Eisman, KRASNYE GALSTUKI V STRANE DOLLARA (Red Neckerchiefs in the Land of the Dollar), Moscow, 1966. Born in Moldavia, then under the Romanian monarchy, orphaned at seven, and an immigrant at nine, he was deported for sticking a safety-pin into the rump of a mounted policeman's horse ridden into a demonstration against the Boy Scouts, which we regarded as militaristic. A mass campaign won him the right to emigrate to the Soviet Union, whose Young Pioneers had invited him. He fought in the infantry as a Red Army volunteer all through World War II, including the Battle of Stalingrad, and died in the relatively moderate Brezhnev era.] The school principal realized that his legislature had changed from a body designed perhaps to give pupils a taste for politics into one acting effectively in the interests of workingclass children, so he dissolved it and set up an appointive honor society instead. To me, the most important aspect of Young Pioneer activities was assistance to strikes, and to strikers' families and children. This faced me with the first important psychological decision of my life, the first involving courage. A coal miners' strike in 1927 lasted a full year, and the workers and their families literally starved before finally giving in. The Young Pioneers participated in collecting food, clothing, and money. I don't know whether my fear of participating had anything to do with possible physical danger: being roughed up by police or whoever. They were more probably the fears of an intellectual kid whose life had been spent going to school, roller-skating and playing ball games, reading and listening to his father talk. Now I had to go out and put my body where my heart was. I do know that nothing that I have done since took as much guts as forcing myself, at age ten, to take one of the collection cans into the New York subway on a Saturday morning, and spend that full day and all the next day going from car to car calling out, "Help the starving miners' children!" As the weekend progressed, it seemed that my arm would fall off. No one on the miners' side could afford to give paper money -- $25 a week was then the average workingperson's wage -- so the can, like an oversize beer can with cardboard side, got full and fuller with coins. I could have burst with pride when it was broken open to count the contents when I brought it in. $18.03. That number has stayed with me for a lifetime. It is equivalent to a couple of hundred dollars in purchasing power today. ------------------------------ My own first organized teaching came at age 17. I had been one of 21 students expelled from CCNY for opposition to ROTC (some student issues never change). In my case it was also for asking a devastating question of the college president at a compulsory convocation about his bringing police on campus to disperse, including by the use of beatings, an indoor meeting of a recognized student club. It was seeking to combat the institution of fees in this hitherto free college at the very bottom of the Great Depression. The Workers' School, a Communist Party institution teaching Marxist economics, Leninist politics, dialectical materialist philosophy, and the history of the labor movement, offered scholarships to all of the expellees interested in studying there. A measure of the mood of the day is that enrollment, 3,000, was as large as that of CCNY in that time when higher education was virtually the exclusive province of the well-to-do but for a tiny handful of free institutions. I took up the offer, and gobbled up everything offered, stimulated by the fact that I had studied Marx' Capital as required reading in the compulsory Political Economy course at Moscow University. I had entered it on a biochemistry track immediately after high-school graduation, when my father took the family to the Soviet Union, offering his civil engineering skills in the cause of "building socialism." That is where I acquired the knowledge of Russian that opened the door to my later career as a Sovietologist. I also got a very practical look at the relationship between education, community, and social movements. In the first place, my fellow-students were, with but a single exception, affirmative-action people, a Soviet invention. That year, 1932, was the first in which the recently established system of Workers' Departments, essentially prep schools for working people, free with living expenses paid and housing provided, turned out enough graduates so the government could carry out in practice its program of providing that class with higher education. In addition to the affirmative-action entrants on the basis of class, there were those to whom admission was granted on grounds of ethnicity. Although, in proportion to population, there should have been one Jew in the class, in fact there were six, to make up for the discrimination they had suffered under the quota system of Tsarist times. It was the very provision in the internal passport identifying all Soviet citizens by ethnicity that got them in. Another aspect of education there that accords with our subject-matter today is that all students who were members of the Young Communist League were required to participate in after-school teaching of literacy to the new workingclass in the plants mushrooming in and around Moscow during this penultimate year of the First Five-Year Plan. This meant piling into open trucks, driving an hour or so to the building site, teaching for an hour or two, being driven back, then to their incredibly overcrowded dormitories to hit the books. That was much more difficult for them than for me despite the language problem. I was, so to speak, a professional student, while for them this was a new endeavor. The notion of the relationship between education and social movement was very high in their minds. Before returning to the United States, I got the head of the Young Communist League group in a corner. I said to him that at the rate he and his fellow students were going in that extremely hungry year, they'd probably die of tuberculosis by the time they were forty, and what was the point? He looked at me as though I were out of my mind, and answered: "We're building socialism." To him that was no slogan. He had been a shepherd in his native Armenia, a country that had suffered genocide at Turkish hands in his own lifetime (they were all in their twenties). He had been able to advance to being an urban construction worker and had been selected to go to the finest Soviet university. If he completed it successfully, he had a position waiting for him on the faculty of a higher education institution in Armenia then under construction. In a very different context, I witnessed the difference between socialization in the American and Canadian school systems on the one hand, and the Soviet on the other. The number of kids native to English because their parents had taken jobs in Moscow was enough for an Anglo-American School to have been established. The pupils were given a winter vacation at a camp outside the city. I was asked to accompany them because, although I was of the same age as they, I had the prestige of being a university student. Upon arrival, we found skis stacked behind a door. The toughest kids grabbed what they thought were the best, carved their initials in them, and announced they would knock the daylights out of anyone else who used them. The Soviet counselors proceeded to teach the idea of public property, and actually got the Americans and Canadians (I don't recall any British) to ostracize the gang leaders. It goes without saying that the education offered by the New York Workers School corrresponded in purpose and emphasis exactly to the title and subtitle of our session here today. At the end of the year during which I took a full load of its courses, the director invited me in and asked if I'd like to teach there. I certainly did. He asked my age and I said nineteen, which would have made me the youngest teacher by far. Actually I was seventeen, but I didn't want to be turned down. I wanted desperately to be a good teacher, and judging by student attendance records, I was the second best in a faculty of dozens. There were no required educational techniques. I employed what I later learned to be the Socratic method. I didn't know of its existence. I wanted people to think for themselves and I was quite sure of my convictions. I believed that if I developed a sequence of discussion questions, then the students' daily lives -- they were primarily workers, although one of mine was Gale Sondergaard, who later became a prominent actress in Hollywood and early TV before blacklisting -- plus our reading materials, followed by simple deduction would produce what I regarded as the right answer. From that I would then proceed to my next prepared question. The students were all older than I, some old enough to be my parents, except for one who was only six weeks my senior. I know her age because I'm married to her. I am grateful that I have never been an academic snob in any context. I was the only teacher in that Workers' School who did not regard it as beneath his dignity to go downstairs to the pressroom of the Communist DAILY WORKER after my evening's teaching was over, pick up the biggest armload I could tote, about fifty, of the next morning's paper, and go out to Union Square to hawk it. Most often it was the passing East Side working people who bought them. Evening-session students at Washington Irving High School, up the block on Irving Place, would come by for a paper. I learned to develop the most saleable shouting headline from whatever was on the front page. Sixty years later, when I found homeless people in Berkeley unsuccessful in hawking their monthly paper at movie theaters, I reached back into memory to teach them how to find catchy headline slogans to shout. I taught for only a year at the New York Workers' School, for I was then asked to go to Cleveland to run the Communist bookstore and build the circulation of the paper in Ohio. I also taught at its Workers' School, where the students were chiefly Slavic. When employed, they worked in steel mills, machine-tool-manufacturing enterprises, and White Truck and Fisher Body of the auto industry. Next I was transferred to Akron, then world center of the tire industry, to head its Young Communist League. There it had about 100 members, primarily Black, because of the prestige Communists had won both in fighting for welfare, non-existent before the Great Depression, in physically putting back the furniture of evicted families, in leading the first major sit-down strike in American history (preceding the well-known one in Flint, Michigan), but above all for insisting that the new Rubber Workers' Union not only accept African-Americans as equals but also demand their advancement out of the heaviest and dirtiest jobs. The YCL could pay no salary, and I earned my living as a teacher on WPA. This was the famous Roosevelt program of made work that, as is obvious from my employment, did more than build bridges, parks, and public buildings. I taught current events. As previously, I found that teaching people with experience in the world of work, attending just because they were interested, as no credits were involved, was vastly more challenging than my later experience in higher education, where my students fundamentally knew nothing of life. Here the relationship between education, community, and social movement involved a significant event in the sphere of race. A statewide conference of WPA teachers was held. We sang the Star-Spangled Banner, and then the few African-American teachers struck up the Negro National Anthem, "Lift Every Voice and Sing." The few whites who knew it, as I did from my Communist upbringing, also sang. A few more whites, seeing us stand, rose to their feet. The next day a white fellow-teacher whom I had liked said, in our teachers' room between classes: "Hell, where I come from we just rolled 'em over and shoved it in." There is a connection between that memory and the fact that, although I am white, The Black Scholar chose to review my autobiography, SAYING NO TO POWER, in a recent issue, and that I was asked to be the Martin Luther King Day speaker by an African-American woman this past January in a nearly all-white city on the West Coast. World War II brought a sudden and drastic change in my relationship to teaching. This country, raised to believe that if that war occurred, it would be against godless communism, found itself allied with the godless communists, and learned that it didn't know the most basic things of a practical nature needed to make that alliance work: such things as the carrying capacity of the Trans-Siberian Railroad for Lend-Lease shipments, the tonnage of ships the ports of Vladivostok and Murmansk and Arkhangelsk could accomodate, the degree to which those ports did or didn't ice up, when, and for how long. I had found a job in New York in 1940 at the tiny private American Russian Institute that was the country's only research center in that field. There was no CIA, there was one person as a Russian Unit in the Commerce Department, and not over a dozen who had worked at our Moscow Embassy since Roosevelt extended recognition to the USSR sixteen years after its establishment). I very quickly became the know-it-all in the field, publishing in that institute's quarterly learned journal and a weekly bulletin established when Hitler attacked the USSR. In 1943 I was asked to teach in the Army Specialized Training Program at Syracuse University. The original idea was for me to head the program, but when they discovered I was 26 and had no higher education (one semester at Moscow; one year at CCNY before expulsion, after which I had refused to make the apology that would have reinstated me), they put it in the hands of a professor who bragged that he had been teaching Russian history for ten years without ever having visited the place. At Syracuse I hung with the students, some Black, in the dives they could afford, and hope I succeeded in giving them some notion of what that society was trying to accomplish. In 1943 I had one of the most rewarding teaching experiences in my life. The previous year I had been invited to Toronto to speak at a stupendous Congress of Canadian-Soviet Friendship, along with Norbert Wiener, founder of information theory, then world-famous Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, and Edgar Snow, newsman who was literally a household name for his RED STAR OVER CHINA. Probably because of the impression I left there, also on a nationwide CBC broadcast, and at a Canadian Army camp where I addressed men my own age who would soon be sent to be massacred in the Dieppe raid on the Nazi-held French coast, I was invited to be, for a week, the "faculty" at the Workers' Education Association Labor College, sponsored by official Canadian organized labor. Afterward I wrote my parents, referring to a particularly warm reception by a workingclass folkdance festival crowd in San Francisco: "My only other such experience was a class literally bursting into tears...after I had had them for a whole week." There was still a lot of British formality in Canada's culture then, and for the young worker-students to find their professor to be someone who was not only in their own age range, but who knew every labor and pop song, was a tireless and improvising social dancer, and played a fair game of softball, apparently had had an emotional impact. So, doubtless, was the fact that I placed no limit of time or place upon answering their questions. My then very recent experiences as a workingman and participant in labor struggles must have given my talks a relevance to them that might not have come from someone with an academic approach. My first book appeared in 1944, getting reviews in the NY Times Sunday Book Section and just about everywhere else one could want one. My second, in 1946, not only got the same treatment, but was one of the first two volumes ever used as a text on the USSR in American higher education. In 1947 I was invited to take up a fellowship at post-doctoral level at Stanford's Hoover Institution, but Truman proclaimed the Cold War in his Fulton, Missouri, speech, with Winston Churchill on the platform, in a matter of weeks. Here the relationship to community and social movements became front and center. In those years when a B.A. got you an assistant professorship, an M.A. an associate, and a Ph.D. a full, it was just not the done thing for someone with faculty status to write in a student newspaper. I wrote a documented slashing attack on the Cold War in the Stanford Daily, and spoke at a meeting in the Palo Alto Public Library, called by a new liberal veterans' organization. The Stanford Daily article brought a response from a Baltic fascist, a term I always use with extreme circumspection, because fascism is too serious a matter to cry wolf about. The public lecture was the first occasion in my experience when police went around noting the license plates of the cars parked in the vicinity. McCarthyism was just around the corner. I banged away at the Cold War in public lectures, conferences at least one of which was reported in the press with my remarks turned into their opposite, and academic gatherings. Hoover Institution fellowships are frequently lifetime posts. Mine was not renewed, on the grounds of lack of funds, although the director, best defined as a Lincoln Republican, actually offered me retention of my large private office and unlimited access to the extraordinary archive (which Condoleeza Rice, in one of her last acts as Stanford Provost before becoming National Security Advisor, ordered dispersed for reasons of economy!). I had acted as his teaching assistant on occasion when he was away. These were graduate students, all war veterans, some of whom went on to distinguished academic careers. But at a faculty and administration reception I was not at, someone asked the director belligerently: "What is Mandel doing here?" One of my students told me the next morning that the response was: "He knows more about the USSR than anyone else in the United States." For the record, that cannot be said of me or of any individual today or for the past third of a century, i.e., since the enormous focus on Sovietology produced several thousand Ph.Ds on every detail of that country's economy, government, history, language, and military. At the time that remark was made, there were no more than a few dozen of us. While at Stanford, I spent as much time as possible an hour north at the California Labor School in San Francisco. Although it was identical to the New York Workers' School and the later Jefferson School there in having been founded by the Communist Party, the extraordinary autonomy and unity of organized labor in San Francisco thanks to the longshoremen-led general strike of 1934 won it a legal status difficult to believe today. It was actually accredited by the government as a school World War II veterans could attend and receive their GI Bill financial support for. For me personally, it was the place where I, an Easterner, made my first acquaintance with Mexican and Chicano culture, particularly dance. At my HUAC hearing in 1960, a question posed to me was: "Did you lecture at the California Labor School in 1947?" My response pleased the audience: "I did. It was on Shostakovich' oratorio 'Song of the Forest.' Whaddaya know about that?" The long night of Truman-McCarthyism closed in for me after the Hoover appointment, and it was 27 years before I again had a paid association with higher education. It was also18 before a publisher would touch me again, although prior to that I had had four book contracts with advances in four years. My teaching returned to that sponsored by the Far Left. I gave courses in the Jefferson School in New York, an organization sponsored by the Communist Party but staffed by faculty with all the proper letters after their names who had been fired primarily during the period of the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact of 1939-41. Again, my lack of academic snobbery stood me in good stead. I was now in my thirties, with books and a distinguished appointment in my background, but it never occurred to me that that should cause me to hesitate to take a course in Negro literature taught by Lorraine Hansberry, then I think about 19 and not yet the famous playwright of "Raisin in the Sun." She and I stood in line for unemployment insurance together in our Washington Heights neighborhood. Years later I had the sad experience of bringing to her husband, for her, a Berkeley Free Speech Movement pin, on the day before she died. By the same token, I did not hesitate to attend a course on the Soviet Union taught by the just-returned Daily Worker correspondent in Moscow, only to find that the textbook in his hand was my A GUIDE TO THE SOVIET UNION, a volume in use at Yale, Stanford, and elsewhere. Likewise, in my own course, I invited to lecture the one truly Soviet Communist available, although he was a Black American. His mother, a Communist, had been fired from her job as a New York City schoolteacher for trying to organize a union, years before its extremely powerful union was built, largely by Communists. She went to Moscow and became the English voice of Radio Moscow. The son, Neil Burroughs, was five when taken there, and spoke English with a heavy Russian accent when he returned at the end of World War II. He was deeply hurt by the fact that, while in Moscow he had been a student of literature at Moscow University, and an essay of his on Turgenev appeared in a Pocket Book here of that classical author's work, back home in America he could only get a job on a radio assembly line. Later, when his Russian got him another in the one New York bookstore then selling Soviet books, he was kept in the basement, because a Black face serving customers on Fifth Avenue in the late 1940s was unthinkable. When I left the Communist Party in 1957 over its refusal to take policy positions independent of those of the Soviet Union, and particularly with respect to that country (Khrushchev had made his "secret speech" denouncing Stalin's crimes), there was no more teaching for me at places under its control. We moved to Berkeley, and, within a month, although I was not sympathetic to Trotskyism, the Socialist Workers' Party invited me, and I accepted, teaching a course on the USSR. The Berkeley Left was sensible. The Black editor-to-be of the Communist Party's PEOPLE'S VOICE, then already a member of that organization, attended. So did graduate student Bogdan Denitch, bitterly anti-Soviet and a social-democrat, who is now a well-known professor emeritus of City College in New York. Another student was a Trotskyist who later became a lifetime figure in academic labor education. Years afterward he wrote me that my testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in San Francisco in 1960 had determined him to face jail, if necessary, if a similar subpoena ever befell him. For me, the HUAC subpoena was a wonderful break. The '60s mood had just arisen among students, they thought my words -- as of this year used in six documentary films and probably a dozen TV specials -- were inspiring, and in consequence, when the Free Speech Movement arose in 1964, they put me on its executive committee. As I drafted this very presentation, I received an approving e-mail on a speech this past week-end, from a colleague of that time, Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun. I took a very direct, if at this point informal, in education at the university. When I gave the first of six lectures outdoors in Lower Sproul Plaza, 600 students were waiting when I got there. On another occasion, I was asked to debate the Jerry Falwell of that day, Fred Schwarz, an Australian M.D. who headed the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. The crowd filled Wheeler Auditorium and two overflow halls to which the event was piped, and the Fire Department had to close the doors for safety. I treasure a photo of the ineffable David Horowitz applauding me like crazy in the standing ovation at the end. The students wanted a better education than the university was giving. They established a Free University, at which I taught. I was not the least bit surprised that attendance, although comparable to that in others of its courses, dropped off. I was teaching about the Soviet Union, and they were looking for a Utopia. I didn't believe in any, any more. But I did my best to improve the education they were getting at UC Berkeley, because I knew that their expressed contempt for it would not withstand their desire and need for degrees. I detailed my view on this in what amounted to a valedictory speech at the last meeting of the FSM Executive Committee, which I titled "The Free University or Freeing THE University." I also wrote a detailed department-by-department analysis, "The Whiteness of the University," front-paged in two consecutive issues of the Berkeley Barb, the first great alternative newspaper, which at one point reached 100,000 circulation nationwide. I pointed out how white students were losing by the absence of the perspective of Black professors in all sorts of courses, from Agriculture and Architecture through the alphabet. To the best of my knowledge, that was the first such analysis, by anyone of either race, of the meaning of the absence of Black faculty in American higher education. Within one year, without acknowledging my contribution, UC Berkeley had taken its first steps to improve that situation. The students demanded a say in naming those who taught them. Sociology professors of national reputation went to bat to get me an appointment in that department. In the light of my having held a post-doctoral appointment a quarter-century earlier, and the fact that I had by now published three books, most recently SOVIET WOMEN, written specifically to serve the new feminist movement, all in use in higher education (the last quite widely), I asked for full-professor salary, pro-rated down to the level of my duties. My sponsors compromised on the associate-professor level. The evaluations by my students were excellent, but Gov. Ronald Reagan said publicly that the professors had better watch out who they appointed, or he would oppose any raises by the legislature. So they did not re-appoint me at UC Berkeley, and dropped Angela Davis at UCLA. Matters were not helped by the fact that I had, as a matter of conscience, taken my course off campus during the Third-World Strike which occurred that quarter, and had been very visible during the period of martial law in Berkeley over the building of a People's Park by street people and students. This was on land that the university wished to make yet another parking structure. At one point National Guard bayonets were just a couple of feet from my chest as I called upon the students not to run but to retreat slowly, facing the military. There were educational satisfactions nonetheless. A superb high-school and junior-college teacher of government, Virginia Franklin, winner of many awards, herself never to the left of the New Deal wing of the Democratic Party, would assign my mid-sixties book, RUSSIA RE-EXAMINED, to her classes so they would have to think through their attitudes to the competing systems. When a Black female student of her's at Merritt College, then a ghetto institution, wrote nearly 20 very thoughtful pages in a report on my book, I was thrilled almost to tears. While Virginia always invited me to address her classes, I would often be invited by others. A Black teacher once invited me to Oakland Tech, another ghetto school, and the students were so stimulated that they wrote an imitation radio program presenting the ideas and views that had batted back and forth in consequence. The teaching at informal educational institutions continued. Only two years after arriving in Berkeley my broadcasts on Pacifica's original and then only station, KPFA, brought me an invitation from the American Friends Service Committee to be part of the tiny "faculty" at its annual high-school department camp at Lake Tahoe. Another member was the wonderful old longshoreman, seaman, and veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Spain, Bill Bailey, whose "dese, dem, and dose" Hoboken English gave the kids in attendance a sense of the workingclass that nothing short of a factory job could have provided. It is my belief, which a musicologist might investigate, that what came to be known as the San Francisco sound arose among the kids there that summer, one of whom was Joan Baez. No sooner had the Sixties ended than an entirely new and different issue brought me to teach again. Angela Davis was tried for murder. Ghetto people became active on her behalf. Under the auspices of her defense committee, I taught a class in Oakland on how to read the newspaper, not in the sense of literacy but in dealing with such problems as reporting on the Attica, New York, massacre of prisoners by guards after an uprising provoked by intolerable conditions. The 1970s were tough. A teaching offer from the Economics Department at San Francisco State University, in which ten of 13 faculty voted in my favor, was vetoed by someone high in the administration, probably President Hayakawa. The faculty had just gone through a long strike, and confessed frankly that they were simply too fatigued to undertake another battle. The Associated Students at San Jose State University hired me at pro-rated full-professor salary, and the president there cancelled the Philosophy Department's offer of credit for the course. The chair was on the verge of tendering his resignation, but I convinced him that the university needed precisely professors such as he, so he compromised by taking a year's sabbatical. In 1975 a student activist of the Sixties, now at the Law School of Golden Gate University in San Francisco, highly regarded for the crop of working lawyers it had produced over the years, proposed and got them to engage me to teach a course in Soviet law. I still treasure the term papers turned in. But the steam had gone out of the student movement, and that was my last formal appointment. From then until 1995 my teaching took the form of my broadcasts over KPFA, in which the question-answer phone-in period was the most popular. Lstener mail volunteered such thoughts as that my program was "like a postgraduate course." Here, too, of course, there was the most direct relationship to social movements. I was finally dropped because I undertook to defend affirmative action against a popular and actually liberal columnist who thought that a policy of color-blindness would suffice. Station management, now essentially desiring that there be no criticism of Bill Clinton from the left, did not want the subject aired, although the manager was an African-American woman. When KPFA let me go, a station near Stanford offered me a weekly hour, and Free Radio Berkeley, an unlicensed lower-power FM station, gave me all the time I desired. When the latter was driven off the air by federal court injunction, I offered to go to jail as a test case in 1999, but the matter became moot. Today I broadcast on its successor, Berkeley Liberation Radio, and on a web station run by an extraordinary man with severe cerebral palsy, www.luver.com. My program is titled "Thinking Out Loud With Bill Mandel," and it is essentially a running treatment of the subject of this session. www.BillMandel.net
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