The personification is political: activists in the classroom.

Responding to my introduction on a class blog, one student wrote: "Please don't take this offensively [sic] because I don't mean to be, but my goodness, you have the opposite viewpoints of most people I have ever grown up listening to." My goodness, indeed. I teach the state's top high schoolers at an esteemed four-year public university. My students have taken years of history and civics and soaked up plenty of television, radio, newspaper, and Internet, and presumably met a whole lot of teachers. I say presumably because this first-year student had not, she seemed to say, ever heard a pro-feminist, anti-war, antiracist critique offered by a teacher.

I was myself an undergrad with conservative family roots and religiously pious parents who were suspicious of learning. I embraced, perhaps too enthusiastically, all things radical and fell happily, and luckily, into the classroom of an activist university Comp Lit professor who took care to avoid becoming a cartoon agent of "opposite viewpoints." He moderated his role as radical by inviting students to make points he might otherwise have made, further charming students who adored him and mollifying those who didn't. And when it came time to discuss E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, an obviously loaded choice, he brought in a fellow faculty member with terrific credentials who, importantly, wasn't him (but also doubled the number of radical teachers in the classroom).

Twenty-five years later, I embrace this tactic. I've hosted dozens of community activists in the classroom, toward expanding the roster of people my students will be taught by and to introduce them to real-life activists. Among many guests has been a union organizer originally from El Salvador who was just then coordinating a walkout by campus housekeeping staff, a registered nurse advocating single-payer healthcare in California. There was the retired math lecturer--also a health care reform advocate--who replied to my question about why, well into his seventies, he was an activist. A tall, elegant man in a suit and tie, he recited from memory Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life" on the spot, causing me to tear up and leaving an impression on students I could only dream of making: "Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and departing, leave behind us footprints on the sands of time." Whoa!

I asked the same question of a student working to divest the University of California from businesses selling to Sudan. She didn't hesitate, identifying herself as Armenian-American and raised, she said, on stories of that genocide. When she hears about genocide, she said, "I know what it means."

Reps from the campus's small Amnesty International and California Public Interest Research Group (Calpirg) chapters offered answers smart and poignant to my Big Question, and when I remembered to ask on a subsequent visit, that union organizer explained that his family had sent him to the U.S. as a high schooler, after his name appeared on a paramilitary death squad list in San Salvador. And here perhaps my very best story: The white organizer with the Coalition of Imokalee Workers showed up with a small, handsome Guatemalan man who stood quietly in the corner until he was introduced. CIW works nationally to bring labor contracts to fieldworkers, famously protesting slave labor conditions exploited by the likes of Taco Bell, which faith, human rights, labor, and student groups were boycotting. As I listened to him speak, the young guy's story sounded familiar. I quickly realized that I'd read about him in New Yorker reporter John Bowe's "Nobodies: Does Slavery Exist in America?" about a nineteen year old named Romeo Ramirez who sneaked into an agricultural workers' compound and rescued women held as slaves by labor contractors, later the focus of a Justice Department investigation and prosecutions. Romeo, a shy but articulate man, had for his bravery won that year's Robert Kennedy Human Rights award for fighting "to end slave labor, human trafficking and exploitation in agriculture fields across the U.S."

My students were blown away. Me? I had organized this astonishing moment in a shabby temporary mobile home classroom at eight in the morning in conservative south Orange County. I was responsible, as teacher, for making it happen. But, finally, it had little to do with me or my putative radicalism and everything to do with a real person presenting--no, living--a real-life perspective which perhaps challenged the viewpoints of people my students had grown up listening to. For a short essay by Romeo Ramirez, see Global Uprising: Confronting the Tyrannies of the 21st Century, edited by Neva Welton and Linda Wolf (New Society Publishers, 2001).

Andrew Tonkovich

University of California / Irvine