Career
Long a professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University, Farber now teaches in the English Department at the University of San Diego. He is widely known as the author of a 1967 anti-establishment essay, "The Student as Nigger," in which he likened the student–professor relationship in American universities to that of slave and master. This piece, based on his experience as a teacher and as an often-arrested activist in the civil rights movement, served as the title essay of his first book
Subsequent books were The University of Tomorrowland and A Field Guide to the Aesthetic Experience.
Since then he has published essays that include "Learning How to Teach: A Progress Report," "The Third Circle: On Education and Distance Learning," "Aesthetic Subjectivity and the Teaching of Literature," and "What Is Literature? What Is Art? Integrating Essence and History." Farber’s short story “Gorman,” which appeared in his first book, was included in The Year’s Best Science Fiction Number. 4, edited by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison.
As a child, Farber was a radio actor and also appeared as Fleance in Orson Welles’s film version of Macbeth. Among the other radio shows on which he appeared were The Great Gildersleeve, Lux Radio Theatre, The Screen Guild Theatre, The Mercury Theatre on the Air, and Suspense.
In addition, he performed in a number of radio adaptations of literary works—appearing as David Copperfield on Favorite Story, as Huckleberry Finn on National Broadcasting Company University Theater, and as Oliver Twist, together with Basil Rathbone as Fagin, on Stars Over Hollywood.
He played Oliver Twist again, with Rathbone, on a Columbia Records album. He was arrested seven times during this period, serving a number of jail sentences, and was arrested on one further occasion for participating in an anti-Vietnam War demonstration against The Dow Chemical Company, which supplied napalm to the United States. military. He was present as an observer for North-VAC throughout the Watts Rebellion (often referred to as the Watts Riots) in 1965.
His account of this event was first published in the Los Angeles Free Press and has since been reprinted in Reporting Civil Rights, published by the Library of America.
