It’s unclear to what extent we should buy into Robert Reich’s autumnal, self-appointed role as a reliable “progressive” voice in the blab-o-sphere. One would think that his bona fides as Secretary of Labor under former President Bill Clinton during the triumphant rise of neoliberalism might compromise his bona fides as an arch progressive. But lately, Reich has been a nearly ubiquitous presence on cable news and social media, testily calling out the iniquities of TrumpWorld and decrying economic inequity. And now, with director Elliot Kirschner’s new film The Last Class, he’s the subject of a salutary documentary about his retirement from teaching after more than four decades in the college classroom.
To say that The Last Class is an underwhelming testament isn’t saying much about Reich, who by all evidence seems to have been a perfectly fine teacher. In fact, Kirschner’s seemingly sole aim is to extol Reich’s virtues as an educator, while questions surrounding his political agenda and legacy are left unasked. As he wraps up his seventeen-year stint at the University of California, Berkeley, with a packed class titled “Wealth & Poverty,” the famously diminutive Reich establishes a commanding presence, cracking jokes, testing economic hypotheticals with in-class polling, and exercising a fairly routine pedagogical approach, prioritizing student engagement over rote lecturing. “Get them thinking,” Reich says repeatedly throughout the documentary. “Isn’t that Education 101?”
Teachers-in-training could very well find the movie inspiring, and even very helpful in a practical sense. The rest of us are encouraged to enjoy a dewdrop of nostalgia for the teachers in our lives that really mattered—their energy, dedication, and power of positivity. Still, the film presumably is not as interesting as actually taking one of Reich’s courses—many of which are available through YouTube and Reich’s own Inequality Media website. Whenever Reich digs into a real sociohistorical point in his lectures, Kirschner’s soundtrack toggles to voiceover narration of Reich dissecting his teaching strategy, as though the film feels safer focusing on Reich himself than the topics of study in his classroom. The result is a precious seventy-one minutes in which we hear Reich recount his days in the media limelight, tour his memorabilia-stuffed office, and follow him down hallways like a boxer on his way to the ring.
But what’s missing from Kirschner’s picture? Reich’s gung-ho support for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is never mentioned, leaving his tenure in the Clinton Administration to be recalled with only a good-old-days wistfulness that leaves policy aside. (The same goes for the film’s wry treatment of Reich’s failed campaign for the Democratic nomination for Governor of Massachusetts in 2002, for which he published a promotional book titled I’ll Be Short.) To be fair, Reich walked back his NAFTA cheerleading after leaving government work, and later came out in penance against the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), citing the negative consequences of NAFTA. At best a short-sighted idealist, at worst a compromised and limelight-besotted centrist, Reich may not be the progressive front man we need right now.
Since the end of his political career, Reich—who has since become a columnist for Newsweek, a guest star on The Simpsons, and an author of non-academic books—is the exact type of cosseted establishment creature that nobody trusts anymore. In his political writing, he purports to explain how a “decent” democratic society ought to function, as well as how to fix the unbalanced political system in which he himself has thrived, through what boils down to vague strivings such as respect for civil institutions, increased voter turnout, and policing corporate power. That the film traipses around so merrily in Berkeley—the epicenter of the new global tech oligarchy, complete with a stark housing crisis—is just another unchecked irony.
But is Reich a terrific teacher? Probably. And if anything, Kirschner’s movie conjures a tiny utopia out of its warmly crowded classroom, where the naked malevolence of the real world—and even of Berkeley itself, in the few years since the film was shot—aren’t really welcome. The undergrads are all gorgeous, eager beavers, and Reich a reassuring Socrates. Ultimately, he doesn’t seem to want to retire, or even to grow as old as he evidently has, lamenting repeatedly the “loss” of teaching experience. “I don’t know how I’m going to feel,” he says, at the prospect of a farewell party and the very last class. We can guess: aging out sucks.
