From the 60s to the 90s to Today: The Roots of the Next Major Teach-In Wave

by Ben Manski

Over each of the past five decades, those seeking an expanded and intensified political debate have organized waves of coordinated events they have called “teach-ins.” Beginning in the mid 1960s with the teach-ins on the war in Vietnam and continuing on through the 1970s and 1980s with the use of teach-ins by the environmental, women’s, anti-Apartheid, and anti-nuclear movements, into the 1990s and 2000s with the Democracy Teach-Ins and Tent State Universities, and most recently with Occupy and Black Lives Matter, activists have periodically revived the tradition of campus teach-ins.

Teach-ins transform college and university campuses into political fora in which students, faculty, and community members take collective responsibility for matters of community, national, and global import. They usually involve large scale gatherings combined with smaller, more intensive workshops. One thing that makes a teach-in different from a conference or an academic seminar is the teach-in’s focus on producing knowledge for use by participants as members of an organized, politicized campus community. Another is the use of a “wall-to-wall” organizing approach in which every member of the community is challenged to engage in discussion and debate on the question at hand. The major waves of teach-ins of the past 50 years have gone beyond the choir to inspire large numbers of people to expand their sense of the necessary and the possible.

In the early months of 1965, what was to become a wave of teach-ins on the Vietnam War began at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, spreading eventually to 120 campuses in 35 states. This first teach-in wave was inspired by the use of the sit-in tactic in the civil rights organizing of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). At Michigan, over 200 faculty and 3000 students participated in what psychology professor Anatol Rapaport called an effort to, “establish a counterforce to the engineering of consent.” That counterforce emerged rapidly out of the teach-in process, greatly expanding the reach of the anti-war movement and deepening the questioning of long-held assumptions about the the role of the United States in the world system. As social historian Staughton Lynd said at the teach-in at UC Berkeley, by the end of the Spring 1965 college term it was clear that, “if you are worried that the natives all over the world are restless, we want you to know that the natives here at home are restless too… .”

The restlessness Lynd spoke of meant that this first teach-in wave quickly transitioned to more confrontational direct action organizing against the Vietnam War, and as a result, the next major wave of teach-ins focused on a different subject and did not take place until 1970. Proposing the first Earth Day as a “national teach-in on the environment,” Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson teamed up with organizers based in Santa Barbara, California to mobilize 20 million people for teach-ins, festivals, and marches. This revival of the mass teach-in as a movement-building tool was soon carried forward throughout the 1970s and 1980s in other social movements, including the women’s movement, the anti-nuclear movement, and the out-of-apartheid in South Africamovement. In the 1970s, some of these teach-ins were quite large and numerous ﹘ with 151 campuses taking part in anti-nuke teach-ins in 1981, for example ﹘ but by the later 1980s the size and number of teach-ins was significantly reduced, reflective of the more limited capacity of progressive social movements at that time. Alongside this reduction in scale came a more generalized and amorphous use of the word “teach-in” to apply to all kinds of educational events, regardless of scale, participation, or purpose.

This began to change with the next major waves of college teach-ins, which took place in five rounds beginning in 1996, under the slogan, “Teachers are not tools, students are not products, the university is not a factory!” These “Democracy Teach-Ins” took on the corporatization of the university and society, reviving the mass organizing approach and structural critique of the late 1960s and early 1970s by asking students on over 400 campuses the question, “Can we pursue democracy and social justice when corporations are allowed to control so much power and wealth?” The first rounds of the Democracy Teach-Ins built the networks and analysis through which the student anti-sweatshop movement emerged and they played a critical role in educating and mobilizing students for the mass protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in late 1999. Later rounds of the Democracy Teach-Ins gave rise to the pro-democracy campus organization 180/Movement for Democracy and Education (180/MDE), which, together with the Students Transforming and Resisting Corporations (STARC) organized further teach-ins and actions leading up to the Books Not Bombs! student strike of 2003, which mobilized mass walkouts on college campuses around the world.

Immediately following the Books Not Bombs! strike, students and faculty at Rutgers University organized an outdoor encampment they called “Tent State University,” modeled on the popular universities and teach-ins of the 1960s and 1970s and prefiguring in many respects the Occupy Wall Street process of 2011-2012. The Rutgers organizers joined in the following years with the Democratizing Education Network, which in turn helped to nationalize Tent State University to campuses in other regions of the United States and eventually to other countries.
More recent use of coordinated teach-ins on a mass scale took place first with the Wisconsin Uprising of 2011, in which sociologist Frances Fox-Piven of the City University of New York led efforts to nationalize that uprising through national teach-ins held on April 5th, the national student labor day of action. Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy movement soon followed, making extensive use of teach-ins on hundreds of college campuses and community spaces, as well as at Occupy encampments throughout the Autumn of 2011 and into 2012. In keeping with Occupy’s culture, these teach-ins were often distinguished from earlier waves of teach-ins in that they were more participatory and open in their formats and subject matter.

Most recently, beginning in 2013 with the Ferguson Uprising, the Black Lives Matter movement has organized college teach-ins to, “help bring the national movement into the community and onto local campuses,” and to, “inform, inspire and mobilize people to combat racism and racially motivated violence, and generate a sense of solidarity that can lead to future activism for social change.” Those teach-ins, in turn, are credited by some with helping to prepare the way for 2015’s National Blackout and Student Blackout actions, alongside the mass protests at the University of Missouri against racism on campus.

In the Spring of 2016, inspired by, “The Next System: A call for national discussion and debate,” students, faculty, staff, and community members at a dozen college campuses in the United States held what were initially called the “Teach-Ins on the Next System.” Those gatherings, which ranged from a few dozen participants at institutions like Mankato State to several thousand at UC Santa Barbara, provide some of the inspiration for building an international wave of Next System Teach-Ins in 2016.