In the spring of 1969, after a year and a half of steady activity with Resist, I decided to return to academe. During that time, I had written parts of The Conspiracy of the Young, coauthored a number of articles for the New York Review of Books and other periodicals, and added my body to many protests. I was weary. Our disruption of the 1968 Modern Language Association convention in New York—to which I will turn shortly—offered a kind of bathetic climax to the increasingly murderous events of 1968. I felt I needed the steadiness and, yes, the salary of a regular job.

I had very mixed feelings about moving full time into movement work, which was one of the options for me at this time. To support my children financially, I needed a regular income. But, the idea of raising the funds for my own salary gave me the creeps. Nor, as a depression baby, could I live with the prospect of being broke five or ten years down the road. I worried: When the war crisis passed and people returned to their normal lives, would they support someone who didn’t have a “normal” life? I enormously admired Dave Dellinger as a person and a movement leader. But I couldn’t accept the economic uncertainty that marked a life like his. Perhaps it was my petty bourgeois upbringing. Or maybe changes in the movement turned me away. The sectarianism dividing the movement seemed loony to me, especially as bombs rained down on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. I couldn’t accept factionalism, given what the American military was doing in Southeast Asia. But even if one didn’t join one or another group, one had at least to pay the various lines some heed in order to maintain credibility in a divided movement and to sustain the momentum of antiwar activity.

The university was familiar terrain—both enjoyable and politically ambiguous. True, we academics helped reproduce the structure and culture of American capitalist society. But maybe we could change that. Maybe we could provoke students and colleagues into questioning racism and patriarchy and the exceptionalism that underwrote America’s culture of war. Education, as I had learned in the 1964 freedom schools, could help liberate and empower people.