A UMass Boston Experience of Strike Action during the Vietnam War
Everything I ever learned that was important to me I learned outside of school. So I never thought to associate schools with learning.”
Maggie, a first-year student
My first entry into a UMB classroom was also my first experience as a teacher. I began with a class of 30 diverse students, with Vietnam vets a small but powerful presence among them. What kind of knowledge did they want or need from me? I asked them to write a brief, anonymous journal response to the question: What do you hope to gain from a university education? Responses ranged from “I have no idea” to “not the bullshit they gave me in high school to “I want to get smarter.” Getting a job was high on the list, but in contrast to my students in 2011, no one listed jobs as their only priority.
In the discussion that followed, it turned out that for many of them, Maggie’s experience was like their own. So on the one hand, there was what you did in school, and on the other, there was the learning you acquired in “real life.” How to connect these two worlds, and use college as a place to gain meaningful knowledge? On a personal level, I understood that challenge very well. Grad school was a time when I went through three years of believing that deep down, I was not cut out to be a Ph.D. No one ever actually told me this. But when you are broke and the daughter of working class immigrants with no formal schooling, such thoughts come easily to mind. At UMB, I seized on the opportunity to ensure that my students’ encounter with the university would be nothing like my own.
In those early years, UMB seemed like a place where anything could happen. It was a new institution with no long-standing rules or traditions; pronouncements by the board of trustees, chancellors, and provosts were routinely adjusted or subverted in practice by faculty and staff. So it was a venue that allowed me the freedom to figure out how my social and political activism connected with my work as a scholar and teacher. These connections became much clearer to me during the late 1960s, when protests against the Vietnam War escalated at UMB and elsewhere.
In 1970, after the US invasion of Cambodia and the murders at Kent State and Jackson State, UMB students went on strike and ended business as usual on campus. I remember long planning meetings in the occupied Chancellor’s office. I spent hours at a time trying –sometimes with success but more often not– to convince faculty colleagues to join us. All of them opposed the war; it was the action part that brought them up short. Had they long ago internalized the same dichotomy between “knowledge” and “real life” that Maggie spoke about?
Sometimes, I was a leader in organizing the events, discussions, and direct actions that were now taking place on a daily basis. At other times, I was listening, learning, and following the students’ lead. Meanwhile, my students were inundating me with questions about what was taking place. An exhilarating sense of solidarity began to emerge between engaged students and faculty. I remember that we organized a film/discussion of the labor-oriented film “The Organizer.” As we walked toward the auditorium, we crossed paths with another group of students and faculty walking to a teach-in in the opposite direction. We greeted each other as if we were long lost friends. For a moment, I exchanged glances with a faculty member (David Hunt?) in the other group. Without thinking, we both raised our fists in the air — both of us intensely glad about where our lives were taking us.
Over 100 students came to see the film. Afterward, we discussed what made the hero/anti-hero so effective (and how to make use of his strategies and tactics.) Some in the audience were labor union members with a lot to teach the rest of us. Our actions together during the strike opened the possibility of new and less hierarchical relationships between students and teachers. At one point, some of my students approached me and asked for help in learning more about Vietnam and the origins of the war. (I am of course not a historian of Vietnam.) So to teach all of us, we organized a political education course that met two mornings a week for 90 minutes each. Between times, students went out to observe, listen and talk with people about the war. In class, they reported on questions they were unable to answer and talked about how to respond to aggressively pro-war people who called you “Traitor” and “Commie.” I suggested some strategies for critiquing media and recommended articles and book chapters which they read (at least in part) before the next class meeting. Many trips to the library, much sharing of information, and sometimes passionate discussions on how to reach out to folks who didn’t agree with you. It did not take long for students to experience the benefit of having more knowledge at their fingertips. As one student put it, “I now have more answers when people question me.”
The UMB strike was one of the most intense learning experiences I have ever had. In the years to come, its lessons changed me in ways that I am still discovering. I was able to see firsthand how ‘school knowledge’ linked to action for social justice transformed the learning process and produced more grounded and effective political action. Whether this would have satisfied Maggie or not is, of course, another question.
Contributed by Esther Kingston-Mann, May 28, 2013