[1] Naison, a former political activist, was a member of Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960s.
[8] In the spring of 1967, SDS held a demonstration against the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) on the Columbia campus.
Naison participated in the demonstration, but to distinguish himself from SDS members, he wore his athletic jacket and carried a sign saying "jocks for peace".
[9] In February 1968 Naison was arrested for civil disobedience at a protest on the Columbia campus at the proposed Harlem site for the new gym.
Mark Rudd, SDS's leader, urged the group (of almost 500) to seize buildings to make sure their voices were heard.
Naison lost one of his dearest friends, Ted Gold, during the accidental explosion of a Greenwich Village townhouse by an amateur SDS bomb-making group.
Kathy Boudin, in the house at the time, had been one of his favorite contacts in the New York Collective, and she survived the blast.
In his grief over the loss of Gold, Naison wrote a poem, published in Radical America, as a tribute to his fallen friend.
Naison claims that his only regret in life has been not leaving Weatherman when they started talking about getting rid of monogamy.
His most popular course at Fordham, "From Rock & Roll to Hip Hop: Urban Youth Cultures in Post War America", was the subject of an interview with him on National Public Radio.
Naison has also appeared on The O'Reilly Factor, Chappelle's Show, and the Discovery Channel's The Greatest American.
[17] Naison is co-founder of the Badass Teachers Association, a group dedicated to fighting the Common Core Curriculum and corporate influences on American education.