“This was our purpose — to promote serious examination of United
States policy,” Gamson said. “I learned something I should have known —
how bright and serious our students are. The closeness between faculty
and students was most moving…. I think the approach last night was
clearly superior to our original plan.”
Even before the teach-in, organizers had been calling friends and
colleagues in their disciplines at other campuses. Two days after the
Michigan event, faculty held a teach-in at Columbia University. Two
weeks later came the teach-in at Michigan State and many more all that
spring — Chicago, Wisconsin, Western Reserve, MIT, Harvard, the
University of Washington, Johns Hopkins, San Francisco State, Penn
State, Texas, Illinois, Oregon. A new thing had been born, and an
antiwar movement had begun in earnest.
Jack Rothman saw the teach-in as proof of his friend Arnold Kaufman’s
“radical liberal” strategy — a middle way in progressive politics
between the moderation of petition-gatherers and the rejectionist strike
tactics of radicals.
Marshall Sahlins, to whom the teach-in idea had “occurred” in the
midst of a tense meeting of minds, thought the tactic caught on in part
because, like SDS, it started at Michigan. “It may have been a cultural
hinterland,” he wrote later, “but being ‘out there’ afforded Michigan
‘the privilege of historical backwardness’ (as Trotsky put it).
Relatively uncommitted to the existing forms of dissent, the anti-war
activists at Michigan were free to surpass them.”
When Sahlins died in 2021 after a long and influential career at Michigan and the University of Chicago, the New York Times‘s
obituary read in part: “The teach-in created an intellectual bridge
between older leftists like Professor Sahlins and the budding activists
of the baby boom generation. And as one of the earliest high-profile
protests against America’s intervention in Vietnam, it set a template
for future antiwar activism.”
Sources include author interview with Zelda Gamson; the papers of
Arnold Kaufman at the Bentley Historical Library, University of
Michigan; Jack Rothman, “The Radical-Liberal Strategy in Action: Arnold
Kaufman and the First Teach-In” (draft in the Kaufman papers);
interviews conducted by U-M students with teach-in participants on the
teach-in’s 50th anniversary in 2015, available at “Resistance and Revolution: The Antiwar Movement at the University of Michigan, 1965-1972“; Matthew Newman, “Vietnam: U-M faculty’s historic teach-in of 30 years ago,” Michigan Today, October 1995; Marshall Sahlins, “The Teach-Ins: Anti-War Protest in the Old Stoned Age,” Anthropology Today, February 2009; Michigan Daily; Detroit News; Detroit Free Press.