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Dick Flacks (April 26, 1938), Richard Flacks. A sociologist and political activist in Santa Barbara, California. He taught sociology at UC Santa Barbara from 1969 until his retirement in 2006. His research has focused on political socialization, political activism, social movements, and the history and culture of the American Left. Along with his wife Mickey Flacks, he was one of the founding members of Students for a Democratic Society in the early 1960s. Since 1982, Flacks has been the host of the weekly radio show called "The Culture of Protest."

Personal life
Dick Flacks was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY by parents David and Mildred Flacks, both school teachers active in the labor movement and other progressive causes. He attended Erasmus Hall High School and Brooklyn College. He met his wife, Miriam "Mickey" Hartman, while serving as a counselor at Camp Kinderland, a Jewish Socialist summer camp in upstate New York. He received his PhD in Social Psychology at the University of Michigan in 1963.

Dick Flacks married Mickey Flacks in 1959. He has two sons, Charles Wright Flacks (b.1965) and Marc Ajay Flacks (b.1968).


 * Charles Wright Flacks (1965-)
 * Marc Ajay Flacks (1968-)

Activism
In Michigan, Flacks sought out other young activists whose politics emerged more from Midwestern prairie populism than from Marx. One such activist was Tom Hayden, who would become Flacks’s lifelong friend and political partner. Inspired by the death-defying courage of Southern civil rights workers, who also followed a nonviolent approach to social change, the Flackses joined Hayden in reorganizing Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), then an obscure group loosely affiliated with the United Auto Workers Union. In 1962, Flacks, Hayden, and about 60 SDS activists gathered in Port Huron, Michigan, to pen what would become the rhetorical anthem for the New Left. An almost hormonal celebration of the democratic impulse, the statement began, “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably at the world we inherit.” It blasted both major superpowers — the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. — and supported democratic principles that they believed could coexist within socialistic and communistic structures. Acknowledging the raw audacity of their vision, the authors wrote, “If we appear to seek the unattainable … let it be known we do so to avoid the unimaginable.” http://files.legendarysurfers.com/sr/2006/05/dick-flacks-looks-back.html As a fledgling academic, Flacks was very much the hot young thing. In 1964, he secured a tenure-track position with the University of Chicago, then among the world’s most prestigious institutes of higher learning, not its current incarnation as a hotbed of neo-con political thought. Flacks resigned from SDS when he took the appointment, but he didn’t stop his political activities. That did not sit well with the school’s administration. Nor did his support of the 121 students who were expelled for sitting-in against the Vietnam War.

At that time Flacks was researching what would become his first published work, Liberated Generation. In tracking the family history of young college activists, he determined their protests were not examples of adolescent rebellion — as noted scholars such as Bruno Bettelheim were insisting — but extensions of the values they learned at home. The book — and its notion that young people could operate as an independent force in American society — put Flacks on the map. Soon publications like Newsweek and the Chicago Tribune sought his opinions on the political activism of the exploding youth culture. At the University of Chicago, however, most faculty couples led social lives that were decidedly old world. Their dinner parties with string quartets and black servants were too bizarre for the Flackses. As Mickey described it, “It was the last bastion of 19th-century male-dominated, super-intellectual elitist nonsense. It wasn’t our scene.”

But by then, UCSB’s sociology department — which was beginning to enjoy a distinctive, quirky reputation — had been courting Flacks. When the University of Chicago did not grant him early tenure, he started looking westward. The last straw came when Flacks was brutally attacked in his campus office by a man posing as a newspaper reporter. The attack — which police believe was administered with something like a crow bar — left his skull cratered in two spots and his right hand nearly severed at the wrist. Flacks’s assailant was never found. http://files.legendarysurfers.com/sr/2006/05/dick-flacks-looks-back.html

Career
After graduate school, Flacks taught in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. While there, he continued his research on the origins of political consciousness and activism. Although Flacks resigned his membership in SDS upon his appointment at the University of Chicago, his general peace activism and other political activities continued, and, in 1968, he was brutally attacked in his office by an assailant posing as a newspaper reporter.

Soon after the attack, Flacks accepted a position as Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara where he continued teaching full-time until his retirement in 2006. From 1975 to 1980, Flacks served as Chair of the Sociology Department. While at UCSB, Flacks developed a model of engaged scholarship that combined research on political consciousness and action with community organizing and local movement building. In this way, Flacks was simultaneously able to produce original research, guide graduate students like Robert Rosenthal, Jack Whalen, and Craig Reinarman toward publishing their own groundbreaking work in political sociology, while at the same time helping grow activist organizations and lead campaigns for progressive political causes in the local Santa Barbara community. Over the decades in Santa Barbara, Flacks played a key role in helping to develop local progressive institutions, including the Santa Barbara Independent (formerly, The Santa Barbara News and Review), Network, the Fund for Santa Barbara, and the Santa Barbara County Action Network.

Upon Flacks' retirement from UCSB, the Social Sciences Division honored him with a party and conference devoted to the themes informing his research. The University named an annual award in his honor--The Flacks Internship Award--and created a fund--The Flacks Fund--"to support research and education that explores the conditions--social, psychological and cultural--for democratic citizenship, the enhancement of democratic participation, and effective citizen action for social justice" http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/news-events/item/flacks-fund-awards.

Philosophical and/or political views
Flacks's philosophical and political views were formed in the progressive Jewish community of New York City in the 1940s and 1950s, but he has sought throughout his life to contribute to a "New Left" politics that embraces "participatory democracy," social justice, and personal liberty. As elaborated most extensively in his book, "Making History: The American Left and the American Mind," Flacks sees the role of progressive intellectuals as helping citizens identify and overcome political obstacles to leading fulfilling everyday lives. His own activism has been oriented around movements for peace, environmental justice, local access to media and housing, and diversity in higher education.

Published works
Youth and Social Change (1971) Richard Flacks

Making History: The American Left and the American Mind (1988) Richard Flacks

Beyond the Barricades: The ’60s Generation Grows Up (1989) Jack Whalen and Richard Flacks

Cultural Politics and Social Movements (1995) Marcy Darnovsky, Barbara Epstein and Richard Flacks (editors)

Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements (2012) Rob Rosenthal and Richard Flacks

Awards
(If any)