10. The Mimeograph Machine

The intellectual radicalization of my graduate school years, which I described in the previous installment, was enormously complicated by the simultaneous three-year struggle with my religion, the personal faith with which I had grown up and seen develop in college. The two “sides” were related, of course; each would continue, over time, to inform and change the other. The period was the same—from late ’67 to late ’70. Through it all, I considered myself a committed Christian, though I was aware from that first year at the University that the nature of my Christian outlook was undergoing a profound and life-changing shift.

It was in the milieu of my university courses that I was confronted, full-force, with the reality of the Vietnam War and my own growing angst at how unjust and unnecessary it was. At first it created merely confusion for me, so I decided to undertake a reading program of my own, apart from my classes, in whatever spare time I could make. I would read as widely as I could, I decided, about war, and I would read from those whom I took to be informed Christians writing about what was going on in the world.

I bought books, more than I should have. What I couldn’t afford to buy, I sought from the university’s libraries. Mostly Christian books—radical Christian books. As it turned out, three writers ended up catching my attention in a big way, and toward the end of that first year of graduate school, by about the end of ‘67, my own Christian—i.e., political/theological—reading was underway. During that spring and summer of ’68, seldom an afternoon would go by that I did not gather up three of four of my books and cross the street to Hess Park where I would prop myself up at a big tree and read and think. I was almost overwhelmed by the war and its horror by then—that went back even to my editorial writing and Democratic National Convention days in Decatur and Chicago. I watched the news carefully and read the New York Times as often as I could buy it. I was deeply moved in ’67 by the enormous anger-producing antiwar march on Washington DC.

I was needing help, though, with how to think about war, period. It was not a subject that I had ever really been introduced to; and now it was affecting me to the point where it was all I could do to keep focused on my graduate studies, where I was hearing about it, too. I learned at one level to keep the two intellectual areas separate in my mind; at another level, though, everything was starting to meld together.

By the end of 1968, three writers were working on me mightily. The first was probably the most famous American pacifist of the twentieth century. Little known actually, he was a Protestant preacher, a clergyman, then in his 80s. He had been a conscientious objector in both World Wars I and II, and now was advocating not just conscientious objection to the war in Vietnam, but all-out opposition to it; and he was doing so on the basis of a unique and powerful Christian outlook—an intensely appealing outlook to me. His name was A. J. Muste, and the book I stumbled onto—Nat Hentoff in the Village Voice had referred to him in one issue and I went looking—the book I stumbled onto was a thick black tome titled, simply, The Essays of A. J. Muste.

I ordered the book and found myself utterly transformed by what I read. His essays were profoundly Christian, drawing on ways I had never read before about the words, the life, and even the death of Jesus Christ. Muste was original, as far as I could tell. He was not doctrinaire, not angry, not legalistic, though he was startlingly biblical. By that time I had read a number of books about Christian pacifism, but none has really convinced me, none had moved me; in fact, some had repelled me. But when I read all of Muste’s essays, I couldn’t believe their effect on me. I had underlined sections on virtually every page with a heavy black pen. I read the entire book again, but this time I underlined in red, sometimes the same words as before, sometimes not. I would come back a few weeks later, sitting under the same tree in the park, and read the book a third, and later a fourth time, each time using different colors of ink. I became, as I have remained all my life, an unrepentant pacifist.

The second book that took me that year from the summer into the fall was a hardback from the library written by the well-known Catholic and antiwar radical, Daniel Berrigan. It turned out to be another book that I could not get enough of, and when the paperback version of it came out in late 1968 I bought and marked it up as thoroughly and as often as I had my book of Muste essays. While Berrigan was regularly in the news media as a result of his audacious and dramatic anti-war activities, he had also written a number of thoughtful activist-theology books. I read the ones I could get hold of, but the book that captured and changed me was They Call Us Dead Men: Reflections on Life and Conscience.

For me, the pull of the book was that it was about the relationship between lifestyle—not dramatic actions but lifestyle—and the communication of radical faith in society. Berrigan wrote about the urgency of a life of voluntary poverty modeled after Christ. “It remains true,” Berrigan wrote then, “that material well-being is always an ambiguous blessing for the Church. . .The affluent are generally inclined to resist social change with all the force at their command. No personal need presses on them to bring about change; and so long as their lives are stable and comfortable, conditions in society, even when most deplorable, remain for them largely an abstraction. If their hearts remain closed before the sufferings of others, they often see the lot of most men only as a personal threat to their well-being.” (18)

Of the renewal of the church, Berrigan wrote that “an understanding of the world under its sign of poverty is so important a question that to renew the sense of poverty within the church is almost equivalent to a renewal of its whole fabric of life.” (20) His words and ideas brought to the forefront of my consciousness notions that had only lurked until then in the back of my awareness.

Berrigan’s passionate book about renewal of the Church’s voice in the world. I read it and reread it, as I had Muste’s essays. Here was a Christian view of economics and lifestyle—of Christian communication as “lifestyle”—that, in my mind, dovetailed amazingly with the economics, politics and even the Marxist theory that I was exploring in my classes and seminars. Here was a radical challenge that was transforming my sense of Christian faith itself. My own faith was being radicalized, and I found myself being challenged to be a wholly different kind of Christian that I had been before—not so much a better one, but certainly a different one. Faith was not so much about other worldly things as it was about living in this world. It was not as much about what one believed as it was about how one lived. The shift for me was life-changing in about every conceivable way.

While I did not overtly realize it then or even for many years that followed, eventually I understood that it was Berrigan’s emphasis on a Christian lifestyle of poverty, undertaken, as he said, in solidarity with poverty-ridden peoples around the world, that imprinted a life-long pattern within me. Throughout my adult life, to the great dismay, even anger, of my wife and others around me, I refused to purchase property or a house of any kind of my own, even when we clearly could have done so, was because of the imprint of the Berrigan book upon me. As I write this I realize that only a year ago, at age 65, did I finally buy a small property, with a small house and a couple of other other buildings, in North Carolina.

While I can now make those clear connections in retrospect, in retrospect also I am trying hard not to second-guess myself for those far-back impulses and decisions. I did—honestly I thought at the time—determine to try to live out the “voluntary poverty” argued so passionately for by Berrigan. I did determine, as much as possible, to try to live without possessions, owning nothing that, in my mind, would send “wrong messages” or that would unduly align me with place or social class that I did not want to be associated with. Through many of those years, though, I remained unduly oblivious to the subtle effects of such a decision on my wife and son and others who would come into my life.

The third book that shaped life for me from my late 20s on—the book that, in many ways, pulled a lot of pieces together for me—was by the great Catholic scholar and mystic Thomas Merton. The book that came into my hands was titled, Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice. Like both of the other books, this one too was a collection of his essays. I found this book in the university bookstore shortly after it appeared in 1968. Like the others, I read and re-read, marking it up multiple times, even wearing out one copy and buying another.

The thrust and power of the book is summed up in the heading of his first section of essays: “Toward a Theology of Resistance.” That word “resistance” was the key that made this book so different in many ways from the other two. As I reread sections of this book now, four decades later, they still ring with the emotional and radical resonance that they summoned up for me back then. This is the book that kicked my life off in a direction that would motivate me for all the decades to follow—it still motivates my fundamental outlook as well as the passions that I am still driven by.

The book was not just about the need for a full-fledged opposition to the war in Vietnam. Nor was it just about a lifestyle of identification with the oppressed of the world. It was those things, but it was primarily about an all-out resistance to the forces of institutional evil which were embodied, during that era at least, in the policies of the American government in the world, policies which, remarkably, still seem to motivate the core American ideology. The theme of Merton’s book, which once I kept taped on the top of my little study desk, is struck on the opening page of the opening chapter about his “theology of resistance”—with these words:

“The population of the affluent world is nourished on a steady diet of brutal mythology and hallucination, kept at a constant pitch of high tension by a life that is intrinsically violent in that it forces a large part of the population to submit to an existence which is humanly intolerable. Hence murder, mugging, rape, crime, corruption. But it must be remembered that the crime that breaks out of the ghetto is only the fruit of a greater and more pervasive violence: the injustice which forces people to live in the ghetto in the first place. The problem of violence, then, is not the problem of a few rioters and rebels, but the problem of a whole social structure that it outwardly ordered and respectable, but inwardly ridden by psychopathic obsessions and delusions.” (3)

Then, quoting Pope John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris a couple of paragraphs later, Merton says that “the problem of violence together must be traced to its root: not the small-time murderers but the massively organized bands of murderers whose operations are global.” (4) So his book, Merton says, “is concerned with the dignity and rights of man against the encroachments and brutality of massive power structures which threaten either to enslave him or destroy him, which exploiting him in their conflicts with one another.”

While times, dates, and global conflicts have shifted, Merton’s words still ring remarkable provocative and prophetic to me. I don’t know that I ever deliberately decided that I would take Merton’s words as the north star of my own outlook, my worldview—but as the words sank in over several readings and much meditation, and as they came to fit so easily with what I was studying in my graduate seminars, I certainly did do that. Over the next several years, I would continue to pick up this book to read his “Blessed Are the Meek” essay, his brilliant pieces on non-violent resistence (published ironically, about the time of Martin Luther King’s murder), on “Peace and Protest,” “An Enemy of the State,” “Religion and Race in the United States,” and his extraordinary essay, “The Hot Summer of Sixty-Seven.”

The theological world of my adulthood was largely created through my captivating digesting of Merton’s concluding theological essays: “Violence and the Death of God,” since J. J. Althizer’s book on the death of God came out in those years;” “Honest to God,” Merton’s deeply important meditation on the John A. T. Robinson’s book by that title, which also appeared about that time; “The Unbelief of Believers,” and “Apologies to an Unbeliever,” as well as his work on “Godless Christianity,” based on the then recently published writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

What all of this meant, at a fairly basic level, was that just as I was being radicalized, both politically and economically, by my university studies, I was being just as radicalized, if not more so, by the other, less formal, studies under my tree in Hess Park. I was not actually losing my faith—or at least I adamantly did not think I was—but I was sure losing my religious innocence.

As an undergraduate at Lincoln Christian College, with a proud church heritage of what can be described as Enlightenment conservatism, I had been taught that it was alright to think for oneself, that there was no higher-up religious authorities to which one had to answer, and that I was free to use my own intellect to understand the Bible and my role in the congregational environment of which I was a part. I assumed and later treasured the independence of religious thought that such a position held out to me within the church I had grown up in. Now, I was using it—and doing so with a measure of confidence.

But there was another dimension of life that I put into operation then, one that would have significant long-range consequences for my future. Under the influence of the “resistance” writings of Merton I was also determined that I had no choice but to try—as a Christian in a particular, if rather small, national community of “Christian Church” Christians—to try to speak out as loudly and as forcefully within that “community” as I could. But, to do that I would have to make my voice heard among my own church’s informal, but easily identifiable, leaders.

With that goal, on a Saturday morning in the Spring of ’69 I went to an office machines store in Champaign where for $90 I purchased a used (but “in good shape”) mimeograph machine. It was way before computers and even a couple of years before public access to xerox machines. In fact, good high-grade mimeographs were the machines of choice for “running off” large numbers of copies of printed material. One typed on a stencil, with each typed key punching the shape of the letter through the famous blue stencil sheets. Since I am writing this to include my students who have no idea what I am talking about, the typed stencil was rolled onto the big round drum of the mimeograph machine. My machine was old so the back side of the drum was actually open, the place where thick ink was poured into it and then rubbed around the inside of the drum with a brush. It was messy—really messy—but it let me make a hundred of so mimeo copies with each stencil.

With my prized mimeograph machine, I gathered a hundred or so addresses of people throughout my church denomination, influential ministers, editors, Christian college presidents and professors, people whose names I knew and who I wanted to try to influence with my emerging Christian outlook and ideas. I was, after all, a fairly well trained and experienced editorial writer, so I knew how to craft a three page essay—an “editorial”—and make it really stick to the wall, so to speak. I would write about the controversial topics of the day: about the war and the need for vigorous protests against it, about Americanism and the evils of misguided patriotism; and about religious subjects, too, about dying churches and horrid preaching, and the failures of Christian lifestyle. The list of the pieces I wrote grew to be quite long, all copied on my mimeograph machine, folded, carefully addressed by hand and mailed.

While a few people responded with some glee about what I had written, the majority did not. Actually, I was deliberately sending the pieces to people that I knew would not see things as I did, to put it mildly. Overall, the reaction over the next couple of months to what I called my “open letters” was angry and stern. Some of the harshest of the responses went to my dad, then the Academic Dean at Lincoln Christian College, my undergraduate school. Dad was clearly embarrassed by what I was doing, though he never tried to discourage my “open letter” writing. I did, however, make a significant number of intense enemies with my letters, something that would haunt me in a big way over time. I should have expected it, of course, yet I was still naïve enough to think that it might be otherwise.

It was also during this time that I started to hunt for a teaching post with my soon-to-be-minted Ph.D. degree. My degree would be in communication—and, despite my quantum shift of mind and heart theologically I still held an intense hope that I would be able to find a good Christian college or seminary that would value my education and love to have me on its faculty. I prepared a good, solid resume and send out more than 50 copies of it, seeking that special religious environment that would want me to work on preaching and ministerial issues. I was ready.

Never mind that my resumes went out amidst the spate of critical “open letters,” or that during that last year my hair had grown long and I was actively involved in the antiwar movement—I was still a Christian at heart and I still wanted to connect my growing expertise in communication to the Church’s failures of communication, in both its life and in the pulpit. None of that drive in me had vanished or even weakened as a result of the changes that had gradually turned me into a very different person.

My resumes, with cover letters intact, went into the mail in late October of ’69. By mid-spring of ’70, I had not only not been turned down anywhere—I had not received a single reply or response from anywhere I had applied. There was just silence. I placed a couple of phone calls to older friends around the country who had reacted positively to my “open letters.” Only then, at their good-natured if candid prodding, did I realize that there would be nothing anywhere for me in that Christian “world.” I was, as one of them memorably put it to me over the phone, “radioactive.” Better move on to something else, he advised.

It was a bitter blow, actually, one that I should have seen coming but didn’t. Instinctively, I began quickly to think job, just get a job, just find a teaching job someplace. It is not , I reluctantly told myself, going to be anything like what you want or think you have prepared for—but you have to find work. I scoured the Gregory Hall bulletin boards, which was loaded with teaching job notices for the following year. The winter had been long and very cold, with a lot of snow. I found a California notice on the board and jotted down the information. I redid my resume package and letter, added a couple of letters that my profs had graciously and hurridly written, and fired it off to Cal State Northridge. By April I was invited to fly cross country for the first time in my life for an interview, and by May was answer came. I had the job, and, as it turned out, it was a good one.

Strangely, I also had a deep anger burning within me that would last for years and years. It was an anger with the Church and everything about it, with my church, with any Church. What I had gone through intellectually, emotionally, and even spiritually, I thought, the whole Church needed to go through. The world had changed, and the Church had to change with it—or else fall more out of step with everyone than it was. I actually resented my new job, as good as it was, but it was a resentment that I would have to figure out a way to live with—something that I knew, even then, would not be easy. The power of that anger was already kicking in.

9. Radicalization

It took a couple of years for me to fully grasp just how thoroughly my mind, my worldview, my weltenschauung, changed during my three years in graduate school at the University of Illinois. I was not alone, of course. It was the nature of those years that, itself, changed countless thousands of us across the country. I need to tell the story of those three years, though—from late 1967 to late 1970—in two installments, since it had two distinct sides, one deeply intellectual and the other still compellingly religious. The two were related, of course, with each impacting the other every step of the way. Ironically, as important as my intellectual change and development were, the religious side, in countless ways, continued to be decisive, at least as far as my goals and ambitions were concerned. But nothing would happen as I had hoped it would.

The time frame around my life then is easy. As a commuter student, albeit a full-time one, I finished my master’s degree in journalism through 1967 and ’68 and started immediately, that summer, on my doctoral work, still working full-time and driving back and forth to Champaign-Urbana. In the summer of ’69, however, after my first year as a Ph.D. student, to my surprise I was invited to become a full-time Instructor in the School of Journalism; and despite how much I enjoyed the editorial work at Lindsay-Schaub, I jumped at the chance.

In August of ‘69 Linda, Joe and I moved, finally, to Champaign-Urbana for what would be the final year of my Ph.D. coursework. I would also teach a full load of undergraduate reporting and editing courses—still, amazingly, never having taken such a course in either of those areas myself. I got the assigned books, combined what was in them with what I knew from my Lindsay-Schaub experiences, and my teaching career was underway.

We rented a small second story apartment just to the west of the football stadium across the street from the block square Hess Park, still within walking distance of Gregory Hall, the communications building on campus. We didn’t have much and the money was thin, and I would work weekend nights on the editorial desk of the Champaign-Urbana Courier, the Lindsay-Schaub newspaper in Champaign. We would make it for a year and then try to figure out where to go from there.

When I was not teaching, I was in class; and what remarkable classes—seminars—they were. They were like nothing I had ever been part of before. I was working in mostly small groups led by a collection of the smartest, best educated, most critically thinking and acting professors I could imagine. Without exception, they were deeply engaged in contemporary issues of all kinds, ranging well beyond the communication boundaries of the college’s core discipline.

What I also became keenly aware of during my first year of work was that this “communications” area that I was entering was a unique hybrid of numerous traditional academic disciplines. Almost every faculty member had come out of one of those other disciplines, bringing a highly developed specialization to the development of this still relatively new field of work. For example, they came out of economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, literary scholarship, psychology and social psychology, computer science—and the list can go on. I felt very lucky to be there; it didn’t take long to discover why the Illinois’ College of Communications was ranked second in leading educational journals of the time in intellectual standing—second in the country to Columbia University.

It was special there because of the people, almost all of whom I remember clearly and cherish to this day. My detailed course notes from lectures and reading during those years are now worn and frayed, but they are still in the same file folders they were in when I first wrote them down. There is not a page in them that I have not drawn on many, many times either for my own lectures over the years or in writing articles or my books.

My adjunct area of study would be sociology, I decided early. Prof. Norman Denzin was young then, not much older than I. But he was already well-known as scholar in symbolic interactionist sociology and he taught it masterfully. His lectures whetted my appetite for more, and it would become one of the intellectual areas that I would live with, write about, and draw on for teaching throughout my career. Denzin had studied at Iowa, one of the two great centers for interactionist theory and research—the other was the University of Chicago—and he would himself become one of the major contributors to the literature of symbolic interactionism as his career progressed. The classic textbook of readings on the subject—Manis and Meltzer’s, Symbolic Interaction, with articles going back to the early 20th century, would continue to be re-issued, but the new editions would come to be supplemented with new research articles by only Norman Denzin.

Inspired, and even encouraged by Denzin, I would begin a lifelong program of reading in sociology, from the classics of the field to the voluminous literature in the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of religion. What I came to realize was that there was no way to become a so-called “communications” scholar without knowing as fully as possible its roots in, and development through, sociology.

Prof. James Carey, widely recognized as one of the most brilliant cultural thinkers and critics of the second half of the century, picked up in his seminars where Denzin left off. Carey, with his eclectic mind and his intense speaking style, was the finest lecturer I have ever heard. Intellectually and culturally, he was the Renaissance man of that faculty. Later in life he became Dean of the Communications faculty, before finally retiring to teach religion and communication at Columbia University. It was from Carey that I learned to read, understand, and deeply value the work of Kenneth Burke, the famous literary critic and communication philosopher. Inspired by Carey’s colorful and probling lectures on Burke, I read everything I could find by Burke—from Counter-Statement to Permanence and Change, to Rhetoric of Religion, to Philosophy of Literary Forms, to various collections of his seminal essays to his “Motives” trilogy of books.

While I became intrigued in Denzin’s classes with the social-psychological symbolic theories of George Herbert Mead, Robert Park, W. I. Thomas and later Herbert Blumer and Erving Goffman, it was in reading Burke and Burke’s protégé Hugh Dalziel Duncan that all of the pieces of the sociological symbolic perspective came together for me. As a part of the preliminary work for my doctoral dissertation, I even managed to put the theoretical ideas of Mead and Burke together in a unique way to create an “original” concept for communication theory, what I called the concept of the “hub symbol.”

I have written it out in several places, most fully and clearly as the basis for my 1998 book, Preaching and the Challenge of Pluralism. I am proud of the fact that my “hub symbol” theory, about which I have lectured for years, was picked up and used in 2005 as the basis for a book by Andrew Wisdom, a young Jesuit scholar from Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis, a student of my friend Greg Heille. Wisdom’s book won the Catholic Book Association’s Best Liturgy Book award for that year. Read his book to see what he does with the notion of “hub symbols.”

At Illinois, I also studied under Thomas Guback, a brilliant young Marxist scholar. It was Guback who opened up the world of economics and political theory to me, the other side of what has dominated my intellectual life. For Guback, Marxism was not an ideology, not a heavy-handed set of ideas connected to Communism. For him, Marxist theory was a way to delve deeply and critically into the inner workings of American capitalism, into the relationships between capitalist ideology and the Western capitalist countries.

For him, Marxism did not have all of the right answers, but it was a powerful framework and methodology, a way to focus on the questions that were the most relevant, and then to uncover the workings by which those in power could get what they wanted from the system. Guback’s were the most eye-opening seminars of my entire graduate career.

Just as I had poured through all of Burke in those seminars with Carey, prompted by Guback, I also poured through the length and breadth of Karl Marx’s writings. I read The German Ideology, a short but rich book on the connection between economics and culture, and I was hooked. From there I thoroughly read all three volumes of the American edition of Capital (Das Capital), several volumes of Marx’s collected essays, including the collection on religion, and even read the large set of his theoretical papers and notes called the Grundrisse. While I remain aware, as Guback was quick to point out, that Marx missed the boat at several places in his analyses of capitalism, what still amazes is the degree to which he was absolutely dead on. It was startling, since it was not at all what I had expected.

But there was more than just Guback. In one of my last seminars, I still count myself fortunate to have studied with another great scholar, less a formal Marxist than Guback but one who turned Marxist concepts into widely-influential, and highly critical, studies of American influence in the world via mass communication. His name was Herbert I. Schiller. In his powerful lectures as well as his writings, Schiller shows how one uses critical theory to do specific kinds of research, how to gather information in order to demonstrate that Marx knew surprisingly well, more than a hundred years earlier, what he was talking about.

Schiller left Illinois for the University of California at San Diego that following year after I had his seminar. There he became celebrated as one of America’s great critical global scholars. His most famous books are Mass Communication and American Empire and The Mind Managers. Like several of the professors, including Carey, whom I salute in these paragraphs, Schiller has died within the past decade.

Not long after I finished graduate school I wrote and published a long and detailed analysis of Marxism, with particular attention to the role of religion, as Marx understood it, in capitalist society. Marx’s oft-quoted line about religion being the “opium of the people” does little more than deflect attention from his painfully insightful analysis of religion, even Christianity, in the capitalist world.

Even since then, too, in teaching my own senior and graduate seminars in communication theory—which I have done countless times, even to this past year—I have lectured on Marxism, explaining Marx’s still very useful insights into the continuing dynamics of how almost all media in capitalist countries, now including computers, are controlled and manipulated by a small number of very large private, profit-driven companies, owned by a handful of very wealthy individuals.

I was greatly affected as well by a seminar with one of the great lions of media critical theory from the first half of the twentieth century, Harry J. Skornia. His books focused on criticism of radio during the 1930s and 40s, and then on the control of television as it came to prominence during the late 40s and through the 1950s. From him I learned media history, which to this day I teach twice a year to freshmen and sophomore students—but I learned it not just as a recitation of names, dates, and events, but as a set of potent currents driven by political and economic forces. There were the details, of course, but the stories were all larger than the details. Strangely, looking back, I can see that in large part I was influenced to teach history by storytelling from the remarkable stories of old Professor Skornia, whose books I still enjoy reading.

I learned the great contours in the history of Western philosophy from Jay Jensen, the head of the Journalism program and the one who engineered my admission to the College in the first place. Jensen knew journalism, but he was a well-educated philosopher, and that was his first love. The small group of us in his seminar talked him out of a copy of his 600 page doctoral dissertation on journalism in the history of western Philosophy from the Greeks to the present. We divided it up and made copies of the entire thing for all of us. We pressed him to take us through it, long chapter at a time, which he did. I still have that dissertation, well-marked, neatly tied up in a worn but hefty brown accordion folder.

From Jensen, I—we—learned about the great sweep, of all things, of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, about Romanticism and the revolutions of Marx, of Freud, of Darwin, and about the philosophical collapse of “modernism” and the rise of what he was already calling “postmodernism” in the Twentieth Century. I learned the ins and outs of Libertarian, or Liberal, thought, the philosophical system of Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence and the First Amendment.

I must also mention having studied with a professor named Martin Fishbein, a strange and brilliant scientist who taught a seminar on Attitude Change, a subject that was very difficult for me but that has been profoundly important to almost all of my teaching since then. He talked far over my head, a scientific language that I struggled to keep up with and learn, but eventually I did. The fact is that I only fully came to terms with it all during intense preparations for my doctoral prelim exams, when I read and re-read Fishbein’s own seminal essays.

He had been a student of Charles Osgood, the old developer of what is still popularly known in research circles as the “semantic differential” and Fishbein had already built his own reputation as a critic and reviser of Osgood’s differential. I did not realize until much later how much I learned from Fishbein, though now seldom a semester goes by that I do not either teach or use Fishbein’s remarkable AB semantic differential in class or my own work.

This reflection, and appreciation, of my three years in graduate school at the University of Illinois, has a point; an important one, really.

This three-year period was, as one may already gather, the major turning point in my life. I have left out of all this so far the events of 1967, most notably, the giant antiwar march in Washington DC (described in detail by Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night), and the events of 1968, including the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the dramatic and secret escalation of the war in Vietnam, and finally the bloody riots of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. As all these events unfolded, university campuses across the country were beginning to boil, vigorously boil. The campuses were the hotbeds of growing resistance to the war. Every month during 1969 and into 1970, things grew progressively uglier; and the universities were the focus since that’s where the great majority of draft age men were.

By the time I left Lindsay-Schaub and moved Linda and Joe to Champaign-Urbana in the summer of ‘69, antiwar demonstrations had become weekly occurrences on campus at Illinois. The war and those who carried it out, the structure of a government on war footing, an administration that was mercilessly killing faraway Asians by the thousands with sophisticated weaponry, including napalm—these were the subtext of every class and every class and seminar on campus, including the ones that I participated in day after day.

The war was always in front of us, every night on TV, and anger, student anger, was turning into a palpable fury. These brilliant professors were agonizing over what to think and what to do, even as they tried with all of their might to stay as close to the “assigned subject” as possible. What literally happened—as those my age who were also in university grad schools can attest—is that the forces of intelligence in those seminars were turned increasingly toward the causes of war, THE war, and how informed citizens like us could and should use everything within us, legal or illegal, to bring the war to an end.

We became radicalized, plain and simple. I became radicalized. Profoundly so. I would have another set of influences pushing me in that same direction that I will talk about later. But to be where I was at that time, to study with the remarkable people that I studied with, to listen and to read and to learn, to be challenged about taking responsibility, meant that one was going to change. We became achingly anti-war, changing not just our outlooks, but our physical looks as well. We wanted to protest in every conceivable way that we could.

Nobody planned it, not even the professors. We were focusing our thinking and reading and learning around specific subjects, but those subjects inevitably had profound implications for battling against the forces of war and for finding some way, peaceful or not, for bringing peace here and in Southeast Asia.

I consciously consciously morphed into an intellectual radical, a critic of everything my country was doing and had done, at various times and in various place, for a lot of years. It was a gradual thing, though, remarkably, it all came to a head on April 4, 1970, near the end of my last full semester at Champaign-Urbana. It’s explosion came with the murders of the four students at Kent State University. That’s when all hell brought loose on the Illinois’ campus. I was one of dozens of those arrested then, actually arrested twice in that week. But as the summer of ’70 came on, things quieted down somewhat, and, even while taking my last, somewhat anticlimactic doctoral seminar, I was actively job hunting. It didn’t take long to locate one and by mid-summer I had flown to Los Angeles for an interview and been hired.

Life was about to change, big-time. I was ready to leave the Midwest, the Great Heartland, to see what the Land of Promise out west might hold. I was not the same person at the end of those three years at Illinois that I had been when I began. Not by a long shot. There was, though, another enormous part of those three years in Champaign-Urbana for me, which is the story, over the same time frame, that I must tell next. The religious story must still be told. And then we shall head for California.