STEVE GOLDSTEIN: Fifty years ago, the U.S. was also in the midst of nationwide rallies–many of them on college campuses and many of them focused on the Vietnam War. Others addressed racism, and that was the case for one at the UA in Tucson in January of 1970. Attending that rally led to the end of philosophy professor Morris Starsky's career at ironically UA's rival school, ASU. John D'Anna of The Arizona Republic dug into Starsky's story–which includes an FBI file and a history of activism and is with me to talk about it. John, what had put an ASU philosophy professor on the FBI's radar?
JOHN D'ANNA: Starsky was very active in a lot of political causes. When he was a graduate student at the University of Michigan, he actually knew people like Tom Hayden, who was the leader of the Students for a Democratic Society. And so, Starsky was clearly identified with a lot of those causes that were considered essentially subversive by the FBI. And at the time, the FBI was running what later was revealed to be an infamous program aimed at neutralizing subversives in American society. And it was called COINTELPRO. And this program was later expanded to include people like the Black Panthers and all the different political activists on the left. Starsky, in 1975, used the newly amended Freedom of Information Act, a new provision in that act to request his own FBI file and found that he had been targeted specifically by the FBI in COINTELPRO as early as 1965 after he organized that first sit-in, or helped organize that first sit-in at ASU.
GOLDSTEIN: John, that part is so remarkable. The idea that, and the irony of— and part of what makes this such an amazing story is that he was able to find the file and learn about himself, and presumably he had no clue that that file was there?
D'ANNA: I was able to interview his wife for this story and she said, you know, they always suspected that they were being spied on. They would see people at rallies wearing ill-fitting civilian clothes who didn't exactly fit in, carrying spiral notebooks and taking pictures of demonstrators. So they always felt like the government was spying on them. And just the extent that the FBI went to discredit Starsky was extraordinary. And it went all the way up to J. Edgar Hoover, who approved it. One of the things they did was they specifically targeted him with a series of letters that were supposedly anonymous — anonymously written by fellow faculty members expressing their concerns about Starsky's activities. But, in reality, they were written by FBI agents. It ultimately cost him his job.
GOLDSTEIN: And he never worked as a professor again. He lived about 20 more years after that, is that right?
D'ANNA: Yeah, well, he had a couple of teaching appointments, one, and that was in San Diego. But his contract was not renewed after he wound up attending a rally in L.A. And then word got back to a newspaper in San Diego, and they began editorializing against him. And then he got a job at Cal State Dominguez Hills, which was a newly chartered university. After that, his contract was rescinded nine days after it was signed because of his political activities.
GOLDSTEIN: Even after all those years, even as the world had changed, his past still caught up to him, at least in terms of the establishment.
D'ANNA: Yeah, well he definitely said he was blacklisted. And I was able to interview Noam Chomsky, who is one of the great intellectual minds on the left, and he told me very specifically that there is currently an absence of safeguards in our country that would prevent this from happening again.
GOLDSTEIN: What stands out to you now that we're in 2020, and it almost feels like history is repeating itself in some ways, for a lot of people?
D'ANNA: A lot of the things that Starsky protested are still issues today, particularly what we're seeing with today's protests involving systemic racism against African Americans. Starsky was very much an anti-racist and spoke out often about it. So that's, you know, that's still an issue that's with us today. There's kind of one interesting little epilogue, I guess, that's probably worth noting. In 2003 or so, one of his sons grew up, was getting ready to graduate high school. As a lark, he sort of sent an application, a college application, to ASU. And Lorraine Starsky, his widow, said we'll never be able to afford it. But then she sort of got an idea: "I have all these papers of Morris Starsky's, this archive, and maybe if I donated them to ASU, they would give my son a scholarship." So they tried that, and ASU was very reluctant. They didn't want to do a quid pro quo, but they wanted the papers. And lo and behold, they found a way to award a scholarship to Ben Starsky. And he graduated from the same university that fired his father. And his father's papers are now housed at ASU alongside some of the people Morris Starsky protested against, like Barry Goldwater. So it kind of all came full circle.
GOLDSTEIN: That is John D'Anna. He's a senior writer for The Arizona Republic. Great storyteller. Always fun to talk with you, John. Thanks.
D'ANNA: Thanks so much, Steve.
