Peter Bohmer Oral History Interview

Item

Identifier

BohmerPeter

Title

Peter Bohmer Oral History Interview

Date

31 July 2019

16 August 2019

Creator

Peter Bohmer

Contributor

Anthony Zaragoza

extracted text

Peter Bohmer
Interviewed by Anthony Zaragoza
The Evergreen State College oral history project
July 31, 2019
FINAL

Zaragoza: If you would just start by telling us your name and where you’re from.
Bohmer: Okay. Peter Bohmer. I was born in 1944, during World War II, in Queens, New York, a part of
Queens called Rego Park. My parents and my grandparents had left the Austro-Hungarian Empire. My
grandparents-three from what is today the Czech Republic and one from Slovakia—spoke mainly
German or Hungarian growing up. The grandparents moved to Vienna as young adults, and my parents
were both born in Vienna.
My mom, which was unusual, had a high school degree, and worked as a gym teacher and as an
exercise-dance teacher. Very beautiful. My father was younger, and his father, they were pretty well
off. They made shoes. He dropped out of school in the eighth grade. The Nazis either invaded Austria
or were welcomed into Austria in 1938. My parents said more welcomed than invaded, because there
was really strong pro-Nazi support in Austria.
My father, because his dad had been active in the Jewish community, was arrested when the
German Nazis entered Austria. It was really more a prison run by the Nazis in Vienna rather than a
concentration camp, but it was hard. He was beaten a lot. My mom worked hard to get him released.
He got out after, I believe, four months, it may have been a bit longer. They got married a few days
afterward, and then they went across the border to France. They wanted to go to Australia because
they were afraid of the violence in the United States from the movies. They couldn’t get a visa to
Australia. It was very hard for Jewish people to get visas to other countries. But they found some
sponsors, I don’t know how, well-off Jews in New York who supported their immigration and helped
them get permission to live in the United States.
They got a visa. They came on a very big ship. One of the really big trans-Atlantic liners. They
came to New York in 1939. They lived in a tenement in the Upper West Side through 1943. It’s sad. My
dad was a very talented person. He was working at the Brooklyn Navy Shipyard and my mom had
gotten pregnant with me. She was afraid they didn’t speak English well. My dad spoke to someone at
the shipyard who said if my dad would pay him a small amount of money, he would not be drafted into
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the army and have to go fight, even though he was working on building ships for the military. My dad
had worked both as a draftsman and as a machinist.
The guy who my dad paid probably was crooked and being watched by the FBI. My father got
arrested with the criminal charge of avoiding the draft. The FBI pressured my dad a lot, and my mom,
too and said to them, “If you say you’re guilty, nothing much will happen.” My dad got a three-year
sentence. So when I was born, he was in a federal prison in Atlanta. It was a big family secret. I never
knew until I was 18 that my father, Willy, did almost a year in prison and was then released. I was 10
months old when he got out of prison.
We were living in Rego Park, Queens, New York City. They had moved there into a rentcontrolled apartment in 1943 just before my dad went to prison. I have a brother, Roger, two years
younger. We grew up in this apartment building. My mom lived there until she died in 2007, she was
97 years old. My grandmother, my mom’s mom, also lived with us. She went from Austria to Sweden
and then to Havana, Cuba to escape the Nazis and worked as a cook there during World War II, from
1940 to 1946. Just before my brother Roger was born, she came to the U.S. So the five of us lived in a
one-bedroom apartment. But then, when I got to seven or eight, they got a two-bedroom apartment in
the same building. Rent control made housing affordable.
I grew up in Rego Park, a neighborhood that was very white ethnic. For example, my public high
school had 5,000 students and only 100 black students, and maybe 100 Puerto Ricans in the whole
school. It was large majority Jewish. There were some Irish Americans and Italian Americans but they
mainly went to Parochial School. I hardly knew any WASP people until I got to college. I was a very good
student. I played sports a lot but I was very much into math.
I was really good in math, and got a partial scholarship and a loan to go to MIT. I graduated a
year early from high school and went in 1961 to MIT. Roger came there a year later. He had skipped
two years. He wasn’t even 16 when he finished high school. I was social. I felt a little bit inadequate in
high school, especially with the good students, mostly because they came from much more intellectual
backgrounds. I made a switch in the economic class of students I hung out with from junior high school
to high school. Most of my friends before high school were mainly working-class, and the majority did
not go to college and if they did, it was a public college, usually Queens College. In high school, even
with my new friends, though, I usually didn’t know the right authors and words. I increasingly socialized
with the intellectual kids, the ones who wanted to go to elite colleges. I didn’t shun my friends who I
lived around, but I spent less time with them.
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Zaragoza: Then in college, what do you study? What are your major interests at that point?
Bohmer: In some ways, I really wasn’t fully prepared for college and MIT and living on my own. I came
from a really strict home. Like a lot of immigrants, the family was everything. It was a very loving home
but strict, e.g., we could hardly go out at night and spent most weekends with our parents. So in college,
I didn’t have much self-discipline. I went to MIT as a math major and had really bad study habits. And
math, up through calculus, or even a little more advanced than that, was really easy. I remember in a
second-year calculus class although I was a freshman, when the teacher got sick he asked me to teach
the class for a month although I was one of the only first-year students.
But then—I believe it was bad study habits—when it got to really theoretical stuff, all of a
sudden it was really hard, and I began to get Cs. I think if I’d had better study habits, I would have been
better, but I just think when it got to very theoretical math like modern algebra and topology, it was no
longer easy. I was very good at applied math, but the really theoretical stuff was very difficult for me.
Zaragoza: That story is exactly my math story. I started majoring in math, and then when there were
math puzzles that I could just get quick, easy. But then, like you say, when it becomes theoretical, and
you have to sit with a math textbook, I didn’t want to do that.
Bohmer: I didn’t want to, and it was really hard for me. I think I loved math, partly because I was good
at it and it was easy. Was that true for you, too?
Zaragoza: Yeah, I like puzzles.
Bohmer: Yeah, math problems. I forgot, but I was on the math team in high school. In my senior year, it
was the first time a regular public high school—not one of the special schools— won the city
championship and I was a key part of that winning team. So difficult math problems, in geometry and
especially algebra, really engaged me.
At the end of my sophomore year at MIT, I switched my major to economics from math
although with a major continuing concentration in mathematics. I didn’t really understand much about
the economy, but economics was easy for me because it was quite mathematical and had a similar logic
to mathematics. I am talking about neoclassical mainstream economics. At that time—this was the
mid-1960s— you could just get a degree in economics or humanities at MIT, so I ended up getting a
degree in economics and math, but I filled up the math much more with applied math classes as
opposed to the super-theoretical ones.

3

I wasn’t a particularly good student my first two years at MIT, I didn’t go to a lot of classes and
stayed up very late. I was a very good poker player, and I won a few thousand dollars playing poker but
in some ways it was like a job. I won because I had a lot of energy, and so I would usually be pretty even
until about midnight or 1:00 am. The games would go all night, and other people would be tired or they
would have a drink or so. Most of my winning came very late at night. I was not good enough to be a
professional player, but I was very good for college. I was also on the bridge team and tennis team at
MIT. I played all sorts of intramural sports, so that took a lot of time. I wasn’t very happy at MIT and
almost transferred. But at the beginning of my junior year, I got happier. My study habits improved, I
began to attend class regularly. In terms of grades, I did well in college my last two years, not my first
two.
By 1962, I began to get really interested in the Civil Rights Movement. Intellectually, MIT was a
somewhat conservative and not very politically engaged place at that time, and partly getting active is
caused by meeting people who are activists when you are ready and I did not know many people who
were. I remember a friend of mine—he was one of the few African Americans on campus and a dorm
tutor, we went to a meeting he had invited me to, my freshman year. It was about Communism. I
wasn’t anti-Communist but neither was I sympathetic or knowledgeable. The speaker was Fred
Schwartz, a virulent anti-communist. Schwartz’s talk was about how to figure out who were
Communists. We both snuck out.
Zaragoza: Like J Edgar Hoover-type stuff?
Bohmer: Fred Schwartz. Yeah, he was totally right wing. I remember another example from my first
year at MIT. The teaching assistant in my introductory to macroeconomics class was Stephen Hymer,
who became a leading Marxist economist but who died at an early age, in his 30’s. You may know his
name. He wrote very insightfully, years after I had him as a teacher about U.S. imperialism and unequal
development. Paul Samuelson, probably the most prominent economist at the time was the professor
for the class, I believe it was introduction to Microeconomics. In the discussion class, led by Hymer, we
were talking about income inequality. I said, “I think we should make income more equal, by taxing the
rich more and not have poor people pay taxes.” He said, “What are you, a Communist?” Of course, he
was being sympathetic, but I was so offended by that, I didn’t go to class for the rest of the quarter
because I thought he was attacking me.
So I was definitely a liberal, and my parents, they had really, really good values and were
strongly anti-fascist but they also felt totally powerless. The idea that you could actually change society
4

through organizing and social movements, was totally outside of their belief system. For me, growing up
in the 1960’s, this belief that people organizing and mobilizing, that social movements matter and can
change society became fundamental to my being. I got the values from my parents, but the activism
from the 1960’s and it has stayed with me.
By 1963 or 1964 I was reading magazines like The Nation and then Ramparts. I developed a
strong position against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. I supported total U.S withdrawal from Vietnam and
was also becoming politicized and increasingly critical of mainstream politics and economic analysis
although I wasn’t yet a radical. I didn’t go to the South as a Civil Rights worker although I admired those
who did. I collected supplies, and did some volunteer work in the black community in Cambridge, like
refereeing basketball, tutoring, coaching, from 1963 to 1965.
April, 1965 was the first big Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) demonstration against the
Vietnam War. They called for immediate withdrawal which was criticized by the more mainstream antiwar groups. SDS expected a few thousand people and it ended up being about 20,000. I heard about it
and wanted to go, but couldn’t find anyone to go with, so I didn’t go in the end but I followed it closely.
So in my undergraduate years at MIT, 1961 to 1965, I studied economics and math, and had
many friends. I played a lot of sports. I wasn’t really an activist, but a lot of the ideas—particularly what
was going on in the South and Vietnam—were really capturing my attention. I began to realize I was
much more interested in that than the economics I was studying.
Zaragoza: What’s the next step for you? What happened after college?
Bohmer: I finished MIT, and even though it was this elite school, I didn’t really know much about
college when I went. I wanted to make it into the middle class, or what I now call the professional
managerial class and I thought MIT would be my ticket and would also be the best for advancing in math
and having the best math education possible.
So in 1965, as I was approaching graduation for a Bachelor of Science (BS) degree, I was worried
about being drafted. At the time, from a reformist point of view, I wanted to get a job working for a
labor union. I was pro-labor although not anti-capitalist. I did not actually know how to find a job
working for a labor union. I was getting grades of A in most of my economics classes my junior and
senior year, so some of the faculty there said, “What are you going to do afterward?” I said, “I don’t
really know.” They said, “We can help you get into grad school”. A major reason of who advances is
whom you know. I got a lot of offers for fellowships, for tuition and expenses being covered in many
Ph.D. programs in economics although I hadn’t thought about going to grad school before November or
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December of my senior year in college. I picked Northwestern University because it was supposed to be
a very good economics department, and they offered me a fellowship that paid my living expenses, and
free tuition for my graduate studies without having to be a Teaching Assistant so I went there.
Zaragoza: Northwestern in Chicago?
Bohmer: Yes in Evanston which borders Chicago. I had never been to a demonstration before I went
there. It’s funny, I went to some SDS meetings, but again, I was afraid of not getting into the middle
class and I wouldn’t sign attendance sheets at the meetings although I challenged my mom who said,
“Never sign anything,” because they had suffered quite a bit. But I would say to her “We live in a
democracy, so we should be able to sign an attendance sheet of a group critical of government policies
without repercussions.” I pointed out the contradiction.
I went to a few demonstrations in support of integration In Evanston in 1965-1966. Evanston
was mainly white and there was a segregated Black community. You know Evanston, Illinois?
Zaragoza: A little bit.
Bohmer: It was a very segregated city. The school was almost totally white. Through playing a lot of
poker, I knew a lot of the basketball players who also played so I possibly knew a third to a half of the
black students at the school. It was a tiny proportion in this elite, very fraternity and WASP dominated
wealthy, private university.
I began to meet people who were against the war, students who came up from the University of
Chicago. I wouldn’t say I was an activist or leftist yet, but I began to see major changes in myself, and I
began to question a lot of what I had studied. At Northwestern, I took a class on comparative economic
systems with an outstanding professor, Professor Karl De Schweinitz. I don’t know if he was a socialist,
but he taught us about socialism and socialist writers and after that class I began to consider myself prosocialist.
By the summer of 1966, I was changing my priorities and world view quite rapidly. I was
working a terrible job outside of D.C. It was a think tank connected to the military. I was hired to do
research about the Japanese economy. Specifically, if a war broke out or threatened between China and
the U.S., would Japan side with China because the costs of being a U.S. ally were too high? It was
reactionary research. I had no energy for it and never completed the research. I’ve never had energy
for things or projects I don’t care about.

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I went to some demonstrations against the Vietnam War in D.C.., where I lived that summer.
While I was there, I learned that Robert Solow, an MIT professor who I had done really well in his
classes, even though he ended up really disliking me, had told my brother, Roger, the following: “Peter’s
a really good economist. He’s excellent at math, and we’ll take him back at MIT and give him a full
scholarship for completing his Ph.D. We’ll match Northwestern.” So that’s why I went back to MIT.
Upon returning to MIT in the Ph.D. program in fall, 1966, I became more and critical of what I
was studying, neoclassical economics that supported for example, U.S. corporate investment in the
Third World, and critical of most of the students who seemed more concerned about advancing their
careers than the economic and social implications of what they were studying.
The summer of 1967 was a turning point in my life. I was studying for my qualifying exam for
my PhD, which I planned to take in fall, 1967—and really disliking neoclassical economics more and
more, a lot, doing my study half-assedly. I was getting increasingly involved in Vietnam Summer, my
first organizing experience. We would go door to door and try to talk about the war if people were
willing to talk to us. I did two neighborhoods. One was working-class and one a little bit less so in
Boston. Most people wouldn’t talk, and they’d slam the door on us. A lot of them thought I was against
the soldiers who were in Vietnam, if you were against the war. But some people invited us in, and even
though I was somewhat shy—I had a slideshow— and they were interested in learning more. They
would often invite some neighbors, and then have the meeting, show the slideshow. I slowly became
more confident and found this organizing and my fellow organizers in Vietnam Summer much more
interesting and thoughtful and relevant than most of my fellow economics graduate students.
I began realizing I had so much more energy for activism than I had for school. You know, we
would figure out, should we do lobbying, should we organize protests? All of a sudden, I was becoming
a different and better human being. So that, and then October 1967 was a really big event for my
transformation into a committed activist. This was the very famous march on the Pentagon. I went with
many friends from Boston. It was one of the really major protests against the U.S. War against Vietnam,
maybe half a million people. We had a permit until 5:00 P.M., and I remember a speaker who really
challenged and affected me, Dick Gregory. He was a Civil Rights activist and also a comedian. He said,
“Are you all going to be 9:00 to 5:00 activists, are you going to just stop protesting because we don’t
have a permit or are you going to take a strong stand against the Vietnam War?”
I was so inspired by his talk. Nobody I was with was staying. However about 10,000 people
from around the country stayed at the Pentagon past 5 P.M. It was a very famous action because of
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Norman Mailer’s book on it, some of the theatrics, and when some demonstrators, mainly women—
were giving flowers to the military Police (MPs) on their bayonets. But what affected me most was
demonstrators letting themselves get hit, because what happened was once the last camera from the
BBC about 9:00-9:30 P.M. left, the military police (MPs) started hitting people with their rifles and
bayonet. I urged my fellow protesters to avoid being hit and in defense, to throw rocks at the attacking
MPs. The violence, especially after the media left, really angered me. I stayed all night, and I loved and
felt part of this community of resisters. Many, including me, burned their draft cards.
Then I walked back—I was exhausted at about 7 am the next morning to D.C. where I was
staying, just across the bridge from the Pentagon, which was in Virginia. A few days later, my brother’s
girlfriend’s father, who was a writer for the New York Times told his daughter, Anne, who told us the
following. James Reston, who was a famous and respected columnist, he reminded me of Thomas
Friedman, a mouthpiece and confidant of the ruling class, especially the political elites, had a column on
the front page of the Times, not the opinion page. Reston wrote how the demonstrators turned violent,
militant, aggressive and so on. I saw that didn’t happen, and Anne told my brother, Roger, that Reston
had actually been in Denver, Colorado that weekend. However, if you read his article on the front page,
Reston didn’t actually say he was at this protest at the Pentagon, but anybody who read it would have
thought he was there. This further radicalized me as I had thought the New York Times was objective.
The U.S. war against Vietnam really changed my world view and analysis of the United States
and my commitments and priorities in life. At first I thought the Vietnam war was a horrible mistake,
that policy makers would soon end it. I remember writing many letters to government leaders, and even
for a short time in 1967, I was the head of the Bobby Kennedy for President committee in
Massachusetts, where I was living. I liked Bobby Kennedy at the time. I also had liked John Kennedy,
earlier. I was naïve in many ways. But then I began to understand that the causes of the Vietnam war
were more systemic, and I began to openly challenge the faculty at MIT for their liberal cold-war politics.
Even more than the economics department, many of the political science faculty at MIT had been or
were tied to the CIA or the U.S. military, receiving grants or as advisers. I began to really identify more
with social movements including the more radical and more militant ones.
So that’s some of my beginning involvement.
Zaragoza: After MIT, what’s your next step?
Bohmer: I was at MIT in the late 1960’s. I was mainly active at MIT but also with working class youth in
Cambridge. For example, I was in a collective that tried to organize at two public housing projects. The
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Black Panther Party was organizing like the black youth, and we were organizing the white youth. That
was very meaningful to me.
I was also in a coalition with many groups, including the Black Panther Party, the November
Action Coalition. Many people I knew joined the Weathermen. I did like their strong anti-imperialist and
anti-racist politics. However, I knew white working-class people were also oppressed, and the
Weathermen, who were often from upper-class backgrounds, denied the oppression of white workers
and focused on white privilege. I remember a leader of the Weathermen, in fall, 1969 (they later
changed their name to Weather or Weather Underground) saying, “The role of the white leftist is to run
the concentration camps where most whites would be put”. I was not very sympathetic to that position
to put it mildly, and found it reprehensible.
I was really active in the New Left and stopped working on my dissertation which I never got
going. My teaching assistantship at MIT ran out in spring, 1969 and I wasn’t enrolled in 1969-1070. So
the military wanted to draft me. Organizing militant resistance at the draft physical in Boston became
very common as opposition to the U.S. war against Vietnam became massive throughout society. Public
opinion against the war outside and inside the military grew substantially after the February, 1968 Tet
Offensive. The realization that the U.S. government was lying when it said victory was just around the
corner was a major reason. With three other people, we organized a riot at our physical for the army
which was the final step before being inducted. So I was rejected and not taken into the army for being
hostile and having violent tendencies. That is ironic, given it was in the middle of the violent and
murderous Vietnam War where the U.S. was responsible for at least two million deaths.
I was very hostile to and critical of MIT because of their active involvement in carrying out the
Vietnam War, in U.S. intervention abroad, e.g., in Latin America, and their large contracts with the
Defense Department and CIA. Because of very active organizing against this complicity, an injunction
was gotten by MIT against 10 of us, and I was banned from campus by spring 1970.
Zaragoza: Lifetime? Have you been back?
Bohmer: I was invited back by students to speak at MIT in 1980 to speak about activism and actions
there in the late 1960’s and 1970. I had been banned in 1970 and the MIT police chief came up to me in
1980, just before I spoke and he said, You cannot be here, legally” but he wasn’t going to do anything.
He asked me for my autograph and said, “It was the most interesting time of my life”, because not much
happens at MIT that involves the campus police.

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I forgot to say I took class from Noam Chomsky in 1968, Intellectuals and Social Change, and we
have been close since. Noam told me later, “MIT changed its admission policies after this period to take
more students in engineering, because almost all the activists were either humanities or science
majors.” There was a difference between the science students and the engineering students. MIT is
mainly engineering students again.
To protest the continued war research and the expulsion of the student body president, Michael
Albert, and active member of Rosa Luxemburg SDS, which I was very active in, we took over the MIT
President’s offices. We all got probation for the occupation, except for one student. He did a year in
jail for building the battering ram that we used to open the door to the office. We exposed the MIT-CIA
connections by hacking into the computer in the President’s office. MIT wasn’t t very happy about this,
nor was the CIA, by having these contracts being exposed.
The second day of the occupation, my friend George Katsiaficas and I—this was early 1970—we
tried to enter three large classes to ask the students to join the ongoing occupation. One teacher let us
in, and he said, “You can do a brief explanation and make a short announcement, which we did. The
two other teachers freaked out because we were going into their class. We didn’t hit anybody, but
there was a little bit of pushing and shoving.
George Katsiaficas and I got arrested for disturbing the school for trying to go into the two
classrooms. We got a 30-day sentence in district court, and we appealed it. We got a new trial but the
superior court judge gave us a 60-day sentence. It got added publicity because George’s mother who
was a public school teacher and Greek immigrant, got up in court and said, “My son is not a criminal.”
So she got 10 days for contempt in a much tougher place than we were, and went on a hunger strike
there. They released her after six days.
The two professors who testified against us lied about us in their testimony in court. They
claimed that we attacked them and came with a big mob, we were just by ourselves. People burned
down their offices the night we went to prison, but we had zero to do with it, but it did give us credibility
in prison. We got out a few days before the 60 days were up.
I had become a committed activist and radical and began to see myself as a revolutionary. It
was a very different period from now, one of a major growth of the college population and a high
demand for full-time faculty. You did not need to have completed your PhD to get a college teaching
job. So I applied to many public universities, and I got offered a job at San Diego State as an assistant
professor of economics. San Diego was attractive to me because of its proximity to the border which I
10

was very interested in and the large military population which I thought was important to reach out to in
order to support and work with the growing anti-war activism and consciousness of GI’s. I wanted to
learn more about Mexico, the border and immigration to the U.S. and San Diego seemed like a good
place for this.
Zaragoza: This was your first West Coast exposure.
Bohmer: I had never been to the West Coast. I had lived in Chicago but that was the farthest west I had
been. Also, I had friends saying—because I was so involved with opposing the Vietnam War— most of
the antiwar movement, we definitely didn’t see GIs as heroes, but we didn’t see them as baby killers,
except for a few. So I thought San Diego with its many military bases would be a strategic place to
move to in terms of deepening the anti-Vietnam war movement, especially but not limited to GI’s. I got
offered teaching positions at Sacramento State and Long Beach State--the West Coast was very romantic
to me. I started teaching at San Diego State in September 1970.
Zaragoza: How long were you in San Diego? Tell us about that period.
Bohmer: That was a very intense period. I taught for two years at San Diego State. I was a very popular
teacher because I was so active and students could see the connection between theory and practice. I
also learned a lot from the students because my classes—they were usually called EOP classes—were
often half or more Black/Latino students. It was a period, because of the demands of the Black
movement and the Mexican/Chicano movement, on and off campus, of a substantial growth of both
Black and Mexican students at San Diego State University, beginning in fall, 1968. In 1968, there were
about 50 students of Mexican background in a school of over 30,000. By the time I got there in 1970, it
had grown to about 1,800. Five to six percent was still far below the proportion of the population in San
Diego or California of Mexican heritage but it was a significant increase.
Zaragoza: EOP stands for Equal Opportunity Program.
Bohmer: Educational Opportunity Program. I remember one student who was Chicano from the county
east of San Diego, Imperial County. He invited me out there to learn about the Imperial Valley and meet
his family, it was 1971. It seemed like feudalism to me, the neighborhood where farmworker families
lived compared to the growers. These were permanent residents not migrants following the crops.
There were dirt roads, the houses were basically shacks, and you could see the houses of the growers,
these 20-plus-room houses. Even though I had seen a lot of poverty, inequality in New York, Boston and
Chicago, it was very visual to me the class and “race” inequality. I learned a lot that weekend which has
always stayed with me.
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I learned more about Mexico and Mexican people, and got really interested in the movements
there. Unfortunately, it was a repressive period in Mexico which has been more the rule rather than the
exception. It was also a repressive period in the U.S. Reagan was Governor of California and Nixon was
President. I became targeted in a major way. My second year teaching at SD State—I just had had my
contract renewed—there were charges against me coming from Governor Reagan’s office. They were a
variety of charges. One charge was that students who wanted to get into my classes when they were
full—my classes were very popular—that I gave preferences to enroll in them to white women and
black, Latino and Native American students, my classes were still about 40 percent white male.
Out of hundreds of students, two brought charges against me with the encouragement of
Reagan’s office -- one was an ROTC student and the main witness was a Vietnam vet who brought a lot
of charges against me. They included that I had discriminated against Vietnam vets, and that is why it
became a national case. The guy who brought it—I had students grade themselves, and he got an A in
fall but a B in spring semester which he claimed was discriminatory. One day in a comparative economic
systems class we were talking about China—I wasn’t a Maoist but pretty sympathetic to China in that
period. The focus on improving the lives of peasants and maintain a rural economy and population and
that peasants were deserving of dignity and respect and access to education and healthcare resonated
with me. We were finishing our section on the political economy of China when Dennis Kenneally spoke
up and said, “Why do we talk about Asians so much in this class? We all know they don’t value human
life like Americans do.”
I did get very angry. There were a lot of Iranian students in the class. They told them how racist
his comment was and that maybe it wouldn’t be comfortable for him in the class. Dennis Kenneally, the
Vietnam Vet, claimed I had threatened him and he became a cause celebre. There was also a brave
Vietnamese student, Phu, in this class. He spoke up a lot, especially against the Vietnam war and the
U.S. invasion. Phu was very antiwar. It’s a myth that all the Vietnamese in the U.S. supported the war,
there was an active group of anti-Vietnam war Vietnamese, the Union of Concerned Vietnamese
Students. Dennis Kenneally, the right-wing student said to Phu, “You know what we did to gooks like you
in Vietnam, we slit their throats.” Kenneally bragged how he once killed 50 people with a machine gun
from his helicopter. But he became this hero nationally to the right-wing because he was the one who
brought charges against me. The woman who lived next door to him was a very progressive person and
faculty at San Diego State, Jackie Tunberg. She said how there was pressure from Governor Reagan’s
office calling to bring charges against me that Kenneally told her about.

12

There were three hearings, one dealt with my behavior inside of class and a second dealt with my
behavior outside of class and the third dealt with all of them. Six thousand students signed a petition
supporting me. There were many big rallies and demonstrations. A few broke some laws, a few
windows got broken, but they basically were peaceful, large rallies, two of 1000 people plus, mainly
students. I didn’t control the rallies, but I got blamed for any rowdiness. I was cleared of all the charges
against me from all three hearings including from a national panel of AAUP faculty and investigators,
and the faculty union and economics faculty supported me very, very strongly. A very wonderful person
and economics faculty was Clint Jencks. He plays himself in the movie Salt of the Earth, an organizer of
the Mine, Mill and Smelter workers, one of the unions expelled from the CIO in the late 1940’s. Clint was
a wise and warm and caring human being, a fighter for justice who made the transition in the 1960’s
from the Old Left to the New Left. He represented to me very capably in these hearings. We worked
together.
(note: By New Left I meant the politics I identified with strongly. We differentiated ourselves from the
Old Left. It meant a politics that believed in revolutionary anti-capitalist transformation. We also
believed in the centrality of revolutions in the third world and the central role of struggles against racism
and sexism and the importance of Black Liberation Movements, that class exploitation was central to
U.S. society but so were racial and gender oppression. We also held strongly that we need to change
ourselves, our behavior and consciousness, as we revolutionized society and the importance of direct
and militant action.)
He and I went a few times to various communities, mainly Chicano working-class communities,
and showed the film, Salt of the Earth, one of my favorite films of all time. I still show it in class at
Evergreen. It is about a strike at a mine in New Mexico where workers win a strike by challenging sexism
among the miners. This movie is from the early 1950’s and based on an actual strike. It shows the
interrelation of race and gender oppression with class exploitation and the need to connect and
challenge all forms of oppression in order to transform this society, I organized the events but had Clint
Jencks talk about the film and its relevance when we showed it in the early 1970’s. I learned a lot from
Clint. He was a mentor of mine in San Diego. John Hardesty was another economics faculty who I
worked with a lot, a good friend and comrade.
Even though I was found innocent at all three hearings, the head of the California State University
system, Chancellor Glen Dumke fired me at the end of the school year, late May 1972. The faculty union
appealed my firing in the California courts, The American Economic Association examined my case and

13

as far as I know, it was the only firing of an economics professor where they found political
discrimination, but I didn’t get my job back. It went to the State Supreme Court, but because of my
behavior at one of the demonstrations, they ruled that they wouldn’t overrule Dumke’s decision. I may
have made some tactical errors.
I began to get a lot of death threats in San Diego, they began in spring 1971 from a group called the
Secret Army Organization, SAO. They used to be called the Minutemen—and they were statewide,
mainly anti-Communist and violent although white supremacist also.
Besides being frequently followed, there were escalating attacks and threats. I can’t remember
how many times from early 1971 to winter, 1972, two or more of my tires were slashed on my car, also
tear gas put inside my car and other cars of members of the collective house we lived in. In December
1971, because of all these threats, I sometimes carried a gun although I don’t like guns but for selfdefense. I had a permit also, because even though the police were not sympathetic to me but with all
these threats, they did give me a permit. I went into a gun shop that month and I saw this wanted
poster of me, wanted dead or alive--there were crosshairs and it gave my description and address—and
300 were made.
I knew most of the men’s basketball players, because many were in my class and I was into
basketball and other sports. They got me two tickets to the January 6th, 1972, Long Beach State-San
Diego State game. They got me front-row seats. I went with my friend and economics colleague, John
Hardesty. Most of the players were Black. They talked to me and with each other about the racism they
witnessed and experienced and how they were upset and angered by it, but thought not much could be
done about it or the risks were too high to challenge racism. They enthusiastically supported my antiracist and other activism. I remember once the captain of the team calling me from Hawaii to tell me
about the racism the team faced there. I came back after the game with John Hardesty. We saw all
these police outside the house. So I thought there was an arrest going on because I did have a few
bogus arrests at this time. We drove to a phonebooth and called the house I lived in on Muir Avenue in
the Ocean Beach community of San Diego.
What had actually happened while I was at the basketball game was there was a shooting into the
house, two shots. Earlier that day, there were threatening stickers on my office door at school, and
some friends who lived a block away and were doing GI organizing received a call, “Say good-bye to your
friends down the street.”

14

A woman I was living with, Paula Tharp, we weren’t lovers, even though it was portrayed that
way by the mainstream medias, was standing by the window. One bullet hit her in the elbow and
another bullet got lodged in the window frame. We said right away that the shooting was done by the
Secret Army Organization (SAO) because they had identified themselves by that name in many of their
death threats but the police didn’t do anything. We then formed a group the ‘”Committee to
Investigate Right-Wing Terrorism” that included many people committed to civil liberties that actively
publicized this case and right-wing threats and their fascist ideology.
A few months later the Secret Army Organization (SAO) put out a second wanted poster calling
for my death and it wrote how prominent liberals rather than burying me and supporting or carrying out
my murder, were instead coddling me. That came out I believe in April, 1972. We had moved out of the
house on Muir Ave. after the shooting and the members of our collective divided up into three
apartments. The local San Diego Nazi Party group shot into the house we had moved out of, after
publicly criticizing the SAO for having failed in their attempted assassination of me. In June, the SAO
(Secret Army Organization) bombed a pornography movie theater in downtown Olympia, claiming
pornography was a communist strategy to weaken the United States.
There were an undercover cop and a DA involved in prosecuting leftists in the theater at the
time of the bombing. I think they were just there, but they said they were there investigating the
theater. They received injuries. Prior to the bombing, the San Diego police claimed they knew nothing
about the January shooting into the house I lived in. After the bombing and also because of the political
pressure exerted by the prominent people named in the second wanted poster, the San Diego Police
demanded that the FBI turn over to them, police, the FBI informant inside the SAO. The main person in
the SA, Howard Barry Godfrey, was on the payroll of the FBI as an informant. The wanted poster, the
SAO put out on me, all of the information came from the FBI files on me. All of the SAO expenses, all of
the guns, all came from the FBI.
The San Diego police, arrested George Hoover, whom they claimed was the shooter, and also
another SAO member, William Yakopec, who the police charged with bombing the movie theater among
other charges. They both were convicted and got lengthy prison term. The FBI agent who hid the gun
after the shooting and knew about it, was fired, but the FBI effectively prevented testimony about their
role in this terrorism from being part of the trial.
It was a very intense period for me. There were constant death threats, our cars being firebombed, tear gas in our cars, being followed. Also a lot of arrests by the police, usually on minor
15

charges after demonstrations I participated in. Even if the charges were later dropped it took time and
energy.
A major reason there was repression against other activists and me and significant infiltration
into groups that I was involved in, was connected to President Nixon having planned to have the
Republican Convention in San Diego in the summer of 1972. We formed a really broad coalition, the San
Diego Convention Coalition (SDCC). We were organizing and planning teach-ins, a left fair and exhibition
of groups nationally and globally with audio hookup, large demonstrations and direct action before and
during the Convention. The attempt was to connect issues and movements opposed to the Nixon
administration.
I was actively involved in the SDCC, but wasn’t in the leadership of it because I was so active in
defending myself and anti-war organizing and teaching, plus community organizing. Some of the
Watergate people met with the SAO during this period, 1971-1972. Not Nixon directly- but the
Republican Party, the Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP), met with the SAO and other rightwing people to plan to disrupt our protests and possibly kidnap organizers including me during the
Republican Convention. When the SAO trials took place in fall, 1972, they said they had met with some
of the Nixon people, people who broke into Watergate. There was a direct connection between
Watergate and the Secret Army Organization and the FBI.
Zaragoza: Has that been documented anywhere?
Bohmer: It’s been documented, see for example, The New York Times, June 27, 1975, “A.C.L.U. Says FBI
Funded “Army” to Terrorize Young War Dissidents”. As a response to Watergate and to investigate
related government wrongdoing, the U.S. Senate established the Church Commission headed by Senator
Frank Church of Idaho. There were investigations both of the CIA and of domestic repression and
government spying. It focused too much on the attacks on liberals; repression was much greater against
left individuals and organizations, particularly the Black, Mexican and Native American left, but also
white leftists who were active, like me. We also were targeted, but much less than what happened to
many Black radical organizations such as the Black Panther party. But it was serious and illegal and
unconstitutional and the Church Commission had lengthy hearings.
The Los Angles American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) —a very progressive and active chapter—
volunteered to take this case on, on my behalf and three others In San Diego, including Paula Tharp,
who had been shot by the SAO in January 1972. Peter Young, a lawyer affiliated with the ACLU, prepared
an excellent brief for the Church Committee and a major lawsuit that sued not only the San Diego police
16

and FBI but up to and including Nixon. The problem was they didn’t put up enough resources into the
case, and they filed this huge lawsuit. Still, a lot is documented in the lawsuit document. I have a copy of
it that maybe I could make for the Archives.
The lawsuit ended up suing everybody who was indirectly or directly involved, Nixon, the heads
of the FBI, Kissinger, etc. It was too broad, because getting subpoenas for such a huge case was a major
undertaking. I do think the available evidence and the connected strong legal case against the
government and police agencies was unusual in terms of the many form of repression, including
violence against white radicals, although as I already mentioned, such repression including government
murder or sanctioned murder was more against radicals who were not white. The main lawyer in this
lawsuit, who recently died, Peter Young, had been one of the two lawyers in the Pentagon Papers case
he represented the less famous defendant, Anthony Russo. The lawsuit required a lot of money, I
believe the ACLU budgeted $10,000, which wasn’t enough. I have always had problems raising money
for situations directly connected to me so I didn’t try to raise money. Eventually, the case got thrown
out, not because of its lack of validity, but because our lawyer, Peter Young, had missed some deadlines
for the case. Probably the best single documentation available is the ACLU report.
Zaragoza: What then do you go on to do after your time in San Diego?
Bohmer: San Diego was a very intense period that is still fresh in my memory and has certainly
significantly influenced my life, who I am, my theory and practice, even though I left there in late 1975.
For example I ended up knowing 20 people who were either police informants or police agents of some
type in the political groups I worked with in San Diego. I am very careful before I call someone an agent
or informant because I have received calls about people I had political differences with—this happened
to me a few time, saying, “This and this person is an agent.”
I remember there was one guy I worked with in a group, the Center for Radical Economics; it
later changed its name to Center for Radical Education (CRE). We were all leftist but very diverse
politically. The person I am talking about, supported Stalin and to what I considered a rigid dogmatic
political ideology. This was common among leftists in the 1970’s, in what was called, The New
Communist Movement. I was completely against Stalin, and the San Diego police, obviously knew about
our differences as there was a police informant in the group, a purely educational group. Somebody
called me twice saying, “We work for the police. We can’t tell you who we are, but Jim, who is a
member of CRE is a San Diego police informant.” A friend of mine and I followed Jim for 30 hours
including where we were told, he met with his police handler. I am sure, looking back, he wasn’t an
17

informant. We’ve made up now. And I never denounced him because I am very careful to be certain
before exposing someone, because what we call a snitch jacket can destroy a person’s reputation and
cause them to be shunned and maybe even worse.
Law enforcement and the state work to divide people and cause suspicion and mistrust. So I
never would never call someone a snitch even when I was suspicious unless the evidence was
overwhelming. I’m saying with 20 people, I’m 99 percent sure that they were police agents or
informants.
That is part of my experience, which in some ways has made me somewhat suspicious or at least
more suspicious than I would be otherwise that people are not who say they are. There were two
women In San Diego, one whom I knew and worked with in CRE, and one who worked for a detective
agency—a really beautiful woman. They were asked by the FBI and San Diego police to seduce me and
then get me to admit to crimes connected to my activism that the government could indict me for. I
didn’t have sex with either of them. It was a very strange period for me.
I was sentenced to California State prison in Chino in January, 1973. I got convicted of aiding
and abetting the stopping of a train with war supplies that was going from Los Angeles to San Diego to
Vietnam. My organizing and activism and speaking and taking action against the Vietnam War is what I
am most proud of in my life and probably the most important. Although I was involved in helping to plan
and participating in many, many direct actions against the U.S. War against the Vietnamese people, I
wasn’t involved in planning this particular demonstration in Del Mar, California, just north of San Diego. I
was very visible at the action. Protesters did stop the train by burning some railroad ties on the tracks,
but the train had stopped a quarter of a mile away, so there was no threat of injury. The train got
delayed for a few hours because of the burning of wooden railroad ties. The San Diego Sheriffs—it was
Delmar, California, so it was the sheriffs not the police, went wild beating people after the fire on the
tracks started. Many people got beaten, and I hid in the woods near the railroad tracks and later made it
back to San Diego. Even the mayor of Del Mar, who was observing, got beaten. There was a call by
officials from Del Mar to convene a grand jury to investigate the action and the police behavior.
However only antiwar people got indicted. Not one sheriff or police got indicted, even though they beat
people.
I was one of the seven indicted, in my case for aiding and abetting the stopping of the train, a
California State felony punishable by up to five years in prison. We called ourselves the Del Mar Seven.
Because I hadn’t been involved in the planning of this action and I had a lot of support and witnesses
18

and a good lawyer, I didn’t think I would get convicted. However there were four major witnesses
against me, all undercover sheriffs who had infiltrated different movements and radical organizations
including an underground newspaper although I did not know them. One other defendant got 30 days,
and Peter Mahone, who became a close friend of mine, was convicted and served a year for a parole
violation. I found out Iater that one of the demonstrators at Del Mar was an undercover San Diego cop
who actually had written a report saying I wasn’t an organizer of this action, but that report was
suppressed, which is illegal.
Note: I believed and still do that stopping a train with war supplies was a righteous action
although disagreed with how this action was planned, not letting the attendees know the risks involved
in attending.
I went to prison in early January, 1973 for what was called 90-day observation, where at the end
of 90 days the judge could sentence me to probation or return me to prison. I had a lot of supporters.
Noam Chomsky got many signatures on a petition on my behalf in support of my release. I was sent to
the state prison in Chino. The San Diego sheriffs, who transported me from the San Diego jail to the
prison in San Bernardino County in shackles told the guards at Chino that I would organize the other
inmates against them. So they put me in solitary. It was a very tough solitary, they called an Adjustment
Center. At that time, there were four in the whole state of California. The one at Chino was all Mexican
and white. It was totally segregated and very anti-Black.
You only got out of your cell an hour a day or less to walk between the cells and take a shower.
Inmates would yell through the bars, “What are you in for?” I would say, “For anti-Vietnam War
protests.” They would day, “Are you a revolutionary?” There was yelling all night. My background was
very different. Most inmates had been imprisoned by the California Youth Authority and had spent
much of their lives in gangs and prison. Some had killed people inside the prison. They kept saying to
me, “Are you a revolutionary?” I would say, “I’m in for antiwar demonstrations.” They said, “You
couldn’t be in the Palm Hall (the name of the prison wing in Chino where solitary was located) for
antiwar demonstrations.”
I remember one day, I walked out and this guy grabbed me through his cell. He had a knife. I
didn’t have any weapons, but almost everybody else did. He said, “We know you’re one of those
revolutionists, but because you’re white, we are going to let you live,” and he showed me his knife. I was
scared out of my mind. It was a pretty tough period. I got out of solitary after 10 days with not so veiled
threats from the prison administration, not to organize.
19

I was returned to the San Diego jail in March, 1967 in order to go in front of the court again.
My case was very high profile in San Diego. I am very proud about the following. I had a lawyer that
represented me in my resentencing named Roger Ruffin. He had been a respected judge in San Diego,
but had been hounded off the court by right-wingers because they claimed that he loved the Black
Panthers and gave too light sentences or low bail to Black and Latinx defendants. Roger Ruffin talked to
the presiding judge about my sentencing, which was up to five years, before this second sentencing.
Ruffin told me that the judge said, “If Peter Bohmer will renounce direct action, illegal protests, we will
give him probation. Otherwise he will get the five-year sentence.”
I have always been more of a justice person than a law person. I thought about what I should do
while being locked up in the San Diego County jail and I knew my statement would be in the mainstream
media; the LA Times had covered my case almost daily, so had the San Diego newspapers and TV
stations. So I told my lawyer my decision “I won’t make such a statement even if means more prison
time”. Because I thought to publicly denounce direct action and doing what is right even if it is not legal,
is absolutely the wrong message to send out. In prison, they make me talk to a psychologist to study my
criminal and violent tendencies. There, I felt I could say almost anything to help me get out because it
was private. In a public venue, I wasn’t willing to in any way discourage direct action against injustice,
even if meant more prison time.
Because I had so much public support- many letters to the court, the petition, started by Noam
Chomsky and even the prison recommending no more prison time, I got a stiff probation but no more
prison time. I had been out of prison and jail for about a week and was staying that night at a close
friends’ house. At about five in the morning the police came to the door without identifying themselves.
A resident of the apartment opened the door when they said, “We’re friends of Peter,” and they came
charging in. I mentioned having guns for self-defense, but as a felon, you can’t have a weapon. I had
sold the gun to a friend of mine, who was in the apartment with me where I was staying. I was just
staying because it got so late. I don’t know how they knew I was there, but I got busted on a felony
possession of a weapon and possession of marijuana which a guest brought into the house after I went
to sleep.
All of us in the apartment were arrested and I spent another week in jail because I was on
probation. I then went back to court, and this time, a different judge gave me “the choice” after having
found I violated my probation because of the gun, either I could serve my sentence—it was an
indeterminate one to five year sentence—or I could get an advanced degree. I wasn’t unique. Another

20

friend of mine who was a leader in the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP), when I later went to complete
my Ph. D had the same conditions on his probation. I agreed to this unusual condition. I also had to do
write daily reports and report weekly and would be sent back to prison for violating my probation if I
attended a demonstration where the law was broken
In 1975, I was still living in San Diego. I worked at the Center for Radical Education (CRE), its
original name was Center for Radical Economics. When I was in prison in 1973, three of the radical
economics faculty at San Diego State University, John Hardesty, Clint Jencks and Norris Clement, took
the leading in forming this center, so that I would have a position when I got out of prison. They raised a
little bit of money and found a good sized house that we shared with an anti-war Vietnamese family.
CRE had a lot of study groups, both practical like self-defense, how to do divorce, how to get out of the
military but also on Marxism, Latin America, organizing skills. One group read Paolo Freire’s, Pedagogy
of the Oppressed. We had as many as 10 study groups at a time, weekly programs of a speaker or film,
we had a library with books and two file cabinets of articles, a mimeograph machine which we used to
make fliers and print our monthly newsletter. I was the staff person and had to raise my $150 monthly
salary, which was hard to live on in the early and mid-1970’s.
I also had other jobs, but it was hard for me to find work and my economic situation was
difficult. I got some of my FBI files later. I had to work as part of the conditions of my probation, but as
revealed in my FBI files, often when I applied for a job or got one, the FBI or San Diego police would visit
the employer and say that I was a Communist and you don’t want a Communist working for you and I
would lose the job or not even get hired.
In spring 1975, I was afraid that I would go back to prison or more likely have my probation
renewed past 1976 because I wasn’t completing my Ph. D. which was a condition of my probation. I
didn’t have a good relation with MIT and the economics department there, where I had studied. I might
have gone back to school eventually, but my probation speeded up the process. The San Diego Court
probably thought this condition would either get me out of California or by getting me back into the
university, I’d be less effective. In retrospect, I believe that I have contributed more to building social
movements and radicalizing people as a college teacher than I would have if I had not returned to get
my Ph.D. I love teaching and did it whether I got paid for doing it or not.
I applied to complete my Ph.D. in economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the
University of California, Berkeley. I got into both places. I loved Berkeley, and San Francisco, the Bay
Area is my favorite part of the country, culturally, it’s such a beautiful area. I was afraid I would be too
21

swept up by the activism there and not complete my dissertation. I thought if I went to U Mass, I would
just study and get my dissertation very quickly—because I already was all but doctorate (ABD)—but it
took me many years. That’s how I left San Diego and moved to Northampton, Mass. In 1976, I started
going to U Mass.
Zaragoza: You got your PhD there.
Bohmer: Yes, although it took me a long time. I got off probation way before I finished my doctoral
dissertation. I had a really hard time writing it, partly because once I figure something out, I lose interest
in writing it up. Secondly, the academic form, given my background of intense activism, when you have
for other academics was foreign to me.
At first, I thought I would do a dissertation on the Mexica-U.S. border and the cause and impact
of Mexican migration to the U.S. I had gotten very involved in San Diego in a group I helped form, the
Mexican Information Group (MIG). We started by supporting social movements and radical
organizations in Tijuana, just across the border who faced a lot of repression. At that time and I believe,
still today, there were thousands of people who were Mexicans living in Tijuana but working in San
Diego during the day, and they would cross back into Tijuana after work. We would give them leaflets in
Spanish about social movements and organizing and land occupations going on in Tijuana and Baja
California. In addition we sometimes helped people just after they had crossed the border at night by
driving them past immigration officers or stops.
My plan was to do a doctoral dissertation on the supply of Mexican labor and U.S. employer
demand—why people leave Mexico, and then the economic conditions here. However, after entering
the U Mass economics department, I was disappointed and angered by the following. All of the graduate
students were Marxists—it’s not true today, but it was true in the late ‘70s—and almost half the faculty
were. In theory, there was a lot of interest in gender and in class—not necessarily in practice. However,
much less in racism and anti-racism.
Many of the students and faculty told me I was really obsessed with racism. I remember once
talking to another mentor, Ted Allen, and I said to him, “Many economics students and faculty at the
University of Massachusetts tell me that I am obsessed with racism, what do you think,” He said, “Did
anybody non-white ever say that to you?” And I said, “No.” Then he said, “The next time somebody
says that to you, say, ‘If you could be a little bit more obsessed with racism, I could be a little bit less.’”
That really stuck with me.

22

I was frustrated and angered by the lack of interest, both theory and practice on past and
present U.S. racism. I am not trying to romanticize activists of the 1960’s and 1970’s, but most of us,
including white activists, and the related organizations put anti-racism and the struggle for racial justice
as central to our praxis. So I decided the political economy of racism was going to be my focus. I
assumed that to be a leftist, to be a radical, to be anti-capitalist included making central, anti-racism,
and anti-white supremacy. Sadly this wasn’t shared. So that’s when I decided to do a dissertation on the
political economy racism.
My first topic, which I worked on but didn’t finish was studying the Chicago area steel mills. I
wanted to show the difference between Black, Latino and European immigrant mobility in the steel
mills. My hypothesis was that first- generation European immigrants had similar jobs to Black and
Mexican background —this would be around 1890’s, basically the worst and most dangerous jobs. But
over time, the white workers ended up still primarily, working-class, at least the numbers I had, but
more in safer jobs, better-paying, more skilled jobs. The Latinos, and particularly the Black workers,
stayed in the worst jobs.
Zaragoza: And whites mainly in control of the union.
Bohmer: Definitely. I looked at all the areas you grew up in, Chicago, Gary, but I didn’t have that much
support from the faculty and my interest waned a little, so I didn’t finish. I did work on that for about a
year, and I was trying to show the difference between “race “and ethnicity, and how racism, particularly
against African-Americans was far more institutionalized than against European immigrants although
they often faced discrimination but it was less systemic—there a lot of commonality, but there are really
important differences, too. I also worked for a while in how “race” and racism were analyzed in the
history of economic thought but also didn’t complete the topic.
Martha Tapia was one of my Spanish teachers in 1973-1974 at San Diego State University where I
was studying intensive Spanish. She was from Mexico and came to the United States in the early
1960’swhen her father, who was a Purepecha organizer in Michoacán was killed by the Mexican military
in a struggle to prevent Purepecha land from being stolen. Martha came to San Diego County and then
began her studies at San Diego State in fall, 1968. I was four years older than her. I liked her a lot and
we got romantically involved. Most of the activists I knew in this period, late 1960’s through mid-1970’s
—including women I was going out with—were somewhat anti-intellectual. It was a period when
actions were emphasized. I have always been an intellectual person who reads a lot. I have never felt
totally comfortable in either the academic world or the activist world. Martha was a supporter of my
23

studying and thinking. We got married in April, 1977. We had like four kids together although got
divorced in 1992. Sadly she died of cancer in 2000.
Our last few years in Massachusetts, Martha worked at the women’s center at the University of
Massachusetts. She was preparing for a talk for International Women’s Day and mentioned to me that
she found that only two per cent of corporate managers were Black. Even though I was very aware of
what I called the racial division of labor and of institutionalized racism, I was amazed how low this
percentage was. I thought perhaps it was an exaggeration. Martha was usually very accurate with data,
so I started researching it. I found there were a significant number of African Americans in managerial
and administrative jobs in the public sector, but not in the private sector.
So that ended up becoming the basis of my doctoral dissertation. My hypothesis was that as a
response to the social movements of the 1960s, especially the Civil Rights and Black Freedom and Black
Liberation movements, the government at all levels responded by significantly increasing Black
employment. For example, the Kerner Commission, set up to understand the urban rebellions of the
1960’s, called for the federal government to hire one million African-Americans to stabilize the country.
I showed that because of these social movements, there had been real improvements in the quantity
and quality of jobs for African-Americans in federal, state and local level government employment,
although not racial equality; but far more than in the private sector, especially for Black women. The
cause was not the common neoclassical economics analysis that a capitalist economy generates strong
tendencies for racial equality and the overcoming of racial discrimination. If markets generate strong
tendencies for racial equality we would have expected improvements especially in the private sector but
this was not the case, remember that only 2% of mangers were African-Americans although they were
about 12% of the labor force.
The improvements were really significant, not as great as mainstream economists said, but they
were major in terms of class composition, they were significant in terms of income. By class
composition, I mean a significant growth of Blacks in the professional-managerial class in the public
sector. These major improvements never really closed the racial unemployment gap. With the decline
of these social movements in the mid to late 1970s—my data goes through 1984— and I completed my
dissertation in 1985, the progress towards racial equality had stopped. The end of progress was also
caused by the major recessions of 1973-1975 and the early 1980’s. Sam Bowles, who was very helpful,
was my dissertation adviser. It took me over 400 pages. I read and synthesized a lot of writings on

24

racism, developed a model on the relation between the public and private sector, and was very careful
with the data I found and analyzed.
It took forever. I was teaching at the time, and I had three kids while working on my Ph.D., my
daughter Josina, born in 1977, and my sons, Inti, born in 1978, and Filemón, all born in western
Massachusetts. I was also active there in the anti-apartheid and against U.S. intervention In Central
America movements. Because we were low income, even though highly educated, we lived for six
years in public housing, Hampton Gardens, and it was some of the better organizing that I have done.
We linked issues connecting mistreatment of tenants, who were mainly women to issues of racial,
gender and class oppression, nationally and globally. There was a significant population of Puerto
Ricans, tenants, probably 40 percent of the 200 plus adults there. Residents in Northampton sometimes
called it the ghetto, but it was at least one half white. Northampton is a very white city.
We organized there. Martha was active, I was also, although not as much as her. We organized
an active tenants union. Many tenants got actively involved in the tenants union. We had monthly
meetings and tried to talk to each tenant about their concerns and were somewhat successful,
connecting international issues to direct tenant concerns. I saw both in San Diego and at Hampton
Gardens in Northampton, Massachusetts the idea that working-class and poor people are not interested
in things beyond their own personal lives was wrong and elitist. I think you can link people’s actual daily
problems such as in this case, sexual harassment or lack of snow removal at Hampton Gardens to
national and global issues that affect people we are organizing less directly such as the U.S. wars in
Central America, or the U.S. overthrowing the Allende led government in Chile, poor and working class
people are interested and can make the connection. For example in the summer, we showed films
outside because there was limited transportation from Hampton Gardens and limited spending money.
For example, once we showed a film about El Salvador and the U.S. support for the murderous and
repressive military and the wealthy there. The audience was mainly Puerto Rican, many did know much
about El Salvador before our film series. I remember after one of the films a few people saying, “they
speak Spanish, they look like us.” There was much interest afterward in learning more about El
Salvador, the U.S. role there, and what they could do. I mainly tried to organize and mobilize the white
tenants, including challenging racism, although the tenants unions was primarily Puerto Rican. Like in
San Diego, I also of course also reached out a lot to Blacks and Latinos, especially in community
education.

25

I remember in San Diego, the Socialist President, Salvador Allende, and the left coalition, Unidad
Popular in Chile, that he had been overthrown by a very violent US-backed military coup on September
11, 1973. To me, that September 11, is the one I am most emotionally connected to. Also, there was
much interest in working class Chicano communities in San Diego that I spoke to about Chile in the two
years after the coup and about the ensuing brutal military dictatorship. Many who attended were quite
well paid workers in the trades and heavy industry, but they were primarily, working-class Mexican men
and women. They were really interested in Chile, too, but, of course, connecting it to their own lives. I
mention this to again challenge the conventional wisdom that working-class people are not interested in
U.S. intervention abroad and what is happening in other countries.
Zaragoza: To go back to one point, it is the linkage and commonality which are absolutely essential, I
think, for poor and working-class people to get into these wider global struggles, not, as I often see at
Evergreen, leading with the other places.
Bohmer: That’s definitely right. I am with you on that. Like in the housing project and our organizing
there, one of our original issues was lack of maintenance. There were cases where they didn’t remove
the snow and two women who were Puerto Rican broke their leg when they fell in the ice. I reached out
to the white tenants to get them to join an occupation of the manager’s office over this. It was easier to
reach the Puerto Rican tenants because a lot of the white tenants felt way more guilty about living in
public housing.
Zaragoza: Stigmatized almost.
Bohmer: Definitely. But we totally started with people’s direct needs and complaints, and then began
bringing in South Africa, El Salvador, etc. It was effective.
Zaragoza: How did you come to Evergreen? That seems like that’s the next step.
Bohmer: In 1984, although I still hadn’t finished my dissertation, I applied for teaching positions at
several universities. I had never heard of Evergreen until one of my last years at U Mass. There was an
economics grad student there named Sue Feiner, who had gone to Evergreen, and it sounded like an
interesting place. I wrote them in 1984, but there weren’t any openings.
I got offers at a few branch campuses of Penn State University. I got offered and took a job at
Penn State, McKeesport, a working-class city near Pittsburgh, that the steel companies had largely
abandoned. At one time, it had been a sizable city with steady employment in the steel mills. Beginning
in the mid to late 1970’s, and continuing into the early 1980’s, many of the steel mills had closed or
severely downsized. McKeesport had been a center of what is called the Mon-Valley, along the
26

Monongahela River, around Pittsburgh. It was right by Homestead, Clairton, Duquesne. There was
depression levels of unemployment when I got there in the fall of 1984. You could see a lot of people
hanging out on the streets during the day.
McKeesport was still the size of Olympia of the mid 1980’s. Yet, there were no movie theaters
open, no hotels, many closed businesses and abandoned houses. I lived in Pittsburgh, but I worked in
McKeesport. My classes were heavily populated by sons and daughters of steelworkers and other
manufacturing, e.g., from a nearby chemical plant, so children of blue-collar workers were a major
demographic. It was a good learning experience for me.
I taught at Penn State-McKeesport for three years. It was difficult to develop a radical political
economic analysis among the students. I was probably the most popular teacher personally because I
respected the students. Most of the teachers there, sadly, would talk about how stupid the students
were, which bothered me a lot. I was also the head of the union there, and I remember how faculty
would talk how unfair it was these steelworkers were making more money than them. I remember at
one faculty union meeting, asking “Would anybody want to switch jobs?” Not one person would. Also,
—I resigned over this—I advocated for including adjuncts in the union, that it was right morally and
economically. The full-time faculty in a close vote, voted not to accept part-time faculty into our union.
That’s when I resigned as President.
In early 1987, I got a letter. I’m not a believer in fate but the letter was addressed to me in
Pittsburgh but with an incorrect address. I lived on the longest street in Pittsburgh. It was addressed 40
blocks ---away, but it came to me. I don’t know how they had an address. The letter mentioned there
was an opening at Evergreen in the Master’s in Public Administration (MPA) program, and encouraged
me to apply for it. So, I did, and it was kind of a stretch because I’m much more of a social movement
person as a cause of progressive and radical change than change coming from good public
administrators. My only experience, working in government, I had worked for the Sandinistas—the
FSLN—for the government in Nicaragua for their Social Security Administration. The Nicaraguan
government had wanted me to work for a year there, but because of family, I couldn’t afford it. But I
did work there for three months. I didn’t do a very good job. I was trying to figure out—and they asked
me to—in the areas of country where the Contras, the people that the US supported, who were fighting
the Sandinistas, whether the social programs were going there or not.
Between the combination of my being not fully fluent in Spanish, and me being this white guy
from the United States, some people in INSSBI (the social security ministry) where I worked, didn’t trust
27

me. Plus, the data being inadequate made my research difficult. I concluded that there had been
improvement in people’s lives in these areas, rural, through the programs INSSBI administeredchildcare programs, senior citizen food programs, social welfare. However most of the resources went
to the cities and much less to the rural areas. So my own experience as a public administrator was very,
very limited.
But anyway, I was offered and accepted a faculty position in the MPA program at Evergreen and
got here in early September, 1987. I think I wasn’t the first choice. I taught in the MPA program for a
total of four years and one quarter. I liked teaching the undergraduates more and it fit more my
purpose of being a teacher. With the graduate program, I was somewhat effective in liberalizing
students by focusing as much as I could on the causes and impact of poverty, racism and economic
inequality and on strategies to challenge these major problems of our society. It’s better that people
are liberal than conservative. My teaching philosophy has always been based not only on encouraging
critical analysis but also in furthering empathy and solidarity with the oppressed. Also, I am more
interested in encouraging long-run participation in transformative social movements and radicalization
than in liberalizing people. Thus, I fit better into the undergraduate program although I enjoy teaching
older students which were more common in the MPA program. My first year in MPA. I alienated some
of the students by my criticisms of the professional-managerial class and my openly anti-capitalist and
anti-racist perspective but I had less of these problems after my first year.
While part of the MPA program, I proposed to the students and faculty, a track or specialization
within the program of learning to be an organizer for economic and social justice organizations, and
also for making the analysis of systemic racism and anti-racism a more central part of the curriculum.
Most of the students supported these ideas. but the faculty, most of them, said, “We have no idea how
to teach that, so we can’t support it.” So it didn’t go through.
Then I began teaching in the undergraduate program. That’s what I have mainly done for most
of the last 30 years. I think the last time I taught MPA was in 2001.

Zaragoza: What were some of your first impressions and early experiences at Evergreen?
Bohmer: Even before I got to Evergreen. I was impressed by the students. When I ate in the cafeteria at
Penn State, most discussions I heard were about football, dating, and cars. There was little discussion
about current events, about what kind of world we wanted, or major economic and social problems., or
what they were learning. There was some and I met many of them inside and outside of class but it was
28

a tiny proportion. When I visited Evergreen as a job candidate for a position teaching in the MPA
program, it was winter 1987, it was a long three-day interview process. I was asked to give a few talks
and did many interviews.. I remember going to the delicatessen a few time in the CAB building and
hearing students talk knowledgeably about South Africa, about Central America, about ideas. It was
inspiring to me. I thought this is the kind of school I want to teach at. I had a very positive impression
of the students at Evergreen during this visit which has continued for 32 years. .
Like I said, at Penn State, I was popular personally, but my ideas didn’t fit that well in terms of
students. There was a few that I reached, but even though most of them hated the steel company
executives— even violently in some cases in terms of the words—but it wasn’t against executives or
corporations in general. It was very much only against US Steel, which was a big company, or USX, and
probably half or more of my students wanted to become managers. I don’t know how many became
that, given the class background, but that was the desire.
At Evergreen, I just felt I could relate to the people better, even in the MPA program. As I
mentioned earlier, I had problems my first year and to a lesser extent my second years because many of
the white MPA students resented by strong emphasis on the continuing centrality of institutional
racism. My analysis of class relations were influenced strongly by a seminal article by John and Barbara
Ehrenreich on the Professional-Managerial class. They argue convincingly that in contemporary U.S.
capitalism, there are four classes- the working-class, the professional managerial class (PMC) a small
business class and a capitalist class. They theorize that the professional-managerial class (PMC) which
arose with the growth of monopoly capitalism in the late 19th century has major contradictions with the
capitalist class but they focus on its contradictions with the working class. Many of the MPA students,
were either members of the PMC or more likely aspiring members of this class. The students who were
most hostile to me were those who most identified as professional administrators. It wasn’t a divide
between liberal or conservative. The men who were usually dressed up in suits, or the women with a
very professional attire usually disliked me. I never mean it a personal attack on them, full-time faculty
like me are part of the professional-managerial. I should have been more empathetic and made more
clear I was arguing for a recognition of class differences but also for a principled alliance between
workers and the PMC. There was also hostility towards me by some white students because of my
foregrounding the centrality of racism which I was openly attacked by a few MPA students and also for
my emphasis on social movements but altogether I enjoyed my teaching in the MPA program and the
students.

29

I am not in agreement with the de-emphasis in recent years of political economy in MPA. The program I
taught most frequently in MPA was the first program students took; it was required, an eight credit
program called, The Political Economic Context of Public Administration. I always used Howard Zinn’s, A
People’s History of the United States, my favorite book of all time, which gave students a very different
understanding of U.S. history, one that focused on the history of oppression and resistance. I don’t think
this program exists today, certainly not for eight credits.
My first year at Evergreen in 1987-1988, I got very active in organizing against what the Higher
Education Board (the HEC Board) was promoting, it was called the Master Plan. It was an attempt to
make higher education Washington more like California, to further the class divide between the
community colleges, state colleges, and universities. It called for institutionalizing more resources going
to the state colleges than the community colleges and of course the most spending going UW and WSU
where the wealthier students would be concentrated with standardized testing playing the a major role
in determining admittance and even graduation. Even though some of this was already the reality, I was
very active in opposing this plan and view of higher education as mainly to serve the needs of
corporations and played a major role in forming a group at Evergreen opposing this plan and organizing
and mobilizing against it. For example we disrupted the Trustees of the HEC Board when they met at
the Double Tree Hotel near Seatac Airport. So even from the beginning, there were some attempts to
fire me away because of my activism. This actual plan was not formally instituted although many
aspects of it have been even put into effect.

Zaragoza: At Evergreen?
Bohmer: Students at Evergreen were especially opposed to it because of its emphasis on standardized
testing,
Zaragoza: Do you want to talk more about attempts to fire or silence you.
Bohmer: In the 1989-1990 school year, I remember a student in the MPA program, Karla Wulfsberg
complained about me to the president at Evergreen and demanded I be fired. I was teaching a class in
public policy, and I would always ask who the public is, as in public administrators, as in public policy. I
learned this from a good friend and fellow teacher in MPA, Dan Leahy. Is the public, the government or
is it the people? I would often talk about public service as opposed to public administration. I also
claimed that public administrator can do the most good if people are protesting, demonstrating, doing
direct action, and doing grass roots organizing and mobilizing. The public administrator and officials
30

should share the relevant information they are privy to, to the social movements dealing with these
issues and about the relevant public agency. It was a dialectic or progressive and mutually useful
connection between people inside the government who can help support the grass roots movements
and pass on useful information. Simultaneously the movements, individuals and groups outside the
government structure, e.g. poor people’s organizations, by their an their actions made possible more
autonomy, could create an environment and possibility for public administrators, who are interested in
economic justice and racial and gender justice to have a progressive impact on public policy. Militant
movements and action encourage public officials and administrators to be more courageous.
In my presentation in this public policy class on what I called the insider-outsider dialectic, I gave
as a positive example the case of Daniel Ellsberg, who was high up in the RAND Corporation which did
research primarily for the Air Force. Ellsberg was commissioned to do a secret study on the Vietnam
war. He passed on this study, which was a powerful in-depth critique of the U.S. role in the Vietnam War
to major newspapers and to its credit, the New York Times and then other papers, printed it, The
Pentagon Papers. Karla made a formal complaint against me to the Evergreen administration and the
MPA head, claiming that I said the only useful thing a public administrator could do was commit treason
like Dan Ellsberg had. My point was that the opposition to the Vietnam War had led him to turn against
it and to have the courage to get the Pentagon Papers published and in turn this publication, which
revealed consistent government lies further strengthened and broadened the movement against the
Vietnam War.
To its credit, the MPA faculty supported me. I remember the head of MPA at that time, Pris
Bowerman, saying they wouldn’t like too many people like me at Evergreen, activists and radicals, but
having a few was good. I always felt a mixed relationship with the faculty.
In the late 1980’s and continuing into the 1990’s, I was active in organizing on the campus,
mainly with students, particularly around affirmative action, more equality, and more access for
working-class students. I also got active in the community. A good friend of mine, Larry Mosqueda,
came to Evergreen, two years after me, in fall 1989. Angela Gilliam, who I was also close to politically
and personally came in 1988. The faculty which had been overwhelmingly “white” became more
diverse, racially. There is no golden age at Evergreen, when I arrived the student body and faculty was
less diverse than it is today and there is still a long way to go.
I was also active at Evergreen and in the community against U.S. intervention in Central
America and in solidarity with revolutionary movements in El Salvador and Guatemala and the
31

revolutionary government in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas. I went to Nicaragua in the summer of 1988,
partly to establish a sister university relation with the main public university in Managua, UNAN, with
Evergreen. We a very good provost at that time named Patrick Hill, a left liberation theology oriented
Catholic who grew up nearby to me in Queens, NY although we didn’t know each other. He had really
supported my being hired and had supported my summer visit to Managua, Nicaragua to establish our
relationship with the university there. Although UNAN was very interested, the relationship with
Evergreen never got finalized, partly because Patrick Hill was fired as provost by President Joe Olander
and the Sandinistas lose the election in 1990.
I remember once at a faculty meeting—the provost, Patrick Hill said, “Every school should have a
niche. Ours should be around economic and social justice and that should be incorporated and play a
central role in the curriculum and in our marketing. He had limited support from the faculty. I believe
his idea is even more important today as a way to turn around our declining enrollment by giving
Evergreen more of a distinct identity. Patrick Hill supported the hiring of more faculty of color and
people like me, who were also activists, so I have a lot of gratitude to him.
I was very active in the Olympia anti-intervention coalition, which had been primarily focused
on U.S. intervention in Central America but by late summer, 1990 had changed its focus to opposing the
looming U.S. war against Iraq.
It was clear that George Bush, Sr. was going to go to war with Iraq. Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq
had invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990. I thought as did many others that the United States did
not want a negotiated settlement. The United States was committed to go to war—partly as a way of
overturning the strong antiwar consciousness resulting from Vietnam, the Vietnam syndrome, the
dreaded disease that affected many people in the U.S.—there strong aversion to the U.S. going to war. I
threw myself into speaking up, going to endless meetings and organizing a major protest against the U.S.
attacking Iraq.
We had a demonstration on January 15th, 1991 against the war when we know the United States
attack on Iraq was imminent. There were about 3,000 people who marched —at least that is what the
Olympia and Seattle papers said. We began with a rally in Sylvester Park in downtown Olympia. We
demanded the State of Washington Legislature pass a resolution taking a stand against the war. We
marched in the street to the Capitol, maybe 800 of us got inside the Legislative Council chambers while
they were meeting by various means. Our occupation got bad publicity, partly for minimal property
damage, more for occupying the House of Representatives chamber. Some of the bad publicity was
32

directed against me. I thought it was a very important demonstration but I was against property
damage inside the legislative chamber that we were occupying. To me, it would confuse the issue and
it would not help us build anti-war support or our movement. I am not abstractly for or against
damage of corporate or government property, it is to me a tactical issue, not wrong ethically.
Some of the occupiers were carving graffiti into the desks of legislators. Almost all of the
legislators left when we entered the this space. So I got up on one of the legislator’s desks, I think that
of the speaker of the Washington State House of Representatives, I’ve never seen the video of it, but a
friend of mine, Tom Wright, has a video of the occupation including my actions. This image of me
supposedly shouting while on the desk was in many Washington State newspapers and on TV, e.g., in
Seattle. Actually, I got on the desk to be heard and said, “It’s a people’s assembly. We ’re here to
oppose the war, but we’re not here to destroy property.” That was hardly reported, only the image of
me standing on the desks was reported and shown. Over the course of the night, people began to leave
gradually and the small group that stayed all night and into the morning, finally decided to leave by 9
am. Heavy U.S. bombing of Iraq and the U.S. invasion began the day after our occupation, January 16,
1991.
This action was a last minute plea for the U.S. not to go to war but the mainstream media
overwhelmingly supported the U.S. going war which contributed to the negative way we were
portrayed. Many high school students and even middle schools students joined our march and rally.
There was a march from Evergreen to Sylvester Park that began the morning of January 15th as part of
this day of planned action. School administrators locked the doors of the two schools the Evergreen
students marched by, Jefferson Middle School and Capital High School in order to prevent their
students from joining. Nevertheless many middle and high school students jumped or climbed out from
windows and marched to Sylvester Park with the Evergreen students who marched six miles to the rally
at Sylvester Park.
A few legislators demanded I be fired from Evergreen for my role in the occupation. The acting
President, Les Purce, in a letter to some legislators, who released it to the local newspaper, The
Olympian, wrote that he strongly condemned my behavior and it wasn’t appropriate for faculty but I
was doing this on my time, not when I was supposed to be teaching so he couldn’t discipline or fire me.
I think someone like Les Purce, if he could have, he would have fired me in two seconds, and also Larry
Mosqueda, who was also very active, but we had a lot of support from faculty and students. I believe
the faculty passed a resolution criticizing his comments about me. Purce as Evergreen President always

33

tried to stop any involvement by Evergreen on issues, actions that went beyond the campus and stated
this openly. I totally disagree, I believe this is our social responsibility.

End of Part I.

34


because of Peter Bohmer
Interviewed by Anthony Zaragoza
The Evergreen State College oral history project
Part Two
August 6, 2019
FINAL
Zaragoza: We are here with Peter Bohmer on August 6, 2019 for part two of his oral history interview.
Peter, would you pick up where you left off? You had just told us the story of being at the Capitol, and
trying to get your colleagues there to have a more focused and effective presentation. You were
standing on a table making this announcement, and you didn’t get the kind of support that you wanted
from Evergreen, though you maintained your position there.
Bohmer: Yes. There were some attempts because of this occupation of the Capitol to have me fired.
There were some other Evergreen faculty who were involved and the Administration also tried to
silence them. It wasn’t just me alone, but very few faculty. I was trying to make the focus what we had
asked the Legislature and the Governor to do: to take a stand against the imminent war, and to also
support any GIs who refused to be deployed to Kuwait or Iraq. So that was the purpose.
It did create a lot of publicity, but the war started a day later, and the protests rapidly declined
in size and energy. I have noticed as with some of the wars the United States has been waging recently,
such as the second war against Iraq in 2003 and the war against Afghanistan that began in 1991 and still
continues; there were large protests before these wars began. For example on February 15, 2003,
there were millions of people around the world who protested. And there was a protest of more than a
thousand in Olympia, a pretty significant number, although not as big as for the 1991, Gulf War. After
the war started, many thought protest and resistance were futile thought and the hype for these wars
was immense, and the protests waned. We couldn’t sustain the energy and organizing that was going
on just before those wars actually started.
Zaragoza: How we got to this topic was we were talking about your early years at Evergreen. What
were some of your impressions of Evergreen itself at that time, and how do you understand those early
years for you at the Evergreen State College?
Bohmer: One point of view that I have always resisted—since 1987, when I got there—is this mythical
past, that Evergreen was this ideal college that was totally democratic, with, with a critical education
pedagogy and with critical and engaged and independent students who all wanted to change the
1

world. To me, that has never been true. Evergreen opened in 1971. The founding faculty were almost
all white and male. Even though Evergreen is still disproportionately white in terms of students and
faculty, the proportion of students of color and working-class students of all ethnicities and more multiracial are greater today than they were in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s and from what I have heard,
much greater than when Evergreen opened. This is also true for faculty. That is my strong impression.
To me, there is no mythical past where Evergreen was this great and ideal place and that we
need to return there. The top administrators at Evergreen in the past and present have for the most part
been what I would call corporate liberals; that the President and the Provosts have often wanted to
make some reforms, like more diversity; and also that Evergreen in terms of mission and practice is
much better, more progressive than most universities. But in terms of a school committed to really
fundamental change and critical education, I don’t think is has ever been that.
There was one Provost, Patrick Hill, who I already mentioned, who wanted Evergreen to be a
school committed to a critical pedagogy and to furthering economic and social justice and liberation. He,
had a different view of what the mission of Evergreen should be from other top administrators, but he is
one of so many. So I have always been somewhat critical of Evergreen, maybe more critical now biut
also appreciating its strengths.
It reminds me of where I got my Ph.D., the economics department at the University of
Massachusetts in Amherst. We were commonly called a radical department. To me, the word radical is
very positive. To me, it means going the root of the problem, which to me is capitalism and change
from the bottom up. When I studied and taught classes at U Mass, I always had these two ideas in mind.
One that the economics department is a much better place in terms of learning and social relations, for
example, secretaries were for the most part, treated with respect, which is an important issue to me—
compared to MIT, where I also spent many years at. The Economics Department at U. Mass was much
better than most economics departments, especially in what it taught, but it was also far short of what
it claimed to be, a radical department.
I think the same with Evergreen; that a lot of phrases are used here about justice, about critical
learning, about pedagogy, about learning to understand the economic, social and climate crisis we are
living under to combat them, this is better and more relevant better than the education at Penn State
or San Diego State, where I taught before, but also so far short of what is claims to be; what many
faculty and administrators self-congratulate themselves about. I have always had this view: Evergreen

2

is both better than most colleges but so far short of what is necessary and the language it uses. It is
important to simultaneously remember both of these truths.
With other colleges I taught at, when friends and acquaintances asked me, should they send
their children there, I usually had mixed feelings. many or mainly negative. At Evergreen, I usually said
yes it is a good school for many students. I would ask potential students and their parents, if the
students were self-motivated and if they said yes, I would recommend Evergreen quite strongly. Among
friends of mine who had grown up in inner city, Black or Latinx communities, I recommended Evergreen
for their sons and daughters but would also mention the challenges of attending Evergreen because
there were often few students from similar backgrounds. White students who had grown up in white
suburban backgrounds were a large proportion of the student body, and were often somewhat
unaware of the culture of students from different backgrounds.
Did I answer your question?
Zaragoza: Definitely. And in terms of the educational setup and methodology, what were some of your
early memories around the actual teaching and learning at Evergreen?
Bohmer: This was one of my first memories of teaching at Evergreen, a very positive one. I had been
teaching for three years at a branch campus of Penn State, a working-class campus and city that had
been abandoned by U.S. Steel, McKeesport. I mainly taught principles of economics classes. I
remembered teaching one class I was excited about, Comparative Race Relations, where I compared and
contrasted the racial system and struggles for racial justice in South Africa to the United States. I put a
lot of time into teaching the class and although I believe I organized a stimulating curriculum, I had
trouble getting the students to talk. I tried to teach by making seminars a major part of the class and
often prepared discussion questions. The main feedback I got from students was they preferred I
lectured the entire period. This was at Penn State in 1987. I also had this experience to a lesser extent
when I taught a another class there that I designed, The Economics of Unemployment.
My first academic program I taught in at Evergreen, was for mainly, first year students, a core
program, Technology and Human Reason. It had four faculty each quarter which used to be common
and no longer is. It also was an all year program which also is less and less common. The other faculty
were science or philosophy of science faculty. I taught most of the social science in this interdisciplinary
program. I remember I got some criticism from quite few students for talking too much in seminar. I
thought that was fantastic as I came from a place where students wanted to just listen. A student said
they kept track in fall quarter counted and I had taken up one-third of the time in seminar. I don’t
3

think it was that much, but it probably was too much. That was so different from what I had been used
to. It was positive that students wanted to speak up more and were willing to constructively criticize
me.
I continue to believe lectures have value but I realize they are good for some students but not
others. In my first few years at Evergreen, I definitely was lecture-oriented, I have evolved to a style
where students feel comfortable making comments and asking questions throughout my presentation.
From my first year at Evergreen until the present, interdisciplinary and coordinated team teaching has
been very appealing, I value it.. Also very appealing to me was that many, close to a majority of the
students were in college, because they really wanted to find out what was going on in society, and to
make the world a better place, not just because their parents told them to, because their friends did, or
only for career reasons so I was really motivated.
I got hired to teach in the MPA, the Masters of Public Administration program, which I
mentioned before. But year by year, certainly by 1991, I decided I fit better into the undergraduate
programs. I feel I have impacted many, many students in terms of their world view and what they have
done with their lives, not only their jobs. Sharing my experiences has become an important part of my
teaching. didn’t talk much about my life experience in the beginning. It is very different from most
faculty, some of what I talked about in my first interview with you.. I held back because although I like
people to respect me but I have never wanted people to put me on a pedestal or idealize me, because
you will usually fall off the pedestal and I prefer more equal relationships.
I gradually began to talk more about my experiences as an organizer and activist and about my
experience with repression. In particular my good friend and faculty member, Savvina Chowdhury,
encouraged me to share more of my history with students. I have increasingly done that and I think it
has helped my teaching, that I am about more than just a radical analysis.
Zaragoza: Talk to us more about some of the programs or teaching that you have done —you started in
1987, and you are still teaching to this day, so that’s 30-some years. Give us some highlights of that 30
plus years of your programs, your teaching.
Bohmer: Okay. The class I taught the most, even though I am always modifying it, used to be called
Political Economy and Social Change. That was its title when I first got to Evergreen and at first I kept the
title. I have taught it with between two and five faculty and one from one to three quarters, although
almost always for fall and winter and most commonly with three faculty. For the last 20 plus years,
when I have taught in it, we have called it, Political Economy and Social Movements: Race, Class and
4

Gender (PESM). I have taught this program, 13 of the years I have been at Evergreen for a total of 25
quarters.
Zaragoza: Wow.
Bohmer: It has been a lot of work because we usually include principles of microeconomics and
principles of macroeconomics as part of this program, and that has usually fallen on me. Savvina
Chowdhury, whom I have mentioned, Carlos Marentes are the only people with economics
background that I have taught it with, Savvina, twice, and Carlos, once. All of the other faculty I have
taught with in this have had different backgrounds. This program has been very rewarding.
I have loved teaching it, in the past it was primarily a historical analysis of capitalism with a
strong influence of Marx. I have become increasingly critical of many academic radicals and of the
related curriculum that focus on how horrible and unreformable capitalism is, that if you can show this
it will radicalize students. Developing a critical analysis, a systemic critique of capitalism is absolutely
necessary and important. However, I increasingly believe, that by itself, it makes students feel even
more powerless and cynical and depressed than they already do. So my focus increasingly—and I think I
could have done even more—is stressing resistance and social movements, that there is a feasible
alternative to capitalism. I have made more central to this program and my teaching in general, both
the resistance—the social movements part—and exploring alternatives to capitalism.
The book I have assigned most often in this and related academic programs, which is my
favorite book of all time, is The People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. Howard and this
book are major influences in my life. I also used it in the MPA program, although there was resistance
by the faculty to assigning it. To me, what is so powerful about the book is that it shows the systemic
oppression, the incredible inequalities of income, wealth and power, and the history of injustice in the
United States and the negative role of the United States, internationally. But it always shows ordinary
people, not always winning but always fighting back and resisting.
I knew Howard Zinn reasonably well. I once invited him out to Olympia., I believe inn 1993.
Friends tease me because I had him speak 14 different times in three days. He said he wanted to do it,
the more places the better. but later, people always teased me about overworking him. Howard stayed
with me. I remember going out every day with him to the Spar restaurant in downtown Olympia for
breakfast. He was always respectful of the workers there and talked with many. For example, he would
go into the kitchen and talk to the kitchen staff about their lives. He was a great human being, a very
wise one.
5

Many academics dismissed him because he wrote in an accessible style without academic jargon
and without a lot of footnotes. On historical periods I am quite knowledgeable about such as
Reconstruction and the 1930’s, he consistently got it right and I think this is generally true. So I have
used A People’s History, often and It always influenced students or other I have used the book with or
given to. I have sent many copies into the prions also. People, when they read it, often feel very, very
lied to by their past history teachers and the textbooks they read. They think they know about US
history, and they realize from reading Zinn, there so much important in U.S. history, they never learned
such as major strikes and government repression.
Political Economy and Social Movements: Race, Class and Gender (PESM) has been a very, very
important academic program I terms of helping students to understand the world better, and getting
students while students or after in being active in social change movements or organizations or
consciously working for social change in their jobs. In
In PRESM, we synthesize the global economy—which we usually do the second quarter
more—with the U.S. economy which we do in the fall along with Marxism. One cannot analyze the
United States in isolation from the rest of the world. We live in a global capitalist system, and that’s a
very, very central part of this program and other programs I have taught in.
I’ve taught the program with many other faculty and often with visitors. Besides Savvina
Chowdhury, I have also been in teaching teams with Larry Mosqueda, Dan Leahy, Dan Leahy, all more
than once. I also taught it twice with a visitor, Martha Schmidt, also other visiting faculty. We taught it
together.
Zaragoza: That’s right, my third year.
Bohmer: Right, 2006. I’m sure I’m leaving out people. Recently with Shangrila Joshi.
Zaragoza: We taught with Zoltan Grossman.
Bohmer: Yes, he was a relatively new faculty.
Zaragoza: You were telling me about the Political Economy and Social Movements program, the various
times you taught it, what you learned in teaching it. I just had an interesting idea. Have you ever taught
it where you started with the resistance? Then ask the question, what are all these folks up in arms
about?
Bohmer: A little bit. I usually start the class with a book that’s not theoretical. One book, which fits this
model, fits it- It is important what you’re saying—and I have used a few times is Days of Destruction,
6

Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges. I’ve also used other books like that in the class such as Evicted by
Mathew Desmond. These and others I have begun the program with are strong in humanizing and
personalizing oppression and poverty and inequality but not necessarily strong on resistance. I would
say I haven’t done enough in centering resistance. I have done it sometimes, beginning with
resistance, or beginning with alternatives to capitalism, sometimes fictional. Often, the emphasis on
social movements hasn’t come until week eight of the second quarter, winter, week 18 of the program.
When I taught PESM with Shangrila Joshi, we started the second quarter, winter 2019, analyzing
socialism, the alternatives to capitalism. What we read here isn’t necessarily an in-depth political
economic analysis of participatory socialism, the socialism I most support. With Shangrila, we began
winter quarter with The Dispossessed, by Ursula Le Guin, a brilliant book. I forget if we used it.
Zaragoza: We did.
Bohmer: I have used The Dispossessed, seven or eight times. In it, Le Guin examines a hypothetical
society, Anarres, that is very equal, very democratic, but also very conformist. It raises an important
question about how to consider both the individual and the collective, which to me is a really key
contradiction in a socialist society. How does a society combine the needs of individuals who are not all
the same, with needs of the collective or the collective good.

In my teaching, I try to separate—even

though It is not that easy—individuality from individualism. Individualism is a major social disease and
growing globally. Individualism is furthered by neoliberalism which furthers it ideologically and by its
institutions. Individualism is only thinking about and acting on one’s own interest, not about others
needs and interests, an indifference to how one’s actions affect others. But we human beings are part
of one race, the human race. We all bleed if somebody cuts us, and our blood is all human blood, but
there are also individual differences among people. So, I differentiate individuality, which to me,
capitalism limits, particularly if you are poor, a person of color, from individualism. A good society
encourages individuality and discourages individualism. Resistance, social movements and alternatives
to capitalism should be central themes from the beginning of the program and I have been increasingly
committed to incorporating them into PESM and into my teaching and curriculum in a major way.

Zaragoza: Yeah, I was just curious. The beginning with resistance has occurred to me, and I’ve tried
that before. There’s maybe something to that. But in addition to PESM, what are some of the other
programs you have taught?

7

Bohmer: I will limit myself to my undergraduate teaching and programs I have taught more than once. I
have taught three times, the Current Economic Issues and Social Problems, it has usually been one
quarter and a lower division program. I have taught it with Peter Dorman and Elizabeth Williamson and
by myself. We usually examine several economic and social problems, e.g., mass incarceration, poverty,
right to abortion, work and examine from different perspectives, causes, impact, and reform and more
transformative solutions. It is less theoretical than PESM which has usually been for sophomore
students and above. A program that I have taught four times has been called slightly different names:
Alternatives to Capitalist Globalization, Alternatives to Capitalism, or Alternatives to Global Capitalism.
It has mainly been a two quarter program. I have usually taught it with Steve Niva but also with Lin
Nelson. We need to 1) criticize the current society, which, to me, is global capitalism. Equally important
is to have 2) some vision of an alternative, and the hardest part is 3) the strategy which connects the
criticism of capitalism to where we want and need to go. In this Alternatives program we focus on
strategy and especially, non-capitalist economic systems and models
The last time I taught it, in 2017-2018, it was a little bit different. We called the program,
Alternatives and Resistance to Global Capitalism: Mexico, US and Beyond. I team taught this program
with Maria Isabel Morales and Savvina Chowdhury. We spent two quarters in Olympia learning about
Mexican history and social movements. We studied in some depth, theoretical alternatives to
capitalism but also attempts to construct alternatives with a Latin American focus, e.g., Cuba. We spent
over a week studying the Russia Revolution and subsequent developments there. Spanish instruction
was also part of this program. We didn’t have enough students to have all three faculty go to Mexico as
you need 15 students per faculty. in the third quarter, spring quarter, 29 students, faculty member,
Maria Isabel Morales and I spent 10 weeks in southern Mexico in Oaxaca and Chiapas,. They are the
two poorest states in Mexico, and two of the most indigenous states in Mexico, that is not a
coincidence. There are major struggles throughout Mexico and in Chiapas, against extractivism, the
growth of mining there. Oaxaca and Chiapas are rich in resources but most people are poor there. We
met with inspiring groups, mainly indigenous, resisting mining and displacement. This was an
alternatives to capitalism class, it included a travel part as have other programs I have team taught or
done individually.
Taking programs abroad has been an important part of what I have done and taught at
Evergreen. I took a program of 23 students in spring 2004 to Cuba. We spent over seven weeks in Cuba
after spending the first two and a half weeks in the United States preparing for our study abroad I am
always looking for alternatives to capitalism, both in theory but even more, real examples. This has
8

been a focus of mine for 50 years. Cuba is a very important and dear place to me and I have been
involved since the 1960’s in Cuban solidarity work. I have been to Cuba five times. I actually lived in
Cuba for four months with my four children in 2001, I taught U.S. Economic History at the University of
Havana to Cuban faculty and worked at a Cuban research institute, the Center for the Study of the
United States. Living Cuba made a lasting and for the most part, positive impression on our family.
Then, with Anne Fischel, I taught two one year programs about Venezuela in 2008-2009, and
2011-2012. We spent winter quarter in 2009 and 2012, there, the first time with 36 students and the
second time with 30. Even though there are serious economic and political problems in Venezuela
now—and the US plays a big role in that but the massive poverty, emigration, and hyperinflation, the
crisis there cannot be reduced to the U.S. attempts to weaken and overthrow the government there.
There are major internal errors that the Venezuelan government has made, e.g. with overvaluing the
currency. Even given the current situation, Venezuela has been an important alternative with a lot to
learn from and I have valued, witnessing it in person. In the period when Hugo Chavez was President,
1999-2013. It was a society that saw poor people as the subjects of history, not the objects. That is
major.
Taking programs abroad which I have done to Cuba, Venezuela, twice, and Mexico has been
labor intensive, even with Anne Fischel and Maria Isabel Morales, two very hard working and
cooperative faculty. Evergreen should be more supportive of taking classes abroad, there is too much
unnecessary paperwork. It has also been difficult because even though there are sometimes
scholarships for low income students, they weren’t for the classes to Cuba and Mexico, the students
who travel abroad tend to be higher income students. We tried to make these programs more
accessible. I can remember in the Cuba class, we did a lot of fundraising outside of the school such as
dinners, dances and making and selling shirts, and thus had partial scholarships for the students. The
school said it was couldn’t do it which limited some of the fundraising. We did this but to a lesser extent
in the Mexico program.
Zaragoza: Would you talk a little bit about the pedagogy of overseas travel programs? Because here,
when we’re on campus, there’s the campus life and then there’s the student’s life off of campus, and
those don’t blend so much. But when you’re away overseas in the class, those become nearly one and
the same. How, as a faculty member, did you navigate some of the tricky issues that may come up with
teaching abroad?

9

Bohmer: Just by way of introduction, in the three programs I mentioned—or four --because I did
Venezuela twice—they were quite lengthy, from seven to ten weeks. Many of the students travelling
abroad told me it was life transforming: going to a country in the global south, seeing US imperialism
and intervention and its past and present but also seeing resistance in many forms and attempts to
construct a more humane society based on the needs of the majority. In these programs for part or in
some cases all of the time, we, the faculty, were with the students almost 24 hours a day. This was true
in the Cuba program and when Maria Isabel and I were in Chiapas, we were in this beautiful place called
Alternatos, “Alternatives” It is a place that a Chiapas group we were affiliated with, Otros Mundos, was
building just outside of San Cristobal de las Casas. It was rural and a steep climb from the road and
there was no wi-fi or even data. Lights went off by 9:00 P.M., it was still battery powered. And Maria
Isabel and I were there with all the students, and being together all the time was difficult for all of us.
And I sometimes feel like a counselor or therapist with students at Evergreen, but far more in travel
abroad programs. In the Cuba class I felt like I was parent, teacher, and counselor. It was very
challenging.
I like to connect with an institution in Latin America where students can improve their Spanish,
not necessarily a university but more likely a progressive, social justice-oriented organization that makes
some money by having people come from abroad. In all my trips with students, we, the faculty, made a
priority to meet with local organized groups and institutions such as progressive unions, community
health clinics, cooperatives, indigenous communities, student activists, women’s organizations, LGBT
groups, Afro-Cuban, Afro-Venezuelan and Afro-Mexican organizations, and communities involved in
land takeovers. For example, in Venezuela, when Hugo Chavez was President, we visited health clinics,
called Barrio Adentro, that existed in most low income communities, supported by Cuba with much of
the medical staff being Cuban.
Cuba played a very positive role in Venezuela. In return for receiving Cuban doctors, Venezuela
sent oil to Cuba. This was under Chavez and Castro. So students saw this example of solidarity in
practice. We often had students volunteering for a weeks in communities and grass roots organizations
in Venezuela —I’m not sure how much they contributed. However, our idea was to give back a little bit,
whether it was on farms, in cooperatives, or in community centers. So learning by doing, not just
listening to presentations. We didn’t spent that much time hearing lectures, although some. Students
involved in volunteer labor, most appreciated it although some complained in all four of these
programs that they didn’t have enough free time. If we add the time in meeting groups in the places
we visited and required study, it may have added up to 50 hours a week. It has been labor intensive for
10

me, both preparing and while in country but it is a great opportunity for students. I don’t know if I have
the energy to do it again, but I really hope Evergreen continues with programs that go abroad. That
Cuba class was hard, because I had 23 or 24 students. I did it by myself. The other classes I did with
Maria Isabel and Anne Fischel, so that did make it more manageable.
Zaragoza: Would you say that there are big lessons that, over these many trips teaching abroad that
you learned that, over those trips, you now would or wouldn’t encourage others to do to make the
learning deeper, more prevalent, as well as the kind of living together and being together for that long
of a period of time?
Bohmer: Those are hard questions. One problem, to a varying degree has been many students, no
matter what they say before they travel, is that a major motivation is to have a good time by partying.
This is a confusing issue. Let us consider, drinking alcohol. I don’t believe students shouldn’t drink at
all, but excessive use of alcohol and getting drunk is a real problem. It has been a problem on some of
the trips we’ve made, so maybe I should have been stricter and enforced more a no getting drunk policy.
enforcing that more. I tend to trust people. It’s been hard, because some students told me I was wrong
to trust them. I think learning on this travel to Latin America has been profound for the students
involved but too much alcohol has been an issue.
Another issue is the one of respect. Even though we had faculty and staff who had taken
classes abroad, Steve Niva, Therese Saliba, Jean Eberhardt and Michael Clifthorne talk to students
travelling before they left Olympia about respecting people of other cultures and respecting each other,
these are young people, for the most part. There were older students, too, but the issue of treating
people with respect, not being “the ugly American.” not being entitled was easier to talk about than to
practice.
I have been positively impressed how respectful most students have been of those they met in
our travels, so I am not saying most students were disrespectful to Cubans, Venezuelans and Mexicans,
it is not a criticism of most students. But Evergreen and travel abroad programs should prioritize more,
before and during their travel, what is and isn’t appropriate behavior and why. A problem on our last
trip—the one to Mexico—because of the numbers, you need 15 students per faculty to get your full
salary and even sometimes to even go. So we accepted a few people who we should not have. We knew
it and it definitely played out in Mexico. I don’t know how to deal with that constraint except maybe
lower the required number of students per faculty. It was different in both the Cuba class and the first
Venezuela class. In that Cuba class, I had many qualified people who wanted to go, and I ended up
11

taking 23, far more than the 15 required and less than half of the people who wanted to go and less
than who was qualified. There were very few problems.
Zaragoza: Because you could be more selective?
Bohmer: More selective, students who were mature and serious, I interviewed almost 80 students who
applied, about why they wanted to go to Cuba for my 2004 program. Students saying they primarily
wanted to travel as part of the college experience were a clearly flashing red light. So was those that
said the specific country didn’t matter, they just wanted to travel to Latin America.
In he first Venezuela program, we also had students making written applications. We turned
down many but still ended up with 36. But in the second Venezuela class, and in the Mexico class, the
numbers applying were down. I’m not sure why, maybe the more difficult economic situation many
students and their family faced. Also by 2011-2012, Venezuela was less exciting as a revolutionary
alternative than it had been a few years earlier. Also because Oaxaca was on a U.S. State Department
list saying it was dangerous, students were not eligible for Gilman scholarships which many low income
students had received in our travels to Venezuela. This reduced the numbers who could afford to go.
Also many students prior to our departure in March, 2018 told me they were very interested in taking
the program and travelling to Mexico but in the end decided not to. In the end we just got 29. We
needed 30 but David McAvity, the budget dean, only reduced our expense allowances by a small
amount. There were probably three students we shouldn’t have taken. Evergreen should be more
flexible with numbers, and we .the faculty should be more careful of whom we take. Still travel abroad
has been a very profound experience.
Zaragoza: Thank you. I appreciate that.
Bohmer: I also did a lot of work, and Anne Fischel did even more planning beforehand in the Venezuela
programs, going to many locations in Venezuela and making many contacts to set up the program
without getting financial support from the school. We, primarily Anne, also set up diverse opportunities
for students to do volunteer work in Venezuela. We also paid residents of Venezuela whom we had met
in our planning trips to Venezuela, before our classes to organize many of the logistics--sleep, meals,
travel and also our meetings with many groups in the cities and communities we visited.
Zaragoza: Like prior scouting and recon.
Bohmer: Yes, I just mentioned the two Venezuela programs. In the Mexico program, we visited two
Zapatista communities in June, 2018 and spent about a week with them. You can’t just show up there.
I met with people connected to the Zapatistas to work that out the arrangements, and also with many of
12

the organizations we collaborated with closely in Oaxaca and Chiapas, the summer before our program
travel. I didn’t do as much in country planning with the 2004 Cuba program, but I had made a lot of
connections with Cuba over the years. I had lived there in 2001. So Cuba was easy, the main solidarity
organization in Cuba organized much of the logistics. I want to conclude with how much I respect and
like the great majority of students I have traveled with, what thoughtful and socially conscious and
caring human beings they are; many I am still in contact with and consider friends and comrades.
Zaragoza: What about other ways in which you developed as a teacher? You mentioned some of these,
but I’m just curious if you have other reflections on your teaching career? How did you develop over
time?
Bohmer: One reason I have been effective as a teacher is that I am very enthusiastic and excited about
the subject matter, I am teaching, it is also my personality. Also students see that I am an activist, not
just a teacher in the classroom but actively challenging homelessness, for immigration and racial justice,
against police brutality, antiwar and against U.S. overt and covert intervention in other countries,
especially in the global south. Students respect by my combining theory and practice and this has
contributed to many students also actively advancing economic and social justice as students but also
after they leave Evergreen. I know this because many students stay in touch me after they graduate.
Encouraging activism by teaching about it but also by doing it is central to who I am.
I have also gotten better in including students in discussions, in increasing participation during
my presentations. The idea of workshops—you are very good at doing them—I have learned to do
them. I should do them more. And with my lectures—I don’t know if I should call them lectures,
because there is usually a lot of active participation by the students and often, by teaching partners. I
usually have very long handouts prepared which I usually distribute to the students just before I begin.
There are a lot of questions and comments from students during my presentations which I welcome. I
hardly ever finish my talks, i.e., go through all my notes or what I had hoped to cover. In addition to
the many student questions and comments, I usually over prepare and try to cover too much ground.
But because students have my handouts, I am less uptight about finishing and rush less at the end than I
used to because I know the students have my handouts, which often includes the conclusion.
To get more students to be more attentive, I sometimes start my talk with an icebreaker. One
icebreaker, I learned from Steve Nova—but I’ve adapted it—is the following. He would begin the
Alternatives to Capitalism program with the following question, “Is it enough to be critical of US
capitalism, or do you need to have an alternative in order to be critical? Examples like that. One I have
13

used a few times before my presentation on racial inequality is “Do we live in a post-racial society”? I
used it when Obama was President. Since the increased knowledge of police murders of Black Men,
and the Trump campaign and Administration, It’s obvious to almost all students that we don’t live in a
post-racial society so I no longer use that question as an icebreaker.
I usually have a question I will ask at the very, very beginning of the class, which I didn’t usually do in
my first 15 years at Evergreen. . I have learned to talk a little bit slower, partly speaking fast was the
result of growing up in New York City although I speak faster than most New Yorkers. Many students
have told me they thought they liked and learned from what I just said, but they weren’t sure because I
speak so fast and they have pay too much attention just to keep up. It has been hard to slow down. Also,
I haven’t been good at using visuals in class. Because of a society that is very oriented to videos,
visuals are very important and students want them, even more than in the past. I have very seldom
used PowerPoint. I used part of a PowerPoint from you on mass incarceration. I gave you credit, it was
excellent. Last year, 2018-2019, I used the book, Economics for Everyone, by Jim Stanford, a very
accessible economics text book. I have sent copies of this book to prisoners interested in economics.
When using this book, I have used or adapted some of the PowerPoint slides that author, James
Stanford, includes on the website for the book.
My written valuations from students have consistently been very positive. However, one
common critique by students is that I should use more visuals and more PowerPoint slides.
Zaragoza: How about your own research? Do you want to talk some about your research over your
career here at Evergreen?
Bohmer: I feel bad I haven’t done more.
Zaragoza: But is that an individual shortcoming, or is that a structural obstacle?
Bohmer: Probably both. Teaching at Evergreen and planning future programs take a lot of time even in
the summer, the planning. Because I have been active organizing, and put so much time into teaching,
this has left little time for research. I have also been a single parent since March 2000 when my ex-wife,
Martha, died of cancer. My two younger children were 11 and 16 at the time. Although I have taught
Political Economy and Social Movements: Race, Class and Gender program, I believe 13 times, it could
be 12 or 14, I am always using new books, and I always try to do at least one or two totally new lectures
per quarter, and I am always updating and revising lectures that I have given before. For example in my
presentation on the political economy of racism, I have four pages of data on past and present racial

14

inequality which I include in the accompanying handout to my presentation. I spend hours each time
getting the most recent data and incorporating it into the handout.
Teaching is very, very labor intensive for me, probably because I am a social person and student
oriented teacher. I spend a lot of time with students and non-students. It is a personal choice, but it’s
also a lot of hours work.
I have written many, many articles for several left Internet websites such as ZNet and
CounterPunch, probably 50 or more. I also frequently write for the alternative and left Olympia,
monthly newspaper. Works in Progress. I have written at least 30 articles for it, many are write ups of
talks I have given outside of teaching. I do research for these articles and talks but not traditional
academic research.
In my 32 years at Evergreen I have given many, many public talks, mainly from Portland to
Seattle, although many overseas also. I have done more in Portland than in Seattle—on the economy,
on repression in the United States, past and present, on racism, on affirmative action, on immigration,
on Cuba, on Nicaragua, on the Greek economy, on Venezuela, on Mexico, on US foreign policy, on the
Vietnam War, economic inequality, on socialism, on healthcare, on capitalism, on neoliberalism
austerity and alternatives to it, on organizing, on strategy for radical change, on my activism—many
other topics. Probably the largest number have been in Olympia, more than ½ off campus. Some have
been at rallies and demonstrations, others at forums or conferences, a few as lectures in other
universities, e.g., Reed, MIT. Most have been in the United States although I have given talks at
conferences or gatherings in Greece, Cuba , South Korea and Mexico. Some have been in Spanish.
I have also done many workshops and talks at four Washington State prisons, about two a year
beginning in 2014. The focus of these workshops are political economy. Often I have organized a team
of up to four teachers to do these workshops, many have been two full days, others have been one day,
AM and PM. The subject matter and material is not all that different from what I teach at Evergreen.
My most common presentations have been the political economy of racism, or ABC’s of Capitalism and
Socialism. Savvina Chowdhury and Carlos Marentes have frequently been part of our team and also have
given presentations. Usually presentations are followed by small group discussion; commonly, 60
students (inmates) among four faculty. Almost all of these workshops and talks have been organized by
an excellent group which is active in most Washington State prisons, the Black Prisoners Caucus,
although one, two day workshop and another one day workshop at Coyote Ridge State prison were
organized by the Hispanic cultural group. I have also been invited to make short presentation for
15

Juneteenth at the prisons in Shelton and Clallam Bay. I consider it a great honor to be invited. Most of
the workshops have been from 50 to 60 people although a few presentations have been to much larger
numbers, up to 200. These students are very engaged, both during the presentations and seminar
discussions. I remember one workshop where inmates sent me 17 questions to answer and I got
through only six of them in three and a half hours. We always make certificates which we give to
students who attend. Most attendees are Black inmates except for the largely Mexican workshop at
Coyote Ridge prison. Only once or twice have more than a handful of white prisoners attended these
workshops. I value teaching and learning form African-American inmates and want to continue this but I
hope to also more workshops that include more other racial and ethnic groups. Prisons are segregated
and the main white prisoners group has a white supremacist ideology although they claim to be white
nationalist, not supremacist. I advocate for a principled unity across racial and ethnic lines, but a unity
based on making central anti-racism and anti-white supremacy. I also am very active writing letters to
prisoners and sending them books and letters.
My academic writing has been very limited. I did write an article with Savvina Chowdhury and
Robin Hahnel for the Review of Radical Political Economics (RRPE) which is about to come out on the
organization of reproductive and household labor in a participatory socialist society.
I am planning to write with Savvina— we are very much at the beginning— a political economy
textbook. Our plan is to analyze and criticize U.S. capitalism as fundamentally oppressive, to examine
alternative to capitalism and to have one part on social movements and strategy. We will try to
incorporate many of our presentations as the basis for chapters. In many ways, it will be writing up what
we have teaching in. We are very committed to doing this but progress has been slow.
Now that I’m moving towards retiring—I only have two more quarters that I’ve contracted to
teach—hopefully I will have more time for this writing. I will continue giving talks writing popular
articles and working with young activists, probably less on the actual organizing and more in an advisory
role. I will continue to be active in Economics for Evergreen, a group I helped found whose origins were
in the educational workshops we organized during Occupy Olympia in 2011. We do monthly
presentations that on the average, 60 people attend. I have been and will continue to be communityinvolved.
Zaragoza: How about governance at Evergreen? What kind of roles did you play, and what has been
some of the major issues that you were most concerned about at Evergreen?
Bohmer: I’m going to use governance broadly.
16

Zaragoza: Please do.
Bohmer: I have brought many speakers to Evergreen. I mentioned Howard Zinn. Another major
speaker I brought was Noam Chomsky, although unlike Howard Zinn, he only spoke once on campus, to
1800 people at the CRC, he also spoke to more than 800 at the Capital Theater. Other well-known
speakers have included Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a great Kenyan writer and Dennis Brutus, a poet and
leader in the anti-apartheid struggle and the post-apartheid struggle for economic justice in South
Africa. He also visited and spoke at the Tacoma campus. Usually what I’ve done is I have the people
speak at Evergreen and in the community. That’s basically my model. For Chomsky, we charged for the
downtown event but usually the off campus events are free or for a voluntary donation. I usually have
gotten speakers for modest honorariums, usually getting money from a few different academic
programs and some money from the academic deans and students groups.
So I consider that governance. So to me, that’s governance in terms of bringing an awareness to
the campus. I was definitely involved—probably not to the school’s satisfaction, but in helping,
supporting and initiating—having Leonard Peltier as a graduation speaker in 1994.
This is connected to another program that I taught in. It was called “ 500 Years of Oppression,
500 Years of Resistance” We taught it as whole year program during the time of the Quincentennial,
1992. There was a growing movement around the world starting in Ecuador, but international about
indigenous people’s resistance and right to self-determination with a strong condemnation of
colonialism and Columbus. I taught this program with Larry Mosqueda, Gail Tremblay, and Sunera
Thobani, who was a visitor. Out of that class, the idea came—and I was certainly involved in that—
having Leonard Peltier, an inspiring and wise human being who had lived in Seattle and been very
involved in the American Indian Movement (AIM) as the Evergreen graduation speaker. Leonard Peltier
was unjustly convicted of murdering two FBI agents at the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975. What was
and is 100 percent clear was that the evidence was totally cooked against him. So far all his appeals for
overturning the conviction, for a new trial, for reducing his sentence, for clemency have been denied
He is very sick now. I have actively supported Leonard’s freedom since he was arrested in 1976 and
have spoken at many rallies on his behalf. I am still working on supporting his being released, but I don’t
know how much longer he is going to live. Students selected Leonard Peltier as the graduation speaker
for the 1993 graduation. He wrote a powerful speech, and a graduating student from Nigeria read it at
graduation.

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To explain the context for another controversial and inspiring and revolutionary graduation
speaker let me begin with an important event integrally connected to Mumia Abu-Jamal, while on death
row being a speaker at the June, 2000 graduation at our college. In late November and early
December, 1999, there were major protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial
meetings in Seattle. I was teaching PESM that year with Dan Leahy and a visitor, Cynthia Adcock. Our
entire class of 75 student attended various events directly connected to the WTO Ministerial, including
teach-ins and protests against the WTO that made worldwide news for a variety of reasons including the
many issues the protesters connected, the creativity of the protests and the police violence. Many also
attended pro WTO events. To raise awareness about corporate globalization and the negative role of
the WTO, we organized teach-ins at Evergreen to prepare people, the Evergreen community but also
beyond about the destructive impact of the WTO on workers, the environment and democracy. Dan
Leahy took the lead in organizing this weekend conference at Evergreen at least a month before the
WTO. Hundreds of students from Evergreen attended the week of activities in Seattle, sometimes
called, “The Battle of Seattle, which included jail support for those arrested. Many of the key organizers
were Evergreen students. For many students in our program it was a transformative experience. I am
very proud of Evergreen’s participation during that week, not only students but also many faculty and
staff.
Out of that PESM program that I was teaching in, a few students decided to promote Mumia
Abu-Jamal as the graduation speaker for 2000. I was involved in that decision and the organizing to
make it a reality, but it was students from that program who, took the lead. They saw it as a logical
continuation of the protests in Seattle. Originally, Mumia Abu-Jamal was voted to be the main
graduation speaker at Evergreen. There was a lot of pressure from Governor Locke and many others.,
especially police organizations, to overrule the decision. Mumia Abu-Jamal, a brilliant and revolutionary
radio journalist had been unjustly convicted of murdering police officer, Daniel Faulkner in Philadelphia
in 1981 and sentenced to death. Jane Jervis, the Evergreen President, compromised but did not cave in
to right wing pressure by having faculty member, Stephanie Coontz, be the official main graduation
speaker. But Mumia Abu-Jamal remained as a graduation speaker and spoke from death row on the
phone to a major student activist, Stephanie Guilloud, who had been active in organizing against the
WTO. We played the recording at the graduation. Mumia talked about the best thing an Evergreen
graduate could do was to be a revolutionary for transformation of the society. He said it didn’t matter
whether you were black, Latino, Native or Asian-American, it is what you did with your life. It was a
powerful speech. Mumia Abu-Jamal is no longer death row and is challenging his current sentence of
18

life without parole. There were protests against Evergreen for Mumia speaking. I was very proud of
Evergreen that day. I consider this part of my governance also.
I haven’t very effective on some of these campus-wide committees that I have been on such as
long run hiring. I’m not sure why, maybe because although I am close to some faculty, I am very
different in my politics and commitment to radical change from most faculty. I am friendly to faculty
and staff but not that close to most. Where I have been very active and more effective is on hiring
committees for specific positions. I have been on many.
Zaragoza: And even pushed to create positions.
Bohmer: Yeah, for example, the Political Economy of Racism.
Zaragoza: The position that I am in.
Bohmer: Right. I was also the chair of that committee and also for the Feminist Economics position. I
both wrote up the description of these two position and the rationale for them and then pushed for a
hire many years, often feeling the support was pretty limited. For example, your position. There was
active opposition—I don’t know if I ever told you by some faculty—not to you but to the position. I also
was chair of the hiring committee for the international political economy position that Peter Dorman
was hired for, and the third world feminist position that Therese Saliba got hired for. Both have been
excellent faculty members. So have Savvina and you who were hired for the political economy of racism
and feminist economics position.
I was unsuccessful in my attempt to get a hire in African studies. I wrote up a proposed
description and rationale for it. To me, it is unconscionable that a school as big as Evergreen not having
any faculty in African studies. That proposal never got that much traction. I was hoping to get a position
around Latino/Latina political economy and helped write up the description for it. You worked on it a
lot. We got it, although it became more of a Latinx studies faculty position.
Zaragoza: Yeah.
Bohmer: That has been important.
Zaragoza: I mean that position turned out to be spectacular, in my opinion.
Bohmer: I think so, too. Maria Isabel Morales who got hired is a great addition to the faculty. She is a
very smart and excellent, knowledgeable and dedicated faculty member, who is an excellent teacher
and oriented toward serving underrepresented populations. She is an outstanding hire but she does

19

not have a political economy focus, even though we did teach a Political Economy oriented program
together for the whole 2017-2018 academic year.
I have been on a lot of hiring committees, and I supported and advocated —this was way back
when I first came here—for the hires of Larry Mosqueda and Angela Gilliam. I was on the overall hiring
committee. Maybe because I am persistent, I have been effective and played a major in getting these
hires, most of whom have been on the left and people of color. That’s one role I do feel very good
about.
Zaragoza: Personally, I’m quite thankful for that, in many ways.
Bohmer: Good. [laughing] I’m really happy you’re here. So that’s taken a fair amount of energy. For
many of these hires and these positions, I haven’t had that much support, but some really good people
have been hired.
Zaragoza: Any other reflections that you have about your career at Evergreen that you think is
important for us to talk about, for folks to know about?
Bohmer: As I move toward the end of my teaching at Evergreen, I do feel bad about the following. It
is the weakness of political economy at Evergreen—and I look at the field of political economy very
broadly. I don’t just consider it, radical economics. The analysis of “race”, class, gender—how
they’re related to capitalism- is central to what I call political economy. As I said earlier, it includes as
central studying resistance and social movements, and alternatives to capitalism. In the period we are
living in, a period of crisis—economic inequality, growing authoritarianism and xenophobia, and the
climate and environmental crisis which I have increasingly incorporated into my teaching and subject
matter. I am nowhere near an expert on climate change and climate justice but I increasingly make it a
major part of the programs I teach in. Political economy analyzes these key issues and economic and
social problems in general in relation to capitalism.
Political Economy is such an important field of study, and it’s weaker now than when I got here in
1987. So I do take it a little bit personally that have been not that effective in maintaining and
expanding its teaching at Evergreen. Right now we are promised to get a hire in Political Economy this
coming year, 2019-20120 but I am quite certain Evergreen will not go ahead with this hire and make
others where they feel the immediate need is higher. This has been an unkept promise for a few years.
Because of the major drop in enrollment, there will be very few hires.
I am very worried about the future of Evergreen— the field of political economy, specifically,
and Evergreen, more generally, the major decline the last few years in the number of students. It is not
20

just the fault of the Evergreen administration, it is a hard period for liberal arts colleges, especially nontraditional ones. Potential students and their families are worried about future job possibilities. So a
less traditional university, even a public one, although more affordable than a private college are likely
to have serous budget problems as a result of declining enrollments. For public universities, the budget
problem is compounded by reduced government support for higher education. I feel bad that I haven’t
been able to do more in terms of having Evergreen and political economy being in better shape.
So my legacy is not institutional but rather how I have been a positive influence of many students
in their lives after Evergreen. A friend of mine, Jules Lobel, who is the head of the Center for
Constitutional Rights—a major and exemplary legal justice group out of New York said I should be
proud of what I have done, how he often meets ex-students of mine who are doing important activism
who tell him I am a major reason for their commitment to significant reform and radical change. This
means a lot to me. Jules has visited me in Olympia and spoken at Evergreen a few times.
I hope that faculty are willing to like speak the truth about the current reality in a period where
we are in a serious crisis, e.g. a growing racist authoritarianism around the world. An example of that
is the very recent, August 3rd, 2019 mass murder at a Walmart in El Paso by white supremacist, antiimmigrant and anti-Mexican, Patrick Crusius. He killed 22 people mainly of Mexican background, which
was his objective. Crusius is a particularly violent example of this growing and violent anti-immigrant
authoritarianism. That stands out in his statement; he often cites Trump although he is even more
extreme.
Zaragoza: And he drove down from Dallas.
Bohmer: That’s important, because El Paso is basically a Latino city and shows his commitment to kill
people of Mexican descent..
Zaragoza: That’s right.
Bohmer: We are living in a time that reminds me of a quote by one of my heroes, Rosa Luxemburg,
the possibilities for the future are either “socialism or barbarism”. I hope the faculty here don’t take
the easy way out; that they speak the truth even if it is risky and many do not want to hear about
what’s going on and possible solutions and their roles including speaking truth, especially to those
without power. I say truth to those without power rather than truth to power because of a criticism I
once got from Noam Chomsky which I won’t forget. I invited Noam Chomsky, who was a teacher of mine
at MIT in 1968 in a class called, Intellectuals and Social Change, to speak at Evergreen, I believe in 1995.
Noam has been a major influence in my life and we have stayed in contact for over 50 years. I took the
21

lead and we organized to have Noam speak at the Capitol Theater downtown and then the next day at
the Evergreen State College gym, the CRC, this was I believe 1995.
I worked with a lot of other people to organize these two events. We had 1,800 people at the
CRC. I introduced Noam and I didn’t really have time to prepare. I should have, but I was running
around so much organizing that I did the introduction without much thought. I said, “This is Noam
Chomsky, a person who speaks truth to power.” And he interrupted me in front of 1,800 people and
criticized me. Noam said, “I don’t believe in speaking truth to power. I believe in speaking truth to
people who don’t have power.”
Zaragoza: Right, to each other.
Bohmer: Yes, to each other. Because to people who have substantial power in society, to them the
truth and a good argument means little. Their actions are largely determined by their structural
position. If yo are the head of a corporation your role is to maximize profits, even though it may
destroy the environment, maximize social costs, avoid taxes, lay people off, move firms abroad, etc.
So the faculty here—in this period of crisis, our lives are short—we should do what is significant
and important, not mainly what furthers self-advancement and is non-controversial. I have tried to do
that throughout my life, although imperfectly, I have certainly made mistakes. I am impressed by so
many of the students here whom I have known who have figure out the causes and impact of our
capitalist society, maybe not immediately but over time and are committed to fundamentally changing
it.
I’ll share one more story. I can’t remember what year it was, somewhere around 2011, I
received an e-mail from a student who said he had hated me while I was his teacher in his Political
Economy class. I think it was a little before ours, but it was around that time. He said he even wrote a
complaint about me to the deans on how biased I was because I was always criticizing banks and
capitalism, and he thought I was totally one-sided.
In my teaching inside and outside of the Evergreen classroom, I always make explicit my
perspective and analysis but I also try to create an environment where students feel comfortable to
disagree with me. I often say, “I think this” or “this is my viewpoint” to make clear it is not the absolute
truth. That student wrote me in his apology to me that the reason he was so upset with me was that
he wanted to be a banker during his time in my program. He got a job after graduating with a bank,
around 2005, and then during the financial crisis, he said he realized banks were actually much worse
than what I had taught about them, that their only concern is the bottom line, no matter how unethical
22

the resulting behavior or how many people lost their homes. —I think it was Bank of America. He wrote
that he wasn’t ready to hear what I presented but after his experience he wanted to totally apologize
and my critical analysis of financial capitalism was something he couldn’t forget while working for a
bank. We need to conceptualize teaching as often planting seeds. It’s not a popularity contest. It’s
important to say what you believe although how we say it is also important. You don’t want students or
those listening to feel so attacked they tune out. On the other hand, you can’t be so indirect that the
message does not get through. I have tried to speak truth to those who don’t have power and I really
hope other faculty do so also.
I would like to come back to a point I made earlier. I mentioned the economics department at
the University of Massachusetts being a radical department. To me an indicator of a radical
department in practice, not just theory, is how the faculty and students of treat the secretaries and
workers. If male faculty teach and write supportively of feminism but treat women secretaries as less
than equal, I am critical of this contradiction. I have always tried with the staff people, secretaries,
maintenance and grounds workers to be respectful and supportive. I have been friends with many of
the staff here.
Zaragoza: I think I have more friends that are staff members.
Bohmer: Good! Often we may have huge political differences, but there has been mutual respect and
a lot of conversation between the staff and me. So with regards to students and faculty, I always check
out how they relate and treat the working-class staff on campus.
Zaragoza: Yeah. I appreciate that very much.
Bohmer: I’ve seen you the same way.
Zaragoza: Yeah. Like I said, I have more friends that are staff than faculty. It’s been that way from the
beginning, because that’s who I could really relate to much more.
Final words from you? Where would you like to see Evergreen in 10 years?
Bohmer: I’m very, very worried about the future of Evergreen. One person, who we both know, thinks
there’s less than a 50-50 chance that Evergreen will survive for five years. Evergreen is worth saving,
with all its contradictions. I feel the current administration, people on the third floor, even many of the
deans, they use word like social justice, economic justice, Evergreen is different, this new pedagogy, but
it’s just words to them. We mean totally different things by these words and for many it is empty. We
need an administration, in this very difficult period, —like Patrick Hill, who I mentioned was the Provost

23

when I got hired who said that the Evergreen niche should be a university where all programs
consciously plan in their curriculum to further justice. The economic and social and environmental
situation is worse now 30 years later than it was when he promoted that at a faculty meeting.
So my hope is the students—I’ve always been a very student-oriented faculty. I probably should
have stressed more that I’ve always been a very student-centered faculty. You were saying Anthony,
that you are closer to the staff than faculty. I am probably closer to the students than I am to faculty.
Ex-students, too. I suggest with students playing a central role, in this very difficult period, the
importance of working in coalition with progressive groups around the state—with alumni, with groups
on other campuses and with community groups and labor unions, towards supporting an Evergreen
that can sustain itself. This is urgent.
I was one of the two faculty most involved in getting the faculty union at Evergreen started, what
became the United Faculty of Evergreen (UFE), with Sarah Ryan. I signed up more faculty than anyone
else for recognition of the union but have been somewhat marginalized by the WEA paid staff, who have
a lot of power and whom I have fundamental disagreements with. The faculty union, the UFE, has been
very effective for furthering the interests of the adjunct faculty, and incorporating them as members
and officers and that’s very positive and commendable. They, especially Jon Davies, have also helped
individual faculty in grievance hearings and against unjust discipline or dismissal which is important. I
support the union and don’t want it to be decertified. But I am a very firm believer in what is called
social movement unionism—where unions are really social movements that deal with many issues, not
just directly workplace issues, that supports and does direct action and I feel our union local follows the
more traditional business union model.
Although of course I am a union member, I have withdrawn from active participation in the
union. We desperately need a social movement union that prioritizes and is really involved with others
to create the kind of Evergreen that we need and hope for, so that Evergreen can thrive, and a union
that with many other organizations including a student movement at Evergreen and beyond, and with
the staff builds enough power and an effective campaign so that the Legislature will continue to fund
Evergreen sufficiently to deliver a quality and accessible education. That’s always been the excuse, if
we are to radical, the legislature will cut us off. I would like to see our union as part of the solution, and
I don’t see it that way right now.
Zaragoza: Okay, thank you, Peter. I’m much appreciative.

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Item sets

The Evergreen State College Faculty and Staff Oral History Project

Media

BohmerPeter_20190731_Transcript.pdf

BohmerPeter_20190816_Transcript.pdf