John D.W. Beck

By his own account, Connecticut management consultant John Beck does work that he loves and gets paid "outrageous fees' for doing it. Can this be the former leader and highly vocal spokesman of Dartmouth's anti-ROTC group (a less extremist group than SDS) who helped oust the military from campus? The conscientious objector who sought alternative service and found his bliss as a fifthgrade teacher in the newly desegregated South?

In fact, Beck's abhorrence of the war and love for teaching led him directly to where he is now. Beck enrolled in the University of Massachusetts s education school, where he discovered his true calling: organizational development, a field in which corporations are seen as communities of individuals whose happiness and productiveness depend on their ability to communicate and collaborate.

He taught and became a dean at the University of Hartford's business school before a private side venture grew into the rapidly rising Charter Oak Consulting Group. "I'm really struck by how a whole generation could get swept up by external circumstances that would permanently shape their lives," Beck says today. While SDS was occupying Parkhurst and issuing demands, Beck preferred to remain outside with his group and mediate. He is still mediating today.

Ex-protester Beck makes pancakes with his kids.

Beck in '69