Carl Oglesby (nonfiction)
New Left writer and lecturer Carl Oglesby, who was brought to Antioch College by students for six months in 1966–67 as “activist scholar-in-residence” and later taught in the literature department, died September 13 at his home in New Jersey.
As visiting assistant professor of literature, the former president of Students for a Democratic Society (SPS) offered a course in The Political Novel and gave a tutorial on Modern Political Drama.
In deciding to appoint Oglesby, who held only a B.A., literature department chairman Dr. Robert Maurer said, “Credentialism wasn’t important. I’ve heard Oglesby lecture and he’s brilliant.”
While at Antioch as “activist scholar”—a post students designed “to bring someone from where the action is to campus for meaningful dialogue”—he co-authored Containment and Change. Of Oglesby’s contribution to the volume, a New York Times book reviewer wrote: “Oglesby’s 168-page essay has the effect of a grenade exploding unexpectedly inches before your eyes—it is the closest that the activist, non-programatic [sic] New Left has come to producing a manifesto.”
A native of Akron, Ohio, Oglesby attended Kent State University and the University of Michigan from which he received a Bachelor’s in literature in 1962. He was manager of Bendix Systems Division’s technical publications department before becoming involved in SDS and serving as its president from 1965-66.
His memoir, Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Antiwar Movement, was published in 2008.
http://magazine.antiochcollege.org/fall-2011/alumni-profiles