A graduate student and teaching assistant in history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, David Cherry was caught up in the campus turmoil which the Dow demonstration heralded. He and Alan Helfman, an undergraduate student of his, collected material in Fall 1967 relating to the Dow demonstration with the intention of publishing an article; this project was, however, never completed. Cherry also joined the Teaching Assistants Association in October 1967, partly in response to the University's handling of anti-war protests and partly in order to seek more widespread educational reform. For a short time in the spring of 1968, Cherry served on a UW student-faculty committee, which investigated ways that the student body could more actively participate in university decisions. He also became the chairman of the Grievance Committee of the TAA. That summer he worked on student organizing at the departmental level (as SDS and other organizations were also trying to do) and on developing critiques of college education at UW and in general. In these capacities, he wrote the leaflet “On the Teaching of History: The Survey Principle Must Go” (Aug. 1968), using the pseudonym Bernie Johnson.
Cherry became very active in the History Students Association which he had helped to create during the summer of 1968. He acted as de facto secretary for the association. In this capacity, he negotiated with publishers and writers over copyright to material that later appeared in the association's publications; handled requests for association publications; and obtained space at the American Historical Association's December 1968 convention to organize a radical caucus of historians.
In 1969 Cherry became increasingly despondent over the potential of campus organizing. He and other UW TAA activists formed a commune in Baltimore during that summer. The following fall, he began teaching at the Essex County College in Newark, N.J.
