The “sixties,” as we know, did not end on December 31, 1969. The war in Southeast Asia continued. Racism didn’t evaporate. Feminist organizations dedicated to combatting patriarchy were just being organized. And America was confronted by a corrupt and secretive presidency that attacked “enemies,” domestic and foreign, and would end only with a resignation provoked by the threat of impeachment. There was plenty to keep activists busy.

Many different paths opened before me. In 1972, after a year at the United States Servicemen’s Fund (USSF), I returned to full-time teaching at a college, the State University of New York’s College at Old Westbury. I wondered: Could I apply some of the lessons learned in nearly a decade of movement activity? Would the teaching and scholarly work I had begun at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and at The Feminist Press be politically relevant? This new SUNY campus was an untried experiment that hadn’t existed ten years earlier. Now the college was under construction in opulent Old Westbury, where the zoning then required two acres to build a house—or, more accurately, a mansion. The new campus, once the F. Ambrose Clark family estate, included some five hundred wooded acres belonging to a network of fancy establishments that once upon a time graced Long Island’s North Shore. In the beginning, the college had been located in another elegant domain, the Planting Fields Arboretum in Oyster Bay. The SUNY system had shut down that first version of the college, in part because it gave birth to the radical Puerto Rican Young Lords Party. But more troublesome, its students and faculty, oriented to 1960s beliefs, and its liberal president, Harris Wofford, were unable to agree on governance structures and central elements of the curriculum. Now, SUNY College at Old Westbury was to reemerge as one among a number of experimental colleges—like Hampshire, Evergreen State, Governors State, Naropa University—across the country.

I asked myself: Could this innovative college become a movement outpost? Could a largely new faculty and student body pursue movement priorities: a commitment to social justice, open access for an unusually diverse student body, hiring an equally diverse faculty, and establishing a curriculum informed by freedom school values?