Phone Call and Fast Plans - This story by James Tobin is reprinted courtesy of the Heritage Project at the University of Michigan

 Now 200 instructors signed in favor of a teach-in, a significant fraction of the whole faculty.

U-M administrators came on board, too, in no small part because the powerful dean of the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, the economist William Haber (father of Al Haber, a founder of SDS), liked the new plan. (The elder Haber made a point of telling Frithjof Bergmann he supported both the teach-in and the organizers’ position on Vietnam.)

When Arnold Kaufman talked to Haber’s staff on the phone the next day, he was quickly assured that the four big Angell Hall auditoriums, plus rooms in Mason Hall, plus public-address and movie equipment would be at the organizers’ disposal.

In these early days of what was not yet called the anti-war movement, there were few big names to call upon for major public addresses, especially on short notice. So the organizers invited three credentialed but little-known academics — Arthur Waskow, a historian at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies; John Donahue, an MSU anthropologist who had done fieldwork in Vietnam; and Robert Browne, an economist who been a State Department advisor in Vietnam.

Immediately, critics roasted the planners for failing to invite anyone to speak in favor of the Johnson administration’s escalation of the war. Arthur Eastman, a professor of English, argued that any teach-in — a term he considered “unfitting” — without a range of views was nothing but propaganda, “public noise,” a pressure tactic that violated “the sanity of democratic institutions to move slowly and carefully.”

The “radical liberal” Arnold Kaufman summarized the planners’ defense. “We were unimpressed by the argument that in order genuinely to teach, every conceivable, or even every influential, point of view must be formally represented,” he would write soon. “It is not as if the government of the United States is unable to find a way to place their position before the people…. The democratic political process requires that all points of view be effectively represented over time and on various occasions — not that they all be represented on every occasion.” (Later, Kaufman would conclude that since many “unthinking” people believed every teach-in should include all points of view, “it was an error of strategy, not of principle, to fail to invite pro-administration speakers.”)

Ads were hurried into the Daily and the Ann Arbor News. Professors fanned out to dorms, churches, fraternities and sororities to spread the invitation to students. In a key concession, University housing officials agreed to “late hours” for women who typically faced a curfew. The planners were hoping a thousand students would show up.