http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/108/1/28/
PA: What was your motivation for writing the book How to Take an Exam...and
Remake the World?
BO: I am very much the teacher, which means that I’m always looking for new
ways to present my ideas in a clear and convincing manner. Also, along with
other radicals, I’ve long been bothered by the fact that too few people come
looking for radical teachers or ideas. We need to do more to attract them.
In this book, I give students a lot of tips that will help them on exams –
hoping in this way to satisfy a strongly felt need – but I exact something
in turn. That something is that they also listen to my simple explanation of
what capitalism is, how it works, for whom it works better, for whom worse,
how it originated and where it seems to be heading. The humor is there to
make the whole thing more fun, and therefore, more attractive than such
accounts usually are.
PA: How do you compare teachers and students on the left today to those of
the past?
BO: I’ve lived through many different periods. My first political
experiences were in the mid-fifties at the University of Wisconsin. There
was little interest in socialist ideas at the time. That changed, and very
quickly, in the 1960s. During most of the 1960s, however, I was out of the
country - in England, Jamaica and France. When I came back in 1967, much to
my delight, I found many thousands of radicals, of all sorts, throughout the
academy. This bullish situation peaked by the early 1970s. Since then we
have been through several dips and rises, as a result of developments in the
world beyond the university. Since the late 1990s, there has been a very
sharp rise, so that today we find almost as much interest in radical ideas
of one sort or another (though not - maybe I should say “not yet” – of our
sort) as there was in the l960s. I’m speaking of students here, and not of
faculty, who remain on the whole a pretty moderate if not conservative lot.
Oddly enough, I’ve been in a position to track some of these changes through
a course called “Socialist Theory” that I have been giving at NYU for the
last 35 years. It’s an elective, so students take the course because they
want to learn more about socialism. The number who sign up for it has varied
a lot but always in strict alignment with what is happening elsewhere, at
other universities, in the country and in the world. Readers of this journal
will be interested to learn, then, that in the last few years the enrollment
in this course has been higher, far higher, than it was even in the late
1960s.
PA: In the late 1970s there was a controversy between you and the University
of Maryland. The question of academic freedom came up in this battle, which
you describe in your recently republished autobiography, Ballbuster?
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