ABSTRACT
By the mid-1970s I felt that the sort of politics I’d been involved in was approaching an impasse. I’d stayed on in higher education, taken a higher degree and had been teaching sociology at university and polytechnics for eight years. But conditions had changed drastically since the early days. Student struggles now centred on the grants issue. There was little criticism of course content or questioning of how education perpetuates class divisions. My possible political activity was increasingly restricted to union politics over teachers’ conditions and the education cuts. Even teaching Marxism and courses on racism and women’s oppression seemed like a contradiction: students could just regurgitate radical lectures in their exam papers without any change of political outlook. As academic sociology became more parasitic on Marxist and feminist theory, books and topics which had been taboo in 1970 now became required reading, and in the process lost much of their critical impact.
