The teach-ins were sparked by the Johnson administration’s launch of the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign against North Vietnam in late February 1965. But it is less its antiwar ideas than its strategic and tactical brilliance that makes the teach-in movement so relevant today, offering a valuable model for resisting the threat that the Trump administration’s authoritarianism and hatred of the liberal university poses to academic freedom and free speech on campus, the university’s funding of scientific research, the college and university’s role in battling racial and sexual discrimination, and higher education’s cosmopolitanism and international character.
Though we tend to think of the campus antiwar movement as led by radical students who used militant tactics, breaking university regulations and the law in their protests, the teach-in movement was initiated by faculty, not students, and it did not break any such regulations or the law. Its only tools were education—offered by knowledgeable speakers—and effective publicity and outreach. In fact, the very idea of a teach-in was the result of a tactical retreat.
Initially, Michigan’s Faculty Committee to Stop the War in Vietnam had envisioned a work moratorium, a day when faculty did not teach their regular academic classes so that the whole university could focus on the Vietnam War. But this moratorium idea proved immensely controversial, drawing all kinds of denunciations, especially from the state’s war-hawk politicians, who labeled it an anarchist hijacking of the university that denied students access to their classes. Seeing that this controversy was distracting people from the war itself, the faculty shrewdly changed course. Instead of a work moratorium, they came up with the idea of an antiwar teach-in that would begin after classes ended and go on through the night (from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m.).
Some on the left saw this tactical shift as unfortunate, even cowardly, and feared that few students would attend such an evening event. But they were wrong. This first teach-in drew some 3,000 students, faculty and community members. It was, in the words of one its speakers, Carl Oglesby, “like a transfigured night. It was amazing: classroom after classroom bulging with people hanging on every word of those who had something to say about Vietnam.” Michigan’s antiwar faculty then helped raise funds for more teach-ins in May, which connected with faculty and student activists on more than 100 campuses, with the movement reaching its peak at a University of California, Berkeley, weekend teach-in that drew some 30,000 participants. All this provided a major boost to the peace movement and helped make the campuses a center of antiwar activism.