1991

After Berkeley I joined the sociology department of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Here I find myself (in common with what I understand to be a disproportionate number of Berkeley Sociology PhDs) as the theory person and have the true pleasure of getting to teach the undergrad and graduate level theory courses. I credit my love for teaching theory primarily to the multiple opportunities I had to work as a GSI for Michael Burawoy teaching social theory (as well as Michael Kimmel and Jim Stockinger).

I'm the Managing Director of Research and Development for The McHenry Group, a financial consultancy that specializes in risk management and business development support for the investment-based benefits market . At McHenry, I am responsible for conducting financial analyses, industry assessments, and research on the latest pension and retirement trends. In addition, I manage research and design for financial reporting and analytical tools, which involves improving statistical measures, data calculation and testing, and product design.

I came to Berkeley Sociology after completing my law degree at the University of Wisconsin. Wisconsin has a rich sociological tradition which permeated law school teaching, but it was still law school. Several times at Wisconsin when I answered a question in class, a couple of professors said with a mildly degrading chuckle  "Well, Mr.

I came to the Berkeley Sociology Department in 1991 from Chicago via Kumamoto, Japan where I had been teaching English as a second language to pursue a dissertation ostensibly about Japanese education and to work with Robert Cole. Bob Cole was lovely but it was clear to me after the first term, that I wasn't that interested in Japanese education and was much more turned on by ideas of racialization brought on by teaching in the Asian American Studies Department. I also enjoyed our methods course taught by Michael Burawoy. Our cohort was infamous both for its size and strong will.

I chose Berkeley because I imagined myself immersed in a politically active intellectual culture by day and being a coffee house free spirit by night. I was not disappointed. Right away, I got swept up in protests over departmental hiring and AGSE's struggle for recognition. Tense confrontations with professors were followed by tense support sessions with other professors. Mental gymnastics in Burawoy's seminars were mixed in with singing 'union carols' on the picket line.

After growing up in Newfoundland and attending college in Ohio, I went to Berkeley in fall 1991 because driving to California sounded more exciting than driving up the road to Toronto.

I'd worked my way through school: bussing tables, driving a delivery truck, digging ditches, waiting tables. I did not know what I wanted to do in life, but I liked reading books and hated working. Also, I had a tee-shirt that said 'capitalism sucks' in Russian and I thought this shirt would be more relevant in the 1990s than it had been in the 1980s.