I, too, was deeply, deeply moved by your letter. I first came to realize the veracity of a Marxist analysis when I taught at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn. My students were mostly black, mostly poor and mostly pissed off. The more time I spent there, the more I realized exactly why they were pissed, and how right they were to be pissed off. Ours is a system which requires an underclass -- and they were the unlucky masses. These were kids who were every bit as bright (and every bit as dull, and every bit as loud, and every bit as shy and every bit as hardworking, and every bit as lazy, and and...) as the kids I later taught at NYU, but they grew up in demilitarized zones of violence and destitution, went to horrible schools and graduated without exploring their potentialities, or even knowing what a verb is.
I learned soooooooo much. It changed my life.
I am now at SUNY Binghamton, and I am interested in starting a similar program here. Could you share some of the details of your program, so that I could get a good handle on how to do it? I would especially LOVE to see your syllabus. I would also like to ask the listmembers for their thoughts. I am a philosopher, so I would primarily be teaching philosophy. Given my bent, it would be social and political philosophy. But perhaps I could also recruit an economist, a sociologist, a comp lit person. I would love to hear what the list has to say on this topic.
Beth Goldstein Beth at philosophers.net