Background on Robert Winston
"Life has taught me a few key lessons. Taking principled positions came at a very high price, but it developed my character immeasurably. It taught me humility, and gave me a modicum of wisdom, resiliency, compassion and empathy."
-- Bob Winston
Born during a Manhattan blackout on April 20, 1942, and raised in a middle-class home in suburban Great Neck, Long Island, the activist Robert M. Winston was the son of a non-practicing Orthodox Jewish father (Philip Winston) and Reform Jewish mother (Sylvia Wolrich).
Bob's initiation into politics came only gradually. Neither of his parents was particularly politically active, but both aligned with the left and were keenly aware of the impact of discrimination and social inequality. When applying to dental school, for instance, Philip changed the family name from Weinstein to Winston to avoid the anti-Semitism that permeated admissions. Like many liberal New Yorkers, Philip was a registered Republican, but he joined the Young People's Socialist League, and the red baiting repression of the McCarthy years only strengthened his political loyalties.
Bob's own political education began during the summers of 1952-1959, when he attended a Socialist summer camp at Deer Lake in Madison, Connecticut, and he entered college just as the wave of baby boomers was finding its political voice. After enrolling at Michigan State University, Winston transferred to the University of Michigan, where he received his BA in Political Science in 1964 -- the same year he married Janet Walerstein -- before continuing on for a doctorate in Government at Indiana University. In Bloomington, he was introduced to Students for a Democratic Society, though never becoming a member, and earned the dubious distinction of being attacked by FBI agents while protesting the university's refusal to recognize the Communist-affiliated W.E.B. Du Bois Club. Winston became an avid participant in the civil rights and the antiwar movements, but his activism was broad-based, influencing the course of his scholarship. Trained as a community organizer by Saul Alinsky, he worked against discrimination in housing and accommodations in the deplorable poverty in the Miller Drive neighborhood of Bloomington.
After Martin Luther King was attacked while protesting housing restrictions in Louisville, Kentucky, Winston and his wife led a contingent of forty IU students to join a protest and prayer meeting at the A.D. King Zion Baptist Church, and he continued on with King to a demonstration at Churchill Downs blocking access to the Kentucky Derby. Louisville soon became the focus of Winston's research. With the support of a Danforth fellowship, he launched a study of open housing initiatives and Black leadership in the city, but soon came to have misgivings about his work and the feeling that social science investigation exploited the conditions of the poor. Activism and academia were not easily reconciled, and within two years he abandoned the project.
Hired as a visiting lecturer in the Life Studies Interim Program of the Parallel Institute at the University of New Hampshire in 1969, Winston was poised for the next step on his career path. His pacifism and opposition to the war in Vietnam made him as popular with students as he was controversial with the administration. When the size of his class was reduced with no explanation, students reacted in sympathy by staging a mass sit-in, and his fellow faculty members were equally vocal in support: the heads of seventeen departments stepped down in protest. The end of the affair, however, was not rosy: while the administration backed off, Winston was forced to resign at the end of the year.
From Durham, Winston moved to Amherst, Mass., to become head of the Valley Peace Center. His position drew heavily on his activist past, calling on his skills at coordinating antiwar activity, offering draft counseling, and support for related social and political causes, and among other activities, he led a series of demonstrations at nearby Westover Air Base and served as the Western Massachusetts coordinator for the Indochina Peace Campaign initiated by Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda. Winston also returned to doctoral study, receiving his EdD at UMass Amherst in 1973 for a Marxist analysis of the community college and higher education system. He later continued his studies at the New York Institute of Radical Criminology and the Summer Institute for Race Relations at Fisk University.
Once again, activism and academia ran into conflict. While teaching at Greenfield Community College in 1972, Winston was arrested during a protest, and was summarily dismissed. To support his wife and three children, he worked a succession of manual labor jobs before once again landing on his feet. When the Center for Urban Education at UMass launched a program on career opportunities for minority paraprofessionals in 1975, Winston was tapped as Director of the Juvenile Justice Program, becoming involved with the contentious process of deinstitutionalization of the state's juvenile justice and mental health systems. He founded a community-based program, the Team Learning Center, to serve those populations, and although the program ended in 1980, he continued to provide care for delinquent youth through another organization he helped found, the Tri-County Youth Program. The TCYP was designed to settle delinquents in foster care, and for eight years, the Winston family themselves offered foster care.
When UMass opened its first prisoner education program for inmates in 1984, operating within the maximum security system, Winston was hired to become a Criminology and Justice Counselor, beginning a twelve year commitment to teaching political science to prisoners in Massachusetts and Connecticut. During this same time, he worked as Director of Drug Addiction Services for two cities, Springfield and Westfield, until 1987, when he left the Tri-County Youth Program and combined them, becoming the Director of Counseling Centers of Western Massachusetts. All the while, Winston continued with his academic commitments, serving as the Dean of Academic Affairs at Asnuntuck Community College in Enfield, Connecticut (1991-2003) and Manchester Community College (2003-2006) before accepting a position as Executive Director at the Bonnyvale Environmental Center in Brattleboro, Vermont, in 2006.
The struggle for social and environmental justice has remained a constant in Winston's life for nearly fifty years, drawing him into service with a wide range of organizations. Among other commitments, he has served on the boards of the Rosenberg Fund for Children (which provides support for targeted activists and their children), the Greensboro Justice Fund (offering grants to grassroots activism in the south), the Karuna Center for Peace Building (international training programs in conflict transformation, inter-communal dialogue, and reconciliation), the Performance Project (a theater group which works with prison inmates to create productions for fellow prisoners and the general public), Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace (of which Winston served as a founding member), and Saving the Salamanders (founded by Winston to save an endangered salamander population). In 1991, Winston was awarded the President's National Merit Award for his environmental work.
