Reflections - This story by James Tobin is reprinted courtesy of the Heritage Project at the University of Michigan

The next day, Bill Gamson remarked on how students opposed to the teach-in had come into one of the late-late seminars, and a genuine debate ensued.

“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.