Word: offner
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When Carl Offner, a seventh-grade math teacher, recently told his students that he had been arrested in an anti-war demonstration he got neither hisses nor applause in response. The class merely looked at him, puzzled. No one knew anything about the war in Vietnam...
...recounting that story, Offner seems bitter. "It's like they (the politicians, businessmen and the media that represents them) are re-writing history," he says. "It's like none of it ever happened...
...years ago, when Offner was a third-year graduate student in mathematics here and a member of the Progressive Labor faction of SDS, the war was a national obsession. Pamphlets and petitions circulated through Harvard dorms; students held workshops and teach-ins. Body counts appeared nightly on the television news. The war was, as former Crimson President James M. Fallows '70 recollects, "a reality that couldn't be denied...
Former SDS members take credit for at least a large part of the political education students received here at the time. "It wasn't just demonstrating and taking over buildings," Offner says. "It was hard work, leafletting, petitioning, bringing out the facts to people...
...were the people who built the movement, though, the people who opened the door and saw what was going on inside, however briefly, "Carl Offner, a former member of the Worker-Student Alliance said...