If you were against slavery in 1840 and a white person, you would have been against the law, the Bible, your church, your pastor, your parents, common sense, tradition, everything. You would have been against everything.

My dad was a [Theodor] Roosevelt Democrat.

Now teach-ins are fairly common or they become common place. But in 1965, the Students for Democratic Society in Ann Harbor organized the first teach-in. The way it happened was that we were advocating for a strike that we advocated that the faculty should strike in solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle.

I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.

The US is indeed a terrorist nation. ...It's also the greatest purveyor of violence on earth over the past half century, and the foremost threat to world peace today.

What we need is a gigantic, messy community conversation about what is teaching and learning for the 21st century. We need to engage communities.

Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.