Teaching Marx, Critical Theory, and Philosophy: Some Personal Reflections

Chapter 10 Teaching Marx, Critical Theory, and Philosophy: Some Personal Reflections

Douglas Kellner

In this chapter, I will recount, first, my first teaching experience, and then my introduction to Marxism as a graduate student at Columbia University during the 1968 student uprising, followed by discussion of my introduction to Frank- furt School Critical Theory during my studies in Tubingen, Germany, during the late 1960s. Next, I tell how I was hired to teach Marxist philosophy at the University of Texas in Austin in 1973, and describe my experiences teaching Marxism and Critical Theory at UT-Austin from 1973-1995, and then at ucla from 1995 until the present. Finally, I suggest in the era of Donald Trump and his aftermath that reading, studying, and teaching Marxism is of crucial impor- tance and relevance.

1 The Columbia Uprising and My Introduction to Marxism

While a graduate student at Columbia, I received a coveted assignment to teach the famous Great Books course to college freshmen. In my first day as an instructor in 1968, I entered the classroom modestly with long-hair and blue jeans, sitting in front of a class of undergraduates, many from prep schools who had read the classics I was supposed to teach, perhaps in their original languages. I confessed to the students that I hadn’t previously read many of the books, but had read Homer and Plato and the Greek dramatists, and was looking forward to working with the class to read these books together. I sat on top of the desk, provided introductory remarks and attempted to engage, sometimes successfully, the students in conversation. Later, when I read Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I learned that I was practicing spontaneous- ly a proper dialogical teaching method, learning from the students as I taught, and I have followed this pedagogy ever since. The Marx text in the Great Book program was Marx-Engels’, “The Commu- nist Manifesto” and it can indeed be read as a great literary text, as well as philosophy of history and theory of society. The dramatic opening citing “A specter that is haunting Europe” and the evocation of the specter as communism sets

204 Kellner the world-historical significance of the text announcing a new revolutionary force and moment in history. The dramatic proclamation that the history of existing societies has been class struggle and the delineation of the two classes facing off against each other—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—and the evocation of revolution as the lever to socialism and socialism as the goal of the existing communist political movement dramatizes the text’s contempo- rary significance and launched Marx and Engels as revolutionary theorists who would be come to be known around the world. In 1968, I was studying for my philosophy comprehensive exams at Columbia and teaching my first course, when a student uprising erupted, with sds radicals occupying the President’s Office, while black radicals occupied another campus building. A series of protests during 1968 combined into a series of dramatic student occupations of key buildings at Columbia University. A student activist with the Students for a Democratic Society, Bob Feldman, discovered documents indicating Columbia’s institutional affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analyses (ida) and it was also discovered that Columbia University professors were doing research for the cia and aiding in the Vietnam war effort. There were on-going protests as well concerning Columbia’s plan to take city park land bordering on Harlem and turning it into a gymnasium, in which the bottom half would be open to Harlem residents while the top half was reserved for students and members of Columbia. On April 23, 1968, students attempted to enter the main administration building, Low Memorial Library, were re- buffed, marched to the Harlem gym site, where they clashed with police, and then returned to the Columbia campus to occupy Hamilton Hall, which had both classrooms and the offices of the Columbia College Administration. In the protests and occupation of Hamilton Hall, the sds students were joined by members of the Student Afro Society (sas) group. To the surprise of sds and white students, the African American students in Hamilton told the white students to occupy another building since their agendas were different. After both groups deliberated, the sds group and other white students decided to take over Low Library, which housed the President’s office. Since the occupation closely followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, which re- sulted in riots throughout the country, including New York, the administration was reluctant at first to use force to evict the students and a dramatic standoff and media circus followed. Other student groups took over other campus buildings at Columbia in one of the first and most dramatic student insurrections of the era. The Grateful Dead came on campus to give us a free concert, and one day Stokley Carmi- chael, R. Rap Brown, Eldridge Cleaver, and other black radical leaders came on