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.