Sperling’s experience with the strike cemented his hatred for the higher-education establishment
He was convinced the establishment would always be against the things he believed in. The only way forward was to fight.
The Beginning of a New Career
Reflecting on https://getbadcreditloan.com/payday-loans-ne/milligan/ the 1968 professors’ strike in his memoir, John Sperling called it “one of the most liberating experiences of my life” because he no longer cared what anyone in academia thought about him. And he decided he was going to find a way out.
The opportunity to leave traditional academia arrived in the form of a federal grant designed to lower the juvenile delinquency rate among working-class kids in the city of Sunnyvale, Calif. Sperling thought the best way to do that would be to work with local teachers and police officers.
He enrolled 30 teachers and police officers in a class and divided them into groups. Each group had to design, conduct and evaluate a project that addressed the problem of juvenile delinquency. Sperling encouraged them to use their experiences at work to inform their research. At the end of the class, all but two of the students signed up for another class. When that class was done, they told Sperling they wanted to take more classes.
“They got fascinated with the process of education,” he says. “It grabbed their minds and they said, ‘Oh my God, this is fascinating. And we want to stay. Not only do we want to stay, we want degrees.'”
A photograph of University of Phoenix students in 1979, posted on a bulletin board at Apollo Group headquarters in San Francisco. (Photo: Emily Hanford)
