The only professor I know who calls himself a Marxist at Harvard is this guy, Stephen Marglin. And he says it with a million qualifiers too, like that he’s a secular humanist first and Marxist second. He mostly does very particular economic work without much advocacy for Marxist praxis. And that’s what I expect most university academic leftists to be, they might call themselves Marxists or anarchists, but with qualifiers and they certainly won’t praise international socialist movements with a full throat. I can’t imagine there are many ivy league professors defending things like the cuban revolution or modern China.
The only three leftist professors I know about who are what we’d call leftists (not radlibs, or socdems, ultras, etc) have been Vijya Prashad, Michael Parenti, and Richard Wolff.
I don’t know if Walter Johnson (history prof) calls himself a Marxist, but I read his The Broken Heart of America and it’s hard to come to any conclusion other than he’s a Marxist but maybe doesn’t explicitly come out and say it. He goes out of his way to discuss various communists in history like Joseph Weydemeyer, who he calls the Zeppo to Marx and Engels’ Harpo and Groucho (he meant it in a positive way, since most Marxists probably aren’t even aware of Weydemeyer).
Try some social science professors, they have much stronger explicitly marxist tendencies than most professors, because they actually study exactly that kind of thing. I know a professor of higher education research who draws a lot on feminism and marxism in her work on class, social mobility, and education.
The only professor I know who calls himself a Marxist at Harvard is this guy, Stephen Marglin. And he says it with a million qualifiers too, like that he’s a secular humanist first and Marxist second. He mostly does very particular economic work without much advocacy for Marxist praxis. And that’s what I expect most university academic leftists to be, they might call themselves Marxists or anarchists, but with qualifiers and they certainly won’t praise international socialist movements with a full throat. I can’t imagine there are many ivy league professors defending things like the cuban revolution or modern China.
The only three leftist professors I know about who are what we’d call leftists (not radlibs, or socdems, ultras, etc) have been Vijya Prashad, Michael Parenti, and Richard Wolff.
I don’t know if Walter Johnson (history prof) calls himself a Marxist, but I read his The Broken Heart of America and it’s hard to come to any conclusion other than he’s a Marxist but maybe doesn’t explicitly come out and say it. He goes out of his way to discuss various communists in history like Joseph Weydemeyer, who he calls the Zeppo to Marx and Engels’ Harpo and Groucho (he meant it in a positive way, since most Marxists probably aren’t even aware of Weydemeyer).
Try some social science professors, they have much stronger explicitly marxist tendencies than most professors, because they actually study exactly that kind of thing. I know a professor of higher education research who draws a lot on feminism and marxism in her work on class, social mobility, and education.