Tom Hayden is a Michigan alum, social and political activist, author, and politician, and director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center in Culver City, California. Tom is best known for his major role as an anti-war, civil rights, and radical intellectual counterculture activist. He may have been the single greatest figure in the 1960s student movement. The Nation magazine recently named him one of the 50 greatest progressives of the 20th century.
Tom was a student editor at the University of Michigan, a founding member of Students for a Democratic Society in 1961, and author of the Port Huron Statement. In 1964, Tom worked as a door-to-door community organizer in the inner city of Newark, New Jersey, part of an effort to create a national poor people’s campaign for jobs and empowerment. During the Vietnam War, Tom was a leader in the anti-war movements, teach-ins, and demonstrations. In 1965, Tom traveled to Vietnam to meet Vietnamese people, promote peace talks and facilitate American POW releases.
After half a century of activism, politics and writing, Tom is still a leader in the movements against the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, for eradicating sweatshops, defending the environment and combatting climate change, and reforming politics through a more participatory democracy. During his time at the University of Michigan, he was a leader of the student, civil rights, peace and environmental movements of the 1960s, and went on to serve 18 years in the California legislature and senate, where he chaired labor, higher education and natural resources committees.
In addition to being a member of the editorial board and a columnist for The Nation magazine, Tom is regularly published in the New York Times, Guardian, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Denver Post, Harvard International Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, Huffington Post and other weekly publications. As Director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center in California, he organizes, travels and speaks constantly against the current wars. He also recently drafted and lobbied successfully for Los Angeles and San Francisco ordinances to end all taxpayer subsidies for sweatshops. Tom has also authored and edited twenty books, and he has taught most recently at UCLA, Scripps College, Pitzer College, Occidental College, and the Harvard Institute of Politics.
Richard Mann is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Michigan, where he has taught for forty years about group process, psychology and religion, and spiritual development, and an original organizer of the 1965 Teach-Ins on the Vietnam War in Ann Arbor and elsewhere, 1965-1966. He was the founder of Project Outreach, an ongoing experimental Psychology program at the University.
Richard also edits the SUNY Press series of books in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology, and he has written three books, Interpersonal Styles and Group Development, The College Classroom and The Light of Consciousness. He is the author of many autobiographical papers, files on protests against the Vietnam War, and Materials on the Program for Educational and Social Change, an effort to open University of Michigan courses to the local community in Ann Arbor.
During his time at the University of Michigan in the 1960s, Richard helped to organize the original 1965 Teach-In and helped to craft teach-ins and social activism protests at many other universities including Harvard. Richard has remained at the University of Michigan as a professor since the 1960s.
