"I learned a lot about organizing while I was at Berkeley. As teacher's assistants, a small group of us organized a student strike in order to fight for reasonable wages. We held teach-ins and thousands of students skipped their classes. I realized then that a few people could really make a big difference. It was an exciting time. So much was going on there. I remember when the police tear gassed the campus. I was teaching a class when it started to come into the room. I had to be evacuated.

"The sixties was also the era of my own sexual freedom. I had asked the doctors in the hospital whether I would be able to have sex or not and they told me that I wouldn't. It was a heavy blow to a kid who was only fourteen. While I was at Berkeley, I had a girlfriend. At that time, I used a push chair. Now, it became extremely inconvenient to have my attendant there pushing me around while I was with my girlfriend; so, needless to say, I was highly motivated to find out how to drive a power chair. I started working with an engineer on it, and we discovered that if the controls were turned around I could drive a power chair. I can pull towards me with my left hand, but I can't push away. So we set up the switch and I spent a couple of hours bouncing off of the walls until I got the hang of it. Then she jumped onto my lap and we rode off into the sunset together – or to the nearest motel.

"I finished everything but my dissertation for my Ph.D. The Dean of Berkeley thought that I was going to get my doctorate and go live in a nursing home for the rest of my life. I broke out during the early 70s and decided that I didn't want to be an academic anymore. I went and taught at an all-black school up in Palo Alto for a while.