Spring 2006
Sociology 335

Dan Clawson

Okay, I'm not registered for the course, but I'm hoping to learn from it, and from you.

Since I was born in 1948, I was 12 at the time of the first sit-in, a high school and college student during the Vietnam war, and a foot soldier participant in some of the movements of that time. Currently I am most interested in, and committed to the labor movement. I am president of the faculty-librarian union, the Massachusetts Society of Professors, have a book titled The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements, and co-authored an article (with Aldon Morris) on "Lessons of the Civil Rights Movement" (WorkingUSA December 2005).

My politics stresses radical democracy: people can do amazing things, and develop unknown capacities, if they get a chance to do so. One of the tragedies of this society is the way it suppresses and denies that.

Therefore, I'll be happiest if students -- as groups, as a class decision, not as individuals -- take over running the class in all kinds of ways.

Related to that, part of the way our society keeps us all in check is to suppress and distort the history of our past. I'd like to help people regain some sense of that past, and I'd like to find ways to connect the radicals of today (or better yet, tomorrow) to the radicals of yesterday, so that people can learn from each other.

This is the course Web site for Sociology 335, Department of Sociology. University of Massachusetts Amherst. Produced and maintained by clawson@sadri.umass.edu.