Ohmann, 90, dies; brought politics to college English
Richard M. Ohmann was an unlikely revolutionary. One of the youngest tenured professors in the country, an associate provost at Wesleyan University and a former member of the elite Society of Fellows at Harvard University, he was the picture of the liberal establishment of the late 1960s.
But there he was, in December 1968, at the annual conference of the Modern Language Association, smuggling a copier into his hotel room to print anti-war flyers, hanging posters in the halls and organizing dissident seminars on Vietnam and the women’s movement.
Then, during the group’s business meeting at the Americana Hotel in New York, he orchestrated a series of anti-war resolutions and even got Louis Kampf, a fellow activist academic, elected second vice president on an anti-war platform — a role that guaranteed him the presidency two years later. It wasn’t just their ideas that were radical: The very notion that a scholarly organization should take a stand on nonacademic issues was practically unheard of.
“We imagined ourselves struggling toward a just and democratic society,” Ohmann wrote for the website Insider Higher Ed in 2017. “We thought of ourselves as the academic wing of international popular movements.”
The New York Times editorial Board, among others, criticized the coup at the association meeting, deriding Ohmann and his colleagues as “a noisy fringe group.” But in fact it was a turning point for academic literary studies, the moment when a vanguard of young professors decided to inject politics into their profession, not just against the war but in favor of fields like gender studies, African American studies and Marxist literary criticism.
Ohmann was 90 when he died, Oct. 8, at his home in Hawley, Massachusetts. His stepdaughter, Nicole Polier, said the cause was complications of heart disease.
He had begun his career as a scholar of British literature, and by the late 1960s was respected enough that the editors of the American Heritage Dictionary invited him to write a definitive essay on grammar and meaning for their 1969 edition.
But starting in the 1970s, Ohmann turned his gaze inward, writing a series of books exposing what he saw as the complicity of higher education, and in particular the study of English literature, in the perpetuation of class, gender and racial hierarchies.
He used his leadership role at Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, to help create some of the country’s first programs in gender studies and African American studies, and he edited two influential journals, College English and Radical Teacher, that spread his ideas around the academic world. He invited other leftist scholars to guest edit issues, which he dedicated to then-outré topics like homosexuality in literature.
“He gave protection and cover to all sorts of radical initiatives when these were dangerous things to do,” Richard Slotkin, an emeritus professor of English and American studies at Wesleyan, said in a phone interview.
Richard Malin Ohmann was born July 11, 1931, in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. His father, Oliver Arthur Ohmann, taught psychology at what is now Case Western Reserve University and later worked for Standard Oil. His mother, Grace (Malin) Ohmann, was a homemaker.
He received his bachelor’s degree in literature from Oberlin College in Ohio in 1952, and his master’s and doctorate from Harvard in 1960. He arrived at Wesleyan a year later.
Ohmann married Carol Burke in 1962. They separated in the 1980s, and he married Elizabeth Powell in 1990. She died in 2007. Along with his stepdaughter, he is survived by his daughter, Sarah Ohmann; a stepson, Stephen Polier; and a step-granddaughter.
Ohmann’s putsch at the Modern Language Association was not his first act of dissent. He was already active in Resist, a group that helped young men oppose the draft, and in 1967 he joined hundreds in a protest outside the Department of Justice in Washington, where they symbolically returned their draft cards — an act of defiance that got him featured on the “CBS Evening News.”
Unlike some activist academics at the time, Ohmann never drew a line between his activism and his teaching or scholarship. His book “English in America: A Radical View of the Profession” (1976) illuminated what he saw as the role of literary studies in perpetuating capitalist hierarchies: It both diverted attention and, by applying standards to writing and rhetoric, perpetuated class distinctions, he wrote.