Michael Parenti
American academic (1933–2026)
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Education and early life
Michael Parenti was born on September 30, 1933, to an Italian-American working-class family in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York City. After graduating from high school, Parenti worked for several years. Upon returning to school, he received a BA from the City College of New York. He was awarded a teaching fellowship at Brown University where he earned an MA in history in 1957. He completed his Ph.D. in political science at Yale University.
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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.
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." The battle over his continued presence on the UVM faculty lasted into early 1972, but ultimately he lost his position there.
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. 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. 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.
In the 1980s, Parenti was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. In 2003, the Caucus for a New Political Science gave him a Career Achievement Award. In 2007, he received a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition from U.S. Representative Barbara Lee.
He served for 12 years as a judge for Project Censored. 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.
In his 2001 book To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, Parenti decried what he considered the demonization by Western leaders of Slobodan Milošević and his Serbian Socialist Party. In 2003, Parenti became Co-Chairman for the U.S. National Section of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević (ICDSM). The committee was formed to urge an end to the war crimes trial of Milošević that commenced in 2002 at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.
Personal life and death
In the last decades of his life, Parenti made his home in Berkeley, California. He was the father of Christian Parenti, an academic, author and journalist.
Parenti died at an assisted living facility in Amherst, Massachusetts, on January 24, 2026, at the age of 92.
Appearances in media
Apart from video recordings of his public speaking engagements, Parenti also appeared in the 1992 documentary The Panama Deception, and in the 2004 Liberty Bound and 2013 Fall and Winter documentaries as an author and social commentator.
In July 2003, he was invited on the C-SPAN Booknotes program to discuss his latest work, The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome. He appeared in an episode of the Showtime series Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, speaking briefly about the Dalai Lama (Episode 305 – Holier Than Thou).
Because of his research for the book To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia (2001) and his travel in the war-torn region shortly after the NATO bombing, Parenti was interviewed in Boris Malagurski's documentary film The Weight of Chains (2010) and its sequel The Weight of Chains 2 (2014) about the former Yugoslavia.
New York City-based punk rock band Choking Victim uses a number of samples from Parenti's lectures in its album No Gods, No Managers. Chilean hip-hop artist Ana Tijoux features a section of one of Parenti's lectures in her song "Caluga o menta".