Bob Schwartz

Tag: teach-in

November 4, 2025

Teach-ins are back

For some, teach-ins were an integral part of organized resistance and opposition to a war and to social and national injustice and inhumanity.

Teach-ins are extended educational gatherings where participants discuss and learn about controversial issues, typically combining lectures, debates, and workshops. They’re designed to raise awareness and foster critical thinking about social or political topics.

Teach-ins emerged in March 1965 at the University of Michigan as a response to the Vietnam War. Faculty members organized an overnight event with lectures and discussions as an alternative to striking, which would have disrupted students’ education. The format quickly spread to campuses nationwide.

Early teach-ins featured:

  • Marathon sessions (often 12+ hours)
  • Mix of presentations, debates, and open discussion
  • Focus on alternative perspectives to mainstream narratives
  • Emphasis on collective learning and action

The model became a signature protest tactic of 1960s-70s campus activism, addressing civil rights, environmental issues, and anti-war movements.

Teach-ins are back, not yet in the same number as in the past, but they are spreading.

Like this:

Why we’re holding a teach-in about American history at the Smithsonian

On 26 October, podcasters, professors, journalists and ordinary citizens will gather on the steps of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History for a teach-in in defense of history and museums.

If you look online, you’ll find many more happening, maybe in your own backyard.

Here’s the original teach-in at the University of Michigan in March 1965:

Here’s a Free Speech teach-in at Barnard in September 2025:

Is this nostalgia for a time when protest happened and sometimes worked? No. It is confirmation that when people effectively organize and educate, it is possible that eventually things can be turned around. Eventually (not to put a damper on this) as in the ten years between the University of Michigan teach-in and the end of the Vietnam War. But without the teach-ins and the marches and levitating the Pentagon (look it up), there is no telling how much more death and damage and suffering would have been inflicted.

It is worth teaching-in.

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March 11, 2014

Teach-in and Dope in the Senate

Teach-in
Yesterday some Senators, mostly Democrats, held an all-night “talkathon” on the Senate floor about climate change. It wasn’t any kind of filibuster, because there wasn’t any particular piece of legislation involved.

Back in the 1960s, this might have been called a teach-in, which was just this sort of session during which change-minded people would learn about the radical issues of the day. Except those people were more likely to be professors and students (or “outside agitators”), and it was more likely to take place in a college administration building than the U.S. Senate.

Two occasional hallmarks of extended teach-ins were sex and drugs. We don’t dare speculate whether any U.S. Senators were having sex during this “talkathon,” but we might just wonder if anybody snuck out to the cloakroom for a quick hit.

In the delightful and trenchant Amazon political comedy Alpha House, one of the four Republican U.S. Senators living in the eponymous D.C. house is seen relieving the tension of running for reelection by bonging it in the bathroom. (The much more serious and dangerous Netflix political series House of Cards also shows the ambitious Frank Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey, sharing joints with his Lady Macbeth of a wife. Sex of all varieties too.)

Back to the climate change teach-in. Even if no substances were involved in the event, what are the odds that any of those participants occasionally indulge, or that any of the rest of the Senate does? As a variant on the old speaker’s trick of imagining your audience without clothes, maybe it would be easier to watch the U.S. Senate if we as citizens just imagined our favorite or least favorite Senators sitting in those iconic smoke-filled rooms passing the pipe. Dope in the Senate. That would explain so much.

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