1974

Since my first reading of Freud at age eleven something inside of me said that I was destined to be a psychotherapist. But psychology alone was not enough - so where could one study race, alienation or phenomenology, not to speak of psychoanalytic theory? Sociology at Berkeley permitted all these fields to be subsumed under the title "the sociology of..." and the Department became a good home to me.

Lucky me: I had no sooner landed my Ph. D. than Berkeley decided to create an undergraduate Mass Communications program and Sociology decided to house it. I got the job, doubling up, and stayed at Berkeley 1978-1994. After an interim year in Paris, I moved to New York original home was calling and taught for seven years at NYU, chiefly in the departments of Culture and Communication (media studies) and journalism. In September 2002 I moved to Columbia, where I profess journalism and sociology. In journalism, my prime responsibility is a new Ph. D. program in communication.

Whenever I look back at my years as a graduate student at Berkeley, I feel a surge of excitement along with a liberal dose of nostalgia. For me, like for so many others, these were years of discovery, exploration and hope, years in which I met some of my best friends, I developed some of the ideas that have stayed with me longest, and experienced some of the moments of greatest emotional happiness and intellectual exhilaration that I have ever experienced.