But in objecting to the toaster, Ignatiev says, he was only applying his guiding principles. "Raise your voice, speak out. I fight against what I believe to be injustice."

Ignatiev, 51, took the high road to radicalism 30 years ago, when he dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania after his junior year.

Instead of studying Marxist theory, Ignatiev decided to live it.

"I was radical, I was an enemy of official society," he says. "I wanted to be part of the class that I thought held the future in its hands."

And so Ignatiev, a native of Philadelphia, spent the next 23 years holding manual labor jobs in steel mills, farm equipment factories and machine tool plants around Chicago.

"I became something of an electrician and something of a machinist," he says, looking far more the aging academic in wire-rimmed glasses, a short beard and a linen shirt.

"I wanted to get to know [the working] sector of the population," Ignatiev says. "It seemed to me that was the heart of America, and I wanted to feel part of it."

By the late 1960s, dropping out of college and working in industrial plants was a trendy thing to do. But on 1961, when Ignatiev deserted his middle class background and joined the proletariat, he was acting alone.

"My parents were sympathetic, if not quite in agreement," he recalls. "They wanted me to be happy."

Ignatiev brought a political passion to his new life. He was active in the civil rights and anti-war movements, he says. Later, when he decided that unions functioned as part of management, he tried to facilitate more informal relations through shop floor discussions and joint community activities.

Shedding his bourgeois background entirely proved impossible, he admits sadly.

"I was never a part of that sector of society in the sense that I would have been if I had been born into it," he says. "But I came pretty close. I was a pretty acclimated visitor."

His old coworkers might say that Ignatiev has sold out by reentering the bourgeoisie. When his plant closed in 1984, he was accepted into the Harvard Graduate School of Education and subsequently entered a doctoral program in the Department of American Civilization.

Today, he says, "I couldn't imagine a place I'd rather be. Harvard has the best research facilities in the country and a body of undergrads that I couldn't imagine better."

He lives near Porter Square, teaches three tutorials in the History and Literature Department, and drives a station wagon.