March 11, 2009

Those who remember me will know that I was the “radical” campus minister at Stanford during A3M and several years afterward. I had just arrived on campus in the fall of 1968 and joining in the A3M sit-in was my first official radical act. Among other things, I was a member of a worker’s collective and led the boycott of the Stanford Union when they laid off some long time workers after years of promising secure employment. I was closely associated with Miriam Cherry of the Newman Center staff during those years. My last hurrah was to perform the marriage ceremony for Kathleen Barclay and Tony Russo in Davey Napier’s office, with Dan Ellsberg as the best man. I finally was fired in 1971 for being openly involved in the movement and, with my family, moved back to Denver in January, 1972.

In Denver, I drove a taxicab for 3 years, served as a union steward, and helped lead the movement to buy the cab company and run it as a worker’s co-op, an experiment that lasted twenty years before it finally collapsed.

In 1975, I moved again with my family back to the Bay Area in order to take graduate work at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, in a joint doctoral program with the University. During that time, I became active in a group called “Christians for Socialism” and spent a lot of time lecturing religious folks about Marxism. Alas, I never finished my dissertation but did get a gig as a result at the University of San Francisco where I taught philosophy and religion courses as a very busy adjunct instructor from 1978 to 2000. In 1987, I was named “Teacher of the Year” out of 450 adjunct instructors. I also led an unsuccessful effort to organize my fellow adjuncts into a branch of the teachers’ union at USF.

In 1982, thanks to Paul Rupert, I got a job working in Redwood City organizing a community mediation program. This led to my becoming the founding executive director of the Peninsula Conflict Resolution Center in San Mateo County, at the time and even now a thriving and ground-breaking community effort toward getting conflicts resolved without going to court. In 1997, putting my ethics teaching and mediation experience together, I gave an address to the Northern California Mediation Association on “The Principles of Mediation and the Future of Ethics.” This speech has had a long and busy Internet life that people who wish to do so can look up.

In 1995, I became Executive Director of the suicide prevention hotline in San Mateo County. I have no problems with people who want to commit suicide but I figured if they called in on the hotline they were asking for help, and I was happy to run an organization that could provide it. That agency was in very bad shape financially so I got it merged with a larger non-profit and merged myself out of a job in 1997.

Not to worry, soon after that I became the first Executive Director of the Pacific Art League of Palo Alto, an artists’ membership group that offers classes and has galleries in a building just west of the Palo Alto Civic Center, from which I retired in 2002. My wife, Eleanor, and I now live in a senior center complex in San Mateo.

Along the way, I took up tennis and played until four years ago. One of my playing partners over the years was Dick Roe, my old colleague at the Stanford Campus ministry, as some A3Mers may remember.

Joe Hardegree
1490 Miramar, #206
San Mateo, CA 94404
650-627-9621