Career
Following completion of his doctorate, Parenti taught political and social science at various institutions of higher learning, including the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UI). In May 1970 while he was an associate professor at UI, he participated in a rally protesting the recent Kent State shootings and ongoing Vietnam War. At the rally he was severely clubbed by state troopers and then held in a jail cell for two days. He was charged with aggravated battery (of a state trooper), disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. After being released on bond, he started a new teaching job at the University of Vermont (UVM) in September. The next month he returned to Illinois to stand trial before a judge. According to Parenti, despite multiple witnesses offering exonerating testimony, the judge found him guilty on all three counts: "In June 1971 I returned to Illinois for sentencing. Because I was already employed outside the state and because a host of academic lights from around the country had sent in appeals on my behalf, I was saved from having to do time. Instead, I was given two years probation, a fine, and ordered to pay court costs.[9]"
This incident effectively ended Parenti's career as a professor. In December 1971, after his UVM department voted unanimously to renew his teaching contract, the UVM board of trustees and conservative state legislators intervened and voted to let his contract expire, citing Parenti's "unprofessional conduct."[10] The battle over his continued presence on the UVM faculty lasted into early 1972, but ultimately he lost his position there.[11]
In subsequent years, he was unable to obtain another non-temporary teaching job. He learned from sympathetic associates at the colleges he applied to that he was being rejected for his leftist views and political activism. He chronicles this period of his life in the essay, "Struggles in Academe: A Personal Account", published in Dirty Truths. He discusses the broader question of political orthodoxy in U.S. higher education in "The Empire in Academia" chapter of his 1995 book, Against Empire.[12] Because he couldn't earn a steady livelihood as a professor, Parenti began to devote himself full-time to writing, public speaking, and politics.
In 1974, he ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in Vermont as the candidate of the democratic socialist Liberty Union Party; he finished in third place with 7.1% of the vote.[13][14] During his years in Vermont, Parenti became good friends with Bernie Sanders. However, the two men later split over Sanders' support for the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.[15][16]
In the 1980s, Parenti was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.[17] In 2003, the Caucus for a New Political Science gave him a Career Achievement Award.[8] In 2007, he received a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition from U.S. Representative Barbara Lee.[8]
He served for 12 years as a judge for Project Censored.[18] He also was on the advisory boards of Independent Progressive Politics Network and Education Without Borders as well as the advisory editorial boards of New Political Science and Nature, Society and Thought.[19][20]
In his book To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia (2001),[21] Parenti decried what he considered the demonization by Western leaders of Slobodan Milošević and his Serbian Socialist Party.[22] Parenti wrote that contrary to Western media assertions about an official policy of ethnic cleansing,[23] Serbia had long been the most ethnically diverse region in Yugoslavia (with 200,000 Muslims living in Belgrade),[24] and that NATO engaged in "hypocritical humanitarianism"[25] as a pretext for military intervention and the privatization of Serbia's public sector economy.[26][27] In 2003, Parenti became Chairman of the U.S. National Section of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević (ICDSM).
