Carl Hedman, 1934–2026

Carl Gordon Hedman, who taught philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and helped build three co-operatives in the city’s Riverwest neighbourhood, died this year after a short illness. He was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on July 31, 1934, studied at Luther College, Augustana, and Columbia University, and taught in New York City, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and at Miami University before coming to Milwaukee. He and Nancy Hedman were married in 1959. His family and friends gathered to remember him at Falcon Bowl (AKA Polish Falcons of America Nest 725) on April 18.

Carl is one big reason this site exists. In the note I left on his tribute wall, I wrote that he “introduced me to Ivan Illich and his friends, lent me books, and generally shared his practical and open approach to philosophy and storytelling while we worked together at the co-op on weekends.”

Saturdays at the co-op

On Saturdays in the early 2000s, Carl volunteered at the co-op, and so did I. Both of us had been involved in its formation and the building’s renovation, as well as the planning and creation of the Riverwest Currents, which had its office upstairs. Carl lent me a lot of Illich’s writings, which were often a subject of conversation. When a gathering of Illich’s friends came to Milwaukee for an education conference tied to a Gates Foundation-funded pilot of small high schools led by Dan Grego and Danny Goldberg, Carl invited me to join. Illich had died not long before, but while he was alive Grego had asked him for feedback on the small-schools project. At the conference, Grego told the story of Illich’s answer: “You’re a whore who wants her children to go to Harvard.”

Illich was known for blunt honesty to the point of insulting friends who started projects based on his ideas, because of the pragmatic tradeoffs they made. Always the radical, he had a point: you can’t build a school outside the system if its success will be defined by your students gaining the highest insider access. Several local alternative public school programs and some private ones all shared the goal of getting poor, inner-city kids into college. Carl stood in-between as a university professor who also ran a free school and unschooled his own children.

Madhu Suri Prakash later wrote about that gathering of “friends of Ivan Illich” that Grego convened in Milwaukee, almost two years after Illich’s death.

Illich on paper

Carl read Illich closely and defended him in print. In 1979 he published “The ‘Deschooling’ Controversy Revisited: A Defense of Illich’s ‘Participatory Socialism’” in Educational Theory. As the title says, he read Deschooling Society as a case for Illich’s “participatory socialism,” not only as a critique of schools.

Illich in practice

He did not leave it on paper. His obituary credits him with co-founding the Gordon Park Co-op in the 1970s, the Riverwest Housing Co-op in the 1980s, and the Riverwest Food Co-op, which opened in November 2001. Carl gave the credit for the food co-op to others. “The group of young people who organized the Riverwest Co-op have taught me an old lesson,” he wrote in a 2002 column, “that no matter how victorious regressive social and economic forces might seem, progressive impulses by the young can prevail.” The co-op’s ten-year history calls him its “resident philosopher.” Nancy Peters, who worked with him in the early 1970s, remembers developing the Multicultural Community High School with him, a program that ran for about forty years.

In 2006 neighbours built a bench outside the food co-op and put a plaque on it. Harvey Taylor’s poem about the bench in Riverwest Currents credits Paul Seifert and other craftsmen with the work, and the photograph beside it shows the plaque:

In recognition of Carl Hedman, who believes that cooperatives promote genuine democracy. His numerous efforts to nurture cooperatives in Riverwest are an enduring inspiration for us all.

Plaque on the Philosopher’s Bench, 2006

In its first years the co-op raised money with spaghetti dinners at Falcon Bowl, where Carl’s family and friends gathered this April to remember him. The co-op itself closed on September 21, 2025, after 24 years.

What counterfoil research owes him

Illich wanted counterfoil research to be public and political, a way for ordinary people to decide together where their tools should stop. A co-op is one of the few institutions built to do exactly that: its members set the limits, keep the books, and share the work. Carl helped build them from the 1970s into the 2000s, and he spent his weekends working in one, lending books to whoever shared the shift.