• Annual conference of Socialist academics which was held annually in New York from 1983 to 2004.  
• Was discontinued in 2005 due to internal divisions

Each year from 1983 to 2004, the City University of New York’s (CUNY) chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) sponsored the Socialist Scholars Conference (SSC). This annual event was founded by Bogdan Denitch, who is now an emeritus professor of sociology at CUNY, an Honorary Co-Chair of the DSA, and the latter organization's permanent delegate to the Socialist International.

The SSC conferences featured the elite of socialist academia as well as union activists, political revolutionaries, reformers, and opponents of "corporate greed." According to the libertarian writer Trevor Loudon, guest speakers at these conferences included "members of the Communist Party USA and its offshoot, the Committees of Correspondence, as well as Maoists, Trotsyists, black radicals, gay activists and radical feminists." Specifically, some of the featured speakers were New York City Councilman (and former Black Panther) Charles Barron; the editor of the Green Party's national newspaper Michael Cohen; civil rights attorney Leonard Weinglass of the National Lawyers Guild; the late Columbia University professor Edward Said; filmmaker Michael Moore; civil rights activist Al Sharpton; Columbia University professor and Black Radical Congress member Manning Marable; feminist writer and The Nation columnist Katha Pollitt; MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky; Harvard associate professor of medicine Steffi Woolhandler; columnist and radio host Julianne Malveaux; author and DSA Honorary Chair Barbara Ehrenreich; University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Eric Dyson;  the late author and columnist for The Nation, Daniel Singer; and Princeton University professor and Honorary DSA Chair Cornel West. 

Numerous politicians also participated in SSC conferences. Among these were  Ron Dellums, Jerrold Nadler, Major Owens, and Bernie Sanders.

In June 2004, seven of SSC's sixteen Board members abruptly resigned, "in protest of the lack of democratic and participatory governance procedures." The resignations came after the Board, led by Bogdan Denitch, had voted by an 8 to 7 margin to fire SSC Staff Director Eric Canepa a month earlier. "We did not want to be part of an organization where we felt people were violating their own principles," said CUNY sociology professor Stanley Aronowitz, who explained that his decision to resign had less to do with the firing of Mr. Canepa than the fact that it was done in a unilateral, top-down manner. "You can't be authoritarian and want a society that is democratic or non-authoritarian," Mr. Aronowitz said. "My politics is that if you are a member of the organization, it has to be prefigurative of the society you want to make. It was not in this case."

In an e-mail addressed to the "Socialist Scholars Conference community," the seven resigning SCC Board members wrote: "We are leaving because we feel that the campaign to accomplish this was riddled with behavior we regard as politically unethical, including grossly inaccurate charges that were repeated even in the face of evidence of their inaccuracy, tirades that were abusive to the point of derangement, and the recurrent implication that those of us who objected to these procedures, being newcomers, were not the 'real' board."

As a result of the resignations, the SSC annual conference was discontinued. The seven members who quit the SSC Board formed a new organization, the Left Forum, which held its debut conference at the CUNY Graduate Center in April 2005.

Among the resigning SSC Board members was Frances Fox Piven, who in the 1960s was instrumental in developing the "Cloward-Piven Strategy" for forcing political change through orchestrated crises. Piven joined the Left Forum with her fellow defectors.


Part of this profile is adapted from the article "Socialist Scholars," written by Michael Tremoglie and published by FrontPageMagazine.com on May 28, 2002.