As a student at Cornell University, Charles Levenstein served as president of the Cornell Forum, which was affiliated with the Student League for Industrial Democracy, a national group that became the Students for a Democratic Society. After graduation in 1960 Levenstein worked as a labor union organizer for the International Chemical Workers Union. Later while attending graduate school in Boston, he continued to be active in SDS and in 1964 he headed SDS's Boston Peace Research and Education Project (PREP), which sought to organize engineers and scientists around issues relating to the conversion of the U.S. economy to peaceful purposes. Levenstein later became a member of the Boston editorial board of Leviathan.
