Five years ago, I had every reason to believe that my job as a history professor at Barnard College was secure.
I had been teaching there for four years, I had published my dissertation with a major publisher, and because I had tripled the sizes of the introductory U.S. history course and the American Studies program, colleagues told me they "would be shocked" if I were not promoted to a tenure-track position.
But that was before my colleagues knew what I was teaching.
I had always been a misfit in academia, partly because of my background, partly because of my personality, and increasingly over the years because of my ideas – ideas that are now a book called A Renegade History of the United States.
I was raised by pot-smoking, nudist, socialist revolutionaries as an egghead white boy in black neighborhoods in Berkeley and Oakland. I nearly flunked eighth grade and finished high school with a C average. Then I went to the anarchist, ultra-hippy Antioch College in Ohio, which accepted all their applicants, didn’t give grades, and didn’t have a history department.
October 20, 2010
