The Teach-Ins: A Student Response
Oglesby, Carl
Most of our teachers were not intellectuals, they were only experts. They had no engagement, only careers. When one was found in the strange state of political motion, he most often seemed to...
...The leftist criticism of the teach-in has more body and is more subtle...
...As if expertise were an Olympian virtue and the bomb could not also incinerate the groves of academe...
...By what agency does it invade the "power structure...
...It can try to fulfill the promises it has already made credible...
...Protest politics being so doomed to symbolism, this service is probably crucial...
...How is it aroused...
...Rightist criticism, predictably ulterior, has tried usually to undermine the intellectuals' protest by aiming past its substance at its genesis, form, and style...
...Can an aroused population force a change...
...Second, policy is created by individuals who are free to create different policy...
...If this line is at all valid, what can the teach-in do...
...It is in need of periodic rejustification...
...Those who support the Vietnam war will be satisfied by these attacks and those who do not will be amused...
...We need nothing less than a severe, even heartless reinterpretation of the 20th Century and the utmost clarity about the 21st...
...If he thought it sensible to stop fighting, for whatever reasons, he could stop...
...But already they have known abuse of an unaccustomed kind...
...In spite of some student discontent at the teach-in's "respectability," the opening toward the liberal center that this entails represents for the students a fresh tactical opportunity: with some right-flank security, they are in a better position to consider their civil disobedience...
...When it fails on any count, it should be repudiated...
...Third, if it is not possible to change Johnson's policy by suasion directly applied, it will still be possible to change it through the creation of widespread popular dissent, itself created through suasion...
...The teach-in has created the possibility, and perhaps the fact, of an international alliance of intellectuals against the Cold War...
...Taking position on the left, where a Western intellectual belongs, the careerist-expert undergoes a breakthrough of sensibility: without becoming a politician, he becomes political...
...Nothing less can break the Cold War...
...What happens later when the chips are really down...
...A fair sample, almost a catalog of other attacks, is Irving Kristol's piece in the August Encounter...
...It can broaden its issue base until its subject matter becomes not incidents, not wars, but modern history...
...Must policy be rational, liberal, and effective...
...There is nothing in Johnson's job that requires him to fight in Vietnam...
...The teach-in has legitimated dissent...
...This means that the teach-in movement must change the American campus from an assembly line for managers and technicians into the seat of a new American learning, a resilient and self-conscious scholarship turned inwards upon our institutions, outwards upon their impact on the world, and broadcast everywhere...
...No longer above it all, therefore no longer so privileged and innocuous, they have allowed themselves not to apologize for their new anger...
...But they are strong enough to create uncertainty about the teachin's political significance...
...So again: What can the teach-in do...
...I mean simply that the students are now not as lonely as they were, and this is all to the good...
...It then becomes insufficient to decry our Vietnam war or even our over-willing co-authorship of the miserable history of these last 20 years...
...Radicals, or some radicals, are not so sure...
...How long can it last...
...When one was found in the strange state of political motion, he most often seemed to feel a bit fallen: "I speak not as an expert, but as an ordinary mortal...
...One way not to be silenced by so impossible a question is to inventory the criticisms already aimed at the teach-in, these falling of course into the main categories of right-wing vengeance and left-wing doubt...
...All in one: What is the nature and the probable fate of the teach-in movement...
...The decision for war is never final...
...To make such public dissent possible in so combustible a national atmosphere, when Congress itself exudes such constant, crazy silence, is not just a small accomplishment...
...By what means does it demonstrate its arousal...
...But it appears that more people now find it more possible to think more unthinkable thoughts than before...
...If at some point no justification can be produced, the decision will be reversed...
...To gaze for long on Vietnam's ruination is to gaze quickly on American Sinophobia and at last, dimly now, into the heart of the Cold War...
...The Tokyo teach-in of August 15 had much of the spirit of the Michigan original (and at 4:00 AM was still being watched by 500,000 on national television...
...How far will this go...
...In early October, the Toronto International Teach-In will make it possible for the first time for North Americans to hear for themselves a systematic development of America's, Russia's, and China's positions on the dominant struggle of our time, backward-nation revolution and advanced-nation response...
...The price is a stiff one, and they have only begun to pay it...
...Our teachers dare at last to be more than they were...
...This is hard to quantify...
...Now Vietnam...
...Who can say that it was not partly the teach-in movement that made more possible the excellent ABC documentary, "The Agony of Vietnam...
...Teach-in" is already part of the international language...
...Such objections are clearly not indubitable...
...Thus, the teach-in seems to picture the war as flowing from a decision made by men who are continuously obliged to reexamine it in terms of liberal value commitments and their role as servants of an expressive citizenry...
...It can recruit more troops, deepen and make more permanent its analysis, and continue the task of turning the protest's achieved legitimacy into unanswerable necessity...
...The power of the fait accompli being evidently supreme, perhaps it need be only effective...
...Consider first some of the things it already has done...
...And since March, we begin to feel a blushing difference...
...Perhaps Bundy did not exist and was therefore invented...
...Maybe just as important, the teachin has created community where before there were only individuals, and in its best moments, a peculiarly exquisite death-of-God elan, one would almost say a stone-sober merriment, where before there was only resignation or even despair...
...The teach-in has created an umbrella of a kind for the militant protest of the radical students...
...The faculty intellectuals support them at least by explaining them, by making their action more intelligible to on-lookers...
...And if this uncertainty holds, what follows is the more menacing objection that the teach-in's main result is merely to provide the "totalitarian liberals" with yet another mask, for they are now in a position to say: Ours is a free country where those who dissent are even met cordially in the White House, where there is honest competition between all views, and where the citizenry, convinced that all sides have been heard, can now retire to its slumber, confident that the right decisions will be made...
...It can reach further both toward the students, who supply its basic political power, and toward the Establishment, where such changes as we are able to force (whether we like it or not) are going to be made...
...Is it made by individuals who could as easily make it differently...
...One point of the radical critique is simply that the rulers of at least one 20th Century superstate have found out that talk is nothing to worry about...
...In fact, the Administration's cooperation with the teach-in has implicitly confessed that there is something to argue about...
...How much can it change things...
...It raises questions about the political assumptions of the teach-in, of which there appear to be three: First, Americans require their government's foreign policy, like domestic, to be rational, liberal, and effective...
Vol. 12 • September 1965 • No. 4
