Robert Rosen

The Interview

An oral history interview for Radical Teacher Interviewed by Jocelyn Wills January 10, 2024. The transcript has been lightly edited for readability. 

Jocelyn Wills: So we are here today to interview Bob Rosen, one of the founders of Radical Teacher. Bob, do we have permission to record our time with you today?

Bob Rosen: Yes, you do.

Jocelyn Wills: Great. I’d like to start with just some basic demographic information. Your birth date, or just your age if you want, where you’re originally from, all that. Because I think that when people see these interviews later, they’re going to want to place people in some sort of continuum. So it’d be really nice to have a little of your background for us. We’ll assume people don’t know everything.

Bob Rosen: Okay. Just one quick correction. I’m not really a founder. I came in a year after it began, so I don’t want to assume that mantle without justice.

I was born in 1947. So, like somebody said at the demonstration, the Gaza demonstration in Grand Central Station, I’m older than the State of Israel.

I was born in Brooklyn. I grew up in Flushing, then Levittown, then Commack and Smithtown. We kept moving out on Long Island. My father had a small, not very successful hardware store, while my mother was a homemaker for a while and then became a library aide at a local school.

I was totally apolitical growing up. I was about fifteen during the Cuban missile crisis, and I was totally unaware of it. I was really unaware of everything political throughout my time living at home. I mostly spent my time in my room with my nose in a math book, and the world kind of passed me by. Things changed quickly when I got to college.

Jocelyn Wills: So your parents weren’t terribly political?

Bob Rosen: No, they were apolitical liberals. They hated people with Southern accents, because that somehow suggested racism.

Another important point to mention is that I basically lived in all-white neighborhoods. Levittown was sort of by regulation all white, and then Commack and Smithtown were equally all white. In my high school of over a thousand students there was one Black student and one Black teacher, a chemistry teacher.

And just as an aside, the teacher took a liking to me and urged me to apply to a summer program for high school students, where they would go to a college and study science over the summer. He urged me to go to this place I had never heard of, Howard University. He kept telling me it was the top school in the country. He had gone there. I knew nothing about it. So I got in, and we drove down there, and as we approached the campus my parents said, gee, there are a lot of Black people here. So that’s the kind of bubble I grew up in, politically, racially, ethnically, on Long Island.

And in some ways I stayed pretty much in that bubble going to college. I went to MIT and majored in math, and there remained pretty out of it politically, with my nose in a book.

And then, I guess it was 1969, things had heated up all around me, but not for me yet. There was something called a sanctuary. It first happened at Boston University, and then another one took place at MIT. A soldier went AWOL, a resisting soldier, and went into a large room on campus, and he was surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of students to prevent the police from coming to get him.

So out of boredom, and an interest in spending some time with a woman I had just met, I started going to these things and hanging out. And it was a great scene. People made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and passed them around, and everybody was loving everybody, and it turned into an enormous teach-in with people like Chomsky and Howard Zinn. And suddenly I was aware of this whole political world, and how my country obviously was on the wrong side of things. So it was a very rapid awakening from a very deep slumber politically. That was a real turning point in my life.

Jocelyn Wills: So were you in graduate school or undergrad?

Bob Rosen: Still undergraduate.

I decided I didn’t want to go into the army, so I decided to stay another year in college to get another year of student deferment, and took a second major in literature. So I ultimately graduated with two degrees, a degree in math and a degree in what they called humanities and science.

And it was there that I met Louis Kampf. He was my teacher for a couple of classes, and he had a real impact on me. At some point I was going to apply to graduate school both in math and English, to postpone having to decide where I would go in my life. In retrospect I probably should have taken some time off. But partly in conversations with Louis, I decided to dump math.

A lot of it had to do with not what I was interested in, but what people were doing with that major. A lot of my teachers were consulting for defense industries out on Route 128 around Boston. I had one teacher for elasticity, a Vietnamese professor who was really wonderful, who tried to convince me that the equations governing the barrel of a gun were the same as the ones governing blood vessels in the human body. So if I did research in his field I could be doing good for humanity, not just feeding the military-industrial complex. I wasn’t convinced.

Ultimately I decided to go to graduate school in English, kind of lurching in as opposite a direction as I could, partly because in the fifth year I stayed I took a lot of literature courses and just had my eyes opened to all kinds of things. There was a big student movement then. There was what they called the Rosa Luxemburg chapter of SDS. So I got to go to demonstrations, I got to hear Chomsky speak a lot. I was never a leader, I was always on the periphery, but it certainly impacted my attitudes a lot. It was really an amazing time, ’69, ’70, that last year.

Jocelyn Wills: Where did you go to graduate school?

Bob Rosen: I went to Rutgers. My first choice was SUNY Buffalo, and I never heard from them when I sent out my applications. So I decided to call them, and they said, oh, they had lost my application. Apparently there’d been some big deal there where Leslie Fiedler and all these other people were smoking marijuana and got arrested, and the whole department kind of fell apart. This is like the spring of 1970. So I went to Rutgers, and I got a very nice fellowship there, so it was a very good deal.

Joseph Entin: Bob, could I ask you, before we move to graduate school. The Louis you mentioned, again for the sake of this interview, is Louis Kampf, who was one of the founding members of Radical Teacher, and who later, somewhat famously, as part of the MLA Radical Caucus became president of the MLA in 1970 or so. I wondered if you had particular memories of Louis, when you were an undergraduate, and his influence on you at that point in your life.

Bob Rosen: Sure. My first encounter with him was in sophomore required humanities. He was just very funny and provocative. And in addition, he did something that was unusual in my eyes, which was that he wore a tie that was lighter than his shirt. I had always associated this with gangsters, so that kind of added a certain something to him. So I liked him a lot without really understanding who he was.

I then took another course, maybe in my fourth or fifth year, called Literature and Revolution, and that’s where I got to really know Louis better, and to know who he was. He was a great teacher. He just really knew how to get a conversation going and handle students. And obviously certain kinds of students at that point, now ’69, ’70, were attracted to him, so that if you were in one of his classes you were with the people you wanted to be with. That was great.

And then I went to see him a couple of times to talk about my various dilemmas about what to do with my life. He also wrote me a letter of recommendation for graduate school. He said it was a letter that would make my mother cry, so it probably helped me a lot.

That was Louis. And I’ll come back to him, because he played another big role in my life a few years later.

So, on to graduate school. I was lucky to go to Rutgers, because at Rutgers they were very into New Criticism. And the good thing about New Criticism is you don’t have to know anything. I didn’t have a background in literature. I hadn’t been a reader as a kid, I hadn’t been an English major as an undergraduate. I’d taken a few courses to get the second degree, and most of them were oddball courses like Literature Today. So I hadn’t read the classics, I hadn’t read anything. So I could kind of get away with it, with all this New Critical work. I could just zoom in on a poem and really take it apart and talk about the ambiguities and the ironies and symmetries. It had its limitations, obviously, but it worked for me.

On the other hand, I was kind of alienated from it. Because when I was studying literature as an undergraduate it was all very politicized, in the midst of an anti-war movement. And now suddenly I was sitting in courses with Paul Fussell or Richard Poirier talking about irony, and it just didn’t seem right. I was kind of close to quitting a few times.

But then, in my fourth year, once the fellowship ended I got a teaching assistantship at the night school, University College. And I loved teaching. So that changed everything. I realized I would be able to stick it out and put up with this, because I really wanted to do this teaching thing.

Jocelyn Wills: Bob, can I just interrupt? When did you know you loved teaching, and that that was something you really wanted to do? Was it before grad school, or during grad school?

Bob Rosen: It was really when I got that teaching assistantship. Having made the decision to go to graduate school in English is almost a decision to pursue teaching. What else are you going to do? But I hadn’t really thought about it, or even conceived of myself that way. I was just a school person. I finished undergraduate school, so it was time to go to another school, and I had rejected math, so I was going to pursue English. But I hadn’t taken seriously what it meant to be a teacher.

And then I finally was thrown in front of a class, and it was a lot of fun. My first semester of teaching, I was a TA, I had my own class. I assigned a book called The New Socialist Revolution by Michael Lerner. We were supposed to assign one nonfiction book in this first-year writing class. And I got called into the office of my department chair. Somebody had complained to somebody in Trenton. But she supported me.

Anyway, it was just great. Obviously thirty years later, in the trenches, it wasn’t always as exciting as that first semester of teaching. But it was enough to hook me.

At some point, maybe after I finished my courses, and that’s the other thing about Rutgers, you only had to take two years of courses and then the rest were sort of independent study, so I still don’t know anything. The person I was married to, or maybe living with, got a one-year teaching job at Bryn Mawr. So we moved there, and I was writing my dissertation and really feeling alienated, because I was now away from the teaching, in some suburb somewhere, and I had to write a dissertation. I was really avoiding it, and kind of bummed out, and also increasingly aware of the job situation. We’re talking now mid-seventies.

I had gotten unemployment insurance as a teaching assistant, and it required me to apply for three jobs a week to keep getting the unemployment. So I just kept sending out letters to colleges saying, will you hire me? And one wrote back and said, I’ve often told my colleagues that if we all quit here in the English department and hired new people we’d have a much stronger department. But we’re not going to do that. So sorry to say, good luck.

So it was at that point that I wrote a postcard to Louis, my old undergraduate teacher, feeling sorry for myself. And he said, why don’t you join Radical Teacher? This was ’75, ’76. So that’s how it started. I started coming to the meetings. It was a schlep from Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, but the following year I lived in New Haven and it was a lot easier. And that was great. I met all these wonderful people.

Jocelyn Wills: Do you have any specific memories? Do you remember your first meeting, or anything else of those early days?

Bob Rosen: One thing I remember, and this may not have been Radical Teacher but the Radical Caucus, they put on talks. They were often at Wesleyan, and Dick arranged them. My partner then was a graduate student in Italian at UConn, and Wally was also there, Wally Sillanpoa, who was on the board for a long time. I kept raving to them about these Radical Caucus events, so I dragged them to one, and they had a professor who called himself a Marxist, whom they were very enamored of, and they brought him along too.

So the four of us were there in this crowd of maybe thirty people, and Adrienne Rich was the speaker. She read some poem and talked about it, and at some point this adviser of Barbara and Wally’s, their Italian professor, raised his hand and said, you know, I think men make the best feminists, right, Wally and Barbara? We had to crawl under the table.

So that’s one memory. But I think the best memories I have of Radical Teacher are those farm meetings, every year at Dick’s farm. I started going very early, and they were just wonderful, particularly if you got there Friday and could stay both nights. Friday night there was a smaller group, maybe eight.

I got to hang around with people like Louis and Dick and Paul, who knew so much and had such amazing stories, and were really kind to me, who didn’t have a lot to offer, maybe a joke once in a while. It was really quite wonderful. At some point Leonard Vogt joined the board and I started driving up with him, so that was always nice, hanging out with Leonard. I think those are the best parts, those farm meetings.

Jocelyn Wills: Could you elaborate a little on the farm meetings, for people who didn’t get to go to them? What made them so special?

Bob Rosen: There were regular meetings maybe every six weeks, usually back then at Wesleyan, which was halfway between Boston and New York. But then in August there would be one at this farm in Hawley, Massachusetts, in western Massachusetts, that Dick had. And there’d be the regular meeting Saturday from noon to five or whatever, but people would come for the weekend and hang out. And that was basically it.

Dick was a fantastic cook, as was Liz Powell, who was on the board and married to Dick, who made these wonderful blueberry pies. There was a swimming pool. There was a lot of joking, a lot of drinking. It was just a wonderful bunch of people to hang out with. Apart from the meeting, where there was stuff that had to get done, for all those other hours nothing had to get done, except cleaning up or eating the food.

They just knew so much, they were so politically astute. And people like Louis and Dick had all these stories from way back when. Particularly Louis, who seemed to have a perfect memory of everything. You mentioned somebody, and he would say, oh, he fucked up a meeting in 1968, he came into this anti-war meeting and he fucked up the whole thing. It was great.

Jocelyn Wills: When you joined the board, a year after its birthing, did they interview you the way we interview people now, or did you just sort of come on and hang out and we’ll see what happens?

Bob Rosen: I got in when it was easy. I didn’t have to write a letter, I didn’t have an interview. Louis had come, so I came, and everybody was welcoming. It was small then, so I think they needed people more. And I had Louis’s imprimatur.

What else about Radical Teacher? I didn’t write much for them, hardly anything at all. I edited one cluster, number 20, on back to basics, and I kind of helped edit a couple of others. I did this Teaching Notes column. I did a lot of manuscript reviewing, and at some point I started doing a lot of copy editing. But I was not only not a founder but really not one of the key members. It meant more to me than I meant to it, for sure.

Jocelyn Wills: Well, I’ll just flat out tell you, those of us who are newer, that’s not how we see things at all.

Bob Rosen: I think in later years I emerged more, and that’s been good. This managing editing thing, sharing that with Michael Bennett, has been good.

Joseph Entin: Can you say a little bit more about Teaching Notes? Because that was at the heart of your Radical Teacher work, that you’ve done for so long, and it’s such a unique feature of the magazine. I don’t know the story about how you came to do that, and the history of that column, which has published so many pieces over the years.

Bob Rosen: Sure. I think it was going into issue number 11. I proposed to the board this column where people would write about one work, a film, a short story, a poem, a nonfiction book, whatever, that they felt was particularly effective in teaching. Limit of 250 words or something like that. I think I wrote one and gathered up four others for the first issue, and that was it.

I just felt it was valuable, because a lot of the articles would say, here’s a course I taught, but then for a reader to try to adapt that whole course was a big undertaking. Whereas, okay, here’s a book that you might want to add to your course. Mostly they were novels early on. I thought that might be useful. So that’s where that came from.

And I kept getting submissions over the years. There was great length inflation, I guess. I started allowing longer and longer pieces, and the rule that it be just about one work kind of got slack, so now I’m not entirely sure what it is. I think it’s things that are shorter than full-length articles. But people keep sending them in, and I think a lot of them come from people who are new to writing for Radical Teacher, or even maybe new to publishing. A lot from graduate students who are finding their way toward publication. So I feel it serves that purpose as well. It gives people a chance to see themselves in what used to be print.

Somewhere along the line we did a Teaching Notes greatest hits, one of the issues in the magazine. I think we were a little short of issues, and Paul had suggested doing that. So I gathered up the ones I thought were best and wrote a little introduction. You can find that one online as well. I tried to come up with some history of Teaching Notes. I couldn’t really connect the trajectory of Teaching Notes to the falling rate of profit or anything else, so it’s not a very theoretical introduction. But it does spell out what it’s about.

Jocelyn Wills: You said in issue 11 you submitted something. What was your teaching note?

Bob Rosen: It was on a novel, The Space Merchants, a novel from the fifties. I taught science fiction briefly, partly because it was the only non-basic-writing course I was allowed to teach when I first started. Somebody at the last minute backed out and so I got that course. So it’s not like I knew science fiction. But I stumbled on this book, and it’s basically a projection into the future of a universe run by advertising corporations. And it’s very funny. I think it still holds up in a lot of ways. So I wrote about that.

There were a lot. Louis wrote some, Dick wrote some, Paul wrote some, a lot of people did it. Often I had to hound people. But it worked.

Joseph Entin: I think my first publication was a teaching note. I was a graduate student, and I was writing about Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers, and how I went about trying to teach that, and in particular her relationship with William Lyon Phelps, a cultural guardian, genteel fellow, who took a fascination with her work. Trying to think about how you could teach about that relationship to students, and what that could show you about the cultural function of ethnic literature in the twenties.

Bob Rosen: I remember that one. And it struck me at the time as being a lot more sophisticated than a lot of the teaching notes. You really were trying to do something more than just say, here’s a good book you should try. I think you made it into the Teaching Notes greatest hits.

Joseph Entin: I was early into my Jamesonian thinking, so I was trying to use the political unconscious to unpack it. Pretentious.

Bob Rosen: I’d say it raised the bar. And now you’re going to join me, right?

Joseph Entin: Yes, that’s the plan.

Bob Rosen: Over the years I’ve occasionally mumbled that someone else could do this. I didn’t want it to be mine for life, or to block other people who might think, oh, he owns it.

Joseph Entin: As with most jobs at Radical Teacher, you’re not blocking anybody. Everybody’s so grateful for whatever anybody else can do.

Do you want to talk a little bit about your teaching career? I associate you with William Paterson, but I don’t know if you taught at some other places before that. Whatever you’d want to say about what you were teaching, your students, how you thought about what it meant to try to be a radical teacher at William Paterson across the seventies, eighties, nineties.

Bob Rosen: Sure. Before I got to William Paterson I had two adjunct jobs. One at the Groton nuclear submarine base in Connecticut. I figured I had to have a couple of adjunct jobs if I was ever going to get a full-time job. And that was a lot of fun. I had to get a special permit on my car, and they saluted me as I came onto the base, but in fact I was able to do anything I wanted. So I remember Xeroxing a lot of left-wing articles and inflicting them on these poor guys. That was mid-seventies. And then I had a second adjunct job at the University of New Haven. That was no fun, because it was first-year composition and everything was spelled out. So it was one of those cases where adjuncts have no rights at all to create their own curricula.

And then I finally did finish my dissertation, and I started applying for jobs, and I got exactly one interview, and that was William Paterson. I was their second choice, I found out later, but I got the job, and I really liked it.

It was a tough beginning, because my first year there was Leonard Vogt’s last year there. He came up for tenure in November and was denied it, and he was my best friend in the department. I was very close to him, so I kind of went through that with him. There was a big student uprising. Hundreds of students came to the board of trustees meeting to try to save Leonard, but it didn’t work. I remember a group of us in the department went to talk to the president to try to change his mind. Our chair said, Leonard Vogt is irreplaceable. And the president said, to quote Clemenceau, the graveyards are filled with irreplaceable men. He must have read that in some president management magazine or something.

So that was a formative experience, and I did spend the next five years thinking I wasn’t going to get tenure. We had a president then who was really into managerial flexibility, so he didn’t want a lot of tenured people in any one department, because then he couldn’t get rid of them. In fact, at a faculty meeting he said at some point, a college isn’t like a pickle factory where you can just shut down the line, oh dills, and give everyone a pink slip. I wish I’d had the courage to say, President Hyman, do you see any other differences between a college and a pickle factory? But I wasn’t brave enough.

So I was scared the whole time, and I think that clouded things. I mean, I really loved the teaching. It was great. And I did get through, I think, because I had published my dissertation with University of Nebraska Press, and that was uncommon, to have a book in the department at that point. So I think that got me through. And it felt great. Suddenly I wasn’t worried. Suddenly student evaluations weren’t a source of terror. We also had to have three faculty observations of our teaching every year when you’re untenured. So that was another trial, because somebody whose aims and style are different from yours is coming in to judge your teaching. It was really a tough time.

But I was lucky, because my first few years I had a lot of courses in the evening division, which was thought to be lower status, and it was a very hierarchical department. I really only taught basic writing and first-year writing for four years. But at night it was great, because the students were older. They knew things. They had lives. I liked it. It was a lot of fun.

Jocelyn Wills: Can I ask what your dissertation was about, and the favorite courses that you finally got to teach at night with non-traditional students?

Bob Rosen: Non-traditional, that was the word we used. As if, what a nice tradition that excludes Black students, and this is non-traditional.

It was on John Dos Passos. I chose him because I figured I’d learn a lot about history and politics following his life. The problem was he wrote almost fifty books, so it was a lot of work. But I lucked out. My two closest friends in graduate school did not end up getting tenure where they worked, and I think part of it is that one of them chose to write a dissertation on Jane Austen, and to publish a book on Jane Austen is not easy, because there are a million books on Jane Austen and it’s all been said. So I lucked out, unthinkingly choosing someone about whom there hadn’t been a lot written, and so I had a better shot at getting it published.

Favorite courses. I did end up enjoying the science fiction course a lot. Basically it got handed to me because some senior faculty member’s high school soccer coaching schedule got changed and suddenly this course opened up, and then I kind of ended up teaching it a lot. I did mainly dystopian or utopian novels, Marge Piercy, or Brave New World, or Vonnegut. I tried to make it as political as possible. And science fiction courses attracted a lot of oddball students, which was a good thing.

In the same way that at this college, which was largely a working-class college, if somebody majored in English as opposed to accounting or business or whatever their parents probably wanted them to major in so that they could get a job, it meant they were rebellious, or different, or thoughtful in some ways. So I think that was great. I liked that a lot.

Students were really grateful if you were at all kind to them, or attentive. None of the entitlement that faculty at other colleges sometimes complain about. I didn’t find that. On the other hand, they were very, very busy, and often had less than great skills. But I really liked teaching there. I have no regrets. I mean, I didn’t have a choice. But I really do feel very lucky to have been at William Paterson.

I taught critical writing, which of course I liked a lot, and I made it mainly a course about critical analysis of mass culture, and that was always a lot of fun. The students got into it and I enjoyed that.

At some point in the early eighties Paula Rothenberg, who was in the philosophy department, and Jay Jordan and Leslie Agard-Jones from the Black Studies department decided to form something called the Race and Gender Project. They got a group of about twelve faculty and organized a week-long training session, and I was invited to that. We were being trained to teach a new required course called Racism and Sexism in the United States, which at that point was a pretty unusual kind of requirement. In fact, at some point it blossomed into a statewide thing that Paula ran, called the New Jersey Project.

So I team-taught that with a couple of different women. I really liked that class a lot. I finally felt like I’m not talking about politics indirectly through a novel, but directly through an essay by Malcolm X or Martin Luther King. The problem was that if you team-taught the course, the class had to be double-sized, because the college president said, teachers can’t both talk at once, so you can’t both get credit for the same thirty-five students. Instead it was seventy students, so that had its challenges. But I liked it a lot.

And at some point there was a group, the Race and Gender Project, that oversaw the course. The person who was doing it didn’t want to do it anymore, and they couldn’t get anybody to be coordinator. So I was asked.

Jocelyn Wills: How long did you do that, Bob?

Bob Rosen: Good question. Probably twelve, thirteen years. A long time, because nobody else wanted it.

I remember at the meeting when I was asked to do it, I said, shouldn’t it be a person of color, or a woman? And somebody said, well, you’re Jewish. I said, so I’m a person of matzo. That’s my claim here.

But I did it, and it was awkward. In some ways it may have given us a little more power with the administration, I don’t know. I feel good about the work I did. I had a group of people that really made the decisions, and I just kind of did the work. And we had a great budget, and we brought all kinds of people to campus. Juan Gonzalez we brought. I’m having trouble coming up with the names, but Cynthia Enloe, Michelle Fine. It was nice having a budget to bring dissident speakers to campus, and usually we could persuade people to bring their classes, so we’d have a full house for these speakers. That meant a lot to me.

And then I got lured away from that to direct the Center for Teaching Excellence, which is a horrible name, but it was basically a thing that was going to run workshops to help people teach better. I said I didn’t want to do it alone, so I got another person to do it with me, and we ran a lot of workshops. And it gave me a lot of release time. We had a 4-4 schedule, so I liked the job. It wasn’t as political in the same way that the Race and Gender Project was. But I did that until I retired.

I got very good at getting release time. That was one of my skills there. Course release, because 4-4 was a lot. It’s nothing compared to what people at two-year colleges teach, or high school for that matter. But it was a lot, particularly in writing. If you’re teaching four math courses you can probably do it without a lot of work. But to read eight hundred papers is a lot.

What happened then is, A, I was getting a little older, but B, Covid came along, and suddenly all the teaching was online. And I hated it. I really did. I think I made some connections. But I wasn’t going to force students to turn their cameras on, because maybe they were in places they didn’t want other people to see. They had their reasons. Somebody once said teaching these classes is like running a séance, you don’t know if anybody’s really there or not. So that was frustrating.

I did that for a year and a half, and then it seemed time to retire. That, plus we had a new president who suddenly was cutting everything. In fact, after I left he fired thirty percent of the full-time faculty in a three-year period. So the place ain’t what it used to be, and those people who are there have bigger burdens, and departments are merged. English has now merged with two other departments. So I was very, very lucky to have been there, and to have gotten out when I did.

Jocelyn Wills: So you were there forty-three years?

Bob Rosen: A long run.

Jocelyn Wills: Can I switch gears just slightly? Other people have told us that one of the things about Radical Teacher is that they really found a home with it. I’d like you to talk a little bit about your time on the board. I know you said the farm meetings were really important. But how did your trajectory with Radical Teacher coincide with your teaching? And I’d also like to know if you purposefully taught political topics prior to tenure, when you were so scared.

Bob Rosen: To answer that second question first, I wasn’t worried politically. In fact, when I applied for the job, the question was, do I put Radical Teacher on my resume or not? And I did. And I put it in all my year-end reports. So I don’t think that was a problem. It was more that I was one more salary that this administrator would have to pay and didn’t want to. So it wasn’t fear politically.

And I have to say, that’s been true in my whole career there. I’ve never once felt any kind of political inhibition. I don’t know what’s going on now with Palestine. It could be very, very different. I know the president put out a mealy-mouthed statement, and then a group of leftist faculty put out a good statement, but apparently couldn’t find enough Jewish faculty to sign it. So they actually asked me and another retired faculty member to sign this statement. So I think that atmosphere might not be good right now. But other than that it’s been totally fine.

I feel very lucky, or in a bubble, or whatever. I did what I wanted in class politically. I was never Marx’s bulldog, or whatever, in my teaching style. I think I did things in a way that suggested openness to other ideas, truly or not truly. I think I handled it as well as I could, given who I was. But I never feared retribution for that.

Jocelyn Wills: And the other question was just your long career with Radical Teacher, and why it matters to you.

Bob Rosen: Why it matters to me. Well, I really love the people. I think that’s a big part of it.

I really want to feel in some way that I’m contributing something to left politics. I’m not going to be a union organizer, and I’m not going to be Leslie Cagan organizing big demonstrations. I’ll go to them. But it just felt like I wanted to be part of something. I’ve been in various groups. I was in NAM, the New American Movement. I’m now in DSA. I was in something called the Montclair Committee on Central America. So I’ve been in various left groups, but this is the one of longest duration. So that’s felt important, that here’s a project that I feel is useful. Teachers are influential, and if we can help them do that better, then I think that’s a real service that Radical Teacher provides. It just always felt good to be part of that.

And I made some good friends. Leonard was one of my closest friends. He died of a brain tumor seven or eight years ago now. I met him at William Paterson, but I continued my friendship with him through Radical Teacher. It’s just been a great group of people.

Obviously some have died, and that’s been very hard. One of your questions was about mentors, and I think Dick, Louis, and Paul have all been mentors to me in various ways, whether they knew it or not. They were really important to me. Paul is still with us. But other people have died. Constance Coiner. Shefali Lyell. Harold Bakken. So that’s what happens when you have close relationships. That’s the price you pay. But I just really love the people.

Jocelyn Wills: Do you want to share any memories of those people, since we’re not going to be able to interview them?

Bob Rosen: It’s hard to capture them.

I think one thing about Dick. He was incredibly powerful and sophisticated intellectually, but he also had what was to me a very appealing adolescent sense of humor. Sometimes the way he would laugh at a joke would just be really contagious. It felt like it came from some inner adolescent. I just really loved that. He was also incredibly generous with his time, and kind, and very funny, and a great host. He did a lot of work for those meetings. He read my dissertation and wrote a little blurb for it that probably had a lot to do with it getting published. So in those practical ways he was also really important.

And I don’t know how to characterize Louis. He just remembered everything and had something to say about everything, and was invariably funny.

A silly, ridiculous thing. At one point we were getting a contract with the University of Illinois Press to publish Radical Teacher, and there was a legalistic contract, and Saul was reading it to the group so we could approve it. And I remember I raised my hand and said, is there a sanity clause? Which is the Marx Brothers routine, right, where he goes, you can’t fool me, there ain’t no Sanity Claus. And I just knew Louis would laugh, and he did. It’s a stupid thing, but I keep thinking of it. It’s like, this is Louis. I could say that, and he would appreciate it.

I think it was just the really expansive intellects of both of them. Louis, you could mention some rock song from 1968 and he’d start singing it. I’m focusing a lot on Louis and Dick, who seemed to be bigger, who seemed to operate in a different dimension. And I could enjoy their company and admire them, but never feel diminished by being next to them. Paul was that way too.

And Paul was immensely helpful with Literature and Society. That’s another thing to say. Once I got tenure I needed to find something to do other than worry about getting tenure, and for a while, with a friend, I started designing computer games. We sold a couple to a company called Sunburst, and then I was done with that. And with Pam we did this anthology, Literature and Society, with Prentice Hall. In the course of doing it I had some meetings with Paul, asking for suggestions for readings. And needless to say, no surprise, he was immensely helpful with that.

And I read his memoir. I really admired it. I had no sense, because I think he’s not as personally out there in the same way Dick and Louis were, of all the stuff he’d accomplished in his life.

So to rub elbows with these people has been a really great part of Radical Teacher. Not to say that lesser lights, Sophie and Joseph and Sarah, there are just so many wonderful people. Susan O’Malley, whom I just had lunch with yesterday. It’s really just been great people.

I was sad when we stopped being a print magazine. It really felt like, when the issue came out, you had something. You could hold it in your hand and say, look at this. You could show it to people. You could get subscribers. And now it seems somehow more ethereal. I think it may also have changed what we publish. I think when we were limited to this many pages we were a little tighter about the editing, a little more careful about making sure something was really in good shape and good enough to be in there. This was inevitable, and it has its virtues in terms of accessibility. But maybe it’s just my generational stubbornness, it feels a little bit like a loss.

Jocelyn Wills: The artwork alone, right? It’s so beautiful to be able to look at a magazine with all the wonderful artwork and everything else that goes into it.

Bob Rosen: Liz did a lot of great cartoons.

Apropos of nothing, I did work on three different collections of Radical Teacher articles, which probably helped me in my career. One with Joseph and Leonard, one with Leonard and Susan, and one by myself. I still feel connected to bound volumes. I don’t know that they did much for publicizing the magazine, but I enjoyed those projects a lot, because I got to read through all the stuff we had published and realize how much of it was great. It was really, really good.

Something else we maybe used to do more, I’m not sure, is draw articles out of people. I’m not clear on this, but it seems to me there was more of, okay, Louis knows so-and-so who’s doing some interesting things, Louis is going to go talk to him and get him to write something. Like he got Saul to write his article about teaching science. I think maybe that process has diminished some. Am I right, Joseph?

Joseph Entin: Somewhat. I think it still happens. I’ve pulled some things out of people. But I think also we have fewer people going to conferences. We have less of a connection to the MLA, which is the professional association out of which Radical Teacher was really born. Radical Teacher members used to go to the MLA every year, and Dick was on the executive committee for a long time. So you would go to a session, and you would hear papers, and you would engage the people afterwards and invite them to submit to Radical Teacher. There was a process. The academy was a different place when things were published on paper and meetings were held in person. And we are in a different space and time.

There are obviously losses that many of us feel because of those changes, and then there are benefits as well. I think we get more unsolicited work. We publish more from people around the country and around the world. Our circle may have actually expanded in terms of the people who are submitting now, which in many ways is a good thing. We may be not only more accessible but more visible now than we’ve ever been. I think we used to operate in a kind of smaller orbit, among people that we knew. People actually had to subscribe back in the day, and that was a real commitment, and so not everybody wanted to do that.

Bob Rosen: I agree, there have been some big changes. It used to be you’d run into somebody, you’d mention Radical Teacher, and they’d say, oh, you’re still publishing? And I think now we’re maybe more clearly a fixture of the landscape. At least I’d like to think so.

What else? I’ll tell you, I wasn’t going to go into this. But Radical Teacher people were really very good support people for me when I was going through a couple of different periods. One was a cancer problem, that’s now okay. And one was that my kid, formerly Maggie, now Ben, very suddenly in their first year of college embarked on this very radical trans journey, including surgery and things, totally unanticipated. And I had a hard time, as did my wife Carol, and as did Ben’s mother. It was just so sudden and unexpected. And this is now like eight years ago, so it was earlier in the trajectory of awareness of trans issues.

I was struggling, because I wanted to be a good, progressive person. On the other hand, I had all these feelings. It’s an irrevocable decision. Is this a mistake? Is this the consequence of hanging around with certain cool people in the college dorm? I had all sorts of feelings and thoughts that were not in line with my stated political beliefs, and it was a difficult time. And I talked a lot with people at various meetings, and it really meant a lot.

And today Ben is incredibly happy, a terrific person. Everything’s worked out well. But it was good to have Radical Teacher back in that tough time.

Jocelyn Wills: I’m glad you shared that. That’s important.

Bob Rosen: Not to mention some divorces. When I got divorced, Louis invited me to come stay with them for a few days, as did Frinde. So people are really very loyal, very caring, and that’s been great.

Joseph Entin: Do you want to say a word about what you feel when you look back on your life, your participation in Radical Teacher, your teaching career? What did it mean for you to be radical? What did that term mean for you as a teacher, as an activist, as a citizen, as a human being? How do you think about that term in relationship to your own life?

Bob Rosen: Back in ’69, or whenever I first started calling myself that, I guess it meant not liberal. We were going to get to the root, capitalism, et cetera, and we don’t just believe in reform.

And I still think it means that. I guess I would say socialist instead, today. Or socialist, feminist, anti-racist journal of the theory and practice of teaching, as Radical Teacher says. But that’s what it means. Fundamental change, not tinkering around the edges. And I still have all those beliefs.

But of course you can’t go to a demonstration and say socialism. You need to say cease fire, or some more limited, practical, identifiable goal. So I think maybe as I’ve gotten older, those deep, long-term goals, which were part of what it meant to be radical, have receded. Not that they’re any less important, but they just seem less possible. And really what we have to do today is deal with the latest crisis, unless you’re going to join PL, or ANSWER, or some other Marxist-Leninist group and build the cadre to storm D.C. at some indefinite point in the future.

So I think Radical Teacher, in its academic way, has kept those ideals alive, the radical ideals, and that’s been important. But this is also probably a privilege of academics. We can say, yeah, we’re for socialism, and yeah, we believe in changing this, we are against capitalism. But actual activists usually are dealing with more specific and concrete issues that in my youth I would have dismissed as liberalism. It still is. But I understand the necessity in a way I didn’t in my college dorm in 1969.

I still remember, I was newly radicalized, as were a lot of us, and I overheard this conversation between two guys at my college. One said, you know what we’ve got to do? We’ve got to organize the students to have a revolution. And the other guy said, what about the workers? And he said, oh, okay, so we’re going to organize the students to organize the workers to have a revolution. It was so easy and unreal back then. And I miss it.

Jocelyn Wills: Is Radical Teacher, in your mind, still a very important venue? And what should we all be doing to keep nurturing this very important group and magazine and work?

Bob Rosen: I think it is. It’s harder to tell. I haven’t really looked at the data from the Pittsburgh site in terms of how many hits we get, and it’s hard to know what it means. But I think the fact that we keep getting all these submissions suggests that somebody knows about it out there.

This is my hobbyhorse, and I haven’t really done anything about it, but I do wish we could publicize it more. I’m hoping, if I get it together, to bring some kind of proposal to the next meeting. Some of this has been done already and then didn’t go anywhere. But I’ve written to Jacobin and one other place asking for their ad rates. And since we do have all this money, I think maybe it would be good for us just to get known a little better. I really do think there is a readership out there that we haven’t reached yet.

I think Emily Drabinski said once that people don’t read the magazine anymore, what they do is go to JSTOR or something and get an article. That’s all valuable. But I still think the magazine could get out there more, and not just be read primarily by people who get to a particular article via a search. Because we do create clusters, we do have introductions, and it looks pretty good, thanks to Chris.

I look forward to the meeting on the twenty-fourth. And I hope someday we’ll be meeting in person. I missed the last four meetings because I was away. But I hope that can continue now that Joseph and Sophie are hosting, and maybe someone else. Because those are great.

Joseph Entin: It’s been really fun to reconvene in person that way over the last couple of summers. It’ll be great if you’re around in the area this summer.

Jocelyn Wills: Thank you so much. This has been really delightful. Is there anything you want to add? We’ve taken up a lot of your time, but it’s been really lovely.

Bob Rosen: I’ll quote Dick Ohmann’s password on his wifi: eat more kale. That’s my closing statement.

No, thanks so much. It’s great talking to you. You two are wonderful. And thanks for listening to me.

Joseph Entin: Thanks for doing this, Bob.