We'll Teach In - This story by James Tobin is reprinted courtesy of the Heritage Project at the University of Michigan

Arnold Kaufman, Bergman’s colleague in the philosophy department, was searching for a way out of the pickle.

Though still in his 30s, Kaufman had a long resume on the left. He’d been active in the Congress on Racial Equality in the 1940s. He had worked with the founders of the Students for a Democratic Society. As a political philosopher, he was trying to craft a middle path between the revolutionary left and traditional Democratic Party liberalism. (His arguments would be published in an influential book, The Radical Liberal, in 1968.)

At 8:30 a.m. on March 17, with seven days to go before the “work moratorium,” Kaufman called Jack Rothman. How about a meeting of the moderates — tonight? Rothman agreed. They split up a list and called Bergmann, Marshall Sahlins and Eric Wolf from Anthropology, and Roger Lind from the School of Social Work. Eight in all met at Kaufman’s spacious contemporary home.

Rothman remembered it as “a strained and tortuous affair. Everyone wanted to avoid the strike, viewing it as a muddy, uncertain tactic, with a low level of support and a high level of active disapproval. But how to get out and what to substitute was unclear. We had all pledged ourselves to the strike; we could not pull out now and leave our colleagues to bear the brunt of an action to which we had given approval. We kept searching for a forthright alternative, one which would not be seen as retreat or capitulation by those who had promoted the strike.”

Hour after hour they talked, tempers flaring. Finally four of them – Kaufman, Bergman, Sahlins and Wolf – retreated for a smaller parlay.

Then an idea “occurred” in Marshall Sahlins’s mind — “if that’s even the right word for a process that was more social than it was individual, and more instinctive than it was creative,” as he put it later.

Sahlins had grown up in a family of Russian Jewish immigrants in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park. His quick wit was sharpened at the dinner table every night; Sahlins’s brother Bernard later founded the Second City comedy troupe that would spawn “Saturday Night Live.” Arriving in Ann Arbor as an undergraduate in the late 1940s, Marshall Sahlins brought an endless stream of jokes and puns and a determination to become an anthropologist. He got his Ph.D. at Columbia, did fieldwork in Fiji, then joined the Michigan faculty. Radical in his politics, he was already developing what would become deeply influential ideas about how culture shapes social and political change.

All the organizers had been inspired by the campaign of “sit-ins” by young African Americans to protest the injustice of racial segregation. Now, according to Sahlins and others who were there, he said something like this: “I’ve got it. They say we’re neglecting our responsibilities as teachers. Let’s show them how responsible we feel. Instead of teaching out, we’ll teach in — all night.”

It was very late. But Arnold Rothman called Bill Gamson right then to ask for another meeting the next night, moderates and militants, to talk about Sahlins’s idea.