For my generation of social historians, whose political and scholarly agendas were forged in the 1960s, E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, served as a foundational text. Every chapter in that great book came as a revelation: “Planting the Liberty Tree,” which followed reverberations of the French Revolution as they spread through working-class milieus in England; “An Army of Redressers,” with its homage to heroes and martyrs of the Luddite Movement. And then there were the vignettes, many no more than a paragraph, yet so riveting that I never forgot them, such as the one that began with reformers who wanted to give the English worker movement of the 1790s “a sober and constitutional pedigree,” with well-behaved discussants exploring the niceties of political theory. Thompson contrasted those decorous gatherings with the atmosphere in taverns frequented by plebian agitators of mean estate, with “songs in which the clergy were a standing subject of abuse,” “pipes and tobacco,” and “the tables strewed with penny, two-penny, and three-penny publications,” filled with subversive content (as recounted by undercover police assigned to spy on popular movements).
Soon after arriving at UMass/Boston, I offered a topic course on Thompson’s 800-page masterpiece. The class was packed with student activists of various stripes, and I had a sense that everyone learned something from the text and the discussions it occasioned. I know I did. I spent a lot of time with people in that class both on and off campus. One apartment occupied by a couple of them was a dingy place, with mattresses on the floor and leaflets, underground newspapers, and books by Fanon, Magdoff, and Malcolm X “strewed” about. On the wall, no, covering the wall corner-to-corner, floor-to-ceiling, was the red and blue flag with a gold star of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. A bunch of people were sitting around listening to music and talking politics. I said to myself “This is what Thompson was talking about.”
Stepping onto the campus with the hope of bringing socialism to the students, I discovered that, while they were interested in what I had to teach, their intellectual and political project was already well launched before my arrival. That was when I gained a certainty about the kind of scholar I wanted to be and certainty, too, that UMass/Boston was where I wanted to teach.
On arriving at the downtown campus, I also found many young faculty colleagues, brilliant and attractive people full of energy and idealism and seemingly as avid for friendship, for comradeship, as I was. They called my attention to many an important text I’d never heard of, including Thompson’s book (never mentioned during the six unhappy years I spent in the graduate program of a nearby Ivy League university). We talked incessantly about our courses and our students and frequently exchanged classroom visits and in the process fashioned a teaching culture at UMB that still survives today.
We also banded together to help each other when major personnel decisions loomed. The first in our group to come up for tenure was Ron Schreiber. In what was later to become a standard practice, we formed a “job committee” to help Ron prepare his case. By that time, he had already come out to his friends, but many people in the English Department did not know he was gay, an ignorance he was determined to remedy. Murmurs of dissent went around the room. Thinking it would be safer to delay until after tenure was secured, we said “Gee, Ron, can’t you wait till next year to tell them?” “Before they vote on my case,” Ron answered, half coming out of his chair, his voice rising, “I want them to know I’m a faggot!” Soon enough they did know, and in the end Ron was voted tenure, though not without a fight.
The young UMB professoriate of those days, galvanized by the cultural and political currents of the 1960s, was often self-important and self-righteous, and occasionally I cringe on remembering our brash arrogance. But there was something courageous and right in our engagements, in the realization that when personal commitment is postponed to moments when risk recedes, we lose ourselves. Struggles waged together created bonds of friendship that have lasted a lifetime.
The best way to put it is to say that the remarkable students and teachers I met at UMass/Boston rescued me from irrelevance and gave a meaning to my existence that I have tried ever since to honor.
– David Hunt
UMass Boston Factulty: September 1969-Present