Teach-in

The main difference between a teach-in and a seminar is the refusal to limit the discussion to a specific time frame or a strict academic scope.

The first teach-in, which was held overnight at the University of Michigan in March 1965, began with a discussion of the Vietnam War draft and ended in the early morning with a speech by philosopher Arnold Kaufman.

[1] About a dozen of these faculty members, including William A. Gamson, Jack Rothman, Eric Wolf, Arnold Kaufman, and Roger Lind, reconsidered the strike and gathered to discuss alternative ways to protest the war in the face of strong opposition to the strike from the Michigan legislature and governor as well as the university president.

UC Berkeley professors Eugene Burdick and Robert A. Scalapino, who had agreed to speak in defense of President Johnson's handling of the war, withdrew at the last minute.

[14] Other speakers included: California Assemblymen Willie Brown, William Stanton and John Burton; Dave Dellinger (political activist); James Aronson (National Guardian magazine); philosopher Alan Watts; comedian Dick Gregory; Paul Krassner (editor, The Realist); M.S.

Arnoni (philosopher, writer, political activist); Edward Keating (publisher, Ramparts Magazine); Felix Greene (author and film producer); Isadore Zifferstein (psychologist); Stanley Scheinbaum (Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions); Paul Jacobs (journalist and anti-nuclear activist); Hal Draper (Marxist writer and a socialist activist); Levi Laud (Progressive Labor Movement); Si Casady (California Democratic Council); George Clark (British Committee of 100/Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament); Robert Pickus (Turn Toward Peace); Bob Moses (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee); Jack Barnes (National Chair of the Young Socialist Alliance); Mario Savio (Free Speech Movement); Paul Potter (Students for a Democratic Society); and Mike Meyerson (national head of the Du Bois Clubs of America).

Excerpts from the speeches by Lynd, Wildavsky, Scheer, Potter, Krassner, Moses (credited as Bob Parris, his middle name), Spock, Stone, Gregory, and Arnoni were released the following year as an LP by Folkways Records, FD5765.

[16] As part of the antiwar movement at the time, teach-ins were regarded by the FBI (then directed by J. Edgar Hoover) and the Lyndon B. Johnson administration as potentially dangerous to national interests.

At a teach-in organized by the Universities Committee on Problems of War and Peace, 13 undercover agents attended and identified students, faculty, speakers, and activists by name and affiliation, passing the information to the FBI.

[18] This report stated, "In reality, the great majority of teach-ins (there were a few notable exceptions to this rule) have had absolutely nothing in common with the procedures of fair debate or the process of education.

… Moreover, the 1965 teach-ins served to identify a coterie of academic experts who challenged national policy, helped to make connections among them, and established them as an alternative source of information and understanding."

This liberal bias of the teach-in movement, however, was one of the too-many-reasons-to-recount-here why the academic community lost its leadership role as fast as it had gained it.

Hence the tension between the political and the carnival in the student left as it moved from liberal protest to radical resistance and campus violence... Alienated by the left students’ tactics, the largely liberal anti-war public reverted to traditional modes of protest, although the marches and demonstrations were now massive in scale, varied in social composition and increasingly joined by establishment politicians."

Students, faculty, and other activists involved in the teach-ins would go on to organize other antiwar protests, including the 20,000-person rally at the Washington Monument in April 1965.

Leading activist and intellectual figures of the 1990s, including Cornel West,[21] Medea Benjamin, Richard Grossman, Naomi Klein, and Vandana Shiva spoke at the Democracy Teach-Ins, which were coordinated in their first years by Ben Manski.

The ‘2010 Imperative: A Global Emergency Teach-in’ was held on February 20, 2007, at the New York Academy of Science and organized by Architecture 2030, led by architect Edward Mazria and viewable online through a webcast.