Isseks had a choice between Cortland and Albany. His father told him to flip a coin. “It came up Albany and I said, ‘Well, OK, here we go,’” he laughs while adding that his father said that if it had come up Cortland, he would have forced another coin flip. At age 78, Isseks still looks ready to hop fences. With piercing blue eyes and an easy, slightly mischievous smile, he speaks with a quiet, captivating intensity. In the shade of a magnolia tree outside the home he shares with his wife, Denise, Isseks recounts how the war and political climate of the late 1960s shaped his experience as a student and activist. He frequently participated in anti-war protests in Albany and as far as Washington, D.C., including the famous 1967 March on the Pentagon.  

“I met professors that I truly feel influenced me a lot,” he says of his college years, adding his English professors “made a huge impression on me, in the way I think.”  

The killings of students at Kent State and Jackson State by National Guard troops and police sparked national outrage and led Albany students and faculty to close the University down. While he has mixed feelings about the tactic in retrospect (“Closing down classrooms isn't the most enlightened way to start a revolution.”), the faculty’s response during the shutdown was a revelation. The hierarchy between professors and student-activists seemed to dissolve as both groups led discussions about the local strike and what was happening across the country in general.

“It kind of went from having professors to having friends. You know, we were referring to them on a first-name basis,” says Isseks, remembering professors Tom Smith, Tim Riley (a.k.a. John), Diva Daims and Harry Staley as being especially engaging. “It was very cordial, very social. And it was an opportunity to really get to know them as people.” That human connection, Isseks says, was a transformative experience and one that he would carry forward in his life.  

When the strike ended and the Class of 1970 graduated, Isseks remained in Albany and earned his master’s in English in 1975. He traveled and, to make ends meet, spent time driving a taxi. Teaching was not on his radar until he took a job as a substitute.  

“When I started teaching, I fell in love with it immediately,” he says. During his early years in the classroom, Isseks realized that true learning happens when students leave the classroom and have actual experiences with real consequences.  

He sought to cultivate a learning environment that was welcoming and nurturing rather than intimidating, collaborative not competitive. Seen as “the cool teacher” by students and considered radical by many of his peers, Isseks was known for his unconventional approach to teaching. So, when the school received a cache of video cameras for use in the classroom, naturally, he was up to the challenge.  

Isseks created an Electronic English class to infuse technology into the course and allow his students to be creative and to follow their interests. When he began collecting credible information about toxic materials in the local landfill, the free-thinking maverick offered his class a radical assignment: become investigative journalists. A few brave students were immediately hooked.  

The result was something no one anticipated. High school students immersed themselves in a multi-year investigation, following leads, filming town meetings, and interviewing an array of characters from colorful landfill employees to slippery elected officials. They learned on the job, asked tough questions, made mistakes and uncovered evidence. In the face of outright hostility from adults, they remained undeterred as Isseks encouraged his students to dig deeper, to be persistent, and to always question what they were being told. Their efforts culminated in a documentary that helped expose a conspiracy involving the mafia and decades of corruption.  

David Birmingham was one of those students. He plays a prominent role in Teenage Wasteland, in both grainy ’90s footage and current-day interviews. Like Isseks, Birmingham is also a UAlbany alum who graduated in 2006. With a degree in philosophy, he returned to Middletown, where he now has a psychotherapy practice. Over the years, Birmingham and Isseks have remained close, and like many former Middletown students, he cites his experiences with Isseks as a seminal influence in his life and career.  

“Fred taught me to be very curious, and to question everything in the best possible way,” he says when asked what makes Isseks so special as a teacher. “That has served me well and is something I teach my children.”

Birmingham shares how Isseks inspired students to continue their investigations even as they were being branded radicals by many. The importance of that perseverance is something he now conveys when asked by young people how they can inspire positive change in their communities. “You might not be a radical,” he likes to remind aspiring activists. “You might just be right.”

Though Isseks, Birmingham and the Middletown saga made headlines in the ’90s, the idea of telling that story to a wider audience didn’t emerge until decades later. Shortly before retiring from teaching in 2011, Isseks did two important things: He saved (and later digitized) all the VHS recordings made during the ’90s landfill investigations, and, to continue the conversation, he created a blog called Garbage, Gangsters and Greed (a nod to the title of the original student-produced film). That blog caught the attention of writer Geoff Manaugh, who shared the Middletown story in a 2020 piece in The Guardian.

The story once again garnered attention, including from Moss and McBaine, the creative team that produced and directed the critically acclaimed Boys State and Girls State movies. When they read The Guardian article, ideas to bring the story to the screen percolated. Moss described the 450 hours of archival footage maintained by Isseks as a “documentary filmmaker’s dream.” After their first meeting with him, the pair knew they had something.  

“You can see why he's a great teacher,” says Moss. “He just has a kind of inner centeredness to him.” The directors, who aren't typically drawn to stories from the past, felt the treasure trove of archival video allowed them to tell the story of the investigation in a way that feels current. Assembled from old and new footage and set to a ’90s-rich soundtrack bookended by Veruca Salt and Throwing Muses, Teenage Wasteland offers a time capsule brimming with nostalgia for the era wedged between leg warmers and the internet age. The film has generated buzz and was an official Sundance selection in 2025.  

“It’s more than just a record of environmental crime,” Isseks says in the promotional trailer. “It’s this archetype of young people rising up to the challenge and doing something about it.” It’s what he calls “civic courage.”  

Isseks explains that, in a democracy, we’re taught that it’s critical that citizens guard against cynicism and pessimism, continue to make their voices heard and to speak out against injustice.

“Civic courage means bluffing…keep doing it and acting as though you live in a real democracy,” he says. “It’s the only way to make any kind of progress. Because if we give up, if we stop acting as if it's a democracy, then it definitely is not one.”

For both Isseks and Birmingham, the story came full circle when they attended a June 2026 screening of Teenage Wasteland at the New York State Museum in Albany.  

“We’ve been to about 30 different screenings at this point, to different film festivals, but I think it's at this one in Albany that I'm getting goosebumps the most,” Isseks says to the rapt audience as the lights come up after the closing credits. “It's unbelievable, and it's very gratifying.”

The two are quick to point out that the landfill issues persist, but they’re hopeful that stories like theirs will inspire others to get involved in their communities and to find ways to practice civic courage. It harkens back to the lesson of human connection that Isseks learned, all those years ago, working with those professors and other like-minded students at UAlbany.

“I'm optimistic about the film,” he says. “It's showing people that, yeah, this corruption has been around for a long while. But more importantly, I think it's the power of the students, the power of the classroom as a place where real change can take place.”

Testament to Isseks’s view is new legislation introduced by New York State Senator Michelle Hinchey, whose late father, former New York State Assemblyman Maurice Hinchey, played a pivotal role in the Middletown story and features prominently in Teenage Wasteland. At the Albany screening, Hinchey and Assembly Member Emily Gallagher shared the proposed legislation, the Corporate Catastrophe Act, a bill that would hold corporate executives accountable for knowingly causing catastrophe or reckless endangerment.

Now retired, Isseks remains involved in his community as an environmental advocate and historian. Through it all, he is guided by an relentless desire to speak truth to power and by an unwavering belief that the education system can be improved. In many respects, Isseks is still hopping fences — and epitomizing civic courage. But Birmingham believes that Isseks’s true influence extends beyond his teaching, his activism, and even his role as a mentor.  

“The thing I admire most about Fred is he's good at life,” says Birmingham. "He just operates on a slightly different plane than everyone else. And it's a good plane to be on.”