Reflections on Running and Life: John Manley’s Marathons

By Cole Manley

My dad hates running. Or, at least, he cannot fathom the appeal of running. The concept of someone running 26.2 miles, in particular, seems especially puzzling. When I tell him about my long runs, or my training for the New York Marathon, he usually shakes his head jokingly and says something to the effect of, “I’m glad it’s you and not me.” My dad played sports growing up, and he was quite a good basketball player in high school. And he follows sports as well, a lifelong Yankees fan (dating back to his Irish Catholic family in upstate New York), an itinerant (and despondent) Knicks fan, and a casual viewer of golf and tennis tournaments on TV. But by the time of the running boom of the 1980s, the moment had passed. My dad was already a tenured professor of political science at Stanford University, dedicating his life to teaching and scholarship, to reading and writing and office hours, and, it turned out, to a lot of rabble-rousing.

John Manley had his own marathons to finish. He was during his tenure at Stanford both an inspiring professor, with poli sci classes with hundreds of students each quarter, and a principled and honest critic of the University’s ties to the Hoover Institution and to other nefarious hideaways. Whenever the University reneged on its founding principles, or whenever it tried to hide shady labor practices, my dad was there to protest.

Webb Ranch was a good example of this. For years, my dad led an effort with Professor Ron Rebholz in English to increase campus awareness about Webb Ranch, a farm on Stanford’s land where migrant laborers worked in atrocious conditions for poor pay. For years, Stanford pleaded the fifth, arguing that it somehow did not have direct control or responsibility for the conditions of workers on the Ranch. Through advocacy and outreach and protest, John and Ron and many other supporters allied with workers at the Ranch to unionize, which led to some improvements in their conditions and pay. At the very least, Stanford’s practices were out in the open.

There were other battles my dad fought which played out in the pages of The Stanford Daily. The Hoover Institution’s links to conservative and neo-conservative (and, now, Trump allies) are fairly well-documented, in large part because my dad was a perpetual thorn in Hoover’s side. He refused to downplay concerns that the University was selling its soul to Hoover by allowing it to exert control over hiring practices, control over which professors were and were not approved to teach in political science and other departments. Although, once again, Stanford argued that it effectively had no formal relationship with Hoover that would affect the teaching and research mission of the University, the truth was plain and clear for all to see. The Political Science Department’s links to Hoover were numerous, with many joint appointments, and, today, these ties largely persist.

One more marathon: the Reagan presidential library. This was a victory for my dad and for many people at Stanford. The Reagan library was slated to scar the foothills above the Stanford campus, near the Dish, a place of immense natural beauty. Imagine looking up from the Oval or Palm Drive and seeing not only foothills and the higher ranges behind them, but a giant building ferrying hundreds of thousands of visitors each year up to its lookouts. The aesthetic--not to mention the environmental--costs of this Library would have been enormous. My dad rightly pointed out that this would have also signified a perversion of the University by connecting it more closely to the harmful policies of Reagan. This would not just have been a library that happened to be on Stanford land--it would have represented, like Webb Ranch and Hoover, an alignment of the Stanford administration with Reagan’s policies. The consequences to undergraduate education would have been significant. Thankfully, due to protest, administrative mismanagement of the building plans for the Library, and various other gaffes, the Library slunk off to Simi Valley.

How did Stanford respond to my dad’s organizing? They responded in fear. They made my dad’s life at Stanford untenable, so much so that he decided to take early retirement as one of the most popular professors on campus. I say all of this even as an alum of Stanford and even as someone who loved my undergraduate years on campus. I say this not to point fingers or to unfairly criticize Stanford among its higher education peers. Other universities have their own histories of neglect and injustice, their own ties to Confederate generals and eugenicists. Rather, I say this because this is what my dad would say, too. I say this because we all have to hold institutions accountable, especially those we cherish and hold close to our hearts.

While all of his marathons were finished, my dad left behind a powerful legacy of teaching and organizing. His teaching--and his life--inspired many students to go onto formidable careers as public defense lawyers, progressive politicians, and professors and teachers themselves. Luke Cole, one of my dad’s most beloved students, went on to become a leader of the environmental justice movement, founding the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment (CRPE), an outstanding legal organization in California that represents victims of environmental racism and injustice. Luke became well-known for his advocacy for LatinX residents of Kettleman City, a San Joaquin Valley town where a company attempted to build a toxic waste incinerator. Thanks to Luke’s advocacy, plans for the incinerator were contested in court and stopped.

Luke tragically passed away about ten years ago, but one of the more personal consequences of my dad teaching him was my name: Cole. My dad was as grateful for his friendships with his students as his students were for his mentorship. Growing up in Connecticut, after my dad’s retirement, I remember that every now and then one of his students would stop by our house for dinner, to catch up about life after The Farm. They had stayed in touch with him for decades.

Today, I’m very sad to write, my dad is quite sick. He is 81 and has Alzheimer’s and various other health problems. He is still irascible when confronted with injustice, like Bernie Sanders, and he knows what he likes (and what he does not like). He has been for his whole life a proud atheist, and, after meeting strangers in line at Starbucks or the car dealer, he tends to respond to people who ask him what he taught at Stanford by saying, with no extra explanation: “Karl Marx.” People generally inhale, their eyes widening, when this happens, which gives my dad some pleasure, it must be noted. My dad never cared for pleasantries.

My dad hated running, but he taught me lessons about perseverance, courage, and dignity that I apply to everything I do--running included. When the running gets painful, in the closing miles of a marathon, I sometimes think about the challenges my dad overcame. Where do you go for strength when you’re running or racing? When I think about my dad, the pain doesn’t feel quite so intense. And so I keep running. His memories are all of ours now.

John Manley’s papers can be accessed at Green Library at Stanford. The Stanford Daily’s records also contain much about these fights and others.