The Teach-In: Where the Anti-War Movement Learned to Speak
Near Ann Arbor, Michigan
On the night of March twenty-fourth, nineteen sixty-five, something new happened on this campus that would spread to one hundred twenty universities before the year ended.
A group of University of Michigan professors had been watching the escalation in Vietnam with alarm. They wanted to do something, but a faculty strike seemed too confrontational and too risky given pressure from Governor Romney and the state legislature. Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins proposed an alternative: hold an all-night event during which faculty and students could talk, debate, and learn rather than walk out. Call it a teach-in.
More than three thousand people came to that first teach-in in March of nineteen sixty-five. It ran through the night. The discussion ranged from the history of Vietnamese resistance to the mechanics of the draft to the moral framework for civil disobedience. The New York Times covered it on March twenty-fifth.
Within a week, thirty-five more universities had organized their own teach-ins. By the end of nineteen sixty-five, one hundred twenty campuses had held them. The format had traveled from Ann Arbor to the national conversation in a matter of months.
The teach-in was not the origin of Vietnam opposition. But it gave the opposition a language and a model. It said that sustained, substantive public argument was a form of political action. It said that a university was a legitimate arena for that argument. Both of those propositions were contested at the time.
Tom Hayden had been at the University of Michigan a few years earlier, editing the Michigan Daily, before writing the first draft of the Port Huron Statement in nineteen sixty-two, which became the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society. The SDS chapter at Michigan was one of the first in the country. This campus generated a disproportionate share of the intellectual infrastructure of the American left during the nineteen sixties. The teach-in was one night among many. But it was a particularly consequential one.
