The Teach-Out, January 23-24, 1970
When the Teach-out got underway on January 23, the Tech Institute was filled with tables and canvassers for Zero Population Growth, Planned Parenthood, the League of Women Voters, the Isaak Walton League, the Audubon Society, and Campaign Against Pollution. Students sold buttons and bumper stickers with slogans like “the population bomb is everyone’s baby.” Many carried around tape recorders and cameras. There were radicals and more buttoned-up students, but older generations and Evanston-area residents of all ages were also well represented. James Sweet, science editor for the Northwestern public relations department, reported that students marched up and down the front hallway chanting “ban DDT” and “boycott grapes.” The crowd started to fill up Tech Auditorium at about 6 p.m. Singer E. Kitch Childs, who was a University of Chicago graduate student in psychology at the time, warmed up the crowd. The overflow crowd exceeded the six large lecture halls, and by 8 p.m. the hallways at Tech were filled with people sitting to watch on closed-circuit TV or listen via loudspeakers. Estimates varied, but somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 people showed up that evening. A story in The Evanston Review quoted one organizer: “We were a little too successful.”
James Reisa. Photo by Bob Hinshaw.
James Reisa introduced the formal evening program. “This is a night of education,” he said, “but it is practical and pointed education, because only an informed public can make the decisions and demand the action that is so critically needed right now.” He credited biology professor Allison L. Burnett with the idea and structure for the event. Dr. Burnett explained that they called it a teach-out because for too long universities had been cloistered institutions for a privileged few, and they planned to make the university accessible to the community with initiatives and resources. They intended to create, that night, the Northwestern Community for a Better Environment.
Tech was packed with local, regional, and national media. WGN, NBC, and CBS sent camera crews and floodlights. There were radio crews from WFMT, WIND, WBBM, and midwestern colleges, reporters from the wire services and many midwestern newspapers, and a correspondent for Playboy.
A press release from after the event with a roundup of media coverage.
Featured speakers
Illinois Lieutenant Governer Paul Simon, Treasurer Adlai Stevenson III, and Attorney General William J. Scott. Photo by Bob Hinshaw.
Dean Robert Strotz read a telegram from New York City Mayor John Lindsay. Photo by Bob Hinshaw.
The main program featured scientists, including Lamont Cole of Cornell, Lawrence Slobodkin of SUNY Stony Brook, and Peter Flawn of the University of Texas. Barry Commoner of Washington University, who would be on the cover of Time a week later, and Paul Ehrlich of Stanford, author of The Population Bomb, had also become public figures. Also featured were three Illinois politicians who had been active on pollution issues: Lieutenant Governor Paul Simon, Treasurer Adlai Stevenson III, and Attorney General William Scott. Finally, there was attorney Victor Yannacone, who had gained attention for legal actions against the Atomic Energy Commission and the use of DDT. NSBE’s Casey Jason called for a standing ovation for Vinton Bacon, who had recently been removed as the head of the Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago for taking on corruption. See video of each address on the Multimedia page.
The speakers touched on wide-ranging issues under the umbrella of “ecology” and the relation of industry to the planet–some more scientific and some more dramatic. Several of the speakers, including Stevenson, who was running for the U.S. Senate, discussed political inaction and criticized President Nixon’s proposal for water pollution measures (in his State of the Union address the day prior). “Pollution is the step-child of affluence,” Stevenson said, but politics can be our “cutting edge” if people demand change. In the meantime, the government spent more on the war in Vietnam in two weeks than it had spent on air pollution in ten years. With spending on projects like Apollo 11: “We reach for the stars, and we can’t see the sky.”
Barry Commoner. Photo by Bob Hinshaw.
Illustration by Bill Kroyer for The Daily Northwestern, January 28, 1970. Courtesy of The Daily Northwestern.
A major theme was that, in ecology, everything is interconnected and must be confronted at once. “If the president wants to be the first eco-president,” Dr. Commoner said, “let him declare, for example, the ecological inadmissability of modern warfare.” Some of the speakers discussed alarming predictions about population growth, but stressed that the issue could not be separated from urgent social needs or efforts to address pollution. Dr. Slobodkin warned that the ecological crisis was being “subverted as a way of excusing a do-nothing policy and a way of ignoring elementary criteria of normal social justice,” while he believed population growth should be addressed by ensuring social justice, strong social security, equal opportunities for women, access to birth control, and access to well-funded nursery schools. Dr. Ehrlich discussed how the over-developed countries have to “de-develop” and help the rest of the world to avoid repeating the same mistakes. “We have got to switch from a cowboy economy to a spaceman economy,” he said. “We cannot keep the legions marching around the globe in order to protect our resource base. Our affluence is based on what we take from the underdeveloped countries of the world, and don’t kid yourself about it.”
Yannacone closed out with the longest address, and drew the most energy with his calls to take legal action to win rights to a healthy environment and reproductive choice and to “housebreak industry.” The crowd was moved by his call that each of them go out and “sue somebody!” There was discussion through the rest of the event of gathering funds to take on ComEd.
A photo spread from the 1970 yearbook. Courtesy of Syllabus Yearbook.
Mike Chosa speaking for representatives of the Native American Committee of Chicago. Photo by Bob Hinshaw.
In the middle of Dr. Slobodkin’s address, some 20 members of the Native American Committee of Chicago approached the stage, including some who were in traditional dress and carried signs. Amid some confused laughter and then applause, Dr. Slobodkin invited them to the stage and offered the microphone. See a clip of this moment below from the film NSBE took of the Teach-out.
Photo by Bob Hinshaw.
“We came here to express our views on what we term pollution, the real pollution, the pollution that you, the white, American, middle class, or what have you—I don’t want to get real radical…I’d like to…”
A member of the group, Mike Chosa, took the microphone. “What you see is what’s left of our nation,” he said. “We didn’t come here to steal your show,” but “came here to make certain demands.” He suggested Northwestern take its shares out of ComEd and put that money toward scholarships. He demanded that Northwestern provide 15 employment opportunities for Native Americans or offer 15 scholarships to Native students; engage representatives of the Native American Committee as speakers to teach “the truth about the American Indian”; and confront the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs which have “polluted our air, our lands, our religion, and our minds.”
Film by Northwestern Students for a Better Environment. Courtesy of McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives.
Dr. Slobodkin resumed his address thereafter. The speakers who followed were supportive of NAC’s message. Dr. Ehrlich commented that as part of the “population explosion” over the planet, and with the cooperation of “reprehensible outfits” in government, humanity has been losing its cultural diversity. He criticized dominant Western society for having “the gall to feel that it has all the answers and that there might not be a great deal of value for humanity in the worldview of the Hopi, or in the kinship system of the aborigines, or in lots of other things.”
“I’ve heard records of breezes / And you tell me you felt one?”
The crowd gathered on stage during Paxton’s performance. Photo by Bob Hinshaw.
Folk singer and guitarist Tom Paxton, with David Horowitz on piano, came on shortly after midnight for a “sing-out.” The audience, some with tape recorders, had already crept onto the stage when they started their set. “Obviously, I don’t have an hour’s worthy of ecological songs,” Paxton said. He said he would also do a couple for fun and some others that had been keeping him “off Ed Sullivan for years now.” Paxton performed a number of satirical and protest songs. (A 1968 New York Times profile described his songs as “about rabbits, pot, freeways, friends”). At a few points he took a drink of water from a laboratory beaker that was going around the crowd.
Paxton said that getting ready to perform that night led him to finish a song he’d wanted to write for a long time, “Whose Garden Was This?” A much-covered and performed song of the period, it takes the perspective of learning about a natural world that no longer exists. Watch a clip below from the end of the set: after the crowd started to get up and Paxton was asked to make a call for donations, he decided to play “Whose Garden Was This?” a second time.
Film by Northwestern Students for a Better Environment. Courtesy of McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives.
Dr. Ehrlich in the press room. Photo by Department of University Relations.
The organizers set up a press room that was filled with student press, local reporters, and national media. Writing for Playboy (and later published by Playboy in a book of essays titled Project Survival), Geoffrey Norman described the scene as speakers came through for press conferences after they left the stage. Faced with alarmist questions from a young reporter in a three-piece suit, Dr. Slobodkin tried to discourage sensationalism. The reporters explained that they hadn’t heard the speeches: the press room had no hookup to the auditorium, which was about a half-mile away. Dr. Ehrlich gave a “full week’s shrill headlines” and quotable responses to the press before he had to catch a plane for a similar meeting the next morning.
The 20 study sections, spread out over lecture rooms and classrooms throughout the building, were scheduled to run on a half-hour repeating basis until dawn. Lecture room 5 wsas given over to coffee and donuts, and other lecture rooms screened films or hosted student group cooperative meetings. Section topics ranged from “how to save a lake,” concerns with nuclear power, and legal approaches to confronting pollution to ethical considerations and the “psychological problems of overcrowding.” Sections were lead by scholars and scientists as well as graduate students like Art Purcell, who was “something of an expert on the internal combustion engine” and wrote about the sections, “when the audience had a chance to speak,” for the Northwestern Report.
There was no formal attempt to make people change sections, so most were open-ended discussions as people came and went. Some sections closed down by 3 a.m., and The Daily Northwestern reported that what before “seemed like some kind of giant party” became “a common experience shared by an ever-diminishing number of participants,” but the conversation in the remaining sections grew more sophisticated and technical. They also grew more heated. Purcell wrote that “hell literally broke loose” after a man in attendance bravely identified himself as a representative of ComEd. The section climaxed after the man admitted that the company hadn’t installed a piece of antipollution equipment because it would cost $50 million, and half a dozen people jumped to their feet and yelled for the company to spend it. Purcell said this sort of thing went on in many of the sections while hundreds of people stayed and talked, and it “was enough to give you hope.”
E. Kitch Childs and Michael Mark. Photo by Bob Hinshaw.
The study sections quieted down by 5 a.m., and shortly thereafter those still in attendance returned to the auditorium to wait for the dawn sing-out scheduled for 7 a.m.
By the time E. Kitch Childs and Northwestern music student Michael Mark returned to the stage, joined again by an audience member on bass violin, there were about 300 people left in attendance. Likely because of the trio’s performance the night before to national media, a press release later reported that NSBE got a call from California the next day requesting the name of the impromptu group’s booking agent.
The Daily Northwestern reported that the sing-out itself was interrupted by efforts to collect more money to take legal action against the proposed ComEd nuclear plant. The musicians finished with a chorus of “Good-Bye, It’s Been Good to Know You.”
It was estimated in the end that volunteers had distributed 9,000 cups of coffee and 7,200 donuts.
Aftermath and Legacy
Read on to learn about the teach-out’s aftermath and NSBE’s activity in the following years.
Sources
This page draws on archival collections and other resources from Northwestern University Libraries, in addition to some external publications. Visit the Bibliography page for more information about these sources. Certain library resources may only be accessible online to those with Northwestern University credentials. All library resources are accessible for on-site research at the McCormick Library of Special Collections & University Archives. For assistance with access or reference questions, please contact specialcollections@northwestern.edu.