Harry Cleaver:  

I, Harry (Rusty) Cleaver attended Beavercreek Schools from the 1st to 12th grade. In those years, I learned - despite the best efforts of teachers to impose their own curriculum - to do my own, independent research into subjects and issues that tweaked my curiosity. Thus in grade school I studied the theory of evolution and in high school studied closed ecological systems - which required learning all sorts of advanced laboratory techniques to study changes in the amino acid composition of unicellular algae. That research won me the scholarships that allowed me to go to college. Despite being reared, at home, on classical music and literature, and at school on football chants, band music and rock & roll, I also discovered and explored the Beats, Cool Jazz (Miles Davis et al) and the French, so-called, decadent poets, especially Baudelaire and Rimbaud. I later attended Antioch College (Biochemisty, then Economics) from 1962 to 1967. During that time, as part of the Antioch work/study program, I worked at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, assisted in research on the periodical cicada in the swamps of the Mississippi River in Southern Illinois, worked on a farm outside Paris and sold fruit from midnight until 6 am in the now destroyed Les Halles market in Paris, shuffled paper as a copy boy, then clerk on the national news desk of the New York Times in NYC, researched rural-urban migration at the Office of Economic Opportunity in the Office of the President in Washington, D.C. during the Watts uprising, studied French for two months in Besancon and spent a year studying Hegel and Corneille at L'Universite de Montpellier in Southern France (1964-65) - when not mountain climbing in the Alps, les Calangues, Le Pic St. Loup, les Dentelles de Montmirail and Le Parc Nationale du Caroux. I took my Ph.D in Economics from Stanford University (1967-1971). Along the way, I was active in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the anti-Vietnam War Movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. I then taught at L'Universite de Sherbrooke, Quebec (1971-1974), The New School for Social Research in NYC (1974-1976) and The University of Texas at Austin (1976-2012). I got my job at UT Austin as the result of an invitation by students who had fought for three years to get someone hired with my skills. As a result I always felt that I worked for students, to help them learn, rather than for the university to impose grades, sorting out the hard workers from the shirkers. As one result, I supported student struggles: for Quebec autonomy, against the austerity imposed during the New York City fiscal crisis, against US intervention in Central America, for...Expand for more