I am now a political sociologist at Tufts University with a speciality on the influence of US domestic politics on military policies. I examine the impact of social movements, public opinion, and various business and bureaucratic interests particularly with regard to the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons policy. I am now writing a book on public opinion and military interventions during the period bookended by the two wars in Iraq. I wrote my Ph.D. thesis with Franz Schurmann on the Pentagon Papers and my interest in the organization of social violence remain with me to this day.
1969
In 1965, I graduated from Harvard with a senior thesis on Thomas Kuhn and the social sciences, and headed to Lesotho with the Peace Corps.Returning to the US in 1969, to enter a doctoral program in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, I landed in the middle of a passionate opposition to Vietnam War. I was already radicalized by living for two years among farmers who lived in thatched roofed huts, so I knew where my loyalties lay. When the war came to the beginning of its end with Nixon’s resignation, my comrades and I turned our attention to the feminist project;
My career path at Berkeley and beyond was neither linear nor traditional, reflecting departmental and social discontinuities during the early 1970's. The first two years were very intense. As I took classes with Neil Smelser, Norm Denzin, Herbert Blumer, Bob Blauner, and others, my life was also directly touched by events related to the Vietnam War, radical movements, and the 'counterculture.' My academic experience changed abruptly when the three faculty members with whom I worked most closely all left Berkeley in Fall, 1971 - two permanently and one (Smelser) on sabbatical.
Since leaving Berkeley, I have worked at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, a liberal arts college in the Jesuit tradition. Much of my energy has been devoted to teaching, offering courses in community, the sociology of place, American Studies, and more recently the sociology of childhood and issues of identity and self. My research agenda has also evolved, with time out for administration and other service at various points of my career.