Nostalgia Trap

During my early years as a graduate student in history, I took a course at the CUNY Graduate Center called "From Civil Rights to Black Power," taught by Professor Clarence Taylor. The readings for the course, along with Professor Taylor's radical approach to American racial politics, completely rearranged my perceptions about race and American society, and helped set me on a path to becoming a radical historian myself. His most recent book, Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the New York City Teachers Union (Columbia University Press, 2011), historicizes the complex interaction between the radical Left and the wider politics of education. In this conversation, he talks about his years in New York City's public high school system and his evolving views on liberalism, conservatism, and the direction of radical politics in the age of Obama.

Reading Todd Gitlin's book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage was a major moment in my development as a historian. Gitlin's colorful, rigorous description of that turbulent decade heavily influenced my decision to study postwar American politics when I began my graduate studies in 2004. I recently sat down in his office at Columbia University to talk about his experience as president of Students for a Democratic Society in the mid-1960s, his personal trajectory as an activist and academic, and his thoughts on Occupy Wall Street and the contemporary American political landscape. 

In 2004, when he was executive officer of the CUNY Graduate Center's department of history, Professor Joshua Freeman was my first contact and mentor in the early years of grad school. His expertise and generosity helped me and many others in our transition to a rigorous Ph.D. program. He is now a Distinguished Professor at the GC and teaches at CUNY's Queens College, sharing his deep knowledge of American politics, economics, and society with students throughout New York City. This conversation touches on his experiences growing up in Brooklyn, his early connection to the Civil Rights Movement, the motivation behind his recent book American Empire, and his development as one of the nation's prominent scholars of American labor.

Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, writer, critic, translator, archivist, and much more. As a professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, he is known as much for his scholarship as for his generosity: with his time, with his attention to student's work, and with his talents as editor and writer. Ammiel recently visited my apartment for a conversation about his youth in Boston growing up around poet and writer Charles Olson, his activism during the Vietnam years, and the path that led him to become a scholar of the Middle East. 

My friend Justin Rogers-Cooper, a professor of English at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, New York, recently invited me to campus to record a "live" podcast with his students. The course was designed to help students consider, and prepare for possible participation in, the profession of teaching. Talking to bright young undergraduates about the "nuts and bolts" of pedagogy was a fascinating experience that offers a unique perspective on what 21st century college students value both in and out of the classroom. The range of backgrounds and experiences presented in this series of clips captures some of what I value most about CUNY itself: an engaged, diverse student body with deep insights into the world around them.

I've gotten to know Christopher Silsby through our work together at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute at Baruch College. Christopher's particular take on the role of technology in education is one that continues to provoke engaging conversations at the Institute and beyond. It was a pleasure to sit down with him to hear about his upbringing in Kansas, his thoughts on education, and his work in theatre and history as he completes his Ph.D. at the CUNY Graduate Center. 

As the main adviser on my dissertation, Josh Brown was and continues to be an important figure in the development of my own thoughts and ideas about American history. Active in the Vietnam antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Josh's vision of the historical discipline's social and political value is in part drawn from his experiences during that tumultuous era. We sat down to a great conversation that touches on his father's unique history in World War II, the violence he witnessed on the streets of Chicago in 1968, and how he eventually became drawn to the radical brand of social history practiced by legendary historian Herbert Gutman.

I first met Barbara Garson while researching the GI coffeehouse movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which aimed to open antiwar, counterculture coffeehouses in small towns outside military bases, as part of a larger movement to end the war in Vietnam. Barbara's time spent working at such a coffeehouse in Tacoma, Washington was one part of a long career of writing and activism. Her controversial play MacBird!, a satire of the Lyndon Johnson administration and the Kennedy family, was an off-Broadway hit in 1967. Over the following decades, she has published a series of books focusing on American labor (All the Livelong Day:  The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work), the economic landscape (The Electronic Sweatshop:  How Computers are Transforming the Office of the Future), and most recently, the social consequences of capitalism (Down the Up Escalator:  How the 99 Percent Live). She joins me here to discuss her personal political development and the ideas driving her work.

Lavelle Porter is a writer with a fascinating set of interests, ranging from poetry and science fiction to racial politics, sexual identity, and the structures of higher education itself. His recent blog post, "More Thoughts on Graduate School," resonated with anyone who's ever agonized over grad school-related decisions in their life, capturing some of the ambivalence that often accompanies the "life of the mind." Lavelle joins me to talk about being at Morehouse College in Atlanta around the time Outkast blew up, how he became interested in artists and writers like Sun Ra and Samuel Delany, and what the future holds for education in America.

Why is the minimum wage so ridiculously low in 21st century America? My guests today (Eljeer Hawkins, Cora Bergantinos, and James Hoff) are part of the 15Now movement, which is seeking to drastically shift the conversation about the minimum wage in cities across the U.S. In Seattle, the movement recently achieved a major victory, in part due to the leadership of Kshama Sawant, a city council member and one of the first socialists elected to public office in a U.S. city in decades. Our conversation addresses the economic and political context of minimum wage activism and assesses the prospects for the 15Now movement as it sets its sights on cities like San Francisco and New York.