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29 AN T I OC H CO L L E G E C L A S S O F 19 6 5 5 0 t h A N N I V E R S A R Y B O O K A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z D i S A L V O DiSALVO JACKIE FAMI LY 4 Husband, Doug Ferrari 4 Son, Daniel CONTACT jdisalvo@nyc.rr.com Y O U C A N ’ T U N D E R S T A N D Antioch’s enormous influence on my life unless you know my background. I must have been led there by my unconscious, driving me uninten- tionally as far away as possible from my past. Born in Brooklyn, I grew up as a working class kid from a hard pressed little, all-white N.J. suburb; by the time I was in graduate school, young men there I knew and loved had dropped out of high school, be- come heroin addicts and were going back and forth to jail. None of my family and few friends went to col- lege, and I only got there through a rigorous if conservative Catholic ed- ucation as well as full scholarships. Since my teachers were the only pro- fessionals I’d known,not surprisingly I would become one myself. My academic aspirations prob- ably arose from being totally para- lyzed by polio at five, hospitalized a year, and to regain my muscles had to unceasingly force them mentally to move, and that willfulness made me a striver. Moreover, listening to all of us children, crying together, in- stilled an empathy which led to my mostly thinking of “us,”not just “me,” while stigma as a “cripple”both gen- erated my identification with other oppressed people and goaded me to compensate via academic success. It was a shock, however, after re- pressive Catholic orthodoxy to meet at Antioch some unpatriotic social- ists, atheists, and even proponents of extramarital sex. My quest to recon- cile those conflicting perspectives would mold me into a radical intellec- tual. My co-op jobs also fostered my politics. I had never even known an African-American till I worked in an interracial summer camp, and falling in love with a counselor from Harlem exploded any inherited prejudices as well as the myth of American democ- racy and cemented my opposition to the racism I now experienced pain- fully, personally. Co-ops with poor, homeless children and in East Harlem, in a feminist commune, and finally in Mississippi Freedom Summer solidi- fied my radical commitment. Thus, my career can’t be sepa- rated from my political work.While pursuing an M.A. in English at the University of Wisconsin, I was drawn into sit-ins against war, and the thrill- ing intellectual collaboration in which we began to analyze U.S. society.Later at Berkeley I reported on the Black Panthers for Liberation News Service, a publication aimed at countrywide alternative newspapers. When I re- turned to Wisconsin for my Ph.D. as a Woodrow Wilson fellowship, I was also one of the first female recipients of a Danforth grant.There I became a leader in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and its fight against rac- ism and the Vietnam War, planning demonstrations that shut down class- rooms and streets and addressing ral- lies of thousands,for which I was once denounced on the radio and earned my first file with the local“Red Squad” and perhaps also the FBI. I was also powerfully affected by the strike which founded the first Graduate Assistants’ union when it shut down the university and in 2011 would initiate the occupation of the State Capitol.As a result I finally began to understand what it meant to be working class, which I never learned at progressive Antioch, where I just felt myself a misfit.Academia,however, was still the McCarthyist University I called it, dominated by a faculty and curriculum resulting from that era’s fear and conformity. Students re- volted, demanding more progressive content and a student centered peda- gogy.We interrupted our classes and began to organize our own interdis- ciplinary study of history, sociology, philosophy, culture and their inter- connection where we learned about the history of class society and its ide- ologies, the labor movement, and got a Marxist economics course so over- enrolled we had to run its discus- sion sessions ourselves.We in English sought to replace the reigning apoliti- cal formalism with more relevant his-