Cary Nelson is known not only as a blunt and devastatingly witty commentator on higher education but also as an activist working hard to reform it. He was active in the effort to unionize the Champaign-Urbana faculty in the 1970s and in the drive to recognize a graduate employee union twenty years later. As a member of the Modern Language Association’s Delegate Assembly he co-authored a number of reform proposals, including a major project to document salaries for contingent faculty in English and foreign languages. For the last ten years he has served on the National Council of the American Association of University Professors, the past six as second Vice President. As a student, Nelson joined the famous 1963 Washington, D.C., march where Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. He was active in the anti-war movement in the 1960s and served as a draft counselor during the Vietnam War. As a scholar, one of his main interests is in preserving the cultural heritage of the American Left. He discovered and published Edwin Rolfe’s anti-McCarthypoems and coedited Madrid 1937, a massive collection of letters written home by American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. He edited the first comprehensive anthology of modern American poetry for Oxford University press, at the same time addressing contemporary topics like political correctness, hate speech regulations, sexual harassment, academic unionization, and the financial crisis in higher education. He is the author or editor of twenty-five books and over 100 essays, including a number published in Academe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Education.