Class struggles

It should come as no surprise that, as reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education [paywall], students on college campuses are struggling over the issue of class.

The situation is particularly difficult for first-generation college students (as I was back in the day), who are cast as subjects of “socioeconomic diversity” within institutions of higher education that are increasingly targeting the sons and daughters of the wealthy in order to increase revenues and move up in the rankings.

The class problem in relation to higher education, of course, is an old one, as Thorstein Veblen discussed in the Theory of the Leisure Class:

Ritualistic survivals and reversions come out in fullest vigor and with the freest air of spontaneity among those seminaries of learning which have to do primarily with the education of the priestly and leisure classes. Accordingly it should appear, and it does pretty plainly appear, on a survey of recent developments in college and university life, that wherever schools founded for the instruction of the lower classes in the immediately useful branches of knowledge grow into institutions of the higher learning, the growth of ritualistic ceremonial and paraphernalia and of elaborate scholastic “functions” goes hand in hand with the transition of the schools in question from the field of homely practicality into the higher, classical sphere. The initial purpose of these schools, and the work with which they have chiefly had to do at the earlier of these two stages of their evolution, has been that of fitting the young of the industrious classes for work. On the higher, classical plane of learning to which they commonly tend, their dominant aim becomes the preparation of the youth of the priestly and the leisure classes—or of an incipient leisure class—for the consumption of goods, material and immaterial, according to a conventionally accepted, reputable scope and method. This happy issue has commonly been the fate of schools founded by “friends of the people” for the aid of struggling young men, and where this transition is made in good form there is commonly, if not invariably, a coincident change to a more ritualistic life in the schools.

And, of course, it’s become much sharper in recent years, with growing inequality in the wider society and soaring debt for those students who are trying to follow the American Dream.

While I’m certainly not against the “dialogues” featured in the Chronicle article, what students in fact need is a clear and rigorous discussion of how class works—in the economy and in the wider society. They need academic courses—in economics and sociology but also in literature and the sciences—that explicitly treat the issue of class, which given students the concepts and methods to understand how class works and how it shapes their lives, before, during, and after their studies.

Otherwise, all we’re doing is participating in the “growth of ritualistic ceremonial and paraphernalia and of elaborate scholastic ‘functions’” and watching students struggle, outside the classroom, with the issue of class.

“Affirmative action for the wealthy”

Pell Grants and need-based financial aid are supposed to make a college education accessible for low-income students and institutions of higher education more socioeconomically diverse. But it’s not working. Instead, what we’re seeing is a determined effort on the part of many colleges and universities—both public and private—to recruit affluent students in order to boost their revenues and rankings. Those schools, in other words, are providing “affirmative action for the wealthy.”

That’s the conclusion of a recent study by the New America Foundation, “Undermining Pell: How Colleges Compete for Wealthy Students and Leave the Low-Income Behind.”

With their relentless pursuit of prestige and revenue, the nation’s public and private four-year colleges and universities are in danger of shutting down what has long been a pathway to the middle class for low-income and working-class students. This report presents a new analysis of little-examined U.S. Department of Education data showing the “net price” — the amount students pay after all grant aid has been exhausted — for low-income students at thousands of individual colleges. The analysis shows that hundreds of colleges expect the neediest students to pay an amount that is equal to or even more than their families’ yearly earnings. As a result, these students are left with little choice but to take on heavy debt loads or engage in activities that lessen their likelihood of earning their degrees, such as working full-time while enrolled or dropping out until they can afford to return.

The problem, not surprisingly, is highest in the private nonprofit college sector, “where only a few dozen mostly exclusive colleges meet the full financial need of the low-income students they enroll.” The rest are leaving poor students behind, because they’re using their institutional financial aid as “a competitive tool to reel in the top students, as well as the most affluent, to help them climb up the U.S. News & World Report rankings and maximize their revenue.”

As it turns out, many public universities are traveling down the same road:

As more states cut funding for their higher education systems, public colleges are increasingly adopting the enrollment management tactics of their private college counterparts — to the detriment of low-income and working-class students alike.

One of the main ways that states have dealt with the financial pressure has been to free their public institutions to take a so-called “high tuition, high aid” approach — meaning that these institutions can sharply raise their prices with the expectation that they will provide more generous financial aid to offset the effect on low- and moderate-income students. This analysis finds that the high-tuition, high aid approach has been a failure for low-income students. In many states that are following this model, such as Pennsylvania and South Carolina, the neediest students are facing net prices that are more than double what they are being charged in low-tuition states such as North Carolina.

Penn State University is a case in point. In-state students attending the university’s flagship campus in University Park pay about $16,000 in tuition and fees annually, which is double the average charged at public four-year colleges and universities. Despite the fact that Penn State spends nearly $14 million a year on institutional aid, its lowest-income in-state students pay an average net price of nearly $17,000, the fifth-highest of any public institution this report examines. In other words, Penn State’s neediest students do not appear to be getting any discount relative to other students at all. At the same time, about 6 percent of the school’s first-time freshmen received an average of $3,800 in so-called “merit aid” in 2010-11.

Schools like Penn State seem to be using their pricing autonomy to gain an advantage as they fiercely compete for the students they most desire: the “best and brightest” students — and the wealthiest.

The result: too many colleges and universities, both public and private, are failing to maintain an accessible higher education for the nation’s students. They are, instead, making it more and more difficult for low-income students to acquire a high-quality postsecondary education while creating a system that provides affirmative action for the sons and daughters of already-wealthy Americans.

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

Chart of the day

According to a new study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,

• States are spending $2,353 or 28 percent less per student on higher education, nationwide, in the current 2013 fiscal year than they did in 2008, when the recession hit.
• Every state except for North Dakota and Wyoming is spending less per student on higher education than they did before the recession.
• Eleven states have cut funding by more than one-third per student, and two states — Arizona and New Hampshire — have cut their higher education spending per student in half.

The decline in states’ support to higher education—resulting in a combination of spending cuts and higher tuition—is what is understood in other countries as austerity.

When will Americans learn?

College athletic directors—why is the pay so high?

 

We’ve just learned that nine athletic directors of major college-sports programs make more than $1 million annually, with an average salary of about $515,000. They include:

Tom Jurich, at Louisville ($1.4-million); Jeremy Foley, at Florida ($1.2-million); Barry Alvarez, at Wisconsin ($1.2-million); Shawn Eichorst, at Nebraska ($1.1-million); DeLoss Dodds, at Texas ($1.1-million); Gene Smith, at Ohio State ($1.1-million); Jack Swarbrick, at Notre Dame (slightly more than $1-million); and Joe Castiglione, at Oklahoma ($1-million). Topping the list was Vanderbilt’s David Williams II, at $3.2-million. Mr. Williams is vice chancellor for university affairs and athletics, as well as a tenured law professor.

Why is their pay so high? According to Patrick Hruby,

Athletic directors themselves offer a variety of reasons. They manage $100 million budgets and megabuck media and licensing contracts. They oversee dozens of teams. They hire and fire coaches, cope with scandals, navigate byzantine NCAA rules. Most importantly, they raise money. As Vanderbilt vice chancellor for athletics and university affairs and athletics director David Williams — a member of the $1 million-plus club — once told USA Today Sports, “if someone says what should I go learn to train to be this, I’d say go spend a year in law school, a year in business school and a year over in the college of education, and then take some communications stuff. And then get yourself a big old box of aspirin.”

Also speaking to USA Today Sports, Louisville’s Jurich was succinct. “I know one thing,” he said. “The ADs around the country are earning their money.” Well, sure. Athletic directors work hard. The job is demanding and requires a wide range of administrative and interpersonal skills. On the other hand, so does being an inner-city school principal, or a day care manager, or the chief executive of a large charity. Everyone with a job that doesn’t involve theft or embezzlement earns their money. So never mind Jurich’s self-serving platitudes. The question remains: why are athletic directors earning so much money? And the answer is simple.

When you don’t have to pay competitive wages for your actual workforce, there’s a lot more cash available to shower upon high-level bureaucrats.

Come to think of it, why should collegiate sports be any different from the rest of contemporary capitalism?

Beware the Ides of March?

I missed remarking on it while I was away. But I couldn’t help but be reminded of the fate of the dictator perpetuo when the faculty of New York University’s College of Arts and Science last Friday approved a vote of “no confidence” in John Sexton, the university’s president.

The results quantified, for the first time and in a public way, the dissatisfaction inside the university. Since taking office in 2001, Dr. Sexton has greatly raised the university’s profile, attracting a vast array of celebrated thinkers, raising more than $3 billion, winning approval for a huge expansion in Greenwich Village and assembling a Global Network University of campuses and study centers around the world.

But during the same period tuition rose and faculty salaries stagnated. His opponents said his emphasis on growth, along with the salaries and perks for a few top employees, were more appropriate to a corporation than a nonprofit institution.

They also found his top-down management style to be at odds with an academic tradition of allowing faculty members to help steer a university. In particular, they have criticized the Global Network University as motivated by financial goals, not academic ones, and resisted N.Y.U. 2031, a controversial plan to add two million square feet of facilities in Greenwich Village and six million overall in New York.

Just sayin’. . .

What, me pessimistic?

Neil Gross [ht: ra] challenges Ted Cruz’s attack on Marxists at Harvard—and the claims of other prominent conservative politicians and commentators about radicals in the U.S. academy:

But who are academic radicals, and what do they believe? This is a diverse category, encompassing social democrats, radical feminists, radical environmentalists, the occasional postmodernist—and yes, some Marxists. All told, about 43 percent of radical professors say that the term “Marxist” describes them at least somewhat well. (About 5 percent of American professors, over all, consider themselves Marxists.)

In the course of seven years of research, I never encountered any radical professors who advocated “overthrowing the United States government.” Those who are politically committed to Marxism are profoundly concerned with economic inequality and class, believe that things aren’t going to get much better for people at the bottom of the income ladder unless capitalism in its present form gives way, and harbor some hope that things might eventually change—but are generally pessimistic. Radical academics vote Democratic in national elections, but do so holding their noses, seeing the Democratic Party and President Obama as far too centrist and business-friendly.

While it seems unclear that the specific professors at Harvard to whom Cruz was referring would describe themselves as radicals, it is the case that many radical academics see no point in trying to neatly separate their politics from their scholarship. Their academic analyses and teaching often have a political thrust. This can be a source of great tension not just with conservatives, but also with generally liberal professors who believe that politics, scholarship, and teaching shouldn’t mix.

I certainly don’t agree with all academic radicals, or those who in the academy think they’re radicals. And I’m certainly not a fan of using the classroom or scholarly publishing as a political soapbox.

But. in the end, the problem is not that there’s a political thrust to radicals’ research and teaching. It’s the fact that conservatives and liberal academics deny that that what they do has political consequences—which of course doesn’t stop them from stepping up onto the political soapbox themselves.

And then selling out their radical colleagues when the McCarthyites arrive at the door.

Quality vs. accessibility of higher education

The debate between accessibility and quality of higher education has a long history in the United States, as John Cumbler [ht: mfa] explains.

Now, in the midst of the new austerity, states are abandoning one model—combining excellence with accessibility for many—and retreating to an older model—of quality and accessibility for a few and accessibility without quality for the rest.

States have cut their contribution to public universities, and public universities have raised tuition to make up the shortfall. More and more students are being left behind. To fill this gap some states are looking to the manufacturing model, standardization, mass production, economies of scale and de-skilling of the professorship. This model has already been adapted by for-profit universities, which provide a degree but very little else. State universities have been urged to either abandon excellence for accessibility, or continue the trend of higher tuition and limited accessibility.

This is a world we know about. At its best it is the old bifurcated world of normal colleges and exclusive elite universities. At its worst it is mass-produced diploma mills. It is a world where the best and the brightest elites will get the best education in the world. It is also a world in which the best and the brightest of everyone else will find limited challenge and limited opportunity. But although the world of quality education for the few and second-rate education for the many is not new, the world for those reaching maturity has changed.

Quality education may have been limited in the 19th century, but there existed alternatives to a university degree in on-the-job training for skilled labor or in opening a small business. But that is a lost world. Well-paid, non-college-trained skilled labor is a declining proportion of the labor force, and despite the rhetoric about small businesses, the reality is that few mom and pop businesses survive. The world we are moving toward is one where a great deal of potential will be lost. In the short term states will save money. In the long term it is a strategy for stagnation and loss.

Stephen Resnick—author

The last time, I wrote about Stephen Resnick’s approach to teaching. Here, I want to consider his written work.

I’m not going to attempt to cover everything listed on his long curriculum vitae.  What I want to do is pick out and comment on a few pieces that, to my mind, are emblematic of his pioneering contributions to extending and reconceptualizing the Marxian critique of political economy.

Let me start with two quick observations. First, much of what Resnick wrote and published over the years, he did so with his long-time friend and comrade Richard Wolff. What I write then about Resnick’s work, especially from 1979 onward, should be understood as an appreciation of the writings of both Resnick and Wolff.

Second, there is a gap of about four years in his curriculum vitae, from 1975 to 1979, which is absolutely crucial—and admirable. That’s the period during which Resnick stopped publishing, in order to focus on two other projects: the building of the new Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and a rethinking of Marxian theory. The first project took up a great deal of time and energy, and Resnick dedicated himself to working with others (not only Wolff but also Sam Bowles, Herb Gintis, Jim Crotty, and Donald Katzner, among others) to create a department where Marxian economics would, after a long hiatus, have a home in the United States.* The second project was born out of a frustration with the received tradition of Marxian economics, and the only way to move beyond it was to sit down with the texts of that tradition, both classic and new, and to initiate a project of rethinking Marxian theory. That involved identifying the distinguishing characteristics of Marxism (what made it different not only from mainstream economics but also from other radical traditions) and then pushing it in new directions (of which more below).

But before I get to that work, I want to go back in time a bit and focus on two articles that, in my view, represent the most interesting dimensions of Resnick’s work before UMass. They are:

“A Model of an Agrarian Economy with Non-Agricultural Activities” (with Stephen Hymer), American Economic Review (September 1969): 493-506

“The State of Development Economics,” American Economic Review, Proceedings (May 1975): 317-22

In the first, Resnick and Stephen Hymer went beyond the usual neoclassical labor-leisure tradeoff model by incorporating, for an agrarian economy, a third possibility: “Z activities.” These were meant to represent a wide variety of nonagricultural nonleisure activities such as processing, manufacturing, construction, transportation, and service activities to satisfy the needs for food, clothing, shelter, entertainment, and ceremony. This allowed them to argue against the neoclassical proposition that the course of capitalist development could simply be reduced to the replacing of leisure by work. Instead, by paying attention to the “complex mosaic of agrarian life,” they could emphasize the effects of the growth of markets and increased exchange between town and country—not only with increased specialization and production (of both food and manufactured goods, at the expense of Z goods) but also the economic and social costs of the disruption of the economic and social structure of rural areas, including the immiseration of important parts of the population. My sense is, even though a certain language is largely absent, and the analytical tools they use are pretty standard neoclassical ones, Resnick and Hymer are drawing on many of the themes of a Marxian analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

Resnick put those issues up front in his 1975 critique of bourgeois development economics. He notes, at the start, the differences between the “underlying theories of value” informing neoclassical and Marxian approaches to development and identifies, in language that would be familiar to mainstream economists, the problems inherent in their method:

Simply put, the neoclassical approach is misspecified because of the omission of production relations and thus yields biased policy conclusions and unreliable predictions. Further, although this approach has recently appended to its analysis the more obvious social and political issues, they are added as unexamined external givens never seen as the direct outgrowth of the underlying structure of production, i.e., the value relation between labor and labor power. Neoclassical development cannot analyze anything outside of a framework of market or exchange relationships because that is the theory upon which it is based; it is trapped not by inadequate data or lack of “better” models, but rather by its narrow focus on supply and demand and its total neglect of those historic forces that have produced international relations of production and technology based upon an exploitive system of one class over another.

Resnick then proceeds to tell a radically different story, albeit a pretty traditional Marxian story (replete with a falling rate of profit and the exploitation of some countries by others), of the history of capitalism and imperialism in the Third World.

And that was the last time Resnick would be permitted to publish his research in a mainstream economics journal. After that—after his publicly becoming identified as a Marxist—the doors of the mainstream wing of the profession were closed to him.

Once the new department was up and running, and considerable progress had been made in the project of rethinking Marxism (with Wolff and in discussion with some of the doctoral students at UMass), Resnick published the results in three key articles:

“The Theory of Transitional Conjunctures and the Transition From Feudalism to Capitalism in Western Europe” (with Richard Wolff), Review of Radical Political Economics (Fall 1979): 3-22

“Marxist Epistemology” (with Richard Wolff), Social Text (November) 1982: 31-72**

“Classes in Marxian Theory” (with Richard Wolff), Review of Radical Political Economics (Winter 1982), 1-18**

In the theory of “Theory of Transitional Conjunctures,” Resnick and Wolff announced their new understanding of “Marxist social science” and then illustrated their approach with an intervention into the discussion of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Western Europe. They rely heavily on the work of Louis Althusser to argue that Marx inaugurated a radical break from other social sciences—based on a different epistemology (an alternative to both rationalism and empiricism), a different methodology (based on overdetermination, and thus a rejection of all forms of essentialism, including theoretical humanism and economic determinism), and a specific definition of class (focused on the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor). They then use their rethinking of Marxian theory to identify various ways Marx’s “simple sketch” of the transition from feudalism to capitalism had been interpreted by other Marxists—from Paul Sweezy-Maurice Dobb through Immanuel Wallerstein—and to produce their own interpretation of that transition. Their view is that it is necessary to focus on the contradictions between the feudal class relation (specified in terms of what they refer to as fundamental and subsumed classes) and its social conditions of existence, out of which the conditions of existence of a different class relation—that of capitalism—were produced, which in turn undermined what remained of the feudal class process.

In the Social Text article, Resnick and Wolff explain in more detail what they mean by a specifically Marxist epistemology. They explain how rethinking dialectical materialism in terms of overdetermination rules out the various essentialisms that have characterized the pendulum swings within debates in the Marxist tradition (back and forth between various forms of empiricism and rationalism, and between economic and  humanist determinisms). They then trace the effects of those debates through various key theoreticians, including Marx and Engels, Lenin, Lukács, and Althusser. Their conclusion is that Marxian theory comprises a particular way of “thinking about society, history, and the process of thinking itself: dialectically materialist, anti-essentialist, and with class as its conceptual entry and goal point.”

Then, in “Classes in Marxian Theory,” Resnick and Wolff present the concepts of class they think are central to Marxian theory—concepts that are different both from the traditional Marxist “two-class model” and from more recent efforts to update that model by considering various other classes and class fractions (e.g., peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and the so-called professional-managerial class). Their solution takes the form of fundamental and subsumed classes, which is their way of bringing together the class analyses Marx carries out in volume 1 of Capital with those elaborated in volumes 2 and 3. In their view, Marxian class analysis is based on a double complexity: first, a difference between the production of surplus labor and its distribution; and second, the idea that individuals often occupy multiple, different class positions, both fundamental and subsumed. One of the results is that the “working class” is reconceptualized as a variable alliance of distinct classes, including both laborers who occupy both fundamental and subsumed class positions. Class struggles are similarly rethought: Resnick and Wolff shift the focus from the subject to the object of such conflicts. Thus, class struggles are redefined as collective efforts to change, either quantitatively or qualitatively, the extraction or distribution of surplus labor.

Five years later, Resnick and Wolff published two extraordinary books:

 Economics: Marxism vs. Neoclassical (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)

 Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)

The first was a product of and a testament to their commitment and skill as teachers. In it, Resnick and Wolff not only compared neoclassical and Marxian economic theories; they set forth a nondeterministic way of comparing the two theories, based on their entry points and logics, and their different consequences for analyzing economic events and institutions.***

The second has to be counted among the most significant books of twentieth-century Marxian theory. Resnick and Wolff accomplish nothing less than a wholesale rethinking of the basic concepts of the Marxian tradition, from the theory of knowledge through its methodological orientation to class analysis. They start with the basic proposition that “Marxian theory has a distinctive concept of what theory is” and then proceed to elaborate that distinctiveness in terms of both contemporary philosophy (through the work of such figures as Thomas Kuhn and Richard Rorty) and the Marxian tradition itself (from Marx and Engels through Althusser to Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst). Next, they discuss how Marxists can “construct a knowledge of an ever-changing overdetermined social totality.” During the remainder of the book, they present their rethinking of the concepts of Marxian class analysis, apply those concepts to some of the major arguments in Marx’s Capital, and produce specifically Marxian theories of capitalist enterprises and the state.

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance for contemporary Marxism of Knowledge and Class. There is simply no major topic in our understanding and use of Marxian theory today that is not affected by the theoretical self-consciousness and thorough-going antiessentialism demonstrated in Resnick and Wolff’s reinterpretation of Marxian theory.

The tremendous impact of Resnick’s written work can be seen in his own later work as well as in the articles and books published by his former students and colleagues and in the pages of the journal Rethinking Marxism. I know that I could not have made my own modest contributions to the rethinking of Marxian theory without the theoretical inspiration and comradely encouragement provided by Resnick over the years.

 

*The story of those early years at UMass has been told by Donald W. Katzner in At the Edge of Camelot: Debating Economics in Turbulent Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). My review of Katzner’s book can be found here.

**These articles were reprinted in New Departures in Marxian Theory, ed. S. A. Resnick and R. D. Wolff (New York: Routledge, 2008).

***A new edition of that book, Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian, with additional chapters on Keynesian theory and recent developments in neoclassical theory (coauthored with Yahya Madra), has been published by MIT Press.

Stephen Resnick—teacher

Back in January, I noted that I expected to be writing more about Stephen Resnick’s gifts and his great legacy to the world. Well, it’s taken me a while to begin to confront the loss and to finally return to that task.

Here, I want to focus on two things: his teaching (in this post) and his writing (in another post).

Resnick was, by all accounts, a great teacher. And I was fortunate to witness that first hand: as one of his teaching assistants (for Introduction to Microeconomics) and as a graduate student (in his course on European Economic History)—not to mention many conversations, seminars, and conferences over the years. (For readers who did not have the opportunity to sit in one of Resnick’s courses or to hear him present at conferences, you can get a sense of his commitment to teaching in his on-line Marx course).

The first thing that struck me was that, at least on certain levels, Resnick didn’t distinguish between undergraduate and graduate students. He treated them equally. I remember as if it were yesterday that, in both undergraduate Microeconomics and graduate European Economic History (and I was in both during my first semester at UMass), he started in the same way: with history and epistemology. He taught both groups of students (1) that capitalism had a history (and therefore a beginning and an end) and (2) that different economic theories produced different conceptions of capitalism (and, of course, had different consequences for that system). So, I literally went from his undergraduate lectures to 250 students to his graduate course with 25 students and heard the same thing. Yes, the language was somewhat different but the lesson was the same: history and theories mattered.

And that’s one of the reasons Resnick took teaching so seriously. History and theories matter. And if undergraduate students were only going to take one course in economics, and if they took it from Resnick, they learned that capitalism had a history (and thus was not the only way of organizing economic and social life) and that economic theories were important (since they affected everything, from individual decisions about whether or not to go to college to economic policies enacted in national and international institutions). Graduate students learned the same lessons, which meant that we were taught from the very beginning that history was important (studying the transition to capitalism implied the possibility of a transition beyond capitalism) and so were different theories (which gave us a reason to study both neoclassical economics and the Marxian critique of political economy).

The other major reason Resnick was so successful as a teacher was because he took the students seriously—again, both undergraduate and graduate. He treated them/us as subjects, capable of both thinking and acting. And therefore of changing the world. In other words, he didn’t teach economics as a dismal science, and therefore as a set of laws that needed to be mastered and obeyed. Instead, economics was alive, both useful and problematic, and therefore important for students to know well and critically. He taught the students to understand how and why different groups of economists told the stories they did and arrived at particular conclusions, because that was the only way they were going to be able to understand the role that economics plays in the world—and then to do something about it.

Back in 1998, I was asked to provide a letter of reference when Resnick was nominated for a Distinguished Teaching Award (which he then won). Here’s what I wrote:

Steve is fond of saying that the only thing he has learned during thirty-five years of teaching is that he hasn’t learned anything. Such statements are, I think, a testament to his humility: he neither accepts all the credit for the many successes he has achieved as a teacher nor is he willing to assume the position of the many merchants of educational “snake oil” who are quick to sell to frustrated teachers the elixir for solving any and all problems they encounter in the classroom.

That was a position that Resnick maintained right to the end. He was proud to be a teacher, and humble about how and why he was so successful. “Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t,” he often said. “And I have no idea why.” But that never stopped him from walking into the classroom, each and every time, with the idea that history and theories matter and with a fundamental respect for the students sitting before him.