Professor Gordon Schochet, who has taught at Rutgers since 1965, is retiring at the end of June.

How did you become interested in politics?

It seemed the natural thing to do. I grew up in Baltimore, so living near Washington had something to do with it. I would stop at the House and Senate office buildings just to meet famous people. Having been a kid during World War II, there was a clear sense, in my mind and in my life, of the importance of politics. McCarthy, anti-Communism, and watching the Estes Kefauver hearings into organized crime on television got me into politics. Roosevelt’s death in World War II had an enormous impact on me. I grew up with the belief, like lots of Jewish kids, that Roosevelt was God. When he died, it was like the death of God. That’s the thing that planted politics in my mind, and I’ve been a Democrat ever since.

How would you categorize yourself politically?

Certainly more progressive than the [Democratic] Party. I gave out campaign literature for the Truman campaign in 1948. The first Democrat about whom I really knew something about his politics was Adlai Stevenson. He appealed to me partially because he was an intellectual, but also because by 1952 I had very strong trade union biases. I still have a deep commitment to trade unionism, even thought it manages to shoot itself in the foot at every opportunity. In high school, I wrote a paper on the Taft-Hartley Act, which basically put handcuffs on unions. I remember when I wrote that paper deciding that I was going to go to law school and devote my life to repealing the Act. I went to school when we still had Bible readings, and being Jewish, I resented this (I still have not said the Pledge of Allegiance since the words “under God” have been added). One teacher in high school came to my support on grounds of freedom of religion and freedom of speech, and that really opened my eyes. That experience sensitized me to free speech and made my hatred of the Act even greater, because it was limiting the speech of the labor unions. When I went to Johns Hopkins, I got involved in what in 1954 were left-wing political activities, and worked hard for Owen Lattimore, who taught at the university and was accused of giving secrets to Communists. I organized a group called the Hopkins Campus Young Democrats. In 1956, I worked for Stevenson, went to a rally in Silver Springs, Maryland, and was introduced to him. My interest in Democratic Party politics was sealed.

Who are some of your favorite political philosophers and minds, past and current?

The philosophers for whom I take many of my bearings historically are John Locke and John Stuart Mill, and even Thomas Hobbes- though I disagree with almost everything he wrote, I think he understood politics with a deep profundity. As political people, I’d say Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall (I admired Marshall since I was a kid. He was a lawyer for the NAACP and was in Baltimore. I grew up in a segregated city, so the kids I played with were not the kids I went to school with, and that always bothered me). I like Paul Krugman very much, as well as Bob Herbert. In a weird way I admire David Brooks. I disagree with him but he’s very smart. I’ve been watching Rachel Maddow and I get a kick out her. She’s smart-assed, smart, and tough. Given the current world situation, we need to be able to simultaneously laugh and be outraged.

What do you feel about Obama’s election?

Obama’s victory is certainly the most important thing that has happened in the U.S. since the end of World War II, and it happens in the worst times we’ve experienced since the Depression. I hope that he will have the strength and courage- and also the money- to do what needs to be done. I really don’t think this is the time for bi-partisanship- the Democratic Party recaptured some kind of vision and given this crisis, we have to plow ahead with that vision, and that’s pretty ruthless and will make a lot of people angry. The thing that I like most about Obama is that he got an enormous number of young people into the system, and I haven’t seen anything like that in American politics since JFK. The fact that he won means that those large numbers of young people don’t have an excuse yet to drop out. His victory can signal a real invigoration of the American political process. The one thing that bothers me about Obama is that he doesn’t seem to have any spontaneity; everything seems to be very studied and measured. I like the idea that there will be opposition in his cabinet, but I don’t know if he has the political will to push some of these things through. He often compares himself to Lincoln but in many respects, I think a comparison to Roosevelt is more appropriate. That kind of slightly above-it-all, well-educated, carefully phrased and thought-out, and- here I can use the word- articulate, and that’s the only word, because the predecessor was a sub-literate who couldn’t put two grammatically-correct or intelligible sentences together, and when he did, it was by accident. I like the fact that we are coming back to the notion that our leaders should be a little better than we are. I don’t want to be governed by Joe the Plumber. I want someone who understands his problems, but I don’t want Joe making policy.

So would you say you’re optimistic about the future?

Well, I’m something of an idealist. I really believe in principles, that people can be reasonable. I believe that we do respond properly to the deprivations and sufferings of others, and we can be made to see that we should put our self-interests aside for some greater good. I really believe that, even though the evidence certainly suggests that it’s not true, until we see that not helping the disadvantaged will hurt us more than we hurt now.

What do you think about the current political climate in the United States (Democrats vs. Republicans, Liberals vs. Conservatives)?

A: The people most responsible for the conflicts in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s pretty much dropped out of the political system. A certain degree of cynicism, though, is absolutely essential to the political process. Our liberties are best protected by being constantly on-guard against those that would take them away from us. We are slaves to our self-interest, so sometimes we need to be kicked. We can’t call each other into account if we capitulate, and no matter how much we love him, we can’t capitulate to Obama. On some level, Democrats are no better than Republicans- just look at [Rod] Blagojevich. He’s a deep embarrassment. We need to constantly ask, “what the hell is going on?”

Dou you believe the issue of gay marriage can tear Liberals and Conservatives apart?

I think at some point they are all going to realize that it’s really small potatoes, that in some sense these people will say, “I don’t give a goddamn, it’s none of my business.” I think the social conservatives are going to be beaten down and are going to realize that there are more important issues. It’s not up to me to say who can love someone and who cannot love someone. You cannot use divine rite as a basis for policy in a society like America. In your private life you might disdain gay marriage, but it’s not your goddamn business, and I think they’ll figure that out. I think the economic crisis will at some level diminish the importance of things like gay marriage. It’s much more important to have a place to live and enough to eat than it is to worry about who’s married to whom. It seems to me that social conservatism is a kind of economic luxury, and we can’t afford any economic luxuries right now.

What will you miss most about Rutgers?

I’ll miss my kids, as I call them. It’s not just the classroom, but what I’ve done over the years. I will miss watching students move through four years of school and see what develops. Participating in the lives of students and helping them get the most they can out of four years of school, in and out of the classroom. I’m going to miss the students as people, because I’m persuaded that every one of you has an interesting story.

How has Rutgers changed since you first arrived here?

I think an interesting and good change is the rapid increase in East and South Asian, as well as observant Jewish students on campus. The increasing number of women in hijabs has been good and interesting to watch- if we are ever to overcome our hostility to Islam, it will be by discovering that they are human beings, too. When I came here in 1965, the campus was fairly conservative. There was an anxiety about the draft, and that anxiety as the Vietnam War lingered, and as black protest on campus increased, created a politically radical nucleus on campus. By the time I moved over to Livingston College in 1969, the campus was much more obviously political, and it was moving to the left. By 1974, it became very conservative again; people were much more interested in succeeding, but not for intellectual reasons, but because they knew they could get good jobs if they stayed in school. They lost interest in politics in part because there was nothing to be political about. Gas prices shot up, and there were lines at the gas stations, but we could not get students to protest, because they had no interest in it. We didn’t become political again until after 9/11, and one of the things that really forced the campus into a kind of political activism was [Don Imus’s] comment about the women’s basketball team.

What are some of you favorite Rutgers moments?

After Nixon was elected in 1968, I walked into class and students sitting in the back each held up a sign with a letter that spelled out, “Nixon is the one,” and I thought that was just wonderful, that these kids knew I would enjoy the joke, and my thought was that I like that they feel free enough to do this, and that they knew me well enough to know that I’d appreciate it. Another moment was in 1970 when a bunch of students, in protesting the Vietnam War, literally shut down the Northeast Rail Corridor by sitting on the train tracks above Edison, bringing the train traffic between New York and Washington to a stop. They were all fined and taken off to jail, a lot of people were really pissed off, but what they were saying was that the inconvenience to you, being late for work, is nothing compared to the inconvenience of people in Vietnam and those whose sons are being sent off and killed. This is a small inconvenience to bring home to you the problems of the world. I don’t think you can get students to do that anymore.