 While Kovel called his dismissal illegitimate and vowed to fight the decision, he did leave Bard permanently per the university's decision in 2009.Kovel became involved in political activism in the 1960s as a result of the Vietnam War.He began to study Marx which created a "conflict with his identity as a Freudian psychoanalyst" and led him to characterize himself as a "Marxist psychoanalyst", two categories which he described as "contrary" to each other.