Alumni Book

Ken Bock Died August 9, 2014 at the age of 98

Rick Biernacki (PhD 1988) writes:

Prof. Bock served graduate students as a model of prudence in remaining unfashionably true to the grand questions of social inquiry.  He also rescued me with his calm adroitness.  During the interminable period in my graduate studies when I was readying field papers for the qualifying exam, Prof. Bock spontaneously invited me to his office and began quizzing me on historical method.  “How would a happening qualify as an historical event from your point of view?” he asked.   Then he queried me on interpretations of The Eighteenth Brumaire.  I had no clue as to why Prof. Bock was quietly posing such a variety of challenges.  It seemed my drafts had struck him as unintelligible.  After thirty minutes of probing, Prof. Bock advised me to take the qualifying exam as soon as the relevant faculty could assemble – quit rewriting the qualifying papers was his advice.  Prof. Bock was so statesmanlike in shepherding me toward the dissertation itself, I have tried to carry on his earmark style of wisdom in advising graduate students ever since.

Jack Bloom (PhD 1980) writes:

I was a TA for Ken Bock.  He was my first experience teaching; I was nervous, not sure that I had something to say to the students I would be teaching.  He encouraged me, allowed me to participate in choosing the books for the course and to give some lectures to the whole class, not just the sections I was teaching.  He regularly sat in on one of the twice-a-week section meetings, never saying anything, but he included questions about what I had been teaching on the final exam, which told me that I was at least on the right track.  He was always encouraging, even though he did not agree with my point of view.  (He was much more conservative than me.)  He was a true mentor, and I am grateful for the experience he provided me.

Robert S. Palacio (Ph.D. 1980) writes:

I met Professor Kenneth Bock during my first year as a graduate student at Berkeley, fall 1972.  In his courses on Social Change and Social Evolution he introduced me to a body of literature and set of ideas that continue to fascinate me to this day.  My life-long interest in the writings of the Enlightenment, as well as his views related to the “organic analogy” vs. the “historical sociology” approach to the study of social change and development, began in his courses.  All this was new to me at that time.  I have fond memories of seminars at his home up in the Berkeley hills.  We sat around the living room with drinks in hand, bread and cheese, discussing the assigned readings related to theories of social change.  It was my introduction to student graduate and academic life.  I was just beginning to read some of the great writers in the history of sociological ideas, and therefore did not feel too secure, yet with him and his courses, I felt welcomed and accepted.  Although formal, Professor Bock always made us feel comfortable.  This mentoring made an impression on me, and over the years, I have tried to mentor my students in a similar way.  

I remember one day I mentioned to him that I did not have transportation to his home for a seminar, so he offered to take me in his car.  Along the way we talked about my academic interests and about my background.  I mentioned to him that I was from the rural central valley of California, Fresno more specifically.  I found him to be interested in me as whole person, not just as a graduate student.   During the ride I   learned that he had lived in Modesto, CA in his youth.  I felt some degree of connection with that.  As my dissertation committee Chair, Ken Bock guided and encouraged me through my some difficult times.  I had some problems forming a dissertation committee, since I did not have any contacts with faculty outside the department.  He arranged a meeting with Jack Potter from Anthropology; he also introduced me to Wolfram Eberhard who became the second member of my committee. After I completed graduate studies, Professor Bock was always available to help me with letters of recommendation for teaching positions at many colleges and universities; I often felt I was burdening him; but he was always supportive.

When my wife and I learned about Professor Bock’s passing, we recalled the time when he called me at home at our graduate student housing (University Village) and our three year old daughter picked up the phone.  He was not upset even though she chatted with him for several minutes before we knew we had an incoming call.  When I got the phone, he said it was no problem, even though she had taken up some time with him.   Professor Bock was a kind and gracious person.

Over the years, we kept in touch by letters and my visits to his office.  He sent us a gift when our third child was born in the early 80s.  But I regret that I did not continue to reach out in later years.  I wish I had said that he was an example to me, not only as a teacher-scholar, but as a gentleman.

Mary Waters (PhD 1986) writes:

Professor Kenneth Bock was a wonderful man who taught me a great deal.  At the time I studied with him I would have said he taught me social theory.  He cared a lot about social theory and appreciated very much that my undergraduate degree had been in philosophy and so we had a lot to talk about.  Now, 28 years after I graduated from Berkeley, I realize what he taught me was far, far more important than social theory.  He taught me how to treat graduate students and how to live a balanced life.  I don’t think I have been as good at either as he has, but his example has given me something to strive for. 

If you did not know Ken Bock well you would have thought he was old fashioned and conservative.  He always wore a suit and tie to teach and he was rather formal when you first met him.  In fact, he was ahead of his time in so many ways. His politics were progressive but he also lived according to his principles. He treated women graduate students exactly like the men—something I see few male professors able to do even decades later. He drove a truck, waxed eloquent about fly fishing and the mountains, had many friends, and did not get upset about academic nonsense. He had a great sense of humor and enjoyed being with people a great deal. He and his wife Margaret invited me to his house for wonderful dinners and drinks where we talked about ideas and everything else under the sun. He told great stories and had a great laugh. He was generous and kind and he and Margaret once even had me spend the weekend with them so that I could take a break from writing my dissertation.  We walked the dog, drank stiff drinks on the deck overlooking the hills and he gave me advice about being a professor; the most important of which was not to get caught up in academic politics. When his wife Margaret died I wrote a letter to him, remembering her and describing her personality and specific acts of kindness I had experienced with her.  Ever the teacher, he responded and added a sentence at the end, “Such letters are a great help and matter a great deal you know”.  Of course I didn’t know.   I was young and no one close to me had died yet.  I had written because it was something I had heard was polite to do.    I know he did not believe in obituaries and did not want one when he died, but writing this has helped me feel better.  It helps, you know, to remember and to celebrate the life of such a good man.

Steve Warner (PhD 1972) writes:

Being a student of Kenneth Bock in my senior year at Berkeley was the chief reason I wound up going to graduate school. I was one of the small group in his Senior Honors seminar (Janet Salaff was another), all of whom he encouraged to grow intellectually, in part by taking advantage of our privilege of access to the stacks of the Doe library. I also took his course called “Social Evolution,” numbered Sociology 100 as I recall, which meant that advanced undergraduates and graduates were in the same class. This was my real introduction to independent scholarship in sociological theory, which turned out later to be the bread-and-butter of my career. Prof. Bock (I never called him “Ken”) was ready to write me a glowing letter of recommendation for graduate fellowships, but, aware of his obscure status in the profession, introduced me to then department chair Kingsley Davis who, so far as I know, endorsed the letter as his own. It worked. I’m glad I listed Bock among my teachers in the acknowledgments to the first monograph I published (in sociology of religion). I regret that I didn’t reach out to him in his years of retirement.

By the way, when I became a major in the department at the start of my junior year (fall 1961), it was still called the Department of Sociology and Social Institutions. I always felt that Bock’s historical leanings were not at all marginal given the huge presence of such figures as Reinhard Bendix, Leo Lowenthal, Franz Schurmann and others in the department.

Charles Perrow (PhD 1960) writes:

Kenneth Bock was responsible for setting me on the sociological path, which in the early 1950s was narrow but rapidly expanding. I took my first sociological course from him, "The Idea of Progress." We started with Hesiod’s “Works and Days” and ended, I think, with Hannah Arendt. In keeping with the broad scope of the course I wrote an impertinent paper called "All About War," and he loved it. His course was so much more trenchant than my history courses and his amiable manner and wide ranging erudition reinforced his urgings that I pursue a sociological career. It was also encouraging that you could be a good sociologist by taking time with projects and not perish for the lack of publications. Alas, those days and that kind of a mentor have long since perished.

Irwin Sperber (PhD 1975) writes:

I still have a vivid recollection of Kenneth Bock as the very first professor from whom I took a course (Social Change) in the Spring, 1961.  Freshly arrived from NYC, I was altogether insecure and uncertain about the courses I should initially take.  A couple of unofficial "greeters" from the Graduate Sociology Club assured me that he's especially interested in the history of social theory, and, in the bargain, an extraordinarily calm and reflective person.  So I signed up accordingly.  Thanks to his empathetic and sympathetic outlook, I was able to accept and utilize his trenchant criticisms of my work over the long haul.  He guided and encouraged me at every turn in my fits and starts throughout my "progression" toward the doctorate.  As the decades have rolled by, I've continued to incorporate his work into my teaching of the history of sociological theory.

Since his remarkably long and distinguished career at Berkeley will be the object of many informed accolades by his faculty colleagues, it would be redundant to attempt a survey of his courses and his publications in the present context.  I cannot help but offer a footnote to the many reminiscences that will be presented in his honor.  Although he was not a prolific author, his substantive writings on the history of sociological theory and, most importantly, on the impact of evolutionist assumptions and ideologies in mainstream theorizing are among the most cogent and profound contributions to our discipline in living memory.  The world and the academic community are poorer places with his passing.

Troy Duster writes:

Throughout the tumultuous period of the 1960s and 70s, when local and national politics often rendered “department politics” very contentious, Bock was a model colleague by every measure - always  gracefully engaged with all factions. He was a kindly and quiet mentor, who spoke softly but effectively. One important example was the story of how he guided the late Lillian Rubin into a career in Sociology.  Bock took notice of a fine paper she had produced in her last year as a late-entry undergraduate.  Lillian fondly remembered how Ken Bock called her into his office and asked if she had considered graduate school.  She replied that this was hardly on her agenda, at which point he told her to “go see Phil Selznick” and show him the paper. The rest, as we say, is history.  Ken’s own scholarship was a socio-historical account of evolutionary theory – and how it would influence social theory for a full century.  It certainly influenced me, and was a significant pre-cursor of what would become the Social Studies of Science.

Lyn Spillman (PhD 1991 ) writes:

Bob Blauner (PhD 1962) writes:

Elwood Carlson (PhD 1978) writes:

Ken's remark that he was "left homeless" when Social Institutions gave way to Sociology resonates with me, because I was also "left homeless" when UCB's department of Demography was dissolved a month after I was admitted to it in 1972. My grad funding survived the end of the department, though, and Sociology graciously took in three of us orphans. There I found Ken Bock, and took his History of Social Thought seminar not once but twice, since it was a different course each time. He showed us the way into the labyrinths of historical development of social theory, and I too got Halevy's Philosophic Radicals to read. I spent many hours talking with him in his office, pretty continuously during the entire time I spent at Berkeley, and he shaped my perspective on sociology more than anyone else in the department at that time. Eventually I went off and did my demographic thing, but I can still hear the country music coming from the radio in his small pickup truck to this day. I treasure the copy of Acceptance of Histories he gave me, and have read it several times. Thank you, Ken, for being the best example of a mentor I have yet encountered.

Arlie Hochschild (PhD 1969)writes:

Ken Bock was a quiet and kindly scholar who taught the history of sociological theory, who wrote elegant prose, stood aside from fractious departmental encounters, felt bypassed by the march of the hotshot quants but upheld  a qualitative flag.

Christine Williams (PhD 1986) writes:

Ken Bock was my professor in graduate school in the 1980’s.  He taught social theory to generations of graduate and undergraduate students, but he never called himself a sociologist.  He was quintessentially an historian of ideas and a humanist.  He assigned Hobbes, Locke, and Tocqueville to his undergraduates, and among many other books, I recall reading Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees and Halevy’s Growth of Philosophic Radicalism in his graduate class.  (I didn’t recognize this approach to social theory as subversive until much later in my career.)  I had the privilege of being his RA when he was working on his book, Human Nature Mythology.  Ken labeled “human nature” a myth that denied humans agency and responsibility for history.  He traced the myth of human nature from its origins in religion, through the enlightenment, to the twentieth century rise of psychoanalysis, sociology, and sociobiology.  He believed that disciplines like sociology—with its emphasis on structural causes for social behavior—robbed people of our agency and responsibility for making the world a better place.

Ken taught me that being a good sociologist is not as important as being a good person.  He and his wife Margaret often invited Martin and me to his house for delicious dinners, country music, and martinis.  He was an avid fly-fisher who escaped every summer to his cabin in the Sierras, where we visited him once.  I remember the only time he raised his voice at me was when I stood upstream of him in the river and scared away the fish.  He was a fair, kind, and wise mentor and role model, and I miss him very much. 

In 2002 Ken Bock wrote this for the alumni site: 

I do not really belong in this group, for my degree from the University was in Social Institutions, not Sociology. Because the Department of Social Institutions soon disappeared in 1946 (mine was the last degree I believe) I was left homeless. It was my good fortunate, then, to be received as a faculty member in the new Department of Sociology and allowed to teach and write in the field of history of ideas for more than 45 years. The many friends among students, faculty, and staff that I made during those years remain fresh in my memory.

Cesar Grana (1919-1986), professor of sociology at UCSD, was killed in a car accident near Cadiz on Aug. 22, 1986. These are Guenther Rothâ’s memories, made at a memorial meeting on Nov. 7, 1986 in La Jolla.

Many years ago Cesar and I resolved to meet one day in Sevilla. We became friends thirty years ago in Berkeley, where we were both foreign students and working on European nineteenth-century themes. We shared the troubles of writing a dissertation and also our women troubles; one day he asked me to help him meet the elusive Marigay, who was to become his wife. Cesar and I were highly ambivalent about our cultural backgrounds. When Cesar went back to his native Peru in 1967 for the first time since leaving it in the early forties, he was badly shaken up and felt the urge to flee from all things Spanish. He flew to my German hometown and holed up for a few days to recover his balance. When I took him to a well-preseved Cistercian monastery, he was upset because it turned out that the little railroad bus was loaded with several dozen Spanish women who worked as Gastarbeiter in a nearby factory. But around 1970 he made his peace with the southern Spanish culture and joined a Gypsy brotherhood, in whose cemetery he was to be buried. In 1986 the constellation was finally right for our Spanish meeting. The previous year my wife Caroline Bynum and I had taken our daughter Antonia Walker through Cesar's decaying birthplace Lima to her own native Andean highlands. On July 4 Cesar met the three of us at the Madrid airport, where we rented a car together. Skilfully maneuvering through the traffic jams of Madrid, Cesar explained the Spanish notion of space which left only inches between cars, assertive egos jostling one another. That evening he showed us the quarters around the Plaza Mayor, beginning with a bar full of fading photographs of bullfighters. His enthusiasm about bullfighting was boundless. He liked to talk to waiters about the heroes of today and yesterday. The next day we headed south in 100 degree weather. Taking the wheel, I quickly discovered that the main road from Madrid to Sevilla and Cadiz was not a freeway. Without any speed limit thousands of cars hurtled through a landscape full of sunflowers and grapevine but empty of villages, castles and monasteries. Cesar was amused about the spectacle of hundreds of Moroccan Gastarbeiter driving their grotesquely overloaded Mercedes cars to Cadiz for the crossing of the Straits. Toward evening we reached Cordoba and a swimming pool in which we could recover from the day’s terrible heat. After nightfall the two of us made a preliminary exploration of the old quarters, the Juderia, past the synagoue and the monument of Maimonides to the enormous Mudeja Pardon Door of the closed Mesquita Cathedral. Cesar rediscovered an ancient bar where old timers used to talk about the bullfights, but it had turned into a noisy discotheque for young people. The next day we visited one of the great wonders of the world, the Mosque-Cathedral. In the Court of Orange Trees, at the old Moorish basins for ritual ablution, we cooled our hands and quenched our thirst. In front of the fountain Caroline Bynum took a picture of Cesar squinting into the sunlight. Having just written about Islam, she had come to see its great architectural survivals, not to study the culture of bull-fighting. To Cesar’s dismay she always took the side of the bull in our conversations.

Leaving the city-driving to Cesar, I drove next to Granada, six or seven hours of winding roads, trusting no driver and surviving a few hair-raising situations. Cesar had not been in Granada for many years and wanted to see it once more in his lifetime. The Alhambra was the high point of our journey together, one of the most beautiful sights in the world. Cesar showed me the plaster decorations and tiles that had changed Marigay’s life; he talked much about her and his two sons and his grandson full of pride.

Granada turned out to be the early termination of our journey together. The heat was too great for driving in a little car. Antonia had become car-sick. The prospect of another six or seven hours on winding roads to Sevilla appeared too daunting, the traffic dangers too great. It seemed better to take the family back by air-conditioned train to Madrid and air-conditioned sightseeing of Segovia, Toledo and Avila. We spent a relaxed morning together visiting the cathedral and the burial site of the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel, who had taken Granada in 1492. It turned out that Cesar had long ago formed a picture of me as a northern Lutheran agnostic, who would chafe at Catholic culture high and low. He was, in truth, not quite prepared to find me married to a historian of medieval spirituality and with a daughter who liked to light candles at altars. Finally, it became time to say good-bye at the railroad station. We were, after all, never to consummate that trip to Sevilla, the place which he wanted to make his home in his remaining years and where he wanted to finish his sprawling manuscript on Spanish culture. We also had to give up the idea of driving down from Sevilla to the sherry wineries of Cadiz. So he made that trip alone and never returned.

Cesar and I were very different from one another, but I considered him one of the few close friends I made in the United States and felt much affection for him in spite of our rare meetings over the years. Ignorant of the future, we had a few very intense and beautiful days together. I shall not forget them!

OBITUARY FROM ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL

Charles Emmert Woodhouse passed away December 28, 2008. He was Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of New Mexico, and earlier was a professor at UC Riverside. Born in Rochester, New York, March 14, 1920, he was raised in Ohio and Wyoming. He served in the US Navy on aircraft carrier, the USS Bunker Hill, during WWII. Upon discharge, he attended University of Colorado and then UC Berkeley where he was awarded his doctorate in Sociology. He was polite and civil and sure of his academic convictions. He was a dedicated scholar and expected excellence from his students. Some welcomed his challenge and became scholars and professionals themselves. He was preceded in death by his former wife, Margaret. He is survived by his domestic partner, Carol Higgins; his son David Woodhouse and wife Gloria in San Diego; granddaughters Louella and Lillian, and great-granddaughter Sidney in San Diego; daughter Ann Marie in Belen, NM; daughter Kristen Schroeder and husband Michael in Kent, Washington; his sister, Betty French in Norman, Oklahoma; nephew Robert French and wife Barbara also in Norman, Oklahoma, niece Sarah French and her partner, Warren, in Pullman, Washington and her son Jacob Rhoads; his extended family of Carol's children and their spouses - Leah and Nat, Bruce and Bonnie, Mark and Tish, Paula and Jerry. Memorial Services will be scheduled at a later date. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be sent to Arc of New Mexico Foundation, 3655 Carlisle Blvd., NE, Albuquerque, NM 87110-1644 www.arcnm.org Those who wish to send condolences may do so at www.danielsfuneral.com

OBITUARY

A memorial service will be held for Robert Parks Rankin, 93 of Chico, on Saturday, Dec. 10, 2005 at 2 p.m. at the Trinity United Methodist Church. He passed away Friday, Dec. 2, 2005 at the Sierra Sunrise Health Center.

Bob was born July 28, 1912 to John and Irene Rankin in Pueblo, Colorado. He received his B.A. degree from San Jose State, M.A. from Union Theological Seminary in New York City and his doctorate degree from U.C. Berkeley. During World War II he served in the U.S. Navy as Chaplain.

In 1938 he married Madge Slayden in Waverly, Tenn. Bob was a Methodist minister in El Cerrito, Santa Rosa, Orland, and Red Bluff and was a sociology professor at Chico State until he retired in 1975. He loved playing the guitar and piano, skiing, hiking, reading and golf. He enjoyed traveling the world and spent a summer in Japan with Madge and daughter Jo on a U.O.P. tour.

His survivors include son Jim Rankin of Port Angeles, Wash.; daughter Jo Rankin of Ashland, Ore.; six grandchildren, Karli Farley of San Clemente, Chris Ballard of Dana Point, Todd Rankin of Port Angeles, Wash., Drew Rankin of Seattle, Wash., Bret Rankin of Walla-Walla, Wash. and Kari Jacobs of Windsor and seven great-grandchildren.

In lieu of flowers donations may be made to the Trinity United Methodist Church in care of the Brusie Funeral Home which is handling the arrangements.

Published in Chico Enterprise-Record on December 6, 2005

Bennett Berger, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, died November 10, 2005 at his home in La Jolla. The cause of death was pancreatic cancer. He was 79. 

Professor Berger's research and writing covered several fields, including suburbanization, youth culture , counter-culture and communes. Such a bare recital of "fields" (a term he hated) does injustice to the thrust of his interest. He was focused on the images of public attention. Thus in his first book, "Working-Class Suburb: A study of Auto Workers in Suburbia" (1960) he asked: "Does living in suburbs create a unique style of life or do residents continue to practice the cultures they bring with them?" He observed and interviewed auto workers living in a suburb of San Jose, mostly new home owners with middle-class incomes. Residence in suburbia had little effect on styles of life. Berger concluded that the idea of a suburban culture was a myth. But he did not stop there. He was interested in why and to whom the myth existed, for some as an aspiration, for others a nightmare. 

His interest in the cultures of America and the images of them in public discourse was the center of his formidable contributions to Sociology. He published a number of papers and book reviews on what he called the myth of a unique American youth culture He criticized the view that adolescent culture was unique to youth. For Berger it was at one with the American emphasis on glamour, romance, sports and popularity backed up by parents' and the schools' efforts to promote solidarity. These thoughts and observations are collected in his 1973 book "Looking for America: Essays on Youth, Suburbia and Other American Obsessions".

These themes of cultural imagery were continued in his many papers and other books. Chief among these was his 1981 observational study, "The Survival of a Counter-Culture: Ideological Work and Everyday Life Among Rural Communards". Here again his focus is on the self-images of the commune dwellers and the contrary actions which practical activities demanded. What he called "ideological work" was the ways this was made acceptable.

As he often said, he was born in Brooklyn, raised in the Bronx but did not grow up until he came to Berkeley as an adult. He served as a Marine in the Pacific during World War II. Was a high school athlete and once tried out for the NY Giant farm system. He was, for a brief time, a singer with a popular music band. He did his undergraduate work at Hunter College and has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley where he was a lecturer for one year. He was a faculty member in the School of Communications at the University of Illinois. After four years he left to assume the Chairmanship of the Sociology department at UC Davis in 1963. He joined UCSD ten years later. 

At UCSD he served as Chair for three years; was active on many committees and since retirement in 1991 was on the advisory group for the Theatre and Dance Department. He was active in Sociological meetings, conferences and guest lectureships and was the editor of the major review journal Contemporary Sociology (1975-78) He is survived by his daughters, Jane Berger, of Augsburg, Germany, Nora Mitchell of Mendocino, CA , Stephanie Berger of Long Beach, CA, a son, Kenneth Berger of San Francisco ,CA and one grandchild, Sarah Veith of Augsburg.

His wit, his insight and his analytic skill will be deeply missed. 

Richard Madsen, Chair, Department of sociology, November 23, 2005

Bennett Berger wrote the following bio in 2002:

I got my Ph.D. in 1958 with a dissertation on suburbia under Reinhard Bendix and Bill Kornhauser. UCPress published it unchanged in 1960 and 1968. After year lecturing at Berkely, my first ladder job was at the University of Illinois which gave me tenure in 1962. In 1963 I moved to UC Davis as Chair of its then rapidly expanding dep't. While there I began studying and writing on youth and was eventually given a large grant by NIMH for field research on child rearing in Hippie communes. That research produced several Ph.D.s by my students and ten years later my book The Survival of a Counterculture which will soon re-appear in a new edition. In 1971 a collection of my essays was published. In 1973 I moved to UC San Diego. In the late 70s I was Editor of Contemporary Sociology. At San Diego I chaired the committees of several first class Ph.Ds (some mediocre ones too) and continued writing lots of reviews and review-essays. In 1990 UCPress published Authors of Their Own Lives, my collection of 20 autobiographical essays by American sociologists and in 1995 my last book An Essay on Culture. I retired in 1991 and don't do much sociology anymore though I continue to write a lot, mostly not for publication.

Berkeley shaped my way of thinking by its theoretical diversity which prevented me from ever becoming a partisan of a particular "school of thought." Pierre Bourdieu was the first theorist I ever read who thought like I did. I doubt that "my" sociology has shaped the world in any way. The poet Auden is often quoted as saying "poetry makes nothing happen" (an exaggeration of course, which makes it quotable). Sociology also seldom makes anything happen, maybe because its structural way of thinking is deeply offensive to American individualism which is why economics (which knows perhaps even less than we do) has become the dominant social science.

Alex Garber came to California State University, Sacramento as an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the fall of 1964. He had been on the faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder. He received his BA and MA in sociology from the University of Chicago and his PhD from UC Berkeley. He was promoted to associate professor and then full professor during his tenure. He chaired the department from 1968 to 1974.

Upon arriving in Sacramento, Alex introduced three courses to the curriculum: Political Sociology, Soviet Society, and Arab-Israel Conflict. He also taught theory and social organization, both at the graduate and undergraduate level. He always had a group of students, both undergraduates and graduates, who followed him around and who were greatly influenced by him. He was an imposing figure. He could talk on and on about many topics, always giving an insightful analysis, even when discussing baseball statistics! He retired in 1982 at the age of 70 and died in Los Angeles in 1984 at age 72.

Alex was extremely bright, very well read, a macro sociologist in the best tradition of those graduating from the sociology department at Berkeley in those days. He knew history, read history and combined his historical knowledge with the sociological perspective. In that sense, he was I would guess a product of the Teggart-influenced department at Berkeley.

Alex did not publish much, but took his passion and considerable erudition into the areas union organizing and politics, especially his involvement over the years with the Democratic Socialists of America. He was a close friend of Michael Harrington, for example. He helped organize the first faculty union on the campus. He was one of the original seven members of the founding AFT chapter. Garber was interested in both the professionalization of faculty and the unionization of faculty. For him this was not a contradiction. Through professionalism faculty gained a voice in running the university in ways they thought were best for students and for themselves, and through unionization faculty gained support for increased resources such as graduate TA's, travel money, assigned time for research, etc.

When I came to CSU Sacramento in 1964 as a young man just out of graduate school, it was the first time in my life that I was in a position to interact with faculty members as a peer. Alex was older and wiser. I learned a great deal from him, as he was one of my early mentors.

Fond memories, Dean Dorn.

Biography prepared by Roger Friedland, Department of Sociology and Religious Studies, UC, Santa Barbara

Robert Alford died of pancreatic cancer on February 14, 2003, just months before his 75th birthday. There was to be a celebration at his parents' ranch in Avery, California in the Sierras. Bob grew up near here at Angel's Camp, the site of the Calaveras jumping frog contests fabled by Mark Twain. Bob loved to walk the forests paths that radiate out across the property, past the pond dense with water lilies and an apple orchard with forgotten species of fruit. The lupine and the Indian paintbrush would have been in bloom. Bob was a huge man who loped gracefully and could walk for miles. He thought best walking, which was how we worked out the structure of the Powers of Theory (1985), through hours and hours of movement.

A socialist radical with a Wobbly heritage, he dropped out of UC Berkeley in 1951, opposed to the McCarthy loyalty oaths, and went to work and to organize as member of the Labor Youth League in an International Harvester truck factory. Robert Blauner was a fellow worker and cell-member there. After Khrushchev's 'secret' speech to the 20th Party Congress leaked out, a speech detailing Stalin's 'crimes,' his incarceration and execution of spies and enemies who were, in fact, loyal Communists, Alford, like many others, including Blauner, returned to the university. The state's promulgation of information that was, in fact, disinformation, or outright lies, would later become a theme in his work.

A graduate student of Seymour Martin Lipset, his 1961 doctoral dissertation on class voting was subsequently published as Party and Politics, distinguishing between determinants of the class distinctiveness of parties and the partisan distinctiveness of a class in Anglo-American democracies. The young quantitative political sociologist left for the University of Wisconsin, where, together with Michael Aiken, he led the Social Organization program until 1974. In this multivariate citadel, a generation of young students fired by the new-left enabled Bob to return intellectually to the home terrain of his politics, and indeed to leave behind the econometric rewriting of the social. In his turn Alford took his students through a critical re-engagement with the classic debates with Marxism as the way forward. It was at the seminar table, through a combination of withering critique and an overwhelming sense of care, that Bob shaped generations of sociologists who learned from him that a statement of a problem, the choice of an indicator, the settling on a particular level of observation, could have fateful consequences. His objective, as he put it, was 'to unpack' a student's approach to a problem. Doctoral prospectuses, chapters, seminar papers all merited copious, typewritten comments. His seminars were always charged, overcrowded zones of engagement. We all foolishly thought that this was how academic life was lived everywhere. Teaching for him was a kind of wrestling, a loving combat. Sometimes after Bob's 'unpacking,' you just wanted to go home and get in bed for the indefinite future. But you knew he knew you could go farther. And you did. His students didn't just admire him; we loved him. In 1997, he was given the ASA's Distinguished Contribution to Teaching award.

Bob left Wisconsin to return home to California in 1974, taking on the direction of the sociology program at UC Santa Cruz. In 1975, he published Health Care Politics: Ideological and Interest Group Barriers to Reform. In that work he showed the ways in which displays of rationality and rituals of rationalization were forms of symbolic politics, part of a political process by which interest groups, organizations and the very structure of the system blocked substantive reform. The volume won the C. Wright Mills award.

This work on politics as aesthetics, beautiful form as substitute for interested transformation, was later followed by work on the politics of aesthetic production. Music was Bob's first passion and the piano a life-long gift, one whose pleasure was later denied him by a congenital ear defect that steadily rendered him deaf. I think music was, in fact, the template by which he understood the practice of sociology, the imagination and construction of a beautiful structure, a disciplined passion, an enchanted reconstruction of the world. And it was from music that he learned the problematic of technique. A gifted teenage pianist, he had hitchhiked from Angels Camp to San Francisco just to hear Artur Rubinstein play. If you asked him, forty years later, he would still talk about Rubinstein's piano-playing technique. Bob discovered that concert pianists, as well as other types of musician, often experienced bodily pains, sometimes quite extreme, indeed even leading to permanent injury. This pain, however, was not a necessity, but a taken-for-granted cost of an institutionalized technique. Bob wrote about it with Andras Szanto in 'Orpheus Wounded: The Experience of Pain in the Professional Worlds of the Piano' (1996, Theory and Society). He had wanted to write much more, but his own pain at not any longer being able to hear the music ended that research.

Bob used to take out his dog-eared copy of The Sociological Imagination and read passages out loud to me like a catechist. C. Wright Mills had felt that he arrived when he finally made it to Manhattan. Bob had fallen in love with New York City as a result of doing research there for his health care politics book. Like Mills, in 1988 Alford, too, finally made it to Manhattan, where he was Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. At CUNY, he spent most of his time working with students crafting their dissertations. Sociologically speaking, Bob was a committed Trinitarian. Everything came to him in threes: home domains, theories, levels of analysis, modes of inquiry, classical theorists, and as it turned out, academic homes. His last major book The Craft of Inquiry: Theories, Methods, Evidence (1998), an exploration of historical, quantitative and interpretative modalities, developed out of decades of doing what he did best--working through the design, the genre, the technique by which one sought to apprehend the social. Bob was the master of the master class. There are hundreds of scholars out there whose craft was learned at his table. And for this we give thanks.

Roger Friedland

Departments of Religious Studies and Sociology, UC Santa Barbara

REMEMBERING BOB ALFORD:

A Friend for Fifty Years

By Bob Blauner

Bob Alford died of pancreatic cancer on February 14, 2003, after a very brief illness. Because of his incredible vitality and the fact that his father had lived to 90, Bob's death, only months before his 75th birthday, and its very suddenness, came as a terrible shock to his family and to his legion of friends. In this remembrance I recount how we first met in the early 1950s and why of all my old friends, the breadth and range of Bob Alford's humanity was unparalleled.

I first saw Bob Alford in the fall of 1952. He was wearing goggles to protect his eyes and a gray apron or smock over his work clothes to collect the metallic dust coming from the machine he was operating. The punch press was even taller than Bob's six foot plus frame. I watched him pull down the lever and the press made holes in the piece of sheet metal Bob was feeding it. Those holes were needed so that the fenders and other parts he would drill in Department 12 (Sheet Metal) could be assembled onto the chasses of truck frames, after the gray metal parts had been primed and spray painted. Add to each frame a diesel engine and a cab for the driver to sit in and a brand new truck would roll out the door.

There were only 150 blue-collar workers at our International Harvester plant in Emeryville, California in 1952. And yet three of us were Communists, or at least members of the party's youth group. The late Bill Lowe was the party's youth organizer in the East Bay then and it was Bill who told me about the other two guys at IHC who had also quit college "to go into industry". Our goal was to radicalize the working class, for according to the Marxist theory of the time, the proletariat ensconced in such heavy industries as steel, auto, and rubber manufacturing, was the only stratum that had a revolutionary potential. College students, the group each of us had abandoned, was the last---and I mean last---social group that could be expected to shake up American society.

I stood by Bob's machine several minutes before he noticed me. I was fortunate to have gotten a job in parts, which gave me the chance to move from one department to another, sometimes while rolling tires twice my size, a lucky break, since only a few months earlier, while working in an Oakland transformer plant, I had gotten panic attacks from remaining in front of the machine all day. Bob shut off his press, I introduced myself, and told him that Bill Lowe had suggested that the two of us, along with Burt, should start meeting every week as a club in "the League," meaning the Labor Youth League, the party's youth organization.

For four years the three of us would meet regularly at each other's houses talking about the factory, how we were getting along in making friends and influencing people---"contacts" was the word we used---and how we could push our extremely conservative local of the United Auto Workers in a more progressive direction. As you can imagine, given that the industrial concentration strategy was misguided to begin with, and to make matters worse, we were trying to colonize what was sadly one of the more conservative sectors of the society, the American working class, and add to all that the fact that it was 1952, the height of the hysteria brought on by McCarthyism and the Korean War, it's not surprising that we got absolutely nowhere. The best we could point to were the friends we had made in the plant, who once in a while---but only a rare while---consented to go to a union meeting with us.

What workers care most about in deciding whether to accept a new man in the informal work group is how good he does his job---and I say "man" and "he" because we were all men on the shop floor at International Harvester then. And Bob did excellent work on his punch press, and at times on another machine, the shears. He wasn't quite as loose in shooting the breeze as Burt was, but he still earned enough respect to serve as his department's shop steward. And as I walked by his work station, I could see that he was on very friendly terms with several of the young Mexican American workers, namely Johnnie Rivera and Johnnie Mena. Whether they visited back and forth at each others homes as Burt and I did with several of the plant's Negro workers, and I also did with a white guy from Arkansas who had befriended me, I no longer remember. 

I used to think that of all my comrades from the 1950s, Bob Alford was the least likely to have become a Red. I thought that because he seemed to be---and was---a normal, well-adjusted, and happy person. Without any of the deep core of alienation that in my case had come from growing up in an unhappy family with a silent withdrawn father. That may be so, but as I recently learned from Roger Friedland, Bob's grandfather had been a lumber worker and a Wobbly, that is a member of the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World, perhaps the most authentically American---as well as Western and militant--radical movement American society has known. 

Today I believe that Bob's becoming a Communist is best explained by one over-arching quality, his essential goodness. Bob Alford was the most unequivocally good human being I've ever known. His growing radicalism didn't come from a wild-eyed youthful idealism. It went deeper than that. It came, instead, from a an urgent desire to do good, to make the world a better place. So that even when we all had to admit that our early efforts to change the world had not borne fruit, Bob never ceased trying to do good, in politics, in community and university affairs, and above all in his work as a professor and as a father to his three children.

After graduating Angels Camp's Bret Harte High School in the heart of Northern California's gold country, where he was already active politically, Bob came to Cal in 1946. It was one year after the end of World War II, so he had missed being drafted to fight in that conflict by a mere year. At Berkeley he would become first active in, and then the president of, Stiles Hall, the campus YMCA, at the the time its leading liberal organization. As part of our "boring from within" tactics, communists worked in such "mass orgs" as the Y, looking for potential recruits and it was there that Bob met the man who brought him into the Labor Youth League. But as he told me two years ago when I was interviewing old friends about why they had become Reds in the 1950s---a most unlikely time---what most influenced Bob was not any one person or group of people. Nor was it ideology. It was music.

What made music such a fitting vehicle is that it speaks to the heart. And Bob was a man with a big heart. He was also a fine classical pianist, played regularly in the 1950s in a Berkeley Chander group led by a brilliant cellist, Dick Anastasia. But it was folk music that would move him politically.

The late 1940s was the beginning of the folk music revival in America. Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie were gaining big followings on college campuses. Bob heard their music sung by Pete Seeger, but it was the songs of Earl Robinson that most influenced him. Robinson's "The House I Live In" was brought to a mass national audience by two great singers, who couldn't have been more different, Paul Robeson and Frank Sinatra.

Bob graduated Cal and went on to work for an M.A. in sociology during the height of the Loyalty Oath controversy. President Harry Truman had set the process in motion in 1948 when he ordered that federal employees must sign   affidavits that they did not belong to the Communist Party or any organization advocating the forcible overthrow of the U. S. government. A year later the State of California followed with an oath for its employees, including professors at Berkeley and UCLA. The oath was universally despised as a blatant violation of academic freedom. But except for a few brave souls, who years later were exonerated when the law was overturned, most of the faculty caved in and signed.

The oath settled it for Bob. Knowing that if he went on for his Ph.D he'd have to sign just to work his way through school as a teaching assistant, he finished his master's degree and left Cal.

Bob never regretted the years he spent at Harvester. We both felt that there was no other place that could have taught us so much about American society. But by the beginning of 1956, with almost four years under our belts, we were getting restless. The work had gotten old and it had become even more clear that we would never be successful in organizing our fellow workers. And there were all the ambitions to make something of ourselves, to become successful in a profession, that we had put to rest for so long.

And then in February 1956 came a bombshell, the report that Kruschëv had made a "secret speech" to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a speech in which he revealed that Stalin had been a criminal monster. The same Stalin who in my first year at IHC had made me feel safe, even as a group of right-wing Irishmen were baiting me as a "Jew-Communist," because with him at the helm in Moscow, all was right with the world. 

Stalin's death in March 1953 would in time lead to a thaw in the Cold War. Tensions eased measurably when the Korean War ended that summer. At home McCarthyism would be dealt a death blow a year later when the Senator from Wisconsin's hearings into subversive activities in the Army backfired.

Years later I would learn that Harvester knew all along that we were communists, but had considered us too harmless to get rid of. Our more politically minded fellow workers also knew what we were up to. Bob may have been red-baited less than I was, because he didn't stand out as a Jew. Our comrade Burt took the most flack, because he was not only a "Jew-Communist like me," but was also married to a Negro woman. But Burt was so unapologetically matter-of-fact about his wife, and also his politics---although none of us ever revealed the full extent of our radicalism---that he was probably the most accepted and the most politically effective of us.

Burt's wife Bru and Ginny, to whom I was then married, were as died-in-the-wool true believers as their husbands. But Gloria never bought into our illusions that the Soviet Union was a workers' paradise or that socialism in America was virtually around the corner. Her healthy skepticism undoubtedly gave Bob a somewhat greater sense of political reality than was typical among Communists and fellow travellers in the 1950s. But reading Kruschëv's speech that spring devastated Bob as much as it did the rest of us. 

Everything we had believed about the Soviet Union, everything we knew to be true about the world,  came down crashing like a house of cards.

For weeks we talked about the Report and what it meant for us. Meanwhile our friends and comrades were beginning to leave the Party and the LYL. First in trickles, then in droves. After a while, as the shock wore off, Kruschëv's words began to look like an act of deliverance. For people like Bob and myself, it meant we had a second chance. The same American society which, only a few years earlier, might have locked us up in concentration camps---for the 1954 McCarran Act had actually provided for the rounding up of dangerous subversives in a national emergency---was now saying that our future was open. 

Although I was admitted to Berkeley's Sociology Department  that September, Bob  decided to wait six months to save up money for his Ph. D. studies. Harvester's union-scale wages were high  and hard to give up.

For two years in the late 1950s Bob and I ate lunch together every day, sitting in the sun in front of the Campanile. We were often joined by others in our cohort, Ken Walker, Ralph Beals, Lloyd Street, and Harry Nishio. Bob and I still packed the same black metal lunch boxes we had used in the factory, but it was what was inside Bob's that provoked the same wonder and jokes that it had at Harvester. With an enormous appetite, he always ate  three or four sandwiches and several pieces of fruit.

Our return to Berkeley came at an opportune time. A new department was being built by Herbert Blumer that would soon be the best in the country. Blumer and his former student Tam Shibutani had a huge following of grad students interested in social psychology that included Tom Scheff and Arlene Caplan Daniels. The other major segment was political and industrial sociology, with such luminaries as Reinhard Bendix, Philip Selznick, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Bill Kornhauser. Along with Bob and I, the political and industrial students included Bill Friedland, Art Stinchcombe, Pat McGillivray, Amitai Etzioni, Fred Goldner, Günther Roth, and Gayle Ness.

The curriculum for students of class, social movements, politics, and work at the time couldn't have been more tailor-made for Bob and me. The books on the Ph. D. core reading list---and the others our profs recommended---were books that helped us make sense of our recent political and industrial experiences, answering questions that we were finally ready to face, questions about capitalism and socialism, the Soviet Union, and the politics of the working class. The books Bob and I read would influence our outlooks forever: Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Selig Perlman's Theory of the The Labor Movement, Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia, and perhaps the biggest eye-opener of all, Roberto Michels' Political Parties. Art Stinchcombe turned me on to Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution and I also learned a great deal from the anarchist theorists, Bakunin and Kropotkin.

Although I became an industrial and Bob a political sociologist, we both soon found ourselves Marty Lipset's star students. The year after I was Marty's research assistant for a book on social mobility, Bob became his leading assistant, doing much of the spade work, and even some of the writing, for the classic text Political Man.

What strikes me now as remarkable, looking back over 45 years, is how we remained good friends, indeed comrades, without falling prey to a competition that would have been natural, given that our relation to our mentor made us virtually sibling rivals. And given also the dog-eat-dog nature of the academic world. I attribute that mostly to Bob and his impressive inner security---he never needed to feel better than someone else to feel good about himself. 

After eight years in which we had seen each other practically every day, Bob left the Bay Area to teach at the University of Wisconsin. A dedicated and selfless teacher, his career took off at Madison and he was the first of our peer group to be promoted to tenure. Still, we managed to see each other at least once a year, at ASA meetings, or when he arranged for me to be invited to Madison to deliver a talk.

My 1962 Ph.D was preceded by an M.A.from the University of Chicago, and prior to that a B.A. in Communication and Public Policy at Berkeley. My first teaching position was at the University of Hawaii, for ten years, and then Northern Illinois University, in DeKalb, for the next 16, including a stint as department chair. I retired in 1985, and live in Alpine County, on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains, about 40 miles southeast of Lake Tahoe. The county has the smallest population in the state, about 1,000; our local community, Woodfords, has some 150 residents.

My perspective was shaped by my experiences as a child in the Great Depression, which included observing a broker negotiating with people who would return to sell their gold fillings and crowns, after removing them from their mouth; working the swing shift as a turret lathe operator in the industrial part of Chicago while attending classes during the day, and participating in the labor movement in the places where I lived. Berkeley's radical groups and activities influenced a socialist orientation. Classes with Herbert Blumer and Tamotsu Shibutani, especially Blumer's social movements work, suggested ways of achieving change to improve people's lives.

Because of a talent in art I began at Berkeley as an art major. my early career goal was a political cartoonist, and while an undergraduate I was Art Editor of the Daily Californian. However, the realization that few newspapers would appreciate work highly critical of capitalism led me to abandon that goal. The Berkeley milieu encouraged a reorientation, and a key influence which eventually led to graduate work in sociology was one of Marty Lipset's classes. While a Ph.D candidate at Berkeley I was president of the sociology graduate students association and one of the founders and first editor of the Berkeley Journal of Sociology.

My main interest continues to be stratification and class, and was reflected in my teaching and research, with special concern for the underprivileged. As a faculty member and citizen I have tried to apply sociological knowledge to improve conditions in academe and the community. In Hawaii I was head of the campus chapter of the ACLU and a board member of the congressional campaigns of Representative Patsy Mink, co-author of Title 9 of the Voting Rights Act. I was politically active in DeKalb as well as in Alpine County upon retirement. In Alpine, as an elected member of the county school board, I was responsible for establishing a voting district containing most of the county's Native Americans. For years none was on the school board, even though a quarter of the population was Native American as were half the students. For many years I was a board member of the county arts commission, and presently am on the boards of the historical society and the Alpine County Democratic Central Committee. Thus, in a sense, my interest in art, sociology, and politics has come full circle.

Arlene Kaplan Daniels, whose colorful, witty, and generous presence enlivened the field of sociology, died in her sleep on January 29, 2012 at the age of 81.  She was active in the SSSP, first as Editor of Social Problems (1975-1978) and later (1986-87) as President.  She also served as Secretary of the ASA and as President of Sociologists for Women in Society.  A well-published sociologist of occupations and women’s work, Arlene had a keen sense of social justice and mentored a wide circle of younger colleagues and students.

As a young girl, Arlene Kaplan moved with her family from New York City to Los Angeles, where her parents owned a small natural foods store.  In 1948 she enrolled as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley; she was poor, but it cost only $25 a semester.  She majored in English but turned toward sociology after taking a course with Tamotsu Shibutani.  With his encouragement, she entered the Berkeley sociology graduate program in 1952 and completed her Ph.D. in 1960.

In a memorable 1994 essay, “When We Were All Boys Together: Graduate School in the Fifties and Beyond,” Arlene Daniels describes an encounter she had before one of Shibutani’s classes that crystallized her sense of a calling to the profession of sociology:  “I bustled up to a little knot of chattering young women who were talking about the class.  ‘That Shibutani is so cute,’ said one, ‘Do you think he’s married? ‘I’d like to marry him,’ volunteered another.  Pushing my way into the circle, I announced: ‘Not me—I want to be Shibutani when I grow up. Eliminate the middleman!’”

At that time, Arlene observes, the male model appeared to be the only pathway available; in fact, she was the only woman in her cohort to complete the Ph.D. program.  During her graduate school years Arlene met her future husband, Richard Daniels, in a carpool to the opera; they married and settled on the Peninsula, where he worked in hospital administration.  The Berkeley faculty helped male students find jobs, but as a woman, Arlene was on her own, in part because some of the faculty began to see her as a housewife.  She kept her connection to sociology alive by doing research supported by grants and contracts.  In 1966 Arlene was hired as an Assistant Professor at San Francisco State.  She joined other faculty who supported the 1969 student strike over demands for Black studies and ethnic studies programs and, as a result, she was denied tenure.  (She and others wrote a book, Academics on the Line, about this experience).  Devastated by losing her academic job, Arlene returned to the world of grant hustling.

During the 1969 ASA in San Francisco she attended a gathering called by Alice Rossi to discuss the formation of a women’s caucus in sociology.  Thus began what Arlene later described as her second professional and career conversion.  She began to recognize (in her words in the 1994 essay) a “larger pattern in all the slights, snubs, omissions, and patronizing acts that I had shrugged off as my paranoia or my just desserts.  I felt rage at what I had endured and terrible sorrow for all that had hampered me.  I resolved to help younger women, to protect them against the systematic frustration and neglect that I had experienced.”

Arlene Daniels poured energy and organizing skills into the women’s caucus, which evolved into the ASA Section on Sex and Gender and Sociologists for Women in Society.  Arlene also became a consummate mentor, reaching out to women sociologists everywhere.  She offered advice, wrote references, edited papers, stayed in touch, and connected people to one another.  The broad-brimmed hats Arlene wore, with flair, to professional meetings became a signature of her presence, taking up space like umbrellas that invited us to come in out of the rains of competition and hostility that too often dampen academic lives.

Arlene Daniels studied women’s work lives, including career contingencies, women in unions, feminist networking within the professions, and the organization and significance of women’s voluntary work, culminating in her 1988 book, Invisible Careers and her 1987 SSSP Presidential Address, “Invisible Work” (published in Social Problems, Dec. 1987).  In 1995 Arlene Daniels received the ASA Jessie Bernard Award for her influential efforts to expand women’s presence in the content and practices of sociology.

In 1975 Arlene Daniels became a full professor at Northwestern University with a joint position in the Sociology Department and in the newly formed Program on Women, which, under her leadership, evolved into the Women’s Studies Program and the Women’s Center.  She flourished there, teaching, mentoring Ph.D. students, and pushing for institutional change.  Colleagues there and elsewhere comment on her talent not only for getting things done, but also for making meetings fun.  She also used humor to demystify the powerful.  Once, according to her colleague, Rae Moses, the Organization of Women Faculty met in an imposing hall with oil portraits of the former Presidents of Northwestern.  Arlene entered the room and threw her coat over one of the portraits.  The other women did the same, and the meeting began with laughter.

Arlene Daniels relished friendship and food; she and her beloved Richard regularly went to the opera and made the most of travel in Europe.  After she retired from Northwestern in 1995, she moved back to California and taught part-time at her alma mater.  Richard Daniels died last April.  Arlene Daniels enriched the lives of those who knew her, across generations; she fought for social justice and opened many doors for others; and she built organizations that continue to do good work. Gifts in her memory can be sent to the Arlene Kaplan Daniels Fund, an award for graduate students doing research on gender.  Checks should be made out to “Northwestern University,” with “Arlene Kaplan Daniels Fund” in the memo line; send to Northwestern University Development Office, 2020 Ridge Ave., Evanston IL 60208.  

Thanks to Barrie Thorne (University of California, Berkeley), Marjorie DeVault (Syracuse University), and Judith Wittner (Loyola University, Chicago) for writing Dr. Daniels obituary.

Arlene Kaplan Daniel's Bio

UC Berkeley was a terrific opportunity in the late 40's. I came to Berkeley, to get away from home. I was poor, but it only cost twenty - five dollars a semester. As an undergraduate English major, I stumbled into graduate school through my admiration for Tamotsu Shibutani. Fortunately, a characteristic of the department at that time was benign neglect. You prepared to take the exams anyway you wished, with the list of great books of sociology as your guide.

When I received my PhD in 1960 I was thrown on my own, searching for grants, interrupted by a brief stay at SF State College. But I made a happy landing at Northwestern University in l975 as a full Professor where I spent the next twenty years. I found I could use what I had learned, primarily from Shibutani and Blumer, especially abut the Chicago School, but also from Selvin, Bock and Nisbet, in my research and teaching.

I made my way in professional circles as editor and President of Social Problems, as council member and secretary of the American Sociological Association and as a founder and then president of Sociologists for Women in Society.

I valued my colleague and the opportunity to work with graduate students and produce PhDs at Northwestern. I produced a modest canon, using the qualitative and analytic methods learned in graduate school, to study the field of occupations and professions, and, the place of women in work.

At Berkeley, my basic approach to sociology, social psychology, and social science grew out of my contact with T. Shibutani. My contact with Goffman and his work was also influential, even though it was many years before I felt its full effect. From Shibutani I learned the importance of integrating theory and empirical work, and of attempting to develop an integrated social science, especially combining the social and the psychological. Later in my career, I began to understand Goffman's work in this way also, even though he himself took care not to develop these themes explicitly.

The two major areas in my sociology have been the societal reaction to deviance, on the one hand, and shame and the social bond, on the other. My theoretical and empirical work on labeling has been influential in many fields and has had considerable impact on the actual treatment of the mentally ill. In particular, my Being Mentally Ill (1966; 1999) was one of the key sources of the reform of the mental health laws of California in 1970, and subsequently in all the other states.

My work on shame and the social bond, begun in the mid-1980's, has also been influential, particularly in two areas, protracted conflict in families and between large groups. This influence is still a work in progress, however, since it requires integration of many different approaches and perspectives. In particular, it formulates links between individual psychology, interpersonal relations, and social institutions.

I came to Berkeley first as an undergraduate in 1950, after doing three years in Forestry at Oregon State College (now University) in Corvallis. In those first three years, I found myself becoming more interested in people than in trees. As a Berkeley undergraduate I gravitated to Sociology through the influence of Wolfram Eberhard, Robert Nisbet and Kenneth Bock. On graduation, I was drafted into the US army in February 1953, destined to serve in the Korean War. But apparently the powers that were wanted to win that war, so they sent me to France. I served out my term, met a fine French woman who became my wife, and then on discharge, won a Fullbright Fellowship to study in Copenhagen. There I continued work I had done for my BA honors essay on the US and Scandinavian cooperative movements. Organizational sociology had got into my blood. In 1956, with French wife, a new baby and University of Copenhagen degree, we returned to Berkeley to resume graduate studies.

Those were heady times. All of us had been out between undergraduate and graduate studies, and some before, mostly in some kind of protest movement. Friedland, Stinchcombe, Alford, Blauner, Daniels and many others were part of that cohort. Someone mentioned benign neglect. That was certainly the faculty orientation toward us at those times. If there were brown bags, we students organized them. If there was something for those fine visiting professors like Rene Koenig, we students organized it. Faculty had offices without names on their doors. We could see them 2 hours a week in the 'bull pen' where open desks found them at obligatory 'office hours.'

Four of us accidentally formed a 'sub-seminar' at the beginning of one of Shibutani's classes. Bill Friedland, Dorothy Anderson (now Mariner), Ernest Landauer and I fell in together and met regularly every Wednesday evening for the rest of our studies. We taught each other a great deal; I wonder if it was more or less than we learned from our professors. Our professors were superb scholars: Bendix, Eberhard, Lipset, Selznick, Smelser, and I learned economic development from Chou Ming Li, later Vice Chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. They did inspire and they imparted knowledge, but it was our peers who provided a far more fundamental kind of intellectual sustenance.

On graduation I was fortunate to receive a four-year post-doctoral grant with the Institute of Current World Affairs. This was primarily the work of Wolfram Eberhard, who seems now in retrospect to have been the only professor even thinking about students' next steps. By this time my wife and I had a second child and we spent the next four years steeping ourselves in Southeast Asia and having a third son.

From Malaysia we came to Ann Arbor, to the University of Michigan. I was hired sight unseen and became one of Michigan's 13 new assistant professors in 1964. Michigan proved to be something of an antithesis to Berkeley. There, we were roughly 200 graduate students left to fend for ourselves. There were three teaching Assistantships and one department fellowship. At Michigan I found 200 graduate students all supported by department grants. Faculty at Michigan entrepreneured for their students, finding foundation and government grants to support graduate students. I'm not sure which was best. At Berkeley we were all old organizers, so the lack of faculty leadership was no problem. We organized and learned. At Michigan students were drawn in and shepherded through their studies. I see advantages and disadvantages at both ends, and have no idea how to produce a net effect.

At Michigan I found a fine Sociology department, with great resources, superb colleagues, and support for whatever I wanted to do. I also found the single best university in the world to study Asia, and have been involved there ever since. I have maintained work in Southeast Asia. This would have been impossible had I returned to Berkeley when I had an offer in 1965. Remember that then even Bendix had to leave the department due to the intense and acrimonious disputes, where, as he put it, 'there was no milk of human kindness.' Michigan was less radical and less destructive. The Vietnam War tore Berkeley apart. At Michigan it produced a highly creative form of protest, 'the Teach-Ins.' This provides a good question for organizational analysts: why destructive protest in one university and constructive protest in another. (Michigan is older, of course, and with Harvard in the 1890's was at the forefront of another national protest in the Anti-Imperialist League.)

And so I stayed, teaching courses in the sociology of economic development; taking organizational analysis into national and international development organizations, into international population planning, policies and organizations, and finally into the intricate realms of population-development environment analyses. I have continued to work in Asia, even in retirement.

Berkeley gave me the joy of the sociological imagination, as we called it then; it gave be Wolfram Eberhard who led me into the rich life of Asian societies; it gave me fellow students who taught me much and have remained life long friends. That it a heady mixture indeed.

Published in The New Haven Register on Nov. 26, 2019

CHICK PERROW'S ORIGINAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY FOR THE ALUMNI SITE

After a quarter at the U. of Washington, two years at Black Mountain College in N.C., a year bumming about in NYC, and a brief stay at Reed College, I entered Berkeley as an undergraduate, reclaiming one year's worth of credit, and plowed through to the PhD. My personal turmoils matched that of the department, which was gutted by the loyalty oath issue but resurrected by Blumer. An undergraduate course with Bock on the Idea of Progress stabilized my direction; I was not going to write the great American novel, sociology was easier. Then came Selznick , Lipset, Goffman, Kornhauser, Shibutani and so on. With an equally stunning group of fellow graduate students to learn from, and Bendix (MA thesis) and Selznick (PhD thesis) as mentors, I drifted into organizational analysis because there was almost no literature to read (I still am a slow reader). Berkeley student unrest broke out just as I left for my first job at Michigan; we had been the silent generation, but the leftist urges were all about me. Graduate student life at Berkeley, of course, was idyllic, compared to that of an assistant professor in the Michigan department, which encouraged me to leave after five years. Since then I have had to leave Pittsburgh, Wisconsin, and Stony Brook, finally serving out my sentence at Yale. My cohort was good, but the market was even better as universities, sociology, organizations, and organizational theory grew; it was easy to be tenured, easy to move on.

Berkeley encouraged my critical stance toward my field and toward society; Michigan didn't, but when I was tenured at Wisconsin I could say what I pleased and had the freedom to leave that university in protest over its repression of anti-Vietnam war activities. Happenstance, almost a normal accident" immersed me in the Three Mile Island story and vectored my career for over a decade. But last year I finally published a cherished project on the origins of U.S. capitalism and its corrosive power."

I entered graduate school in Berkeley in 1953 and received my MA in Sociology from UCLA in 1952 working with Ralph Turner.  In Berkeley, I studied with Reinhard Bendix, William Petersen, and Herbert Blumer.  I was greatly influenced by the global outlook of Reinhard Bendix who wrote the forward to the publication of my thesis by UC Press.

I taught at UCLA from 1961 to 1989 and was also a visiting Professor at the University of Rochester.  I have been a guest lecturer at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a symposium on modern Italy at Columbia University, and keynote speaker at a conference at Alma College.  Swiss National Radio interviewed me on social change in America. I have taught courses in formal organizations, sociology of deviant behavior, social change, social theory, social structure and economic change, and political theory. 

My research positions have included research assistant to Clark Kerr, one of principal investigators on the Mexican American project of patterns of work and settlement, and principal investigator of internal migration in Italy. I was a fellow at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio Italy, received two Ford Foundation fellowships, and research grants from the American Philosophical Society and the UCLA Committee on Research. 

My publications include several studies on Mexican Americans, and work and modernization in Italy published in different Italian and American journals.  I have been a manuscript consultant for several presses and journals. 

I don't know if or how I have shaped the world, but I have participated in several important activities such as faculty consultant to the Scope Project of the Southern Christian Conference, statewide consultant for California Rural Poverty Projects, consultant for Dimension Films on social change, and co-founder of a UCLA faculty group to identify, encourage, and counsel high potential high school students in Watts, California which became an Academic Senate committee feeding Upward Bound programs. 

Today, I spend much time renewing my guitar repertory from my former jazz musician days and writing new songs in my own special style. 

I left China, my native country, when I was a child to join my father in the Philippines. As a resident alien who had been through the difficult World-War II years and other hardships in the Philippines, I developed a deep interest in race and ethnic relations. This central interest led me in 1954 to the graduate program in sociology at Berkeley. Professor Tamotsu Shibutani, my dissertation adviser, invited me to work with him on a special project after I received my Ph.D. in 1958. Ethnic Stratification: A Comparative Approach, published by Macmillan in 1965, was the product of that collaboration.

I began my teaching career at Ohio University. My second academic appointment, at California State University, Northridge, lasted from 1965 until June 2000 (except for a visiting engagement in 1972-73 at the University of Hawaii).

Individuality and Social Control: Essays in Honor of Tamotsu Shibutani (JAI Press, 1996) - a collection of mostly original papers by nineteen contributors -- was some form of personal repayment to my longtime associate and benefactor. I wrote a 23-page "Foreword" to the Festschrift -- offering selective interpretations on (1) Darwin's Evolution Theory, (2) Peirce's Scientific Logic, (3) Founding of Chicago Pragmatism, and (4) Rise of Chicago Sociology. The preface concluded: "These two distinguished Chicago alumni [Tamotsu Shibutani and Anselm Strauss] and many of their associates and students have faith that generations of young men and women will discover anew the verities of their intellectual heritage, build on what they have done, and make further advances." Guided by these great traditions -- Darwinian natural selection, American pragmatism, and a renewed Chicago Sociology --  I hope to make additional contributions in the future.

I have one thing left to do-----. Up to now, in a career that went back and forth between academia and executive experience I have written articles or chapters based on my research or experience in such divergent organizations as Ford Aircraft, IBM, Kaiser Cement, HSA, New York City Health and Hospitals Corp., the priests of the New York Archdiocese, Sanus (an entrepreneurial start-up of an HMO, and NYLCare, its large corporate successor). In each I attempted to do what I was challenged to do: from Blumer -- to thoroughly understand the continual emergent nature of their world as perceived by organizational participants;  from Bendix -- to understand the structural, historical  and ideological  processes involved in these organizations; from Selznick -- the role of power, politics, and the "imbuement" of values involved in organizational units.  Out of this came materials on pronoia, demotion, boundary roles, delegitimation of the non-profit sector, professionalization as a control device, the growth or cynical knowledge in the priesthood,  rhetorical reticence in politics, the role of beliefs about market processes and organization structure, and power and conflict as inherent organizational processes.  And then there was my plea in 1975 at an ASA session to stop ignoring the flow of money as a key to understanding organizational behavior. And now -- I will attempt to do just that in a comparative study of those above organizations in order to explicate relations between personal experiences and organizational processes in such issues as money flow, blame, centralization/decentralization, etc. Wish me luck.

I can claim few, if any significant contributions to academic sociology. After my dissertation on 'Employee Rights and the Employment Relationship' was published by the U.C. Institute of Industrial Relations and a subsequent book on the sociological process of Professionalization was published by Prentice-Hall, and after some further graduate level course work in management, my career turned toward applied research and development and then into administration. Initially I served for 13 years at Stanford Research Institute (Now SRI International) in charge of management development and organization development projects. Our clients for such work included federal government agencies such as the U.S. Air Force (projects on the organization of research laboratories and the management of scientific personnel): state agencies (design of the new Department of Ecology for the State of Washington); Indian reservations such as economic and social development programs on the Colville, Crow, and Navajo reservations and many other applied projects. For a two-year period thereafter I served as Chairman of the Department of Sociology at the American University, Washington, D.C..during which time I also participated in the design of a new College of Public Affairs at that university.

After returning to California (San Francisco), I became corporate manager of management development programs at Bechtel Corporation, an international construction firm. Then after several years of independent consulting work on organizational design, I became Director of Extended (Continuing) Education at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo California for 11 years. More recently, I've served on several boards of directors of non-profit corporations. At times during the above years, I taught sociology courses part-time to adults at Pennsylvania State University, University of Alberta-Calgary, University of California Extension, Stanford University, University of San Francisco, and Antioch University-West.

For me, the U.C. Berkeley graduate program in sociology provided a strong foundation for my lifelong work, especially in classical sociological theory (e.g., Weber, Durkheim. and other authors of the '75 great books'). The fact that sociology (along with inputs from other disciplines) can provide a significant foundation for practical applications in 'the world' I believe is illustrated by the variety of involvements I have had in my own life.

Obituary for Ida R. Hoos

By KATIE HAFNER, New York Times, May 5, 2007

Ida R. Hoos, a prominent critic of assessing technology solely on the basis of mathematical models that failed to take account of societal factors, died on April 24 in Boston. She was 94 and lived in Brookline, Mass.

The cause was complications of a lingering case of pneumonia, said Judith Hoos Fox, her daughter.

Dr. Hoos, a sociologist, was widely recognized as an outspoken critic of systems analysis, which came to prominence after World War II. The approach used mathematical models to perform cost-benefit analyses and risk assessments on complex technologies like radar systems and military aircraft.

With the concept strengthening in the 1950s and ’60s, when the use of computers to assess technology grew more popular, she wrote widely on a need to balance it with other considerations like effects on the work force.

“A kind of quantomania prevails in the assessment of technologies,” Dr. Hoos wrote in 1979 in the journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change. “What cannot be counted simply doesn’t count, and so we systematically ignore large and important areas of concern.”

Dr. Hoos urged national decision makers to take such assessments “with a large measure of skepticism lest they lead us to regrettable, if not disastrous, conclusions.”

Harold A. Linstone, emeritus professor of systems science at Portland State University and longtime editor in chief of Technological Forecasting and Social Change, said Dr. Hoos was in many ways the intellectual conscience in the field of technology assessment.

“She basically pointed out that in a lot of complex social and technical systems, a reliance on these systems analysis approaches couldn’t always do the job,” Dr. Linstone said. “She would not accept the superficial answers or phony arguments.”

Dr. Hoos also questioned the usefulness of systems analysis when evaluating public policy. Her 1972 book, “Systems Analysis in Public Policy: A Critique,” cast a critical eye on the prevailing methods for evaluating education, waste management and health care.

“These technical-think-tank types were riding high,” and Dr. Hoos “wasn’t averse to pointing out that the king was naked,” said Louis Feldner, an engineer who worked with her on several technical committees over the years. “And she was respected for it.”

Ida Simone Russakoff was born on Oct. 9, 1912, in Skowhegan, Me., the middle of seven children. Her parents were immigrants from Russia, her father a jeweler.

She graduated from Radcliffe in 1933. While studying for her master’s degree, which she received from Harvard in 1942, she founded Jewish Vocational Services in Boston, to help Jewish women who were working in the city’s garment district find better jobs.

In 1942, she married Sidney S. Hoos, an economist. The couple later moved to Berkeley, where Mr. Hoos taught in the agricultural economics department at the University of California.

Ida Hoos began to pursue her Ph.D. there and became interested in the effects of automation and technology on workers. She received her doctorate in 1959, and her dissertation was published in 1961 as “Automation in the Office.” Another book, “Retraining the Work Force,” was published in 1967.

Dr. Hoos remained at the University of California as a research sociologist, first at its Institute of Industrial Relations, then at the Space Sciences Laboratory. At the laboratory, where she was the lone social scientist, she expressed concern over the effect of satellite surveillance on individual privacy.

She retired from the university in 1982. Over the years, she also served on committees at the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, NASA and the Department of Energy.

In addition to her daughter Judith, of Boston, she is survived by another daughter, Phyllis Daniels of Goldendale, Wash.; a brother, Philip Russakoff of Skowhegan; three granddaughters; and three great-grandchildren.

Dr. Hoos was largely unfazed by being a woman in what was seen as a man’s field. In an unpublished memoir, she wrote of serving in the 1980s on a high-level committee at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. The committee had a preponderance of aerospace industrialists.

“I was the only woman,” she wrote, “and thoroughly used to the Happy Hour salutation of ‘Hey fellas — oh, excuse me, Ida!’ ”

On Jan. 1, 1984, Dr. Hoos was called by National Public Radio and asked for her thoughts on George Orwell’s predictions of universal surveillance, now that the year had actually arrived.

“On that subject,” she later recalled, “I could only say that thanks to the dramatic developments in information technology, we had already been here a long time.”

Autobiography

UC Berkeley was an important step in the way sociology influenced my career. My undergraduate years at Radcliffe, under the wonderful inspiration of Gordon Allport, had already provided the template to guide me. thus, 5 years out of Radcliffe, I founded and ws director of a then-unique social service organization, Jewish Vocational Service, which is still flourishing and is still a major force in occupational guidance, training, and placement in the Boston area. With many branches and myriad activities, it is recognized for its service to the entire community.

Marriage to Sidney S. Hoos, on leave from UC Berkeley to the War Department OQMG in Washington, put a temporary end to my work in Boston along with my part-time graduate program at Harvard. My main focus was Fannie Farmer and Dr. Spock, with Kuchen and Kinder all-important, while our two daughters grew up and Sid kept the armed forces in the far-flung theatres of war supplied. After the war, we returned to Berkeley, Sid much honored for his service and greatly advanced on the academic ladder.

A sabbatical at Harvard for Sid meant a refresher at the Pierian Spring for me. A return to ivy-clad Emerson Hall inspired me to desert Girl Scout cookie sales. Gordon Allport exhorted me: You just mustn't stay graduated. Herb Blumer smoothed all the administrative hurdles. My thesis, 'Implications of Electronic Data-Processing for the Clerical labor Force', became a book, Automation in the Office, published by Public Affairs Press and was translated into German. I wrote and delivered the series 'Office Automation in America' for the Voice of America. My sister commented that if only I had titled my work 'Sex and Automation', it would have attracted more attention!

With our two daughters now 12 and 16, we took our first sabbatical abroad, this time a year (for Sid) under the joint sponsorship of the Ford Foundation, the Italian government, and UC. Our year in Naples was a high point. When we returned to Berkeley in September 1961 I was considering another PhD in Romance Languages, just for the fun of it but but the Institute of Industrial Relations, under Art Ross and Peg Gordon, invited me to join their research program, 'Unemployment and the American Economy' and, always interested in adjustment to technological change, I designed a study of retraining programs. My book, Retraining the Work Force was published by the UC Press and ran through two editions.

Technological advance was evident on every front. Not only the more mechanical aspects of handling data but the very process of managerial thinking were becoming subject to new concepts and theories. The 'dominant paradigm' embraced only the quantitative. What you could not count did not count. The social and human aspects were systematically avoided in the rush to be 'scientific.'

OBITUARY (San Francisco Chronicle)

Laile E. Bartlett July 23, 1915 - May 11, 2006 Laile E. Bartlett, Ph.D., writer, sociologist, researcher, lecturer, and wife of Rev. Josiah R. Bartlett for 57 years, passed away peacefully early in the morning of May 11th in Ft. Bragg, CA. Dr. Bartlett received her B.A. at the Univ. of Cincinnati, Phi Beta Kappa; her M.A. at American University, W.D.C.; and her sociology Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. Three early appointments presaged an eventful career: a social settlement post in the east end of London, an internship with Nat. Inst. of Public Affairs in W.D.C, and a lectureship with the League of Nations in Geneva. The first half of her sociology career was devoted to teaching on college campuses (Hiram and Marietta Colleges in Ohio; and UW, Seattle) and the second half to research and writing. Her published books include: Bright Galaxy (Beacon Press), The Vanishing Parson (Beacon Press), New Work/New Life (Harper and Row) and Psi Trek (McGraw-Hill). The most distinctive aspect of her work was her long and extensive collaboration with her husband, the late Rev. Josiah Reed Bartlett, a Unitarian minister who served as president of the Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley for nearly 20 years. They wrote books and gave speeches together on topics of mutual interest, e.g. Moment of Truth and A Religion for the Non-Religious. They were founding members of the Bay Area Funeral Society and of the CO-OP member-owned food store chain. In 1968, when Josiah stepped down from the presidency, he and Laile created an interim ministry program for their denomination. Over the next two decades they served as interim ministers in over 25 US churches. They were regarded as models of matrimonial and professional teamwork to all who came in contact with them. Laile was a member of the Mt. Diablo Unitarian Church in Walnut Creek. Laile is survived by her four children: Joel Emerson Bartlett of Phonenixville, PA; Joselyn Kingsley Bartlett Miksak of Caspar; Loel Starr Bartlett Miller of Walnut Creek; and Noel Channing Bartlett, of Lafayette; and three grandchildren: Serena Reed Bartlett, Raleigh Hart Miller and Colby Reed Miller. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to the Student Conservation Assn., (SCA), PO Box 550, Charlestown, NH 03603-0550 www.theSCA.org.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

My biography is in some ways the reverse of the usual assumptions. In short, my Sociology Ph.D. works as much or more as a legitimation of past activities rather than a preparation for future ones. More specifically, I was the Sociology instructor at two Ohio colleges (three years in all) and general utility instructor for three years at the University of Washington in Seattle - teaching a broad cross section of courses from Criminology to Race Relations.

My main emphasis both at UC Berkeley and afterwards, however, was the Sociology of Religion. I taught a summer course in this at Berkeley after getting my degree.

My post Ph.D. activity, however, has been research and writing: four books by major publishers, two published by organizations, and four books that are still in manuscript form. Much of my writing has a Sociology of Religion orientation. My most recent manuscript, Making Sin Legal, is an overview of gambling in America.

IN MEMORIAM: ARTHUR STINCHCOMBE PASSED AWAY ON JULY 3, 2018

Arthur Stinchcombe, or simply Art as everyone knew him, passed away on July 3^rd. He was 85 years old, having had a brilliant, luminescent career. He received his PhD from Berkeley in 1960. He was a distinguished member of the famous First Berkeley School of Sociology who went on to shape the discipline. There was nothing Art couldn’t do. He began as a mathematician, turning his mind to sociology where he made major contributions to organization theory, sociology of law, sociology of education, and economic sociology. His books dealt with the logic of inquiry, statistical methods, social history, comparative sociology, high school rebellion, and much more. They won him countless awards. Art taught at Johns Hopkins, Chicago, Arizona and Northwestern as well as at Berkeley (1967-75), chairing the department in those hot years, 1971-73. He will be missed by sociologists in many a place; he will be remembered for his gangly, retiring disposition, but always ready to engage with anyone on any topic; he leaves us with original contributions, impelled by his idiosyncratic, quirky, refreshing imagination.

From Margherita Larson: Art Stinchcombe was my teacher, my thesis adviser and my very dear friend for almost half a century. It is difficult for me to write something that tells both what this friendship represented –the constant surprises of his conversation and his company-- and the depth of my intellectual indebtedness. He taught me to think as a sociologist. In part it worked because of what he has called the solidarity born of citing “the same dead Germans:” Max Weber, first of all, without forgetting Marx (I liked that he never forgot to include Trotsky among the non-Germans of his pantheon)

I met Art in 1967: he had just returned to Berkeley after Johns Hopkins; I was working on David Apter’s research project on the politics of modernization. I do not remember what we said exactly, but the sense of relief from the abstract systems of political science, as we discussed how his 1961 article, “Agricultural enterprise and rural class relations,” applied to the Spanish colonial system on which I was working. He was inquisitive and generous with his time since he enjoyed the discussion --empirical “twigs” rather than theoretical trunks, he was to write later when he explained the “mind-complexifying” function of the classics in “Should sociologists forget their mothers and fathers?” Most of Art Stinchcombe’s writings, as any serious conversation with him, aimed at replacing clichés with “complex and flexible patterns of thought.”

I saw him again in October 1970, when I entered Berkeley after solving my visa problems. I wrote a paper to be exempted from the introductory theory-methods class, which Art and Neil Smelser taught, but I still followed the lectures. Art and Neil were faced with a typical but not too clever insurrection, from students who did not want to read Union Democracy or the other classics assigned but Andrè Gunder Frank, Mirra Komarovsky and others I wish I could recall. Art’s response was to write for each “insurrectionary” text an analysis so intelligent, so biting, unconventional and erudite that everyone in the department read them and the students of the insurrection felt humiliated, especially when he brought up Doris Lessing as his own example of feminist thinking. Few students understood then how much of Art’s approach to our field was based on aesthetic judgment and the aesthetics of intellectual work.

We went every other week to his house for conversation. The “habitués” (among whom were Erik Wright and Faruk Birtek) mingled with Art’s children crossing back and forth as did a huge brown rabbit pursued by a cat. It was fun. We shared many stories and one is indelible: there were unsolved machete attacks in Berkeley that winter but Art, who had insomnia, continued walking the streets at 3 am. One night the police stopped him. After having declared that he worked at Berkeley “in maintenance” (ashamed to say he was the department’s chair), he had to stand in the car’s searchlights to be identified by the rescued victim. Only when he turned to his guard to ask how long the ordeal was going to be did the woman see his profile and make a negative ID!

Going back to our work and his teaching, Art was in Holland the whole year when I wrote my dissertation but he was the only mentor I could imagine. I had to send a chapter every month and, in 1973-74, that meant packages and snail mail back and forth. In one of his letters, answering to something terrible that had happened, he wrote about the perpetrators:” Why can’t people understand that when they kill, the others are dead. For ever.”

Much of what I did followed “Social Structure and Organizations,” and then his command to show why anyone would follow the professionalization project that I was trying to articulate in two different historical contexts. Finally, he responded to the last chapter: “It is a real book, why don’t you call it ‘Crime and Punishment’?” I replied that the title seemed to be taken, and what about ‘Pride and Prejudice’ … I imagine he laughed. I had not only taken from him the fundamental question of how to build trust among strangers, but also learned that sociology needs to move from micro-foundations in tangible or possible behavior to the support and reproduction of broader structures. In reading and teaching Constructing Social Theories I found that same injunction in the memorable discussion of the unexplained feedback loop of functionalism: we don’t give countenance to black-boxing.

After Art remarried and moved to Chicago with Carol, I saw them as often as I could get to the happy house on Asbury Street. The radiating happiness of that marriage had made him serene and perhaps less judgmental. I remember fewer instances of his favorite sorting out of social scientists into “first rate,” “second rate” or “not first rate,” seasoned by his taste for twigs over trunks—a taste that once had him tell me he had chosen Hopkins over Harvard because he preferred to be denied tenure by Jim Coleman than Talcott Parsons.

One of the last times I went he was working on When Formality Works: Authority and Abstraction in Law and Organizations. A difficult endeavor, where he rescues formal plans for as long and insofar as their abstract principles are built to be corrected by and adjusted to the “twigs” of reality, it moves from architectural blueprints to law, liquidity in markets and organizations and scientific paradigms with a mastery that I am obviously unable to judge. Six years. That was the time it took him to get to the study of formality from the amazing political economy of slavery in the Caribbean, in which he ultimately clarified the social and political foundations of freedom. Five years before that it was the milestone of Information and Organizations, where I recall that he used Chandler to “modernize” Schumpeter, both authors that he had taught us to appreciate.  Art’s mind worked in this way, seizing a fundamental question that did not necessarily connect to the one before it (although I am sure he could explain the passage), breaking it down, clarifying it, not solving the puzzle but posing more questions.

Art Stinchcombe was original and profound, or profoundly original. He wrote about the classics “The only reason we tend to use older works as touchstones of excellence is that our geniuses are rare and have to be made to last at least until we get the next one.” Art’s work is now the touchstone.

From Seán O'Riain: I was very fortunate to get to know Art a little during my sabbatical at Northwestern in 2008-9. This started since we both had a habit of sitting at the back of seminars – which was worth it just to hear Art’s pithy and insightful summaries as he headed out the door at the end. I still think often of those comments – “well I always behaved as if ideas were real” particularly sticks in my head. Meeting Art inspired me to search out his many works, with important ideas typically lurking behind modest titles. I had no idea that “Organization Theory and Project Management: Administering Uncertainty in Norwegian Offshore Oil” would contain so many remarkable insights in to markets, liberalism and software teams, among other topics. But most of all, it was a pleasure to get to know Art himself. He was mildly cranky in a way that was passionate and generous about ideas and very funny. He was profoundly egalitarian in his respect for and engagement with all, and in his many jokes at his own expense. I feel very grateful for the opportunity to have known him, even for a short while.

From Faruk Birtek:  Art was one of the brightest persons I have ever met.  He had such a breadth of knowledge. I learned so much from him.  The beer parties at his home were all learning expeditions. He was a great conversationalist. He was most logical. He made sociology a science. I learned organizational sociology from him which shaped my dissertation. I am forever grateful. He was cynical and iconoclastic when need be and most serious and impatient with sloppy thinking – a great loss. I have lost three of my Berkeley beacons this year, Smelser,  Matza and now Stinchcombe. I feel naked yet so lucky that I knew them as their devoted student; Art Stinchcombe was a most exceptional person - we were a lucky generation to have known him!

From William C. Cockerham: This is getting freaky. Last night and this morning I was rereading Art Stinchcombe's book, Constructing Social Theories (1968), as background and a reference for a new book I'm writing on sociological theories of health and illness and only hours later, this afternoon, I just received the notice on his passing. I consulted Art's book often over the years, and learned much from it. I really didn't know him enough to write a tribute, but his passing is obviously a great loss to sociology. I know rereading a book published in 1968 or even citing it would be questionable by some, but there is still a lot of contemporary relevance in what Art had to say about theory construction.

From Art Stinchcombe (2002): Dear Michael, putting your re-request for a bio together with an In Memoriam for Phil Selznick, my dissertation supervisor, has jacked up my guilt mechanism to a level that overcomes my embarrassment at tooting my own horn in as bio. The thing I have to guard against is that I think very well of myself, and when I talk about myself that comes through. But I had a lot of experience early in my career with people like Phil (whom I could never call "Phil") that I knew would apply higher standards on my work than I would. Fortunately some of it passed Phil's standards for coherence and sociological depth, and other people like James S. Coleman sometimes thought my treatment of the facts was at least workmanlike. The dissertation was a quantitative one, and I have tried to develop strategies to make quantitative research fit to deal with the sort of complexity of the facts that Coleman was nearly as good at as Clifford Geertz and Erving Goffman, my superiors in my own cohort. My attempt to formulate this task and some ways to approach the problem Coleman used to call "choosing the right oversimplification" is my last book, The Logic of Social Research--Charles Tilly criticized me for the singular "The." Even using them (or Tilly) as a yardstick shows the kind and degree of vanity that I have to guard myself against. Fortunately I have supervised enough dissertations that I never could have managed myself, sometimes by showing that I was dead wrong (as John Markoff  did on the rural revolution on France, by showing I had chosen the wrong dependent variable(s) to explain).

The big problem that I picked up from Phil's work was that of the tendency of formal law and formal organization to oversimplify, or otherwise distort, the complexity of the values that they were supposed to serve. One of the early attempts to study this problem by a strategic combination of ethnographic methods and qualitative components in interviews to guide the formulation of the problems that I could study quantitatively was "Creating Efficient Industrial Organizations". It had essentially no impact on sociology, except that I had the advantage of knowing all the things I found out, and the people that didn't read it didn't. My self-serving interpretation was that South American government-owned steel plant managers that I studied didn't what  a sociologist (rather than a successful steel plant manager)  to tell them how to make steel plant go, and American socialists weren't much interested in the problem of efficient socialist steel plants. In some ways, my most successful book in influencing sociology of organizations was the theory developed in that book, with the steel plants left out, "Information and Organizations".

Sometime during the early period I wrote a theory textbook from some of my lectures, in which setting the problem of building social theories within a positivist view of what "science" was about in a few pages generated almost all of the citations to my work, which people still quote me. In some sense, my sociological biography stopped 40 years ago with "Constructing Social Theories". But I have tried to expand on,those few pages, and the illustrations that accompanied them, in "Theoretical Methods in Social History", and returning to Phil's influence on the substance of formal organizations and laws, "When Formality Works".

I am now Emeritus at sociology at Northwestern, mainly involved in historical and comparative work, advising people around here, and sometimes elsewhere, if I can get them to give me copies of their papers or books to comment on. My own comparative research is on why provinces vary so much in their ability to govern and tax their localities while getting along with their empire or federal center, and arguing that the main variables explaining variations in strength and ability to cooperate with the central government are those describing the commercial flow out of the locality. I expect the market for this book will be more or less the same as the efficiency book and another book that essentially no one has read, on comparative slavery and emancipation in the Caribbean during the 18th and 19th centuries. My excuse for the commercial failure of this last book is that no one really wants to know how some kinds slavery were not as bad as some other kinds, and some kinds of  emancipations are almost as bad, at least for a while, as slavery was.

So in some sense my summary of my biography as a sociologist is suggested by the name of some British degrees, "upper second." I have however loved doing sociological research, seeing many of my students having learned from me  how to find out things I couldn't have found out. I should also mention that my wife, Carol A. Heimer, has made my work and my effects on others better than it was before. And admiring her and my children, as well as loving them, has been a main joy of my life. And may I be forgiven for liking some of my work better than others do.

I came to the United States in 1953 from the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research to finish a denazification study with Kurt Wolff at OSU. From 1955 until 1958 I was a full-time research assistant under Reinhard Bendix for the Ford Project on Labor in Economic Development housed in the Institute of Industrial Relations. A part-time graduate student in the Soc. Dept., I picked up my Ph.D. in 1960 with one of the first dissertations in historical sociology. For many of us assistants in the interdisciplinary Institute the apprenticeship nature of research was more important than disciplinary study, since we could look over the shoulders of our masters. For some of us our first teaching experience was in the Social Science Integrated Course. What all of this meant to me I have tried to recollect in Bennett Berger's "Authors of Their Own Lives" (UC Press 1990), where I also recount my growing up in Nazi Germany and surviving the war.

I retired from Columbia in 1997 to finish my last book, a historical lesson for German readers, "Max Weber's Anglo-German Family History 1800-1950" (in German, 2001). I document Weber's descent from one of the wealthiest Anglo-German families in the 19th century and suggest counterfactually that a stronger cosmopolitan bourgeoisie might have helped prevent the catastrophes of the 20th century. 

I will publish a book on the Leo Baeck Institute website in early 2011: Edgar Jaffe, Else von Richthofen and their children: From German-Jewish assimilation through antisemitic persecution to American integration. This concerns the circle around Max and Alfred Weber and their exiled colleagues. My manuscript is based on my discovery of 1,500 letters in the possession of an American grandson; I have annotated these letters and arranged for their donation to the Leo Baeck Institute in New York.

Obituary

Dr. Hubert Wilhelm Oppe passed away on October 18, 2017.  He was born on November 1, 1924 in Bremen, West Germany to August and Emilie Haehnlein Oppe.  He was the seventh of nine children.  At age 17, he was conscripted into the German army during World War II.  From 1943 to 1947 he was a prisoner of war in Egypt after being captured in Italy.  He lost three brothers during the war:  Hans, Conrad and Werner.  After the war ended, he returned to Germany.  In 1950, he came to America as a youth representative under Harry Truman’s Conference on Youth.   He moved to California later that year to attend San Diego State University.   He taught himself English with a textbook in one hand and a dictionary in the other.   He met and later married Dorothy Fawkes on October 21, 1950. They had four children, all born in California.  He received both a bachelor’s degree from San Diego State and a master’s degree and Ph.D. from Berkeley.  In 1963, Hubert moved his family to Canyon, TX to accept a teaching position with West Texas State University (now WTAMU).  He became head of the sociology/social work department in 1970.  He started the social work degree program while at WTSU. 

He always showed a strong sense of purpose and commitment to whatever project he started.  His students respected his enthusiasm and his ability to teach.  He retired from WTSU in 1988 and was awarded the Professor Emeritus in 1992.  Following retirement, he spent a great deal of time with his five grand-children whom he treasured.  He was a very loving husband, father and grand-father.

He was preceded in death by his wife, Dorothy, on September 16, 2006. 

Survivors are Michael Oppe from Canyon, Thomas Oppe from Vicksburg, Mississippi, Janet Schulte and husband James from Amarillo, and Debby Arrant and husband Eddie from Plano.  Grand-children include Christopher Schulte, Nicholas Schulte, Katie Schulte from Amarillo and Michael Arrant and Daniel Arrant from Plano.  He was very supportive and proud of his entire family.

My years at Berkeley were in many ways the unhappiest of my life, but I learned a lot inside and outside the formalities of academic instruction: I learned a kind of sociology (including survey methods and mathematical sociology) that I was fundamentally at odds with though I didn't realize this until later; I learned George Herbet Mead from Tamotsu Shibutani's brilliant course; I learned a lot I could have done without about North American sexism (I've always been grateful to John Clausen who did not share the pervasive sexism of other departmental faculty of the time); I learned a great deal from the Free Speech and Anti-Vietnam War movements on campus though I did not participate very actively because I was not an American citizen and didn't want to be deported as an English friend of mine had been; I learned a radically different conception of poetry from once hearing Alan Ginsberg recite at Sather Gate; I discovered by accident in the university bookstore a copy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's The phenomenology of perception that furthered the intellectual transformation that originated with Shibutani's course. I resolved when I taught my first undergraduate course in sociology that I had to find a different way of doing sociology. These experiences at Berkeley were foundational to the step I took as I became active in the women's movement (three or four years after I left) to start writing a sociology that would know how to begin in the actualities of people's lives.

IN MEMORIAM: BOB BLAUNER PASSED AWAY ON OCTOBER 20, 2016

I have received sad news: the passing of Robert Blauner at the age of 87.    Bob – as he always insisted on being called – was a Berkeley graduate student in the 1950s, receiving his PhD in 1962.  He became a faculty member in our department in 1964.He had a distinguished career.   

He was the author of such classic studies as Alienation and Freedom (1964), partly informed by his own experiences as a worker for 5 years at International Harvester in Emeryville – a book that prefigured the subsequent rise of Marxist studies of the labor process; Racial Oppression in America (1972) that deepened and popularized the idea of internal colonialism – a critical contribution to the transformation of race studies in the 1970s – that was updated and expanded in 2001anticipating the discussion that has erupted nationally today; Black Lives, White Lives (1989) which portrayed race relations through and after the civil rights era based on extended interviews with blacks and whites between 1968 and 1986;  Our Mothers’ Spirits (1997), a compassionate collection of men’s writings grieving the loss of their mothers; Resisting McCarthyism (2009) which focused on the brave Berkeley faculty who refused to sign the Loyalty Oath, and on the politics that set the stage for the Free Speech Movement.  

Bob was a man of integrity and principle in practice as well as in theory.  His promotion to Full Professor was long delayed because of his outspoken criticism of the McCone Commission that investigated the Watts rebellion of 1965. Bob had been a member of the Commission’s research team, but then resigned in opposition to its law and order approach, prompting him to write his (in)famous article, “Whitewash over Watts”. In 1978 he incurred the wrath of his colleagues when he accused one of them of sexual harassment – a term that barely existed at the time. The case became one of the early milestones in the movement against sexual violence.  He was ahead of his times in other ways too. With Troy Duster he began Affirmative Action in the Department, actively recruiting students from the South.  And for 20 years, starting in 1975, he taught a course on men’s lives, trying to grasp the other side of the gender revolution. 

Bob retired in 1993 to spend the next 23 years doing what he always enjoyed, following baseball, playing chess and poker, above all writing his memoirs, and living a life devoted to his wife, the filmmaker, Karina Epperlein. He died of a kidney disease which had afflicted him for several years.

Michael Burawoy.

From Yiannis Gabriel. Bob was a man of great integrity, compassion and intelligence. I attended two of his graduate classes and he was one of the members of my dissertation committee. More importantly, he sponsored several courses organized and taught at Berkeley by graduate students like myself, putting his signature on various documents to satisfy University of California bureaucracy. Bob also put his signature on numerous 'nearly' truthful statements that kept me out of the Greek army at the time.

Bob's academic work concentrated on the sociology of work, race relations and what was at the time an embryonic field of death studies. His Alienation and Freedom (1960) tried to initiate a new life for the concept of alienation, a hugely popular and much abused term in the sixties. His attempt to link alienation to different levels of automation was generally criticized by Marxists for psychologizing alienation and by industrial sociologists for being technologically determinist. Yet, when Braverman did something similar ten years later using the concept of deskilling, it proved to be a major breakthrough in neo-Marxist studies of the labour process.

In race relations, Bob theorized the concept of internal colonialism, long before postcolonial studies had emerged as a discipline. Again he antagonised Marxists who had, until the 1970s, tended to see racism through the prism of 'dividing the working class'. Yet, I can think of no greater advocate of race equality and equal opportunities in the US than Blauner, as evidenced by his stinging critique of official report on the 1965 Los Angeles riots in "Whitewash over Watts".

I last saw Bob in the summer of 2009. As ever, he was full of life and ideas. What I will always remember about Bob is that he embodied the ideal of a scholar who scorned to differentiate between the personal and political long before it became a cliche. He not only brought his politics into every aspect of his life but he refused to shelter his personal life from the wider political arenas, making himself vulnerable and being unwilling to cover up contradictions and dilemmas. In particular, he refused to shelter himself from Berkeley graduate students who, at least in the 70s, did not have a great deal of respect for the intellectual and political qualities of the faculty.

From Larry Rosenthal. I came late to knowing Bob. There were some meals together. With Karina. Always lovely. Bob, his characteristic—or so it seemed to me—fluctuation between taciturn and suddenly funny. He sent me some autobiographical writings. They were profound and moving. I answered him at some length. There was now a bond between us. We saw something of ourselves in one another.

I got invited to his poker game. It was a table full of basically sweet and aging men. But, as poker will have it, an individual trait became exaggerated. Became one’s poker persona. Bob’s persona? While the poker players have long been on to this, it might come as a surprise those who were not at the table. Bob was the banker. Always the banker. He insisted on it. He brought the chips. He counted them out. Collected our greenbacks. An accountant’s seriousness about it--even though we were still playing in 2015 for stakes that were low, low end already in 1975. You get cleaned out? Bob will sell you more chips. At the end, cashing in the chips, meticulous, almost fussy, about the final quarters coming true. Was this a pole away from the labor organizer and the theorist of alienation? Somehow it never seemed that way.

From Leon Wofsy. I had great respect for Bob. We became close during the time of the Free Speech Movement, the movements against the Vietnam War and, later, against South African Apartheid. Actually, when I came to Berkeley in 1964 and met Bob, he reminded me that we had come together in the Labor Youth League in the 1950s. Bob was so different from most academics, so rich in insights and human connection with the “common folk.” He was so genuine, so original and unpretentious. However his views developed and changed over the years, he was always unwavering in integrity and principles.

From Colin Samson. Bob was one of my teachers. He made a deep impression on how I think about the world and about myself. He taught me about oral history; its techniques and its importance as a vehicle for affirmation of people who are so often ignored and dismissed. His classes were open, convivial and he was always generous to everyone. Bob built a community out of our class, enabling us to learn from each other, from him and from the many sources he opened up to us. The lives of people were always personal and political, and as students he helped us see that scholarship was political. How could it be anything else? I will always remember Bob as a person who made me think "I want to be like you". If I have inside me only a small amount of what he showed, I will have succeeded at something. Rest in Peace.

From Richard Apostle. My sincere condolences. Bob could spot a plebe in need at great distance, and very kindly invited me over for occasional chess games during bad patches. Along with another faculty member, he was very much responsible for my navigating a system which remained a puzzle to me for decades. Also, I very much appreciate the opportunity to come and visit you both a few years back. It meant a lot to be in your graceful presence.

From Robert Kapsis.  It was  the early 1970s during a session of his graduate seminar on race when Bob eloquently defended me against the wrath of Black Nationalist graduate students who were horrified that a white liberal graduate student (born and raised on Chicago’s North Side) would have the audacity to  pitch the idea of doing a dissertation about the black community of Richmond California. Thanks in no small measure to Bob’s encouragement, I wrote the dissertation and published a series of scholarly articles based on the research.  My interest and curiosity about the black experience continues to this day.  In 2011 I published a book length study on legendary African-American film director Charles Burnett (1944- ) to coincide with the opening at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) of the first complete retrospective of Burnett’s work, which I conceived and co-organized.  Thanks Bob.

From Michael Lerner. Bob Blauner was an amazingly wonderful human being, as you know Karina. He wrote for Tikkun and my friendship with him goes back to the 60s when he was one of the most reliable faculty people we students could count on when the administration would attempt to squelch our activism. I felt he never got the recognition he deserved, particularly for his work against racism

From Rivka Polatnick. As a sociology graduate student in the '70s and early '80's, I had the pleasure to take courses with Bob and was delighted by his combination of scholarly excellence, political and moral commitments, engaging teaching style, and humanism and kindness. When it came time to choose a dissertation chair for my study of late '60s Black and White Women's Liberation pioneers, my mentor Arlie Hochschild was on leave and not taking on any new dissertations. I was very happy to have the fine alternative of asking Bob to be my chair, and he responded with enthusiasm. He guided me through the process with skill and warmth, and I am indebted to him. He was very helpful in writing me letters of recommendation, and my own teaching incorporated his scholarly work and pedagogical style. I will remember him with great respect and fondness.

From Nicole Biggert.  I was a graduate student who knew Bob in the late 1970’s and until I graduated in 1981. Bob did not like the formality of a classroom but when it came time to talk about ideas that he cared about the passion came through and there was no better teacher.  One issue that really hurt him deeply was the criticism he faced as a white man who had dared to write about race in America.  He was caught in a political conundrum and allowed us to talk about this personally painful issue as a way to help us to learn and to sharpen our understanding as sociologists.  I always appreciated his generosity of spirit.

From Susan Takata. I was so saddened by the passing of Bob Blauner. I was at Cal between 1975 and finally obtaining my PhD in sociology in 1983. I took several of his grad courses including the early beginnings of a gender course that you mentioned below. To date, when I teach “Race, Crime, Law,” I mention Bob’s book, Racial Oppression in America. When I first met Bob, he had this gruff exterior but as I got to know him, he was actually a very nice guy, and a very caring teacher. After receiving my Ph.D., I got hired here at UW Parkside in sociology in 1984, and in 1997, I became the founding mother of the Department of Criminal Justice, one of the largest majors on campus. I kept in touch with Bob. We exchanged Christmas cards each year.  I will miss Bob. He truly cared about his students.

From Lois Benjamin.  For forty-nine years, I have known Bob as my professor, advisor, colleague, and friend.  In September 1967, I first met Bob when I enrolled in his Race Relations class.  As one of the first two African American women to be admitted to the graduate program in the Department of Sociology (1967), I was immediately drawn to his integrity and sensitivity to others, his openness to myriads of ways of knowing and understanding, and to his critical, pedagogic approach on racial/cultural politics and power.  His lectures and the attendant discourses were animated and civil.  A brilliant scholar, Bob was at the leading edge of academics who challenged the conventional analysis and wisdom of race relations in United States in the late sixties.  His fresh, penetrating writings and lectures were influential in shifting the focus in race relations from prejudice and discrimination to institutional racism.  Additionally, he was instrumental in deepening the analysis of the construct of internal colonialism.  In his Race Relations class, I wrote a research paper on the impact of racism on black male/female relations.  Bob encouraged me to use the work as a basis for my dissertation.  At that point, he became my academic advisor and mentor.  Later, he chaired my dissertation committee.  Bob always wrote in a clear, elegant style and he encouraged his students to write likewise and to shun turgid academic prose.  He would say, “My goal is not to turn out another Talcott Parsons.”  

After receiving my doctorate, Bob and I remained in contact throughout the years.  As colleagues and friends, we shared, critiqued and supported one another’s articles and works in progress, as well as championed each other during promises and perils of our professional and personal lives.  I have been fortunate to have many magnificent educators who have impacted my life; however, as I stated upon Bob’s retirement in 1993, he, along with my third-grade teacher, had the most profound influence in my educational journey and life path.

From Michael Kimmel. When I arrived at Berkeley in 1974, Bob Blauner had already influenced me twice.  I'd read Alienation and Freedom (a book title that I'm sure most of us wish we'd thought of!) as an undergrad and was moved by the way Bob described these workers' lives with such empathy.  But the article, "Internal Colonialism and Ghetto Revolt" blew my mind when I read it in my first year at another grad school.  Here was the analysis that I thought I was looking for - that applied the analysis of our imperialist adventures in Vietnam to the maintenance of an internal colony here at home.  When I finally met him, I was struck by the combination of his humility and his enthusiasm. He listened to people, cared about them, and was astonishingly self-effacing about his own stature in the field.  My research took me towards others in the department (and in the history department), and my dissertation about 17th century French tax policy had less than nothing to do with Bob's move towards gender and masculinity studies.  His interest was only secondarily academic, spurred by years of analysis and serious soul searching.  And the way that Bob fused the personal and the analytic in both his teaching and his research was the third, and most significant way, he influenced me.  He became a friend and a mentor, especially after I had begun my career.  Who else would call himself a proud Mama's Boy?  Mike Messner and I dedicated the most recent edition of Men's Lives to Bob. I'll miss him. 

From Paul Joseph. Bob played a major part of my graduate studies at Berkeley. This was in the early 1970s, his book Racial Oppression in America had just come out, and the department was continually caught up in many of the national and Bay Area developments occurring at the time. Bob’s work, particularly his discussion of internal colonialism, played a central role in these discussions. I know that many of my peers were influenced by his views, and inspired by his presentation of what sociology could be.

We became and remained friends. He played softball in the Friday afternoon game behind Barrow Hall. We played tennis together and I joined him and other faculty in a monthly poker game. Bob was very personable and approachable; he served as a most valuable mentor to a young person navigating the entry points of the sociological profession. We had a meal together whenever I visited and I followed the progression of his interests through his other books on race, masculinity, and eventually the loyalty oath. I especially remember his voice: strong, resonant, and populist. When Bob spoke, democracy seemed to carry in its timbre.

From Juan Oliverez. I was one of those minorities to benefit from Affirmative Action. I was admitted in 1971 and earned my PhD in 1991. From 1988 to 1991 he formed a group of students to assist them with the completion of their PhD. I was one of them. I am very sad to learn of his passing. He was a great friend to Chicanos and all students. I was honored to know him personally and professionally. He cared about me as a person and as a student. I have to say that he was my favorite professor. May he Rest in Peace. He will surely missed and appreciated by his students.

From Magali Sarfatti Larson. I am deeply saddened by these news. I can see Bob Blauner’s face in front of my eyes, hear his comments about jury selection, remember the conversations in his office, the discussions about Alienation and Freedom and especially about the United States and the Sixties. Bob was in so many ways the symbol of what we believed. I could not take a course with him during my time at Berkeley, because he did not give graduate seminars during that time, but I asked him to be on my dissertation committee, even though I was not doing research on something of direct interest to him. But then, everything was of interest to him and, for me, having a reason to talk with him was a privilege. He dignified our discipline and our calling. His life was a paragon of intellectual and political integrity. We will not forget him.

From Douglas Davidson.  I have fond memories of Bob.  He along with Troy Duster, and a collective of fellow Third World Liberation Front supporters in the graduate student population were vital to my ability to navigate the often tumultuous waters of doctoral studies at Berkeley.  He influenced my life and work in more ways than I can illuminate in this message.  His contributions were immense and he will be sorely missed.  Please pass my condolences to his family and close departmental associates and colleagues.  peace--douglas Davidson: former student and mentee

From Teresa Arendell. Thank you for the notification of Bob's death.  I entered the UCB graduate program in 1979.  Bob seemed to recognize that I had a passion for learning but no cultural capital, coming from an impoverished level of the working class (and being a mother of a young child).  I finished the PhD program in large measure because of the support, intellectual challenges, and kindnesses of Herb Blumer, Arlie Hochschild, and Bob Blauner.  Bob's analyses of class and racial, and later of gender, stratification and oppression were formative in my becoming a sociologist.

From Eloise Dunlap. I am very saddened to hear of the passing of Dr. Robert Blauner.  He was my life vest while studying at Berkeley.  I do not have the words to express what he meant to me. It is due to him that I am able to enjoy a 30 year career as a research scientist writing NIH grants and acquiring funding.  Dr Blauner truly cared for his students and spent time helping us to understand concepts. There was no limit to his efforts to be of help to his students.  I will always remember him with love and fond memories. 

From Faruk Birtek. It is very sad to hear of the passing of Bob Blauner. More than fifty years ago he was gracious to let me - as an undergraduate - into his graduate seminar. He was a most enthusiastic, bright lecturer, and at the end of the term he spent much time discussing my  paper.  We later became friends, although only running into each other infrequently due to geographical distances. His book, Alienation and Freedom, was a break-through at the time, in the midst of a lot of talk about alienation with no substance other than Marx's. He was a person with great politics, very big heart and brilliant head. I am sad, Berkeley will miss him. I especially miss him as I write from the other side of the globe with a lot of hell around.

From David Nasatir.  Bob was a good friend for a long time. One bit of of arcana that may have been overlooked is Bob's identity as a "Quiz Kid".  You may not recall this radio program from the 1940's, but Bob was a "contestant" on the show of October 8, 1941 along with Gerard Darrow, Ruth FIsher, Emily Israel and Van Dyke Tiers. Always a smart guy!

From Marcel Paret: I met Bob Blauner in 2006 during the planning for the annual BJS conference. It was the 50th anniversary of BJS, and the theme for the conference was Power. Alongside Troy Duster and David Wellman, Bob was part of a panel on the topic of "Power and Insurgency: Communist and Anti-Racist Struggles in the University of California." He presented on the work that would eventually become Resisting McCarthyism. In one of our email exchanges devoted to planning the panel, he promised to "tell amusing stories" about David Barrows, of Barrows Hall, among others. I think he did, in the end. But I was a bit star struck. I had come across Bob's work on internal colonialism in my reading around issues of race and class, and thought that he was onto something important. In my letter inviting Bob to present, I expressed appreciation for his involvement in social justice movements, his critical research on race and work, and how he had shaped Berkeley sociology. Bob reminded me that his first article was published in BJS, in 1958, and noted his surprise that I was familiar with his work. He thought that Berkeley sociology had moved on to a different kind of sociology. I don't know if he was right about that or not (in my case he was certainly wrong). But it reflected a deeper humbleness that was evident to me when we finally met in person. Bob was kind and generous, and I feel lucky to have met him.

From Guether Roth: Thanks for your moving obituary of Bob Blauner. In the fifties we were good friends in Graduate School. As he has written in his autobiography, we were part of a close group, having fierce chess battles at the old Institute of Industrial Relations—he mentions Amitai Etzioni, Pat McGillivray, Fred Goldner, myself--, where we worked under Bendix, Lipset and others. We often played chess on the lawn around the Institute, and I remember his resolute moves on the board. But Bob also mentions the “unbelievable comradeship and solidarity” of our group. We prepared together for the five days of written qualifying exams. The faculty did not like this, but could not do anything about it. Working together through the 75 required books, assembled unsystematically by the faculty, broadened our knowledge beyond our own burgeoning interests. Even more importantly, we learned how to do research from looking over the shoulders of our mentors in the Institute. It was a lucky constellation for becoming a sociologist in an era of great expectations.          

From Mary Anna C. Colwell. Thanks for sending the news about Bob. I was an average, underprepared grad student in the very divided department in the late 1970s and was truly an outsider among the very bright graduates from Harvard, Yale, etc. who took Marxist analysis as gospel. I struggled through, put together a dissertation committee (Private Foundations and Public Policy) because of personal connections, and Bob was chair of my orals committee. Afterwards he hosted a small party to celebrate and that may have been the first time I felt like I belonged. He was genuinely kind and I greatly appreciated that. 

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I returned to graduate sociology at Berkeley after five years working in factories where I had been a total failure at revolutionizing the working class. I say return because I spent one semester in 1951 in the department. Then I had absolutely no interest in sociology, because as a communist (Stalinist variety) I had all the answers already and I was in school only for a deferment to keep me out of the Korean War. Reinhard Bendix was not at all impressed with my term paper arguing that Soviet workers were not alienated because they owned the means of production. So that in early 1956 I was afraid that C grade would prevent my getting back into the department. I asked my friend Tom Shibutani if he could help, and maybe he did. 

Shibutani had been my main M.A. advisor at Chicago for a 1950 thesis on the social psychology of personal names. But because of my years as a worker and a communist I was now more interested in industrial and social psychology. It was almost as if the new chair, Herbert Blumer, had built a department tailor-made to my needs, which was to make sense of my experiences, and to answer questions about the politics of the working class (Selig Perlman), the similarities and differences between socialism, communism, and capitalism (Schumpeter), why revolutionary parties and movements ossify (Michels), and the appeal, for someone like myself, of ideologies and utopias (Mannheim). Not only did I have great teachers like Kornhauser, Lipset, Selmick, and Bendix (whom I never dared ask if he remembered me), but we had a fantastic cohort, as other bio writers have attested to. My best pal was the late Bob Alford, who had worked at International Harvester with me: other recent local proletarians included machinist Lloyd Street and railroad switchman John Spier, and from Detroit's auto plants, Bill Friedland. At the Institute for Industrial Relations, where I TA?d for Marty Lipset, we had a chess rivalry that included fellow grad students Amitai Etzioni, Guenther Roth, Pat McGillivray.--perhaps the most erudite and knowledgeable of all of us -- and Fred Goldner; a few years later my friends in grad school became Bill and Dorothy Smith. (Dorothy's bio is available, but not Bill's, who after a series of teaching jobs, including one at the University of Pittsburgh, gave it all up to become a plumber before dying from cancer in 1986.) 

The comradeship and solidarity in graduate school was unbelievable---I've not yet mentioned Harry Nishio, Ernest Landauer, Art Stinchcombe, Gayle Ness, Walt Phillips, my good friend Ken Walker, and dozens of others I learned from-- in fact it was so good that I wasn't prepared for what I would meet when I began teaching. First at S. F. State, then at Chicago, finally at UCB, my fellow assistant professors were almost the opposite of my grad school peers: closed off, ultra-competitive, or perhaps just afraid that you'd steal their ideas. 

My dissertation on factory workers was informed by my industrial experiences, but didn't draw directly on them. But Alienation and Freedom made my career. It got me a job at Chicago which permitted me to be hired back at UCB---the first Ph.D. to return since Ken Bock. It also got me tenure at Berkeley. I am indebted to Selznick, who made me rewrite a draft on the sociology of industries into a more theoretical version.

During the year that I did my M.A. at Chicago Blumer had been like a father figure for me. Though mostly from a distance as I sat in his seminars and marveled at everything about the man. That 15 years later the secretaries at Berkeley would be mixing up our mail is something I never would have dreamed of. It was great to see the Blumer renaissance in the 1960s, for after a period when he had been marginalized, the New Left grad students took to his theories and he gained a new following. But it was too late for Shibutani, who like Blumer himself, was not really respected by the very political and industrial sociologists who were my mentors, and who had been -- most unfairly in my view -- denied tenure. 

Sometimes I've regretted that I only stayed one year at S.F. State, because I loved San Francisco, and also, in large part because of pressure from my second wife who hated Chicago, I left my alma mater after only one year. Another regret is that I flitted around in terms of research and writing, from workers to the sociology of death to Black-white relations. Each time I changed fields I had to learn a whole new literature. I would have had a less "disorderly career" (Wilensky) had I just stayed in the area of work, and then as I got inspired by the civil rights movement, studied race relations in the context of the factory. 

Had I stayed in Chicago, where the department and the city was much more conservative than Berkeley, it's quite likely that neither my sociological writing nor my personal politics, would have become as radical as they did in the late 60s. I would probably have stayed in Freudian psychoanalysis rather than going through those four years of primal therapy in the '70s, an experience that was life transforming. It led to four years of no writing or research, followed by the decision to work on experiential projects (like Black Lives, White Lives) rather than theoretical ones. And it was the motivation for a change in my teaching style from the lecture format to discussion and an emphasis on personal experience. I am proud of the fact that I was one of the first to offer a course on men's lives, which I taught from 1975 through 1995. 

Retiring in 1993 was my best career move ever. Even though teaching got easier over the years, it was never natural for me in the way writing is. As a retiree at UCB you get a cheap parking permit and all the time you want to write. Like Bennett Berger, my writing is 90% non-sociological these days and 90% unpublished. Exceptions are a collection of essays on race (Still the Big News, Temple 2002) and an anthology of men 's writing on the death and lives of mother (Our Mothers' Spirits, Harper Perennial, 1995). I'm quite excited about my current project, a memoir of growing up in Chicago in the 1930s and 40s that is part social history, part family history and coming of age story, with a lot of baseball (the Chicago Cubs) thrown in. 

John Finley Scott '55, June 2006, in Davis, California, a victim of murder; John's body was discovered in April. John received a BA from Reed in philosophy. From Stanford, he received an MA in 1956, and from University of California, Berkeley, a PhD in 1966, in sociology. He married Lois Heyman in 1965; they divorced in 1987. John taught at University of California, Davis, retiring in 1994 as emeritus professor of sociology. He published Internalization of Norms: A Sociological Theory of Moral Commitment (Prentice Hall) in 1971. John was inspired by the photography of Ansel Adams to become an outdoorsman. A mountain-climbing accident at 23, which left permanent injuries, led him to seek alternative ways of ascending the California mountains. He was known in Davis as a “bicycle pioneer,” and described himself as a “bicycle guru.” He was instrumental not only in helping to establish bicyclists' rights in the State of California, but he also built the first prototype of the mountain bike in 1953. In 1960, he developed a “Woodsie,” a lighter-weight, off-road bike, which was a precursor to the modern mountain bike. His personalized license plate, “Homeric,” was attached to a double-decker London bus he created for mountain-bike touring. In 1980, he purchased the Cupertino Bike Shop, which he sold in 1989. His love of the outdoors endured, and he spent later years camping and developing his skills in photography. Survivors include his sister, Jane Scott Chamberlain. His father, Frank C. Scott ’15, also attended Reed.

Here is an excellent obituary of John Finley Scott from the cycling world:  http://mmbhof.org/mtn-bike-hall-of-fame/history/john-finley-scott/

I entered the University of California at Berkeley in 1951, three months after graduating from George Washington High School in San Francisco.  I remained in Berkeley until 1960, obtaining a BA (sociology and social institutions, 1955);  MA (political science, 1957); Ph.D. (sociology and social institutions, 1961), and serving as lecturer in the Department of Speech from 1955-1960.  During my undergraduate years I switched to sociology as my major after doing a year as an economics major and finding that subject boring.  My courses with Blumer, Bendix, Selznick, Kornhauser, Lipset, Shibutani, Grana, and Bock provided me with a broad and deep knowledge of the discipline and its several contending schools of thought.  I was especially attracted to the historical sociology that was being espoused by Kenneth Bock.  He would serve as my graduate adviser, outside man on my MA thesis, and chairman of the oral examinations committee for my Ph.D. Thinking of my self as a "political sociologist", I decided to take my MA in political science. With the blessings of the sociology department, and with the assurance that I would return to sociology for my doctoral studies, I went across the hall of "Old South" and studied with Ernst B. Haas, Paul Seabury, Sheldon Wolin, and other political scientists.  My MA thesis, "The Impact of Germany on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization" was chaired by Professors Haas, Seabury, and Bock.  (Thirty-eight years later, It was published as Germany And Nato: A Study In The Sociology Of Supranational Relations, [Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1995] and awarded "honorable mention" in the "distinguished book award" competition conducted annually by the Mid-South Sociological Association).  I returned to the sociology department and, with the supervision of Kingsley Davis, Franz Schurmann, and Edward A.N. Barnhart, completed my doctoral dissertation, The Structure Of Chinese Society In Nineteenth-Century America, in 1961. (Twenty-five years later, it was published as Chinatown And Little Tokyo: Power, Conflict, And Community Among Chinese And Japanese Immigrants In America, [Millwood, NY.: Associated Faculty Press, Inc., 1986).
     
Since the completion of my doctoral studies my career has been peripatetic.  I taught in the department of anthropology and sociology of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, from 1960-63; directed the Liberal Arts Extension Division of The University of California, Berkeley, 1963-4; founded and chaired the sociology department of Sonoma State College [now University], 1964-68; served as vice-chairman of the department of sociology, University of Nevada, Reno, 1968-70; joined and taught in the sociology department, University of California, San Diego, 1970-2; accepted the invitation to become Professor of sociology and, later, of Asian Studies, and department chair, Graduate Faculty of Social Science, New School for Social Research, New York City, 1972-85; and was named Robert J. Morrow Eminent Scholar and Professor of Social Science, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, 1985-present.  I have also served as Senior Member, Linacre College, Oxford University, 1976; Fulbright Lecturer, Ryukoku Daigakuen and  Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan, 1981; Visiting Foreign Expert, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Peoples Republic of China, 1986; Co-director International Colloquium on Social Structure and Social Stratification, Dubrovnik, Croatia,  1986-present.  Under the auspices of the United States Information Agency, I have lectured in Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Sri Lanka, India, Kenya, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, South Africa. I presented papers at two of the World Congresses  of Sociology in Mexico City and Montreal.
     
My published researches include 25 books and about 100 articles in refereed journals, educational reports, essays and book chapters.  I have received four Distinguished Book Awards and two Honorable Mentions from the Mid-South Sociological Association, the George Herbert Mead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, and recognition awards from the Chinese Historical Society of the United States,  The Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, The Japanese American Citizens League, and the American Association for Ethnic Studies. I am one of the founders of the Section on Asian/Asian American sociology of the American Sociological Association.  I have served as President of the Mid-South Sociological Association.
     
I believe the comprehensive education that I received at Berkeley provided the groundings and the bases for the development of my career in the discipline.  For this I shall be always grateful.
    
Stanford Lyman died of pancreatic and liver cancer on March 10, 2003.
    
    


TRIBUTES TO STANFORD LYMAN
    
    
From Armand Mauss: An Anecdote of Inspiration
       
I will always remember Stan with gratitude for serving as the catalyst for my very first publication. At the annual meetings of the Pacific Sociological Association in 1965, I presented a paper in a session where Stan was present. Afterward, he undertook to offer me some criticisms. As a complete rookie, I immediately became defensive in the belief that he was trying to shoot me down. However, in response to my defensive reaction, he softly replied, "Hey - I think it's a publishable paper already - I'm just suggesting some improvements!" Stunned, I recovered long enough to ask how one would go about getting a paper published. He pointed to the then-editor of the Pacific Sociological Review across the room (now Sociological Perspectives) and said, "There's the editor of the PSR over there. Go and ask him". I did so, and "the rest is history." I went on to publish four score papers or more, plus three books. Stan started it all off for me. Without him, I might have stayed with my junior college job indefinitely and never published anything. I had no idea that publication was possible for ordinary mortals like me! Thank you Stan, wherever you are : "May flights of angels bear thee to thy rest!".     
    
    

From Ivan Light: Nomination Letter for the Distinguished Career Award in International Migration
    
1-15-03
    
Roger Waldinger,
Department of Sociology,
University of California,
Los Angeles.
    
Dear Roger,
    
This letter nominates Stanford Morris Lyman for the IM Distinguished Career Award. Technically, it is not needed because Lyman was nominated last year. Therefore, he is automatically renominated in a successive year. In fact, Lyman was our number two candidate last year whom we passed over in part because, at 67, he is younger than Milton Gordon, last year's award winner.  Nonetheless, aware that documents are often lost from one year to the next, I have taken the liberty of recompiling Lyman's record for nomination.
    
My compilation focuses only upon publications that deal with Asians in America. These publications constitute the core of Lyman's contribution to the sociology of international migration. The attachment  ("Lyman.S") lists Lyman's publications on the topic of Asian Americans. The earliest is dated 1961; the most recent 1997. The list contains his seminal doctoral dissertation, nine books, and one article. I have listed the chapters in four books separately as articles in order to display their Asian American content. These chapters were originally published as articles in refereed journals; but they were subsequently combined in edited books to facilitate access. There is really only one article that was never published in book form.  
    
The chronology shows that Lyman's interest in Asian Americans has been continuous throughout his professional life. True, in the last 20 years, many others have shared this interest. Prior to that, however, Lyman was the first sociologist who undertook serious historical and theoretical  scholarship on this topic. Of course, he had able forebears. Frank Miyamoto's Social Solidarity among the Japanese in Seattle (1939) was a great community study that made sociological sense of the Japanese community, probably for the first time. The accomplishment was the more memorable in view of the war clouds that were then gathering.   Rose Hum Lee deserves credit for providing a historical account of Chinese in America. But Lee's main publication, The Chinese in the United States of America, was principally interested in bringing Chinese American contributions to American history to the attention of Americans of Chinese descent. Paul Siu's superb 1953  dissertation on the Chinese laundryman brought this then common American icon under the theoretical umbrella of Chicago School sociology. That was a splendid contribution, but Siu's ambitions were limited.  In contrast.  Lyman's massive 1961 dissertation,  much later published in book form as Chinatown and Little Tokyo: Power, Conflict, and Community among Chinese and Japanese Immigrants to America (1986) analyzed the social organization of nineteenth century Chinese and Japanese communities in the USA in a work of prodigious, comparative scholarship.  Drawing on Park, Weber, and Simmel, this scholarship put the comparative historical experience of Chinese and Japanese Americans on the serious research agenda of American sociology in a way that previous efforts, very meritorious in themselves, had not accomplished. It is no exaggeration to observe that Stanford Lyman was the father of Asian American studies, but that statement does not do justice to his contribution to the field of international migration. It is not simply that Lyman's work opened up the unexplored history of Chinese and Japanese in the United States for research and scholarly analysis; Lyman framed this historical experience in terms that improved the general level of scholarship on immigration. His interest in structures of community opened the way for subsequent inquiries into non-Asian immigrant communities. The strategic role of what current Mexican American research now calls "home town associations" was first fully explicated in Lyman's 1961 dissertation on Chinese and Japanese.
    
Because he was such an early pioneer of Asian American research, Lyman confronted a professional sociology that did not then understand the importance of his historical and theoretical contribution.  Now we do; then we did not.  It is easy now to study and research that subject; then it was not easy. Moreover, that we now understand the importance of Asian American immigration owes much to the shoulders of Stanford Lyman onto which later sociologists climbed for a better view.   It is, of course, true that the immigration of Asians to the USA since 1970 has increased the visibility and salience of Asians in American society, thus increasing the significance of their history. Without that real and current immigration of Asians, Lyman's comparative studies of nineteenth century Chinese and Japanese communities would have less practical significance now than in fact they do. On the other hand, thanks to Lyman, when Asian immigration resumed after 1970, and sociological interest accelerated, sociology had a superb understanding of the early history of the Chinese and Japanese in America. This strong base permitted research to proceed apace in response to renewed interest. For many years Lyman's work was the arcane source, known to the cognoscenti,  from which departed what we now identify as classic research into Asian American society.
     
One should recall that in 1961 when Lyman's career began, there were few persons of Chinese or Japanese descent who were professional sociologists. Now there are many; then there were few.  Lyman was, however, neither a tourist nor a curiosity seeker. Although a non-Asian, Lyman actually began his research into Asian American history and sociology as a student in San Francisco's Galileo High School, which is still Chinatown's public secondary school. Hanging around with Chinese and Japanese friends after school, Lyman acquired a knowledge of, interest in, and love for them and their communities. This basis sustained and animated his subsequent professional rendez-vous with their history. This  human interest story offers a little vignette of American history that I happen to know as a result of conversations with Stanford Lyman, and I am glad that it can now be recorded in the official record as a small counter-weight to the otherwise lamentably common American practice of marginalizing Asian Americans.
    
When IM makes a distinguished career award, we evaluate the scholarly impact of the nominee's scholarly work. This is a job only scholars can do as they alone understand where the ideas came from that now bedeck and adorn the mentality of journalists and media pundits. John Maynard Keynes once remarked that crackpot ideas spouted by "madmen in authority" were originally deposited on the page by unknown scribblers.  As scholars, it behooves us to note that scribblers sometimes have good ideas too.   If we ask, where would the sociology of immigration be today without Asian American studies, we conclude appropriately that it would be depleted and inferior. In that sense, Lyman's seminal contribution to Asian American sociology has earned our gratitude as well as this official IM recognition, the distinguished career award.
    
Yours truly,
     
Ivan Light
Professor of Sociology
UCLA
 

Three factors shaped my history: family, 14 years of political and union activism, and Berkeley: family provided fundamental direction; activism provided an understanding and grounding in organization, politics, people, stratification, social analysis, especially Marxism; Berkeley gave me social science discipline.

Initially I followed a standard academic trajectory -- African studies and appointment at Cornell -- until the upsurge of the mid-1960s reactivated me. This led to a search for ways to survive within the university while engaging in social change teaching and research. I began at Cornell but found less academic bureaucracy and a willingness to experiment at UC Santa Cruz where I became the founding chair of Community Studies, an undergraduate department training students for activism by preparing them for six months fulltime field study followed by a senior thesis. Since 1969, teaching in Community Studies provided fine usage of my sociological and anthropological training geared at social change.

Activist research was more problematic. Agricultural interests brought me to research the UC's role in agricultural mechanization. This culminated in a decades long suit against the UC (we won, but lost on appeal). Bumping into rural sociologists in the late 1970s after finding zero interest in agriculture in the ASA, I found a supportive milieu. Mostly what I've tried with my rural sociology colleagues is convince them that gemeinschaft and rurality no longer exist in agriculture; modern agriculture consists of many discrete industrial systems. While it has been somewhat of an uphill struggle, it has had its rewards and satisfactions.

I was born in Italy, in 1934, and educated there. In 1956, shortly after graduating in law at Padua, I became a graduate student in sociology at UCB. In 1957-58 I worked in Rome as an assistant on an American political science research project, returning to Berkeley the following year, and leaving after two years to work on my doctoral dissertation on Italian Catholic Action. I studied chiefly under Lipset, Bendix, Kornhauser, Lowenthal. I returned to Italy in 1961, and received my Berkeley PhD in 1963. In 1964 I joined the sociology dept. newly founded by Tom Burns at Edinburgh, and remained there 24 years (though during this time I also taught in the US, Canada, and Australia). In 1988 I joined the sociology faculty at the University of Virginia, which I left in 1965, returning to Italy in order to teach at the European University Institute (Florence). My current (and last!) post is at the University of Trento. My two main research and teaching fields are modern political institutions (I have published two books and several essays on the state and related subjects) and the 'classics' (I have published on Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel).

Dr. Arthur Lipow, 81, of Alameda, CA passed away peacefully on Jan. 6, 2016, with his wife Gretchen by his side. Dr. Lipow grew up in Southern California and attended high school in Pasadena. He received his B.A. in sociology from UCLA in 1955. He then studied under Professor Seymour Martin Lipset at UC Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. in political sociology in 1969.

Art Lipow.

Dr. Lipow was a rigorous intellectual historian and academic. He was highly influenced by his friend Hal Draper, who wrote a classic pamphlet of democratic socialism, The Two Souls of Socialism, which inspired Arthur to write his Ph.D dissertation, later published by the University of California Press, as Authoritarian Socialism In America: Edward Bellamy and the Nationalist Movement. Bernard Crick, biographer of George Orwell, praised it as a guide to the real meaning of democratic socialism: “the kind of socialism one wants.” While writing his thesis, he also served as a primary caregiver for his three young children, who frequently cajoled him to stop typing and take them to the merry-go-round and pony rides in Berkeley’s Tilden Park.

In the 1970s, Dr. Lipow moved to England, where he was a member of the Labour Party and an active participant in European Nuclear Disarmament (END). He was a founder of “Charter 88,” the British constitutional reform movement which proposes a democratic Bill of Rights for Britain. He was formerly director of the Michael Harrington Center at Birkbeck College and then co-founding executive director of Labour and Society International in London.

The Harrington Centre was funded by City University of New York, and chaired by the late President of CUNY and former Peace Corps Director in Ethiopia, Professor Joseph Murphy. Among its other projects, the Centre initiated a program to assist the development of higher education in Africa, sponsored by UNESCO and the United Nations Development Project (UNDP).

Dr. Lipow organized and participated in an international conference in Ethiopia in 1992, sponsored by UNESCO and UNDP, to further cooperation between institutions of higher learning North and South. He published five books, including Authoritarian Socialism in America: Edward Bellamy and the Nationalist Movement; Political Parties and Democracy; Neither Capitalism nor Socialism: Theories of Bureaucratic Collectivism (co-edited with Ernest Haberkern); The Other City (co-edited with Susanne MacGregor); and Transatlantic Crossings: A Voyage of Discovery.

A life-long rebel and champion of social justice, a crusader for civil rights in the United States and abroad, he was an active supporter of Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Cesar Chavez and Larry Itliong of the United Farm Workers. He was arrested protesting the final House Un-American Activities subcommittee in San Francisco May 1960 and when working with trade unionists in Czechoslovakia, where he shared a cell with Christopher Hitchens. Dr. Lipow amassed an extensive home library of more than 10,000 books on a spectrum of subjects, including politics, history, and sociology.

Upon his retirement in 1998, Dr. Lipow returned to California. Together with his wife, Gretchen Lipow, he co-founded the Alameda Public Affairs Forum in 2004 and the Center for Global Peace and Democracy in 2007. He continued to pursue many of his life-long passions, including scholarship, activism, eating ice cream, hanging out in coffee shops, and spending time with family and friends.

He is survived by his wife, Gretchen Mackler Lipow. He is also survived by his children Jenny, Stephanie, and Nicholas, grandchildren Toby Walecka and Sydney Lipow, and by his stepchildren Jennifer Roloff, Phil Mackler, and Aaron Mackler and their children Peyton and Taylor Roloff and Hazel Anne Mackler. He was preceded in death by his former wife Anne Grodzins Lipow, and his brother Myron Lipow.

A celebration of Arthur’s life will be held on Saturday, March 19th, noon at the Wedgend Club in Oakland. 

This obituary was written by Gretchen Lipow, Art's wife, and a member of Solidarity.

After receiving his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1958, Dr. Amitai Etzioni served as a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University for 20 years; part of that time as the Chairman of the department. He was a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in 1978 before serving as a Senior Advisor to the White House from 1979-1980. In 1980, Dr. Etzioni was named the first University Professor at The George Washington University, where he is the Director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies. From 1987-1989, he served as the Thomas Henry Carroll Ford Foundation Professor at the Harvard Business School.

Dr. Etzioni served as the president of the American Sociological Association in 1994-95, and in 1989-90 was the founding president of the international Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. In 1990, he founded the Communitarian Network, a not-for-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to shoring up the moral, social and political foundations of society. He was the editor of The Responsive Community: Rights and Responsibilities, the organization's quarterly journal, from 1991-2004. In 1991, the press began referring to Dr. Etzioni as the "guru" of the communitarian movement.

Dr. Etzioni is the author of over thirty books, including The Monochrome Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), The Limits of Privacy (New York: Basic Books, 1999), The New Golden Rule (New York: Basic Books, 1996), which received the Simon Wiesenthal Center's 1997 Tolerance Book Award, The Spirit of Community (New York: Crown Books, 1993), and The Moral Dimension: Toward a New Economics (New York: Free Press, 1988). His most recent books include My Brother's Keeper: A Memoir and a Message (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), How Patriotic is the Patriot Act?: Freedom Versus Security in the Age of Terrorism (Routledge, 2004), Security First: For A Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy (Yale University Press, 2007), and New Common Ground (Potomac Books Inc, 2009).

Outside of academia, Dr. Etzioni's voice is frequently heard in the media. He appears often on radio and television programs, and is regularly consulted by print media as well.

In 2001, he was named by Richard Posner as being among the top 100 American intellectuals as measured by academic citations.

Also in 2001, Dr. Etzioni was awarded the John P. McGovern Award in Behavioral Sciences as well as the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. He was also the recipient of the Seventh James Wilbur Award for Extraordinary Contributions to the Appreciation and Advancement of Human Values by the Conference on Value Inquiry, as well as the Sociological Practice Association's Outstanding Contribution Award. 

Extracted from "My Brothers Keeper: A Memoir and Message" published by Rowman & Littlefield

Obituary

Valerie Oppenheimer, a UCLA sociologist known for pioneering research on the effects of employment trends on marriage and the American family, died Nov. 2, 2009 of a stroke and heart attack at her home in the Holmby Hills area of Los Angeles, said her son Chris Oppenheimer. She was 77.

With hubris nourished by degrees from MIT, Stanford and a fellowship at the Merrill Palmer Institute for Human Development, I arrived in Berkeley in the fall of 1957 with wife, child and not a clue about how we would support ourselves.

It took almost a decade for me to finish my Ph.D. I was having such a wonderful time as a graduate student. I taught in the department, was deeply immersed in research at the Survey Research Center (under the direction of Charlie Glock) and eventually became director of the International Data Library and Reference Service.

My involvement in the social science data archive movement and early consulting jobs eventually led to work with organizations as diverse as the Berkeley Board of Education, the United States Postal Service the Ford Foundation and the Government of Chile. My 1973 monograph for UNESCO, Data Archives for the Social Sciences helped establish the first international standards for this activity.

Applying perspectives and techniques learned from Herb Blumer, Marty Lipset, Hanan Selvin and Marty Trow involved me in efforts to assess the effects of such diverse policies and activities as school integration, the creation of a regional transportation system, college drinking policies, and the feasibility of transforming rice farmers to fish farmers. Trying to develop the resources, and demonstrate the potential of 'social impact analysis' using survey data has taken me to West Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, India, Europe and back to Berkeley.

IN MEMORIAM: NATHAN GLAZER, 1923-2019

Nathan Glazer, who taught in the Berkelery Sociology Department, 1957-58 and 1964-69, passed away on January 19 (2019) at the age of 95. 

From Ivan Light: In 1967, while still a graduate student at UCB, I was asked to review Beyond the Melting Pot by Daniel P. Moynihan and Nathan Glazer. for the Berkeley Journal of Sociology.  The result was"Ghetto Violence and the Growth of Negro Business" in which I proposed that these authors had been right to notice the surprising and unwholesome shortfall of "Negro-owned" business firms.  The world of social science rejected their observation. Indeed, just calling attention to it made Glazer and Moynihan exceedingly unpopular and, although, later in his career, Glazer endorsed affirmative action, he was always perceived as conservative in his views on race. Now, many years later, reflecting on his career, and regretting his demise, I must in truth affirm that Glazer and Moynihan  were correct in noticing and commenting upon the unusual and unwholesome ownership of retail stores in the black communities by non-black outsiders. Doing so, they continued the tradition of class analysis of African American communities that had been begun by St Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton in Black Metropolis, and continued by Franklin Frazier in Black Bourgeoisie. The topic had become too hot to handle in the 1960s and the world of social science veered into decades of in which class stratification in ethno-racial communities was a  tabu topic.  Some day Nathan Glazer will receive recognition as a brave scholar who spoke an unpopular truth.

His contributions to 'the public interest', the title of a magazine he edited,are immeasurably great. From 'The Lonely Crowd' (co-authored with David Reisman and Rueul Denney), to 'Beyond the Melting Pot' (co-authored with Daniel Patrick Moynihan) and beyond, Glazer never gave up trying to make things work better.

Born in poverty, his affection for the poor of all races and ethnicities never deserted him, even as the practical policies he proposed discomforted ideologues. Nat Glazer had the courage to identify -- based on solid data -- culture and family as the keys to social advancement. He took on fashionable criminality like graffiti from the common-sense perspective of the New York subway rider who 'is assaulted continuously, not only by the evidence that every subway car has been vandalized, but by the inescapable knowledge that the environment he must endure for an hour or more a day is uncontrolled and uncontrollable, and that anyone can invade it to do whatever damage and mischief the mind suggests'. 

He dared to suggest that some monstrous Serra sculptures were 'attacking the awful [urban office buildings] by increasing the awfulness'. He loved New York, slums and all, especially Central Park, even going so far as to quote Khrushchev on Manhattan: "There is no greenery; it is enough to make a stone sad." Such a poetic thought from a Soviet Premier would amuse Glazer's Old-Left colleagues from City College if any remained. Nat Glazer's wit and wisdom, so rare today, will be sorely missed.

Many of his articles are archived here: https://www.nationalaffairs.com/authors/detail/nathan-glazer  They are still relevant and worth reading today.

Peter Miller
Berkeley Sociology, PhD 1974.

IN MEMORIAM: CHARLES GLOCK (1919-2018)

Professor Charles Glock passed away on October 19, 2018 at the age of 99. He was affectionately known as Charlie Glock. He was part of the exodus of distinguisherd sociologists from the East who built Berkeley’s sociology department in the 1950s and 60s. Professor Glock arrived in 1958 from Columbia University and in 1979 retired to Idaho.  For 20 years he was a fixture at Berkeley: in the department of sociology, which he chaired twice; as head of the Survey Research Center; and at the Graduate Theological Union. He collaborated with colleagues, such as Robert Bellah, as well as graduate students such as Robert Wuthnow and Rodney Stark. He was the author of many well-known books on religion. The students who passed through his classes will fondly remember Professor Glock for his generosity and kindness as well as his unusually effective courses on statistical methods.  Please send any tributes to Charlie Glock to me at burawoy@berkeley.edu and I will post them on this alumni page.  

From Armand L. Mauss: Several of the Berkeley sociology faculty were helpful to me as I transitioned from the history department to sociology in the early 1960s. No one, however, was as helpful as Charlie. There was no special reason for him to have extended himself as much as he did: I was not one of his stars; I was never a collaborator on any of his projects or even a research assistant. I was rather an unconventional graduate student, having already acquired a wife and several children before returning to graduate school later in life than most. Nevertheless, Charlie reached out to encourage me at times of special stress, and when I finally finished the Ph.D., he continued to help my career in various ways – always with no expectation that I would ever be able to do anything in particular to help him.

I taught in the public schools and junior colleges of the California Bay Area 1957-67 while working toward Ph.D. Moved to Utah State University, Logan, UT, as Associate Professor of Sociology, 1967-69. Then I went to Washington State University 1969-99 and retired there as Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies. I had eight children with wife of 50+ years, Ruth, plus 21 grandchildren, and so far 3 great-grands. I am currently living in Irvine, CA, among some of these descendants.

My areas of specialization for research and teaching are deviant behavior, social problems, social movements, and the sociology of religion. I have been active and periodically an officer in several professional societies related to those special fields, but mainly the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, the Association for the Sociology of Religion, and the Religious Research Association. I was editor, 1989 through 1992, of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and associate editor of several other journals. I was founding officer of the Mormon Social Science Association, 1976 and officer and president of the Mormon History Association (1,000 members), 1995-2000. I was also author or co-author of around 100 articles and reviews in various refereed journals, especially in JSSR; Sociological Analysis; Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought; Social Problems; Journal of Alcohol Studies; ASR, and AJS. Author of four books : Social Problems as Social Movements (Lippincott, 1975); Neither White nor Black: Mormon Scholars Confront the Race Issue in a Universal Church (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1984, with Lester E. Bush); The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation (University of Illinois Press, 1994); and All Abraham's Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (University of Illinois Press, 2003).

My interests in graduate school focused mainly on the sociology of religion, survey research, and social movements, so naturally my chief mentors were Charles Glock and Neil Smelser. I redirected what I learned from Smelser more toward social constructionism and somewhat away from the functionalist tradition, and thus my 1975 book was a social constructionist "merger" of social problem theory with social movement theory. Underlying all of this was an abiding interest in the sociology of religion, with particular reference to the rise and evolution of new religious movements. Focusing particularly (though by no means entirely) on the Mormons was a natural product of my own background. Inspired by Charlie's work on religion and prejudice, I have tried, with some success, to use sociology as a vehicle for constructive change within the Mormon tradition.

I never intended to be an academic, but I always saw my Ph.D. training as a way to inform committed activism with the broad range of social insights that a Berkeley training was especially useful in instilling.  My research, since turned into a book called Net Loss: Internet Prophets, Private Profits And The Costs To Community (published by Penn State Press in 2002), was a way to analyze how changes in technology had shaped and been shaped by broader policies effecting economic inequality in society. I went to law school after Berkeley and, after a short stint in a law firm representing workers and unions, I now am employed as a policy analyst and counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice, which is affiliated with NYU Law School. My work focuses on supporting community groups and unions that are fighting for more work rights and smarter economic development for low-wage workers.  It combines a nice combination of legal work, research, policy advocacy and community organizing. 

I was appointed an instructor in sociology and anthropology at Princeton University on July 1, 1961, whereupon I went to Cuba for the summer to begin research for my dissertation on the revolution and workers consciousness; I returned to Cuba the next summer to complete my research, and got back to the US just in time for the "missile crisis." Princeton terminated my employment soon after, effective at the end of the academic year of1963.  If the interpretations of my being "let go" vary, the facts are not in dispute: the president of the university had called the department's chairman, as he later told me, to evince "concern" about my frequent public criticism of American foreign policy toward Cuba (my first book, with Bob Scheer, Cuba: Tragedy in our Hemisphere, came out late in the summer of 1963); and the Daily Princetonian and some alumni letters had publlicly urged that Princeton fire me. I'd have been out of a job and out of a career if not for the fact that among the burgeoning faculty of sociology at UW-MSN were three UCB alumni who managed to convince a skeptical Ed Borgatta, then chairman, to hire me as an assistant professor in the fall of 1964. So I say two cheers for the Old Boy network. I got promoted to assoc prof in 1968 and to full professor in 1970.  But I often wonder how, since those were years, in Madison, of my deep involvement in the intensifying anti-Vietnam war movement, in rallies, protests, and demonstrations on campus, which were met at their high point by massed helmeted police with billy clubs and shields and national guard troops armed with live ammunition and bayonets, buttressed by a tank that sat high on a hill overlooking the campus. All too many of my fellow faculty were denied tenure as the result of their own involvement in these activities. Soon after things quieted down there, I opted for the Southland, and UCLA, where, since the fall of1977, I've been hiking, horseback riding, sailing, sunning, and biking, except for enforced interruptions to teach, research, and write. 

I was influenced by Berkeley in two ways: as much if not more by the time I spent outside of class involved in campus activities against capital punishment; in rallies against violations of civil liberties by HUAC's notorious Hearings in San Francisco in 1960; picketing in support of the early civil rights movement (e.g., at the Woolworth's in Berkeley, which had segregated facilities in the South), and especially in writing, mimeographing, and distributing leaflets and making one long speech after another at Sather Gate (along with Bob Scheer) in the defense of the Cuban revolution against US covert action and intervention. I had entered Sociology after a year in Anthropology at UCB studying both ethnography and paleontology with some of the world's leaders in their field. In Sociology, my historical sensibility was deepened by the tutelage of my research and writing on Japanese feudalism by Reinhard Bendix, my M.A. Thesis committee chair, and Wolfgang Eberhard; intellectual (and political) jousts with them and then with S. M. Lipset, who chaired my doctoral dissertation committee, and Martin Trow, another committee member, as well as with Leo Lowenthal, Hanan Selvin, and William Kornhauser (for whom I TA'd), not only taught me an immense amount but also strengthened my commitment to carrying out socially relevant research and writing.  

Having admitted to that aspiration, to shaping the world that is, I am tempted to say "bah, humbug" in answer to this question. Although I know (and am grateful) that my work is taken seriously and respected if not admired by other scholars, and my teaching too is appreciated by and has enriched many students over the years, none of my scholarly research and writing -- as far as I can tell, alas -- has even rippled the surface waters of "the world" outside academe, let alone  in any way actually having "shaped the world." 

Philip D. Roos, Ph.D., on Aug. 6, in Jefferson City, MS.  Philip was born in 1936 in Holland and immigrated to northern California at the age of 3. He received a doctorate in sociology from Cal and served eight years in the Navy. Philip founded the Berkeley Free Press in the 1960s and helped found the Missouri Mycological Society. He is survived by his wife, Erika, one child, eight stepchildren and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

This is Dr Roos's own biography written in May 2003:

I taught sociology for about six years; three at the Denver campus of the University of Colorado; 2+ at Stockton State College in Pomona NJ, some off and on as part of the University Year for ACTION program at Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. My work at Pine Ridge convinced me that I was a lot better program evaluator than sociologist -- just a change from "pure" to "applied." I worked as a research associate for the Nurse Practitioner Program at Northeastern University for almost 4 years.  An interesting job with some evaluation included.

I was jobless many times and for many years. I was fired three times. My Ph.D. in sociology was at least a minor hindrance to finding employment.

The last 14 years and 3 months of my work life, ending with my retirement on 1 Dec 98, was with the Missouri Department of Mental Health where civil service protection, an angel in Personnel, and perhaps my veteran's status prevented some of the managers who hated me from firing me again. I did a little evaluation at the beginning, but worked mostly as a SAS programmer, analyzing patient/client data.

My approach to solving intellectual problems became much more systematic as a result of my Berkeley training. Goffman's Hobbesianism shaped my thinking in general. The Berkeley sociology department's lack of statistics, mathematics, and computer programming as part of the Ph.D. had to be made up by post Ph.D. formal courses, self-instruction, and assistance from others.

As to how my sociology has shaped the world -- not even the teeniest, tinyest bit.

The late Ingeborg Powell, who became Inge Bell, was a graduate student in the department between 1958 and 1965, during which time she was active in CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). We do not know when or how she died. She wrote her dissertation on CORE and then published it as a book, CORE and the Strategy of Non-Violence (1968).  She later published This Book is Not Required (1983) which pursued her vision of Buddhist Sociology, taking a critical look at undergraduate education. The following extract is taken from the preface, but you might want to turn straight to the last paragraph:

This is a book that invites you to look at your college education: what it could be, and what, alas, it often is. It is a book which suggests to you what you can make of this opportunity, given the resources at your disposal. If you want to become truly educated, you will have to educate yourself, and at times you will have to do it in spite of the academy. Perhaps this is good, because knowledge which comes too easily doesn't train one to be an independent thinker, and only an independent thinker is ever truly intelligent. 

We will not look at these four years merely in terms of the formal world of classes and professors. We want to look at the larger experience: at your whole environment and your whole life during these four years, because some of the most important learning is always done outside the classroom. 

I have tried to make this a survival manual for undergraduates: emotional survival and intellectual survival. I will even say that it speaks to the issues of spiritual survival, if by "spiritual" we mean the capacity to live in harmony with oneself and with the universe. 

You will undoubtedly disagree with parts of this book. It is only one person's view. But if it connects with your life at any important point, I shall feel that it has served its purpose for you. I have tried to give you the broadest possible picture of your position as a student in the academic world and in the larger society of which you are a part. To do this, I have had to use a large brush, and I have undoubtedly made mistakes. But I have always considered this broad perspective more important than the fine attention to detail given by the academic specialists. 

This is not an academic or scholarly work. It is a very critical look at academia by one who has been through it from freshman to full professor. Occasionally, I will suggest a book which I think you might like. But you will not find an ibid. or an op.cit. littering these pages. 

In my years as a college teacher, I succeeded in what was ever the chief ambition of my career: to keep my students awake. Of course, there were always a comatose few who hadn't gotten to bed until four in the morning, or had mononucleosis, or where merely in love. But on the whole, I succeeded because I discovered that students always came awake when I laid aside academic sociology and talked to them about their lives as students -- about the academic institutions in which they labored, and the how and why of how those institutions functioned; about the competition and anxiety created by grades; about their ambitions and difficult choices of major and career; about the travail of those who came from minority or working-class families; yes, even about their love affairs and loneliness. We talked about how you find out what you want to do in life and about how you can keep your integrity and your sanity in this very difficult society. 

Eventually, drawing on sociology and Eastern philosophy, I developed a course devoted solely to these questions. I shall describe that to you in the chapter "Adventures in Desocializatioin" and give you some of the exercises and "walking meditations" which I used to help students gain insight into their own functioning. 

As I discussed life in the academy with my students, I also listened, and learned a lot. It is therefore to all my former students that I dedicate this little book, because much of what I have written here I learned from them.

It is, perhaps, ironic that after writing a chapter called "Everyone Hates to Write," I found myself hugely enjoying the process of writing this book. After the writing I had done in the usual, stilted language of social science, it was a huge relief to talk good English. I always love to write, and I think I did pretty well at it until I got to graduate school and had all the style knocked out of me by the demands of school. I always resisted a little. I remember my dissertation chairman asking me sadly whether I had "turned against sociology" because I used too much plain English. In writing this book, I felt that I had regained my writing voice after 30 years.

My academic career ended a few years ago. It began at Berkeley in 1961, and finished at San Jose State University thirty two years later. My career was good, and my life has been excellent. As Max Weber wrote some values conflict, so I struck a balance between the values of life and work, family and career, location and ambition, fun and duty. In grade school, I knew they were lying when they said you can be anything you want to be. It would have been pleasant to win an endowed chair at Harvard, the Nobel Prize or just an award for the best sociology book of the year, and have a full life and great family. But as Weber pointed out, some values contradict others.

I grew up in a rural, Midwestern area, majored in history at a liberal arts college and became involved in a radical Catholic organization. No, Catholic radical is not necessarily an oxymoron. In the early 50s, we tried to organize college students around anti-nuclear, social justice issues. Then I worked for the Chicago civil service commission and was conscripted into the army for two years. Almost by accident, I landed in Berkeley when the requirements for graduate school were lower than now. Erving Goffman once said he wouldn't have gotten in either so I am in good company.

In the 1960s, Berkeley was the center of a global revolution of social, intellectual, political and cultural change. It was a wonderful learning environment where classroom analysis was directly applied to real life situations. My former military training with tear gas, along with Marxist theory, was directly applied to everyday, real life. A day might go like this: Class with Herbert Blumer in the morning, then a noon rally featuring Malcom X, followed by an evening concert with a weird group called Jefferson Airplane and their light show of colored oil spilled on an overhead projector. Intellectual excitement, political activity and cultural rebellion formed a magic mix. I was young enough to be involved and old enough to know where to stop.

I spent much of my time at the Law and Society center founded by Philip Selznick. The center became an intellectual vortex for the issues of the day, and, with great advice from from Phillip Selznick and Shelly Messinger, I wrote a thesis about the changing authority patterns at the University of California. To my enormous delight, University of California Press published my thesis as major book in their stable. The book greased an easy slide into tenure.

Through major miss timing I got married, started teaching and went out on strike --all within a two month period in 1968. I came to San Jose through a chance meeting with an old friend, and planned to leave within a year or so.  California was distasteful to me. But personal circumstances and a changing job market prompted me to remain in California where the idyllic environment gradually seduced me away from my Midwestern roots.

After coming to San Jose State, I continued doing research on organizational authority and published articles here and there. Following my mentor, Phillip Selznick, I wrote a conflict oriented text.  But unlike Phil's, mine floundered. It was partially a victim of a capitalist buy out to kill off competitors. But I had the pleasure of writing what and how I wanted in the non sociological language.

In the early 80s, my wife and two children spent a semester in Oslo Norway where I was attached to the Work Research Institute. Norway combined the environmental and workers movement with organizational democracy and passed a law outlawing unhealthy work.  Nothing unusual about that, but they defined boredom and lack of personal control as unhealthy. Towards the end of my career, I became chair. Like crime, I thought that studying organizations is better than doing it. To my surprise it turned out to be both satisfying and fun. I was paid and rewarded to talk, socialize, gossip and plan. Planning is more gratifying than doing. The President of the University once said that she hoped the last professor in sociology would turn out the light and lock the door, but for the first time in 19 years, we were able to hire new people who energized us tired, mainly white, old men. Taking advantage of my one and only administrative experience, I ran for dean of the School of Social Science and lost.

I owe a lot to the University of California and the sociology department. It gave me an enormous amount of intellectual capital, political insight and cultural richness.  When my daughter graduated from Cal, it was one of the great moments of my life. To my slight embarrassment, I bought a Cal hat and, for the first time in my life, attended Cal football games.

Like many people from the 60s era, I feel that academia has declined from the golden era of fat budgets, dedicated students, subsidized research and more jobs than professors. Yet graduate training at Berkeley and being a sociology professor was the basis for a good life, satisfying work and useful career. I have gone full circle and now spend time in classes learning to be a painter, not houses, but landscapes.

IN MEMORIAM: DAVID MATZA (1930-2018)

David Matza died in Berkeley on March 14. He was a brilliant sociologist who taught in the Berkeley department from 1960 until he retired in 1992. He is best known for his books on deviance and delinquency, Delinquency and Drift (1964) and Becoming Deviant (1969). He will be remembered by his students and colleagues as a deeply engaged sociologist.   

From Clarence Y. Lo. David’s passing is a great loss for me and other sociologists who are trying to meld committed scholarship with qualitative methods and historical, structural, and institutional analysis.  David supervised my dissertation on the social sources of the Truman administration’s military budgets during the Korean War.  His open mindedness was a high principle, and insisted that no sectarian, ideological, or theoretical line would be imposed on his students’ work, and that they could follow the trail of documents, the negotiated process, or their quirky hunches to whatever conclusions were warranted.   He challenged conventional academic wisdoms by taking as problematic  the reproduction of the entire global institutional order of Post World War II capitalism.  He helped us by practically demonstrating to us the relevance of the qualitative sociology of the time to such tasks as interpreting historical documents and thinking about presentation in bureaucratic politics and the micro processes in elite circles.  Matza insisted that for works such as Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, that we not only read them seriously and critique them, but also see them as integral to social construction of the institutional logic of the Postwar world.  I remember fondly his keying gesture, a wry smile, which was a welcome respite from the gravity of our intense labors.

From Richard Weisman.  It’s taken a few days for this to sink in - that David Matza who was the professor I felt closest to as a graduate student in the 1960’s - is now deceased. David was the chair for my dissertation committee and I have no doubt that were it not for his complete faith in me that I would not have taken the risk I did with what was then an unconventional topic- witchcraft in Seventeenth Century Massachusetts. David was brilliant, approachable, humble, slightly tormented in the way that creative people usually are, and incapable of writing a sentence or putting forward an idea that was not utterly true to what he believed. I had the good fortune to audit his course while he was still in the process of formulating his master work - Becoming Deviant - and I was enthralled by lectures that articulated the shifts in perception that were taking place not just in sociology but in the society as a whole. For me and perhaps others, David would remain a model of academic integrity that I aspired to in my own work. This is a time of big losses from those glorious years in sociology at Berkeley. May the passion that David communicated in his work and the kindness that he demonstrated in his person live on in future generations of sociologists.

From Fred Block. In the early 1970’s, David Matza supervised my dissertation on the rise and fall of the Bretton Woods international monetary order. He wasn’t the obvious choice for this role since his own work had been in the area of deviance. But since I had burned bridges with some of the other potential mentors, David took me on as an act of solidarity. It was, however, not just kindness since David had begun doing research on the post-World War II strike wave and the politics of the Truman Administration. I don’t think he ever published that work, but we learned from each other in the process.

He was a terrific mentor. Most critically, he encouraged me to embark on a study that would only become a “legitimate” topic of sociological inquiry with the rebirth of economic sociology in the 1980’s. He read my drafts with great care and he offered feedback and invaluable support. I remain deeply grateful.

David was a serious intellectual always working to make sense of what was going on around him. His writings, even those just circulated to a few friends and colleagues, invariably contained flashes of his intellectual brilliance. He was always committed to a sociology that was not narrowly academic and along with his allies, he fought to assure that Berkeley Sociology would continue as a place where graduate students were able to do creative and original projects that defy the convention of “value free” social science.

From Magali Larson. I remember David Matza as a teacher, in the wild and brilliant seminar on sociology and activism –I do not remember the official name—that he taught and let us teach in 1971. David’s mind was acute and rapid, and so were his comments, always seasoned by such a keen sense of humor that he could seem cynical, at times. A colleague graduate student and I had to fight him, however, because we wanted to write our “Marxist-revisionist” paper together and he rightly insisted that he had to judge each of us alone.

I apologize for making this a much too personal note but, in truth, I remember David most vividly and with the deepest emotion as a close friend who talked about sociology and justice, about politics and art, about literature and life, and the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” No one told me funnier anecdotes about parenting than he did (and they were useful!) and I remember right the names he gave his daughters: Karen and Ina, saying that he could thus always think of Anna Karenina and his favorite novel. I could add many of his stories about what to do and not to do with babies, including how he came to meet my newborn bearing a gift for him and for the cat, because “sibling jealousy” is so pernicious. But these stories make me very sad because he is gone, and because I found it difficult to keep in touch after leaving Berkeley, beyond a few years.

I was able to check out what he had told me about Philadelphia and about Temple, where David had started teaching, and where I had decided to move after barely two years at Penn. I did talk to him about decisions and difficulties and he always helped to reduce unnecessary drama. I saw him four or five years ago for the last time.

David will be remembered for work that changed the ways in which we conceived of deviance and transgression. Others will talk about the field that he illuminated, so much better than I could. I would also like to remember that he looked like Marc Chagall and like Chagall created magic where it seemed most difficult to do so.

From Susan Takata (1983). I was so deeply saddened to hear of David Matza's passing.  David was on my orals exam committee and my dissertation committee.  As a graduate student, his brilliance always impressed me, and yet, he was the most approachable and down-to-earth professor in the Sociology Department (back in the late 70s/early 80s). When I first met David, I thought he was spacey. But, then I realized that he was in such deep thought. His office door was always open for his students. We would play with different theories and concepts. We just lost a major pillar in the field of deviant behavior as well as in juvenile delinquency. He was certainly one of a kind.

From Michael Kimmel. I was saddened to hear of David Matza's passing, especially so soon after that of Bob Blauner, his long time comrade.  David was an integral part of what became known as the "Gang of Four" in the department, the four professors who were most supportive and sympathetic to progressive student issues, especially during the last years of the war in Vietnam.  David was brilliant -- quirky and eccentric, always seeing things from multiple angles at once.  In conversations, he'd start to think, his eyes would gaze into the distance, and he'd twirl one of his curls as he mused.  Then a torrent of ideas, rapid fire, overflowing, would start pouring out.  As a first year student, I found it dazzling. 

From Teresa Arendell, '84. David Matza was one of my favorite professors during my time in the graduate program in the early and mid '80s.  I took graduate seminars and TA'd for him several times; I found him to be brilliant, quirky, and warm and supportive. His love of sociology was contagious. One of my favorite Matza stories was when a fairly strong earthquake hit while we were in a seminar classroom on the 4th floor of Barrows.  We all filed out of the building and waited on the lawn for awhile. When we returned to the room David was not there nor did he show up. The next week when we met he said, "Some think the captain should go down with the ship, but I don't. You're on your own.  Who wants to be in Barrows if disaster strikes?"  I hope David felt the good times outweighed the difficult ones during his last years.

From Jualynne Dodson. I was a student of David Mataza when the department began admitting more than token numbers of African American graduate students. I may have been the first female after Berkeley had a 100% attrition rate for Black women graduate students. Mataza was distinctively open and much less arrogant in his personal and professional posture. It was most appreciated and my research project on African American children's early education via "Pan African" ideas was give honorable respect and succeeded. It was a welcome difference from other faculty experiences that were so dismissive as to be offensive.  I credit David Mataza with helping me to maintain my sanity and complete the degree. Thank you David!!!

From Andrea Mallis. I remember sociology professor David Matza on so many different levels. I was a student of his in sociology in 1983 and have since become an astrologer. Looking at his chart, I see what made him so unique….an earthy Taurus who once held class outside Barrows Hall by the trees, complete with taking his Birkenstock sandals off. I knew I was not in NY anymore. But the life of the mind is what I’ll treasure and remember the most, blessed with 4 planets in intellectual Gemini, the life of the mind, and what a mind it was. Equally comfortable in the ivory tower, albeit an activist one, and the green grass of Cal campus, a fellow quirky New Yorker, he reminded me of home. His office hours were inspiring; being in the company of a brilliant mad (social) scientist was exhilarating, I sensed a kindred spirit. Timing is everything, being idealistic and wanting to change the world, Cal seemed a perfect fit for me, and the Institute for the Study of Social Change resonated even more. Berkeley on so many levels was a perfect fit and David embodied that energy. As above, so below, as David Matza transitioned during his 3rd Saturn Return, a cycle of endings and new beginnings….29, 58, 87. May the Goddess Bless, Blessed Be.

Obituary taken from Demography India:

On Tuesday, the 13th of November 1990, Professor J. R. Rele, former Director of International Institute for Population Sciences, Bombay and former Vice President of Indian Association for the Study of Population passed away. Every one who knew him and came in contact with him is saddened over the sudden passing away of an eminent demographer and a thorough gentleman. 

Born in 1931, Professor Rele, after a brilliant academic record, joined the International Institute for Population Sciences, Bombay (erstwhile Demographic Training and Research Centre, Chembur). Rele had also been an alumnus of this Institute as he was trained at the DTRC in its very first batch (1957-59). Within four years of his rejoining the Institute he was elevated to the post of a Professor. As an acting Director he steered the Institute through the turbulent period of 1973 to 1976. He became the full-fledged Director of the Institute in 1977. After leaving IIPS, Professor Rele joined the Division of Population and Social Affairs. United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. Bangkok as Technical Adviser. Just before his death he was Adjunct Professor of Public Health and Affiliate Graduate Faculty in Population Studies. at the East-West Population Institute. Honolulu, Hawaii.

Professor Rele held a Master's degree in Statistics, Diploma in Demography and Ph.D. in Sociology from University of California, under the guidance of Professor Kingsley Davis. Thus a beautiful blend of a statistician. demographer and sociologist could be seen in his research work. His work on estimation of fertility and mortality through an application of the concept of stable population has contributed a great deal towards the development of the discipline of population sciences. His method known as Rele's method of estimating fertility and mortality using age-sex distribution obtained from various censuses is useful for countries with incomplete or unreliable data like India. The method has the advantage that it can be applied to any type of population-unstable and affected by migration-in his words. "to any eccentric population". 

Those who had been fortunate to be his students can never forget his efficient style of unfolding even very difficult topics. It was a pleasure to hear JRR explaining GRR and NRR. 

Professor Rele was a soft-spoken. mild-mannered and a modest person. He possessed a strong inner character and did not falter to stick to his convictions though it was at times disadvantageous to him. During Emergency, Professor Rele had reservations about the introduction of compulsory sterilization bill in Maharashtra. After Emergency, Professor Rele was proved to be right and his stand was vindicated. It was a great pleasure to be with Professor Rele as his colleague. The sudden demise of Professor Rele is a tremendous loss to the community of Indian demographers. We at lIPS will miss him. 

My 36 years in higher education have been an extraordinary personal experience. I have had the opportunity to build a strong relationship between my commitment to teaching undergraduates and my research, scholarship and community service. While much of my time has been spent in higher education administration, the teaching and research have always been extremely important.

The pattern of my academic career was established early in its first decade. Between 1966 and 1973 I started teaching at the University of California at Santa Cruz; completed a doctoral dissertation on social change in Mexico; published a book on the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense; and founded an undergraduate college at Santa Cruz.

The process of working with outstanding undergraduate students at Santa Cruz while simultaneously working closely with extraordinarily angry Panthers in Oakland who were the same age as many of my students had a great impact on my intellectual development. In both venues the youth were intelligent and talented and had an infectious joie de vivre. However in Santa Cruz they were building for the future through learning. In Oakland the youth picked up the gun because they did not believe they had a future.

Ultimately for me my mission in higher education became how to use my skills in undergraduate teaching and learning to provide a hopeful future for all youth, regardless of background or social circumstance. I always maintained a regular program of teaching regardless of my administrative appointment. The teaching focused exclusively on lower-division students because of my belief it was important to give new students a strong beginning.

I developed a philosophy of teaching/learning that has guided all my work: There is no known limit to the capacity of the human mind to learn, grow, develop and change. As a result my courses emphasize active student involvement in the learning process and high expectations of students, all within a context of respect for their intellect and support for their academic goals.

After graduating from UCLA and the obligatory summer trip to Europe for the privileged, I headed up Highway 99 (there was no highway 5) for Cal -- lucid about what I didn't want, rather than what I did. With mentors such as Erving Goffman, Charles Glock, Marty Lipset and Neil Smelser the latter quickly changed. After the orals exam, spent a year traveling around the world, including going by land from Iran to Calcutta. I received the Ph.D. in 1966 and taught at Berkeley in 1966-67; before moving to the Harvard Department of Social Relations with appointments at the Joint Center for Urban Studies and later the Law School's Criminal Justice Center, moved to MIT in Urban Studies and Planning 1973-1994. I have been privileged to have had a variety of shorter teaching and fellowship sojourns in France, England, Santa Barbara, La Jolla, Italy, Stanford, Belgium, Spain, Boulder, Vienna, Nankai (PRC), Washington D.C., and most recently at UCI, Northwestern, UCB Law School and the University of Washington.

Books on the civil rights movement, undercover police, and new surveillance technologies kept notoriety and resources coming in. I moved, in a trajectory I could not have predicted, from initial work in race relations and stratification, to social movements and collective behavior, social control, and technology and society and from quantitative to qualitative methods. I have worked with a variety of commissions, Congressional committees, government agencies and non-profit groups on issues of inter-group relations, civil liberties, social control and technology and society.

Change the world? Nowadays I am happy if I can get through the day with my dignity in tact having done no harm. Yet I have tried as the poet said, 'to patch the world as best I can.' Among contributions to social change :keeping large sums flowing into the civil rights movement as a result of the findings from Protest and Prejudice; contributing to the report of the National Advisory (Kerner) Commission on Civil Disorders and the Senate Select Committee On Undercover Activities; helping provide the intellectual rationale that led the phone companies to eventually reign in Caller-Id; increasing national and international awareness of the social issues raised by new information technologies through popular and academic writing and training students.

Articles on my web page dealing with success and failure and the search for meaning in academic life, 37 moral mandates for aspiring sociologists, Erving Goffman, Neil Smelser, travel, muckraking sociology, dirty data and whites in the civil rights movement reflect the anvil of Berkeley.

OBITUARY

Heirich, Max Arthur 5/13/1931 - 4/27/2017 Ann Arbor, Michigan Max Arthur Heirich, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Michigan, left us April 27th, 2017 at the age of 85 after a long illness that included cancer and heart disease. He was known to many in the Ann Arbor community for his teaching, social activism, and work in alternative medicine. His academic work encompassed the sociology of religion, social movements, and healthcare. He was a longtime member of the Ann Arbor Friends Meeting. Max will be remembered as an inspired spiritual seeker by those who knew him and by the many people whom he helped. Born the son of Charles and Virginia Heirich in Aurora IL on May 13, 1931, Max grew up in Muskogee, OK. His early life was strongly influenced by a passionate in-depth study of the Bible. He trained as a youth minister and after high school he entered the College of Emporia (Kansas) with the intention of becoming a minister. He transferred to Earlham College, a Quaker school in Richmond IN, graduating in 1953. During these Korean War years Max became the first conscientious objector in the history of his hometown, Muskogee, and served his Alternative Service teaching at Warren Wilson College in Asheville North Carolina. As a staff member of the American Friends Service Committee for 6 years (College Secretary) Max visited campuses--primarily in the south-eastern states--raising questions with students about war, peace, and race relations. In this role he was present at the founding of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960 and worked with prominent activists in the civil rights movement including Ella Baker and Martin Luther King Jr. These years contributed to his life-long passionate involvement in defense of social justice and a deep personal identification with the African-American community. In 1960 Max entered graduate school in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. While he was planning to focus on social change the 1964 Free Speech Movement erupted and this became his dissertation topic. This work became a book, "The Spiral of Conflict: Berkeley 1964", that remains the most authoritative documentary account of those events. In 1967 he joined the University of Michigan Sociology department. Until his retirement from the University of Michigan in 1999 Max was a respected and popular teacher in the Residential College as well as in the Sociology Department. Max co-founded the interdisciplinary UM Health Policy Forum and for twenty years held adjunct appointments with the University of Michigan Medical School where he taught courses in patient-doctor relations and comparative medicine. He worked with the Worker Health Program at the University's Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations where he designed, implemented, and evaluated the effectiveness of programs for disease prevention and health promotion in the workplace. He served as consultant to NIH's Complementary and Alternative Medicine Advisory Board and to the Obama administration White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy. He co-authored congressional testimony given by the American Friends Service Committee in support of the Affordable Care Act. In 1971 Max developed a disabling health condition. As part of his recovery he began to practice Hatha Yoga through the YMCA, a practice that he continued for the rest of his life. These yoga contacts led to learning Polarity Therapy, an energy healing method based on the Eastern concept of Chi. Max introduced this therapy to Ann Arbor where it continues to be well represented in the alternative medicine community. He spent many years working with recovering addicts in inner city Detroit where Polarity Therapy provided a low cost treatment for their symptoms. In the 1980s he founded the Positive Living Network in Detroit which provided alternative healthcare treatments to individuals with HIV and AIDS. As a result of his Hatha yoga practice Max began to have powerful meditation experiences. In order to understand these experiences he began to meet eastern spiritual teachers. He spent a year's sabbatical apprenticing to non-Western healers and in 1985 one of those teachers took him to her native India on a tour of the Himalayas. These experiences led him to refocus his academic life with an intention to bring Western and non-Western understandings of reality into a more dynamic interchange. In retirement Max refused to give up his calling to make the world a better place. After many years of trying to influence health-care decision makers he turned to seeking better living alternatives and health care for the elderly. His last years were spent mobilizing groups to promote renewable energy at a local and statewide level. Max will be remembered for his unfailing ability to make friends everywhere he went, his passion for music, and his love of terrible puns. He lived his life from the heart. He is survived by his children and their spouses: Douglas Heirich of Palo Alto, California and his daughters Kyra and Marissa; Alan Heirich of Half Moon Bay, California and his children Laura, Nicole and John; Julia Heirich of St. Oyens, Switzerland and her daughters Helena and Camille; Deborah Maddox of Chicago IL and her daughters Charlotte and Clara; by his former wife Jane Ruby Heirich, his cat Zima, as well as many, many, dear friends. A memorial will take place on Saturday May 27 at 10 am at the Unitarian Universalist Church at 4001 Ann Arbor-Saline Road in Ann Arbor.

My sociology graduate school was Berkeley in 'the '60's' - entered 1960, Ph.D. 1969. I entered grad school at age 25, but I'd been thinking 'sociologically' since age 5. I was an idiot savant with numbers, statistics, and methodology, but the advent of the computer at UC (about 1963) transformed me from near genius to near dummy.

Sociology, as I experienced it was exciting largely because of its political relevance, even though much of the classwork and most of my professors were neither particularly exciting nor politically relevant. There were, then, a slew of 'new' social causes in which to become involved, and even influential'at just about the time Marx and Marxism were being interred. (Talcott Parsons, by contrast, never seemed alive enough to warrant a big funeral or much mourning).

Early in the '60's I participated in local political issues, I was hosed down SF City Hall's steps in the HUAC demonstrations; was a campus stump speaker for CORE (re supermarket hiring); headed the Berkeley campus' Student Civil Liberties Union; and did several housing studies for groups in communities threatened by urban renewal.

The most important , and exciting, study was presented at the first major anti-urban renewal demonstration in San Francisco to preserve the Fillmore district. A few months previously I helped direct a volunteer study in Hunters Point to protest proposed urban renewal clearance, which succeeded in putting a damper on Redevelopment Agency plans for that area. In April 1964, three classmates : Carl Werthman, Mike Miller (a sociology Grad student for only one year) and Herman Blake asked me to do research for the United Freedom Movement, an off-shoot of the NAACP in San Francisco, to be presented at an imminent San Francisco Board of Supervisor hearing. In just under a week I conceived of a report, got the data, wrote, typed and corrected the ditto-masters (the slow and messy means of reproduction at the time), found a machine, ran off about 15 copies, and sped to the hearings arriving 4 ½ hours after its scheduled beginning. 1,000 residents turned up (thanks to community organizers, like Mike); hearings were moved to a larger hall; a supper break was necessary; and so I arrived 10 minutes before our side began its testimony. Right off, I was introduced as the key researcher for UFM. My argument: by combining blocks on the area's borders (well maintained buildings lived in by rich whites), with the entire Fillmore district (old housing lived in overwhelmingly by poor blacks), the agency claimed Western Addition II was mixed, in housing, incomes, races, and improvement vs.-- relocation. In fact, the wealthy fringe areas would all be improved and the Fillmore totally demolished. As I began to lay out the finding I heard stamping and felt the floor trembling. Urban renewal planning in San Francisco changed that very moment. I didn't 'cause' the change; the research was not original (similar scenes happened in cities across the country); urban renewal in San Francisco did not end; and the great old Fillmore was slowly but surely replaced by a new but incoherent and bland neighborhood but, for better or worse, plans for Western Addition II were derailed; massive, instant demolition in San Francisco was a thing of the past. Racism in housing policy would thereafter be more subtle, even kinder and gentler.

Other sociologists later tried to influence local urban renewal. At follow-up hearings on Western Addition II, Nathan Glazer (whose first urban Sociology class at Berkeley [1963] was attended by Carl, Mike and myself) gave a quintessentially sociological defense of Fillmore on the basis of its being a superb Black community which the Redevelopment Agency did not begin to fathom and should not touch. A few years later, another sociology graduate student, class of 1960 Harry Brill was an activist researcher opposing the insatiable Redevelopment Agency when it set its sights on the housing units of poor persons living South of Market in San Francisco.

Carl, Mike and myself would leave academia. Mike's career has been as a community organizer. After the Fillmore demonstrations, he helped create and headed the Mission Coalition which wrung concessions from BART, guaranteeing that local businesses and residences would not be torn down or boarded up during BART construction, and that there be two Mission stations which would have charm and local character. This preserved and enhanced a wonderful Latino community. Carl went directly from grad school to UC faculty, yet was so popular and busy outside academia, and so inattentive to administrative details, that UC let him go. He soon was Jerry Brown's friend, confidants, and pollster when Brown first decided to run for governor, and won. Carl was given an office in the Governor's Mansion and was a key back-stage figure (and right-hand man) during Brown's first 2 years as governor Brown's most radical, independent, and successful years. Carl also wrote 2 major housing studies one in 1966 on New Towns, and a massive study of the major new federal housing program of the early 1980's 'Section 8 housing' completed in 1984 (a few months before he died). On the first study, Carl and I were co-authors; on the latter study I was recruited and worked full-time the last 6 weeks (of a multi-year project) as editor, sounding board, outliner, typist, and calming influence.

Except for the anti-renewal and the new town studies, and teaching Urban Sociology at Sonoma State College (1969-1972), housing was not my focus. Early in the 1960's I became interested in marijuana, especially the history and implications of prohibition. Banning marijuana always seemed to me idiocy and extraordinarily (and increasingly) harmful. The Sociology of Drugs course I taught at Sonoma State College drew a small crowd. After my third year there (when I was Department Chair), I got a fellowship to go to Washington D.C.; in 1974 I was doing research on drug problems of US youth in Europe, which based in Paris and St. Tropez. (Conclusion: 8 different European societies had saner drug policies than the US; the US policies caused the problems. The report was re-written by my 'liberal' sponsoring agency.) Life was so exciting and intellectually stimulating that I let Sonoma go and never again got back to academia. (Being white, male, and not having published a book didn't help.) From 1972-1981 I was primarily in Washington DC, and hated it. With nary an exception, the government employees in Washington running the drug agencies enforcement and treatment were the most naive people I ever met on the drug issue. US drug policies are deliberately ignorant, mean-spirited and socially destructive, yet unstoppable. My views and government policy were so at odds that my best year from 1974-1981 was spent on a farm. My longest job ran from 1989-1994, when I 'cloned' a San Francisco project providing AIDS outreach services to drug injectors for Bronx Community College, and directed the project (La Familia Unida) in Mott Haven its first five years. The job was exciting and rewarding, but New York City on the drug issue is ultra-conservative light years behind the Bay Area. The thought of recuperating from major heart surgery in a small New York City apartment pushed me back home, to Berkeley in 1994.

The past 8 years I resumed drug research, at my 'leisure' (i.e., with a vengeance). My earliest research always seemed to me to be lacking a 'prime mover'; the issues, the raison d'etre to prohibition, had been decided at some distant time and place. At last, I took a close look at Britain in Asia (India and China) where a debate raged for the better part of a century between, on the one hand, the British colonial class (my heroes) and the masses (Indian opium growers and processors, and Chinese opium smokers) who were their allies, and, on the prohibitionist side, a narrow strata of top Imperial Chinese along with 3,000 extraordinarily dedicated, influential, ignorant and quite possibly mad Protestant (English and American) missionaries in China. I've also stayed active in the medical marijuana movement. For years I've been inundated with data the history of drug prohibition is weirder, yet more relevant, than I could ever have imagined when I was a graduate student. (The first major 'modern' war between Anglo-European culture and 'the East' was the Opium War circa 1840; the earliest tales about marijuana which were used to justify it prohibition in the US, in 1937, involved young men in the Middle East who, in the late 11th century, individually, and often suicidally, attacked Christian crusaders. The Old Man of the Mountain, Hassan ben Sabbah [the man behind those assassins], meet Osama bin Laden.)

In retrospect I've been blessed by the intelligent, original, funny, and interesting life-long friends from my graduate days in Berkeley, and downright lucky to have settled in Berkeley where it took me 35 years to discover that UC's Doe Library was superb for the very drug issues which most interest me now. Among my regrets are that I so badly misjudged my ability to make a living wage outside of academia, and that in these late years, when I have amassed a truly world class library of 18th & early 20th century writings on the history of drug prohibition, I have neither the skills nor resources to convert them to a computerized library; and that I see not the slightest sign that the sociology department in Berkeley the past 20 years seems as interested in drugs and drug policy as were the graduate student classmates and our faculty in the '60's, or as I and my surviving graduate students are today.

I left Berkeley in 1971 to become Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. In 2004 I accepted an appointment as Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University where I also serve as Co-Director of the Institute for Studies of Religion. I am well along on my 32nd book. For details: www.rodneystark.com

Published in The Augusta Chronicle:

AUGUSTA, Ga. - Sondra J. Betsch, Ph.D., died on December 5, 2004 after an extended illness. Dr. Betsch had earned her undergraduate degree at Ohio University and her Doctorate in Education at the University of California, Berkley. She had taught Sociology at Augusta State University for 9 years and was forced to take a medical retirement in 1998. Dr. Betsch is preceded in death by her parents, the late Harold and Leora Betsch and her brother, the late Larry Betsch. Survivors include her nephew, Jeffrey (Dr. Linda Roberts-Betsch) Betsch of Columbus, Ohio; nieces, Jamie (Gary) McGaughey of Louisville, Kentucky and Jodi (Timothy) Smith of Indianapolis, Indiana. There will be no memorial service. Memorials may be made in lieu of flowers to St. Joseph Hospice., 2260 Wrightsboro Rd., Augusta, Ga. 30904.

From David Nasatir, July 20, 2006:

David Sudnow died early this morning following surgery for cancer at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley.

His dissertation: "Passing On: The Social Organization of Dying in the County Hospital" did not  forecast his future success.

His  book: "Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct" brought him considerable fame both within and outside the world of academe. In a very special way, he put reflexive sociology to work and by this effort brought a great deal of happiness to many.

I knew so little about Sociology when I arrived in the Bay Area, that I wasn't accepted into the graduate program until I had taken a full semester of undergraduate courses. I was an ordained minister and wanted to work in the Sociology of Religion. Charlie Glock, who was the expert on that topic at the time, hired me for a research project on new congregations and encouraged me to take a qualitative approach. The report developed into my Master's Thesis and was published (and reviewed in the ASR) before I took my comps. The experience pumped up my confidence so much that I failed the exam and had to retake it. I was also influenced by Blumer, Smelser, Wilensky, and Selznick.

The best thing Berkeley did for me was to introduce me to my wife, Mary Haywood, by putting us together as TAs for the undergraduate methods course. We both got Kent Fellowships in 1965 which made it possible for us to get married. Our first choice of available jobs was a liberal arts college (Earlham) in Indiana, where we were nearly the whole department. We learned about teaching and became competent in a wide range of substantive areas. Student interest in religion was declining so I decided to prepare myself in medical sociology which promised unending growth. To get into the backstage of health care I trained (while still a faculty member) as an Emergency Medical Technician. This nurturing of talents didn't impress the administration, and after six years our contracts weren't renewed.

I was hired at Marquette University (and Mary later at the U. of Wisconsin), where I spent a mostly pleasant twenty-six years, several as department Chair. I got certification as an EMT, worked for a private ambulance company, and wrote a book about ambulance work. My primary interest is in exposing the intriguing complexities of social life to non-specialists, so my greatest pleasure as a sociologist has been in teaching (except for the grading). When I retired in 2001, I was happily involved in an introductory course, substantive courses in health care systems, and a capstone course for majors. Looking back, I can see that I have made little mark as a sociologist, but I am able to feel I have contributed something useful to a lot of people. I am more convinced than ever that sociology is important; I am grateful for the life it has enabled me to lead; and I delight every day in being able to exercise the sociological perspective Berkeley gave me.

Much of my education at Berkeley in the 1960's careened on outside the classroom. I remember Herb Blumer bending over the drinking fountain on the fourth floor of Barrows Hall showing a bunch of us how to wet our handkerchiefs and cover our eyes against the tear gas coming from canisters dropped by helicopter during the massive campus protests against the war in Vietnam. I remember members of the Berkeley Women's Caucus sitting cross-legged on the floor of my apartment on Virginia Street, debating what sociology might look like if women helped produce it: (there were no ladder rank female faculty when I arrived in l962.) Berkeley in the 1960's was an education in itself.

But inside the classroom were true masters of the trade : Neil Smelser, Erving Goffman, Reinhard Bendix, Robert Blauner, Charlie Glock, Robert Bellah : and it was a privilege to work with them. Privately those first two years, I felt lost and lonely, and I deeply appreciate those who helped me find my way - especially Neil Smelser, my fellow graduate student Janice Stroud and my orals study group. I graduated from Berkeley in 1969, returned to teach here in 1971 and have ever since. My books -- The Unexpected Community, The Managed Heart, The Second Shift, The Time Bind, Global Woman (co-edited with Barbara Ehrenreich), and The Commercialization of Intimate Life span many issues. But some of them are long answers to points raised in those Virginia Street debates, and all of them focus on that echo chamber between social structure and individual human emotion. Ask radical questions, do serious scholarship, make a difference --that was the message I drew from Berkeley.

Obituary

Fr. Jim Meehan, SJ, died May 29, 2016 at the Sacred Heart Jesuit Center In- firmary in Los Gatos, CA. A gifted educator, compassionate counselor and priest, voracious reader and cultural trend spotter: these descriptors barely scratch the surface of this man of God who shared his life with many.

One of two brothers, James Nealen Meehan, was born on March 3, 1929, in Seattle to Stanley J. and Harriet L. (Dreaney) Meehan. Tragically, Fr. Meehan's mother died shortly after his birth; he nonetheless experienced a devout and loving home with his dad and stepmother Irene. He attended St. George's Grade School and graduated from Seattle Preparatory in 1946; inspired by the example of the Jesuits who taught him he entered the Novitiate at Sheridan, OR on July 30, 1946.

Following the regular course of Jesuit formation studies and teaching experiences, Fr. Meehan was ordained a priest on June 13, 1959, in Spokane.Having completed his priestly formation Fr. Meehan moved into the rapidly changing world of the 1960's to pursue studies in Sociology. He completed a M.A. degree at Fordham University in 1962 and a doctorate in 1971 from U.C. Berkeley. While working on his doctorate Fr. Meehan also taught courses in Sociology at Gonzaga University. In 1973 he was awarded the "Outstanding Teacher Award" by the alumni of Gonzaga; that same year he took a leave from G.U. to be the Assistant for Education to the Jesuit Provincial of the Oregon Province. He became President of Jesuit High School in Portland from 1977-1980 and returned again to Gonzaga in 1981 to continue teaching in the Sociology Department and provide support for University Ministry. From 1991-2001, Fr. Meehan served as Pastor at various churches in Washington and Montana until his return to Gonzaga as Chaplain and Search Coordinator in University Ministry from 2001 to 2006. Not content to retire quietly, Fr. Meehan served as chaplain to the Spokane Catholic Urban Native American Community from 2008 to 2014.

Fr. Meehan is survived by his sister-in-law Rhonda Meehan, his niece Meagan Meehan, and numerous cousins. He was preceded in death by his brother Tim Meehan. He will be deeply missed by his many friends, former students, colleagues, and brother Jesuits of the Oregon Province.

A vigil service will be held Tuesday, June 7, at 7:00pm in the Jesuit House Chapel, Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA. The funeral Mass will be celebrated at 11:00am, Wednesday, June 8, also at the Jesuit House Chapel. The interment will be at 1:30pm, Wednesday, June 8, at Mt. St. Michaels Cemetery. Memorials in honor of Fr. Meehan may be sent to the Senior Jesuit Fund, Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus, P.O. Box 86010, Portland, Ore., 97286

I write this upon my retirement after 36 years as a professor of sociology at San Jose State University. I was a graduate student at Berkeley from 1962-67, went to teach at SJSU in 67 and finished my dissertation in 1970. Professors who influenced my professional development included Herbert Blumer, John Clausen, Erving Goffman, Kenneth Bock, Neil Smelser, and Charles Glock. I was part of John Clausen's NIMH training program to study Social Structure & Personality. Henry Lennard came to Berkeley and taught a graduate seminar on "Social Interaction" that had the class going one week to observe family therapy sessions at Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute (part of the UC Med Center in San Francisco) and the alternate week observing family therapy sessions at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto which had what came to be some of the leading family therapists in the United States. We were put in interdisciplinary teams to observe communication patterns in families that featured a schizophrenia child on the premise that pathological communication in families drove children crazy. As a sociologist I was teamed with anthropologists, teachers, psychologists, nurses, social workers and we all observed from our disciplinary perspective and discussed what we saw with the therapist and helped the therapist strategize the next session. This experience launched me into a second career as a state licensed Marriage, Family & Child Therapist.  

While teaching sociology (classes in family, socialization, theory) and training family therapists in a Clinical Psychology graduate program at SJSU, I had a private practice as a family therapist. I have spent many years as an advisor to judges, for two years as an adult probation officer where I recommended sentences to judges in municipal and superior courts in San Mateo County and also as a child custody evaluator for the Santa Clara County Superior Court. I recommended custody and visitation schedules to judges when parents could not agree among themselves on custody issues. I have conducted over 250 child custody evaluations over an eighteen year period; some of these required giving testimony in court as an expert witness. I also do divorce mediation in my private practice, assisting couples write a marital settlement agreement relative to custody and visitation issues involving their children.

I believe that the probation work, custody work, mediation work, and therapy work all arose as a function of learning interviewing skills in the graduate program at Berkeley. My doctoral dissertation had me interviewing eighty legally blind young adults in the San Francisco Bay Area assessing the effects of employment conditions (did they get jobs themselves or through a social worker, did they work in a sheltered workshop for blind people or were they integrated with normally sighted people) on self esteem. Results of the dissertation were published in a monograph published by the American Foundation for the Blind, an organization that invited me to an international invitational conference in New York in 1970 for people they considered the fifty top researchers on blindness in the world. One of the issues I considered in the dissertation is how a person who is congenitally blind comes to cognitively grasp what blindness and sight are, what seeing involves.

Although I taught at SJSU for much of my career, I spent a year as a Visiting Scholar teaching at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1973-74 and was one of few Americans to get into Mainland China during the height of the Cultural Revolution in 1974. I was recruited as a researcher by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations and the Tavistock Clinic in London in 1978 to research what in a family therapy session makes a difference in affecting change, versus all that happens that makes no change whatever. Can one tell any therapist what they did that affected change and what they did that had no impact? In1985 I was a Visiting Scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where I helped to train family therapists who were going to work on kibbutzim. In 1997 I was part of the first ever United States Delegation of Marriage & Family Therapists to the People's Republic of China where I conferred with divorce mediators in China to compare the the mediation process in China and the United States (resulted in an article for the sociological journal Social Insight) and consulted with judges and attorneys in Shanghai who were trying to get a divorce court off the ground.

I have written four books: Theory & Methods in Sociology (Schenkman/Wiley, 1974), Family Therapy: Etiology & Treatment of Illness (Applied Medical Training, 1981), Frameworks for Studying Families (Dushkin, 1995) and Children As Caregivers: Parental & Parentified Children (Allyn & Bacon).

In my senior year at UC Santa Barbara, recent Berkeley émigré Tamotsu Shibutani introduced me to social psychology and the sociology of knowledge, and therein began the influence of Berkeley sociology on my academic career. When I first arrived I found the bigness, competitiveness, and cosmopolitan impersonality of the Berkeley campus difficult to negotiate. Despite these challenges the combined mentorings of faculty as diverse as Robert Blauner, Ernest Becker, Reinhard Bendix, Herbert Blumer, Troy Duster, Gertrude Jaeger, Leo Lowenthal, Philip Selznick, and Neil Smelser turned me into an enthusiastic PhD. From them I got a strong sense of the foundational importance of sociology and social theory for understanding the contemporary world and its politics. Most of all, these mentors taught me lots of theory, supplying often seemingly disjunctive pieces of what was to become my 'sociological imagination'. The originality, creativity, dedication, rigor, and intellectual weight of these faculty gave me both a sense of being distinct from graduates at other institutions and the confidence to enter university teaching.

The contrasting claims of symbolic interactionism, functionalism, and Marxism created an exciting environment of competing intellectual forces that seemed to drive the debates and politics of the department. A collision and uneasy fusing of these forces in my own work constituted the center of my overall experience and development as a student of social theory and set me on an early path of struggling with the 'agency/structure problem.' Overall, the highly charged theoretical atmosphere of the department afforded me a perspective that transcended the familiar and routine practices of what I thought of as conventional sociology. More than any specific skills or knowledges (though there was that), Berkeley provided me an intellectual method, a way of comprehending the world, and a disciplined style that were unique and productive.

Determined to stay in the Bay Area I took a position in the Department of Sociology and Social Services at CSU Hayward, where I taught for 32 years. I specialized in theory, cultural sociology, social inequality, and, lately, the sociology of identity. Most of my research has been in the areas of mass culture, critical theory, and postmodernity. My book, Identity Crises: A Social Critique of Postmodernity, was published by University of Minnesota Press in 1998.

My years in Berkeley (1962-65, 1967-69), were among the most formative of my life, largely because of the social movements of that era and the vision of community I caught and never lost. I specialized in the sociology of religion, and have long felt grateful to Robert Bellah, Hanan Selvin, Gertrude Selznick, Philip Selznick and Neal Smelser for their mentoring (and to Albert Rasmussen and Charles S. McCoy, both deceased, who were on the faculty at Pacific School of Religion). The influence of sociology in my life and work is largely caught up in C. Wright Mills' notion of the sociological imagination, which I value deeply and try to keep alive. When I left Berkeley in 1969, I left formal academic life as well. I moved to Washington, D.C., where I was a community organizer working a racial issues for five years, and then to Philadelphia, where I worked for a decade as dean of studies at Pendle Hill, the Quaker living-learning community. During that time, I started trying to learn how to write, and am now working on my seventh book; the last two were "The Courage to Teach" and "Let Your Life Speak". For the past fifteen years, I've worked independently as a writer and traveling teacher, focused on the same themes that preoccupied me in Berkeley: education, community, spirituality and social change. During this time I have lived in Madison, Wisconsin, a city that reminds me of Berkeley, thus making me feel much younger than the sixty-four that I am. For that reason, I have no intention of moving, ever! I am taking 2004 as a work-free, sixty-fifth year sabbatical to try to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. 

Since I "retired" in the late 1990's, I've spent full time volunteering for Democratic candidates at local state, and Federal levels. I spent 12 years on the Alameda County Democratic Central Committee, 6 years as Director of Region 6 of the California Democratic Party (Alameda and Contra Costa Counties). I've served as a delegate to the California Democratic Party since 1994. I've spent the past six years as the "Community Member" of the Board of Directors of the Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine College, Berkeley. I've spent the last four years on the Board of Directors of the ACLU-Berkeley, North East Bay Chapter, working on issues like immigration reform, abolition of the death penalty, police practices, need for reform of the "War on Drugs", and its adverse impact on racial minorities.

After years of combining anti-Vietnam war activities and graduate school, I was finally able to bring academics and politics together enough to finish my dissertation on the personal and professional crises of scientists and engineers in the military industries in the Stanford area. In the process, I helped make two documentary films to aid their efforts to organize fellow scientists and engineers. I left Berkeley in September 1969, dissertation unfinished, to join Dave Colfax and George Rawick as new members of the Washington University "radical" sociology department. Unfortunately, Al Gouldner and the others who recruited us thought we were just radical scholars. But our scholarship served to point our way politically. With my students, I helped produce "The McDonnell Film" which did not endear me to Sanford McDonnell, a member  of the Board of Trustees. In the course of making the film, the McDonnell workers in the film were threatened by Naval Intelligence. Dave Colfax and I had the same friendly undercover agent of the St. Louis police watching us. We frequently chatted with him, standing bored by one of our houses. With a professor of Asian history, I started "War and Peace Report" on a local radio station. After unrelenting support for Dave Colfax in his tenure battle, I was denied a contract renewal. Although I had not completed my dissertation, I was told I would receive a renewal if I would stop publicly speaking on Colfax's behalf. I did not and soon I was on my way to Cortland State College in the SUNY system, a big intellectual drop, I must say. But as soon as my dissertation was accepted (on the condition that the political history creating the huge pool of science warriors in the labs be cut, including my political economic analysis) I applied to the State College of Buffalo, because it was in an industrial city. I tried to teach at night there as much as possible to reach working people.  

While at Buffalo, I received a notice (over the radical sociology group) of an opening for an assistant professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin. I applied and received the position. I started teaching in West Berlin in April 1976. It took several months before I went over to East Berlin to talk with Americans and non-Germans living there. From watching GDR television, I had been very impressed with the achievements of the GDR in the area of full employment, institutional equality for women (and thus, for men), child care, and (high) culture, also for factory workers, who could not only attend opera and theater for almost nothing, but who went as collectives, if they wished. There was universal health insurance, almost free child care by trained personnel, from six weeks onward, union or company-owned vacation facilities that cost very little. The GDR was supporting Cuba and Vietnam with tools and training. Just as important, I was enthused by the fact that the leading members of the GDR government, army, courts, and cultural life, had been anti-fascists, many having spent years in the concentration camps. On the other hand, West Germany's leaders were credited with their earlier loyalty to their fatherland. Older judges and law school teachers served the Nazi regime and were allowed to train the next generation of judges and diplomats.  

Until this time, I had been an anti-communist, self-labeled American "socialist revolutionary" with neither academic nor direct experience with a functioning advanced socialist society. I was taken aback by my first media impressions of the GDR; they did not jibe with my prejudices. To try to understand this seemingly impressive society, my wife and I visited a famous novelist, Walter Kaufmann, now an Australian, but a Jew born into a "bourgeois" Düsseldorf family. We visited an American Communist journalist and TV personality Victor Grossmann, who told me he was in the same CP cell at Harvard with Robert Bellah. We talked with a female American playwright, Edith Anderson. And we became friends with an Irish English lit professor who translated Brecht and organized the annual  political song festival.  I attended the world-famous Leipzig Documentary Film Festival, where I wept when I embraced the Vietnam delegation and when I saw a Cuban documentary in which workers were marching, holding up as though they were weapons the drills provided by the GDR ? weapons of peaceful construction. None of those living in the GDR spared us their criticisms but all were united in saying that there was no other place to live if one wanted to live in Germany.  

As a result of all of this, I thought I would like to live in the GDR and experience so-called "real socialism" first hand. Well, it came differently. As a result of my Princeton background, I was an ideal candidate to be more helpful to the protection and improvement of the existing form of socialism, if I stayed in the West, gave up my Berkeley-acquired ways and appearance to return to my earlier potential - a Princeton graduate headed into the policy arena.  

I became a specialist in nuclear non-proliferation policy, spending a year at the research institute of the German Society for Foreign Affairs in Bonn. In my next position at a West German National nuclear lab, I was asked to became advisor to West German conservative politicians, a liaison between the German government and various U.S. Congressional and executive government agencies, and a Senior Associate Consultant for a Watergate-based energy policy consultant firm that did a great deal of work for government agencies, including intelligence agencies. I was, I have to admit, delighted to have myself on a list of consultants with retired generals and admirals.  

With Berkeley in my head and Princeton on my face and suits (Richard Burt, U.S. Ambassador to Germany and a Cornell graduate, accused me of having the Princeton seal of my buttocks) after a number of years, I came to the point that I knew a lot about of what went on in the German Chancellor's office and why, not to speak of other German ministries and large German firms producing energy or energy-generating equipment, including nuclear reprocessing facilities.  

I am proud to have been part of a group of "Agents for Peace" as we call ourselves, still meeting annually with Markus Wolff and others in Berlin to discuss the political situation and to raise money for those who have spent much more time in jail than I have, and to work on our second book. We gave the GDR breathing space and we helped to prevent NATO military aggression against the socialist countries. With my comrades at the top of the NATO policy planning staff, in high positions in the German foreign service and defense ministries, and as head engineer of the advanced German fighter, Tornado, we learned first-hand of the first-strike plans of NATO's 150 nuclear missiles onto the Soviet Union, two onto the GDR. Knowing exactly what was planned enabled actions, both political and military, to counter them.  

I am proud that the education and convictions I acquired in Berkeley were put to the service of preserving the peace in Europe, which, according to U.S. plans, would have been sacrificed in balls of fire in a limited nuclear war.  

I am still active in anti-war politics, in the Munich-American Peace Committee, speaking in front of the famous Munich City Hall, where I first stood over 40 years ago as a Princeton senior.

And I am putting my sociology education to good use as a systemic family therapist - the only kind that a sociologist could become, I believe.  

None stated

I am going to resist the temptation to recite my professional achievements, culminating with a humble encomium to my professors for making me the great sociologist that I am. Instead, in the Berkeley tradition, I am going to inject a dissident voice. I'm skeptical about the logic behind this Berkeley Alumni Project. Not that I am immune to the innocent pleasure of peering into lives attached to names from the distant past. But I have a gnawing sense that the real purpose of the Alumni Project is to develop a cult around UC, Berkeley. Either this is elitist at its core, or it is a fundraising gimmick, or it is just plain silly: an evocation of 'old school' spirit, even though we passed through Berkeley at different times, did not know each other, and have nothing in common except for a nominal institutional affiliation. Don't get me wrong: I have nothing but positive memories of my years at Berkeley, both the university and the charms of Northern California. But when I returned last summer after living in New York City for three decades, I felt like Woody Allen's character in Sleeper, awakening in a strange place, save for some enduring physical markers and a few senescent professors (joke!). For me, 'Berkeley' is not a place that invites nostalgia or self-congratulation, but rather an injunction to go forth and change the world. With this caveat, however. As Godfrey Hodgson wrote in America in Our Time with reference to SNCC in the 1960s: 'Success is not the only test. Since, in the end, failure is the fate of most human endeavors, what matters is with what enterprise and in what spirit one fails.'

I have been Professor of Sociology at UCLA since 1969. It was my first job.Berkeley offered poor training in quantitative methods in those days, and the graduate student culture was hostile to them to boot. Unfortunately, those proved subsequently to be the dominant methods in professional sociology so, in this respect, I was poorly prepared at Berkeley. It would be very presumptuous to suppose that my sociology has shaped the world; to the extent that my research and writing have influenced the world in some minimal manner I hope and believe they have strengthened agency in a field top heavy with structure.

OBITUARY

John Irwin, Professor Emeritus at San Francisco State University (SFSU), passed away January 3, 2010. After a conviction for armed robbery and serving a five year sentence in California's prison system, he received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1968.

Irwin taught Sociology and Criminology at SFSU for 27 years. In prison he discovered that deviants and convicts were mostly ordinary human beings. This insight, not entirely appreciated by many academics who study crime and criminals, guided all of his academic and political activities. His considerable research on prisons included six books. 

While Irwin has contributed to many community programs over the years, he is best known for creating Project Rebound at SFSU in 1967. Project Rebound is a program that provides comprehensive support for ex-convicts to enter and complete degrees at SFSU. Over the last 40 years, many Project Rebound students have obtained BA, MA, and PhD degrees in various disciplines. As an organizer and leader of the Prisoners' Union in California, he worked closely with the California legislature on the Uniform Sentencing Act passed in 1976. He received the August Vollmer award from the American Society of Criminology (ASC) for outstanding contributions to criminal justice. John also served on the Board of Directors for the JFA Institute and the Sentencing Project.

John was one of the founding members of the Convict Criminology Theoretical Perspective. John has been a friend, mentor, and inspiration to many people in the Convict Criminology Group. He has been instrumental in helping many ex-convicts and non-convicts in their careers.

I left Berkeley in 1968 for the University of Hawaii. I stayed 12 years, became a father, grew concerned about overpopulation, the environment, and hunger, crafted my ability to teach, and began writing textbooks.

In 1979, my wife, Sheila, whom I had first met at the Survey Research Center at UCB, got a job offer in the Bay Area. Taking a deep breath, I resigned as a tenured professor and department chair, and we moved. For the next seven years, I was a writer only. As the years went by, however, I found I missed the classroom, partly because the ham in me missed performing.

At about the time I was strongly thinking I wanted to get back into the classroom, I learned Chapman College (now University) was beginning to search for a new chair. So I applied and moved to Orange in 1987. I've been here ever since, partly to watch the political transformation of Orange County, beginning with Loretta Sanchez's booting out B-1 Bob Dornan.

It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of my Berkeley education. When I was assigned Charlie Glock as my advisor and sent off to the Survey Research Center, I wasn't sure what survey research was. (Charlie remedied that.) Even more important, I met and became friends with such a variety of people, with varied sociological and social views that I think their impact still pushes my unfolding evolution.

How has my sociology shaped my world? Totally, I suppose.

I graduated with the Ph.D. in 1969 and went off for a first teaching job at the University of Santa Clara. I had been radicalized by the student movements of the sixties and while I was initially headed for a job at a so called big ten school, I ended up at much smaller venue due in part to my anger at my professors for being on the wrong side during those tumultuous days. Neil Smelser, Erving Goffman and Marty Trow were my mentors. Trow was marvelous in his supervisionof my dissertation.

Having received absolutely no training on how to teach, I was totally unprepared for the boredom and indifference of students in my sociology classes at Santa Clara. So I developed a style of teaching that I came to call 'experiential sociology'. It consisted of designed experiences that I and students developed and then implemented and then documented using multi media formats. I carried on this approach at my next teaching job at Stockton State College in New Jersey after getting the boot at Santa Clara for participating in a disuption of a ROTC ceremony after Nixon went into Cambodia.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, I never could decide, I never was able to convince the administrators at Stockton State of the value of experiential sociology and thus I was denied tenure at that institution. Fortunately, my father, Nevitt Sanford, the founder of the Wright Institute in Berkeley, found a spot for me at the institute where I took up residence for three years in the late 1970s. Next it was out into the world of business and the discovery of my calling.

I fell into a real estate office in Montclair in the early 80's when interest rates were 19 percent and the market was flat. My sales manager told me to go out and make cold calls so that if and when the market turned I would have some customers. Nobody else in the office was making those calls; I went out and tried and found it very difficult, embarrassing and humiliating. And hence the question that all my years at Berkeley taught me how to ask: What is there in us that resists reaching out to strangers with our proposition? That is, why is it so hard for most people to make cold calls to strangers, to bridge the social gulf between themselves and strangers when there is no third party introduction. This is in business to business calls, where the phone is used to set up appointments.

I became of a student of the problem. I researched the literature, overcame the reluctance myself and ended up teaching public seminars on how to overcome call avoidance. Now I have a web site, www.coldcalling.com where I market training materials on business development and coach people on how to reach out to strangers with their business proposition. I have written a book on the topic, Fearless Cold Calling. And my next book will be on reluctance in other arenas: stage fright, writer's block, fear of public speaking and self promotion. I plan a second web site: reluctance.org.

UC Berkeley sociology gave me the willingness to write and do research and as a result I have been able to leverage those strengths in ways that have greatly aided the growth of my business.

I arrived at Berkeley in the fall of 1963, after completing my B.A. at Immaculate Heart College (1961), and M.A. in Sociology at the University of Notre Dame (1963). My key interests - theory, religion, and education - were sharpened in courses taught by Neil Smelser, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Blumer, Reinhard Bendix, Nathan Glazer, and by my many discussions with Erving Goffman.

After graduation from Berkeley in 1968, I taught at Immaculate Heart College, Los Angeles, run by members of my religious community. In 1970 I accepted a position at George Washington University in Washington, DC.

My first book on gender issues was an edited book, Feminism and Sociological Theory (1989). Over the years, two Berkeley colleagues were my coauthors: Shirley Hartley (1988) and Kathryn Meadow Orlans (1994). Kay and I were pleased to discover that our book, Gender and the Academic Experience: Berkeley Women Sociologists, was the inspiration for Michael Burawoy's project.

Among my other publications were a theory text, Contemporary Sociological Theory, coauthored with Alison Wolf, and two books from my research on leadership changes in Catholic parishes: They Call Her Pastor: A New Role for Catholic Women (1992) and They Call Him Pastor: Married Men in Charge of Catholic Parishes (2003). I am convinced that George Washington University was a good "home" for my teaching and research over thirty-two years, and I am indebted to the Berkeley professors and graduate students who were a major influence on the shaping of my career.

I got the doctorate in Sociology at Berkeley in 1970. From 1968-72 I taught in the Social Sciences Integrated Course and Field Major at UCB, and directed that program for its last year. Later I was Academic Director of UCB's Field Studies Program, worked as an Evaluation Research professional in the campus's Health and Medical Sciences Program, and was a research staff member at the Institute for the Study of Social Change, studying the social and legal impacts of genetic research. I also helped to create an Oakland campus of New York's College for Human Services, and for 28 years I have been a Board of Directors member and adjunct faculty member of the Western Institute for Social Research, a State-approved Berkeley institution that provides degree study for community-involved adults. Since 1984 I have been a professional Trial Consultant, using social research to advise litigating attorneys about the discovery of bias in potential jurors, and the clear presentation of complex case materials. From 1984-1996, I worked at the National Jury Project/West, in Oakland, and am now a semi-retired, independent practitioner.
     
My time in Sociology at Berkeley was one of great turmoil on campus, and I learned as much from that as from my course work. But study with Philip Selznick, Reinhard Bendix, and others opened new windows for my mind, and I value it greatly. Through various projects of UCB's then Center for the Study of Law and Society and Center for Research and Development in Higher Education, I wrote a monograph on the Free Speech Movement and the issues that it raised for social and legal research, as well as other papers on campus protests and the structures of U.S. higher education.
 
The social theory and methods training that I received in the Department helped me a great deal, of course, in the research and teaching work that I have done. And, less directly, it helped me to understand the structures and processes of American universities, while I worked in several different experimental programs designed to change them. Also, for someone who grew up in this intensely psychologistic culture, studying sociology very usefully, if belatedly, broadened my liberal education. So I've always been glad for it, and for some of the friends whom I met there. I continue to live in Berkeley, ten blocks from the campus.

My thesis researched Chinese family formation, supervised by Kingsley Davis. From my perch in Hong Kong, I tried to do a minisurvey people using topical questions, on people that no longer lived in China. I discovered that asking people their views of what would have happened if they had remained in China [what would have happened in their lives if they had not done what they did do] was troubling to me and them. I really had to do participant observation. So I retooled myself in interpretive sociology with a structural bais. I have studied Chinese family formation with interviews and participant observation ever since.

My best known book is WORKING DAUGHTERS OF HONG KONG, which pioneered the life study method on a previously overlooked population of factory girls. I have also done research on the Chinese diaspora elsewhere (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Inner Mongolia). I am currently writing a book on PRC immigrants to Toronto, looking at labor market adaptation, entrepreneurial activities, family economies and child care opportunities and responsibilities of this newest outreach of the Chinese diaspora. With my new husband Arent Greve (Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration), I am applying concepts of social networks and social capital to understand why skilled immigrants have trouble getting jobs in Toronto. I learned in Berkeley not to "blame the victim," and I am trying to give a voice to well trained Chinese in Toronto that are diminished by their efforts to develop their capacities in North America.

I married Dave Hartley two days after graduating from Berkeley the first time in Business Administration. I worked as a full charge accountant for several years and knew that wasn't what I wanted to do indefinitely. So, after two children and intense volunteer work, I went back to grad school in sociology. It changed my life completely.

I felt fortunate (as an early woman Ph. D.) to be hired at CSUHayward. We had a heavy teaching load, and I taught 25 different courses, introducing many of them to our campus. I managed lots of eclectic research, three books and about 20 articles. I was elected to the Board of the Population Association of America and served on an NIH Research Panel.

Sociology is endlessly exciting, and Berkeley, especially, opened my eyes to learning and the world we live in. Fortunately my husband is also very open and loves to travel. We've visited about 120 countries and also scuba dive world wide. Now, in retirement, we are volunteer mediators in a very active program on Maui, and I am active in the art community, painting Plein-aire in oils and have been featured artist in several shows.

We currently live on Maui most of the time, travel about three months a year and return to the S. F. Bay Area two to five times a year for short reunions with family and friends. We started a travel website, but were travelling too much to keep it updated.

After four whirlwind years as a Berkeley graduate student, I took a soft-money position at Langley Porter/UC San Francisco conducting further research on my dissertation topic: social and psychological effects of deafness on children and families. The result was Sound and Sign: Childhood Deafness and Mental Health (1972) co-authored with psychiatrist Hilde Schlesinger. Together with articles from my dissertation, this helped change the education of deaf children. Formerly, all schools barred sign language for those younger than 13. Today, sign language combined with speech is standard practice from preschool onward.

By 1976 soft money was scarce, college tuition for two children expensive, and divorce had changed my financial outlook. I moved to a hard money research post at Gallaudet, the world's only liberal arts college for deaf students. There I set up a research program, wrote Deafness and Child Development (1980), and worked happily until retiring in 1998, the gratified recipient of a festschrift.

Graduate school gave me some life-long friends: many contributed to Gender and the Academic Experience, Berkeley Women Sociologists (1994), edited with Ruth Wallace. It also gave me a measure of confidence and the research skills to produce a satisfying body of work. John Clausen's mental health training program, life-span approach, and acceptance of an 'odd-ball' dissertation topic were especially valuable. In 'retirement,' I weave, am an active grandmother, a cookbook memoirist, and continue to work with Gallaudet colleagues: Parents and Their Deaf Children will appear in 2003, and Oxford will publish The World of Deaf Infants in 2004.

I came to Berkeley in 1963 with the naive faith that lived experience and social perceptions could be recorded on punch cards with nothing lost in the translation. Four years later, when I left to work in New Jersey, my assumptions about the availability of the external world had been badly shaken on moral and methodological grounds. If the pursuit of sociology was inextricably value-laden, was our privilege to speak as scientists a sham? And, if we relied in an unexamined way on common sense to ground our insights and test our theories, were we the emperors without clothes? What happened in between was immersion in the legendary Berkeley of the mid-sixties - the rise of ethnomethodology and my succumbing to its subversive charms, countless discussions with fellow grad students about the early R.D. Laing, and the intellectual ferment of a major theoretical reorientation in deviance- as well as exposure to social movements that were upending familiar categories of race, gender, and sexuality. It was a blessing and a curse but ultimately more of a blessing. In Berkeley, I saw the future before it arrived elsewhere - but the intensity and instability drove me to seek sanctuary in the East and ultimately in Canada. My career has been interdisciplinary to say the least- my dissertation was intended to apply sociology to history but overshot the mark and when it was published(in revised form) got lots of attention among historians but was ignored in sociology. I went back to school in 1982 and got a law degree in 1985. My research and teaching has since been focused on analyzing legal discourse- as the great normalizing language- and placing it in historical and sociological context.

I earned my Ph.D. in 1973, having left in 1971 to teach at UC San Diego. In 1982, I left UCSD, having been denied tenure. In 1985, I graduated from Yale Law School. I now am a litigation attorney at the Office of Consumer Counsel, a State of Connecticut agency. We advocate for the ratepayers of regulated utilities. The simplest way give you a flavor of my legal/policy practice is to refer you to our agency website, www.occ.state.ct.us, from which [at the “What’s New” link] you can download a long piece titled “ELECTRIC RESTRUCTURING TODAY: The OCC White Paper.” While that document does not have my name on it, I wrote it.

You ask how Berkeley influenced my use of sociology. At Berkeley, I learned social science from three marvelous sources. First, key faculty (e.g., Reinhard Bendix and Bob Blauner in Sociology; Henry May/History; Sheldon Wolin/Political Science). Second, numerous fellow students (e.g., Nigel Young, Sam Kaplan, Volker Eisele). Third, the very times (e.g., the Free Speech Movement, La Huelga and Country Joe’s I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixing-to-Die Rag).

I took a Berkeley ethos (critical, historical approach to sociological issues, etc.) with me to UCSD and that is part of why retrograde senior faculty there voted against my tenure. That event (which of course angered and frustrated me at the time) turned out okay, partly because I had come to believe that college teaching has no helpful effects on students. By then, I had been an expert witness in some legal cases, which helped me decide what to do next. My social science experience undoubtedly has made me a better lawyer, so that is a continuing benefit.

You also ask how my sociology has shaped the world. What a hubris-laden question! The obvious answer, of course, is not at all. I doubt whether anyone with a Berkeley Sociology Ph.D. can claim much influence in the world beyond academic sociology as such. In the 1960’s, after his fatal heart attack, we said “C. Wright Mills lives” --- but of course this did not turn out to be true as meant (because no critical mass of public intellectuals emerged in sociology thereafter). By now I have spent more time working as a lawyer than as a sociologist. I like this second career just fine, and believe that in it I have “shaped the world” more effectively than I could have done as a sociologist. Also, I find it a lot more challenging to convince a judge to decide a dispute my way than to explain ideas to undergraduates.

Having earned all my degrees at Cal (BA, MA, PhD), I am quite thoroughly stamped with the Berkeley experience, not only in sociology (Neil Smelser, Reinhard Bendix, Guenther Roth, Leo Lowenthal, Kenneth Bock, William Kornhauser, Erving Goffman, Aaron Cicourel, the Berkeley Journal, and my Fellow graduate students) and other disciplines such as history (Carl Schorske),political science (Sheldon Wolin) and english (Gardner Stout), but also with the movements (anti-HUAC, Civil Rights, FSM, AFT, anti-war and TWLF) and above all the exuberant, questing spirit of the place in the '60s. My training in what we grandly called 'theory' not only got me every teaching job I have ever held (Sonoma State, UC Berkeley, Yale, UIC). It also prepared me later to master the field of research (sociology of religion) in which I now work but was not trained. The theory taught, debated, and modeled at Berkeley instilled in me the convictions that theories were plural, that every theory had to be interrogated for its meaning as well as its truth, that theorists were answerable to empirical reality, that empirical reality was always changing, and that 'empirical' did not only mean 'quantitative.' If my work has shaped the world, it is through my mentoring of succeeding generations of students and bringing to light neglected corners of the social world (most recently, the religious institutions of post-1965 immigrants).

Marty Lipset was my most influential mentor, since I was his research assistant five years at Berkeley and Harvard. I became a peacenik in Berkeley, though my status as a single mom then inhibited my activism. After I came to Toronto in 1971 my career was divided between two concerns revising my successful introductory textbook, Foundations of Modern Sociology (of which I produced ten different editions over the years) and my commitment to peace studies as professor, researcher, journalist, and activist.

I have edited Peace Magazine since 1985 and write for it; I created a peace and conflict studies program at my college and administered it for 14 years until I retired five years ago; and I have produced books on such peace-related topics as women in post-Communism; separatism; and the lessons of Yugoslavia.

At conferences in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union I discovered that the international peace movement had extraordinary influence on Soviet military policy, especially under Gorbachev, and began documenting these effects. My interviewing of officials was interrupted for several years after I was deported for associating with dissident peace activists. Fortunately, I was able to help them more from Canada, for the prime minister sent observers to a trial with favorable effects.

Since retiring I am writing a book on the serious uses of entertainment. Part I is theoretical and Part II empirically explores the moral, emotional, and physiological effects of episodic television dramas.

I had a great time as an undergraduate in English at San Francisco State taking courses in comparative literature, poetry, language arts, modern drama, and psychological and social approaches to literature. Some of my English professors assigned sociological texts by C. Wright Mills, David Riesman and others. To my surprise, my major advisor recommended that I go across the Bay and study sociology at Berkeley as a graduate student.

I went to Berkeley and had some great classes, seminars and small reading discussion groups with Reinhard Bendix, Leo Lowenthal, David Matza, Erving Goffman, Aaron Cicourel, Robert Blauner, Philip Selznick and Neil Smelser. Selznick as the departmental chair admitted me to the graduate program and Smelser eventually served as my dissertation supervisor. I was at Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement in the fall of 1964 and in 1965 and later years during the protests against the Vietnam War.

My first jobs were temporary ones (in Political Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and in Sociology at Colorado College in Colorado Springs). After my new spouse could not get a job in Berkeley and thus support the continuation of my graduate study there, I was able to obtain an appointment as an Assistant Professor at California State University, Long Beach. Just after I received tenure, I managed to get a five-year leave of absence to work in epidemiology programs at the National Institutes of Health. During that time I was the Principal Investigator for a study of 1,367 employed men and women in Detroit. It was at NIH that I learned how to do quantitative data analysis. After I returned to Long Beach, I was promoted to Full Professor.

My experiences in and out of classes at Berkeley gave me a lot of self-confidence to move into other areas. Besides social epidemiology, I have gotten involved in critical and post-colonial theory, popular culture, and human rights. Although I found my political voice during the Vietnam War, it got stronger after I met Judith Blau at a Southern Sociological Society meeting and I joined Sociologists without Borders.

Obituary of Eliezer Rosenstein taken from Publication of Technion University

Eliezer Rosenstein was born in Israel (Palestine), was married to Yehudit and had one son. As a young man he participated in youth movement activities and in the Hagana, and fought during the War of Independence in the Gallil. After completing his B.A. studies he served as personal secretary to the Minister of Education, and with the completion of his M.A., he became Personnel Director of an industrial enterprise. This professional experience served him well when he joined the staff of the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion as a Research Associate in 1961. He advanced through the academic ranks, and was promoted to Full Professor in 1986.

Eliezer Rosenstein was intensively involved in establishing the Area of Behavioral Sciences and Management at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, and especially in the field of Labor Relations and Human Resource Management. In these fields, he guided about twenty graduate students in their M.Sc. and Ph.D. theses. Eliezer Rosenstein published extensively in the professional literature, focusing primarily on issues of participation, manpower management, industrial democracy, quality of work life, and labor relations. In these fields he was recognized internationally. He had particular interests in the maritime industry, and was involved in the benchmarking study of Israeli maritime manpower.

His professional expertise also came to expression in numerous consulting activities in the Israeli industry and in membership in various public committees.

Eliezer Rosenstein filled most of the administrative positions at the faculty, such as Head of the Graduate Committee, Associate Dean of Research, Head of the Behavioral Sciences and Management Area, and of the Industrial Management Area. He also served on major Technion-wide committees. Professionally he was highly active in the Industrial Relations Research Association of Israel, where he served as President during 1984-1986. He was a member of the Management Board of the Israeli Management Center and the Israeli Sociological Association.

Beyond his academic activities, Eliezer had wide cultural interests, loved art and literature. These contributed to his well-rounded, knowledgeable personality.

At the faculty, his integrity, human understanding, and commitment, made him a highly valued colleague, whose advice, support and negotiating skills were invaluable.

His premature death due to a long-lasting disease is deeply mourned by all who knew him.

James L. Wood A beloved husband, father, friend and mentor for many, died April 18, 2007 at the age of 65 with family at his side. Jim grew up in a vibrant, diverse North Oakland neighborhood where he attended Santa Fe Grammar School, Woodrow Wilson Junior High and Oakland Tech High. He had many fond memories of participating in Oakland police athletic leagues, swimming at Forest Pool, attending 49er and Cal football games with his father and brother, and spending summers at his family's cabin in Boulder Creek. He received his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, with a major in sociology. He attended Berkeley throughout the '60s which influenced his decision to specialize in issues related to social movements and political sociology. He formed many lifelong friendships during his time on campus. Upon completion of his doctoral studies he taught two years at UC Riverside before moving to San Diego State University, where he remained for 30 years. He was regarded as a very supportive teacher and mentor by his students, and encouraged many to pursue further graduate or professional education. He was the author of several influential books in his field including "Sources of American Student Activism," "Social Movements: Development, Participation and Dynamics," and "Sociology: Traditional and Radical Perspectives." In addition to teaching, he served as chair of the Sociology Department from 1991-2000, served on the legislative committee for the California Faculty Association, and was a cofounder of the Faculty Coalition for Public Higher Education, a group dedicated to achieving funding stabilization for the state's public colleges and universities. Following retirement, Jim resettled in Berkeley with his wife Patsy. Jim was a wonderful father and husband who greatly enjoyed family life and always welcomed friends of his children into his home. Friends fondly recall his warm smile, terrific sense of humor, loyalty, tolerance, and how he cared so deeply about sociology, higher education, and social and political justice. He is survived by his loving wife; daughter, Ann of Berkeley; and son, Jeff of Los Angeles. 

San Francisco Chronicle, April 25, 2007

AUTOBIOGRAPHY:

I have taught in the Department of Sociology at San Diego State University since 1975 and was Chair from 1991-2000. Until 1991 I taught and researched in the areas of social movements and political sociology, as well as taught statistics and methodology. I have written several books and articles, including The Sources of American Student Activism, and Social Movements: Development, Participation, and Dynamics (with Maurice Jackson), as well as articles on collective behavior for the Annual Review of Sociology (with Gary T. Marx), and the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. 

This focus changed significantly in 1991, lasting to the present in 2002, when I became involved in the struggles of higher education.  Whereas I still teach and do research in social movements and political sociology, my interests have become increasingly centered on problems of higher education, where I have focused on academic and applied - including legislative - solutions to such problems as budget cuts, reduction of tenure-track faculty, distance learning, copyright ownership of courses, and the increasing corporate influence over the university.

All of this has Berkeley origins. I was an undergraduate and graduate student in Sociology at Berkeley, taking courses with most of the well-known professors then, including Neil Smelser, Bob Blauner, Bob Somers, Herbert Blumer, Erving Goffman, David Matza, Reinhard Bendix, and William Kornhauser. I was also exposed to the early-1960s protests over civil rights, the death penalty, and nuclear weapons, which gave me a political as well as academic education.

My first day of graduate school in Sociology, October 1, 1964, was the beginning of the Free Speech Movement. The lessons from the FSM - and later Vietnam protests - were invaluable in 1992 when I helped restore 9 academic departments which were targeted for elimination at SDSU in the budget crisis of the early-1990s, assisted by much appreciated support from Neil Smelser and several other members of the Berkeley faculty.

I've hesitated to write this because I have conflicting feelings about my years at Berkeley. On the one hand, they were very exciting and yet ,very traumatic times. While some professors were outstanding as lecturers (Blumer, Goffman, Smelser) others (unnamed) were arrogant, if not abusive towards students. The challenges of the  various social movements meant we were sociology students in action not just students in the classroom. 

I was originally not admitted to UCB and I went to see Blumer who was chair to see what I could do. He called every member of the graduate committee in front of me and asked "WHY?" Finally, he slammed the phone down and said, "That's no reason!" He said that some members didn't want to admit me because I was married! (This was 1964). Blumer not only admitted me but arranged for a reduced out-of-state tuition fee for my excellent academic record as an undergraduate and  M.A. from Kansas. Isn't that a great story about the giant! 

Sociology like other academic disciplines maintained a very traditional outlook which meant studying society from a masculine perspective. I never had a female professor of Sociology! There were no tenured women faculty at UCB.  In 1968  I audited the first sociology undergraduate course dealing with women's issues taught by an adjunct faculty Pauline Bart. Nevertheless, I now recognize that my challenging experiences as a graduate student and as a mother of a young child,during those Berkeley years led to my career focusing on women's issues. 

I am a professor (and former department chair) at California State University, Northridge, where I  designed the courses in Sociology of Gender, Gender and Work and team taught the first women studies course "Sex Role Stereotypes" in 1971. My research and by political life have focused on women's issues, especially dedicated to assisting women in the professions. Hopefully, I have helped succeeding generations of  women sociologists. 

I was born in Minneapolis, went to Carleton College, and came out to Berkeley only after my first year in India, in 1963-64, returning to India in 1970-71 to do my Ph. D. dissertation and then to finally 'settle' there in 1978. So I have taken something of the 'great years' of the 60s from Berkeley to India ­ and vice versa! When trying to combine living in India and teaching at San Diego didn't work, I quit and went to India. I had married into a middle caste ('Bahujan') 'rich peasant' farming family in western India and have 'settled' in the large 'village' of Kasegaon (my daughter calls it a 'town' in her poems but by Indian definition it's a village) in southern Maharashtra, with Bharat and other members of an Indian joint family. I've been an Indian citizen since 1983.

The social movements I've been involved with included the Dalit and anti-caste movements, environmental movements, farmers? and women?s movements, but at present I'm most active in the anti-caste movement. To tell the truth, I am a kind of 'mother figure' (along with one other American, Eleanor Zelliot) to many Dalits. One way of putting the problems people of my category has been expressed by one Indian friend ­ "I don't have an address." I've had a variety of occupations, which might be described as 'upscale unorganized sector' jobs. Most recent is a three-year position as Senior Fellow at Teen Murti in Delhi (a prestigious place and it has the advantage that I don't have to be there very much of the time but with no computer facilities).

My most important books include, most recently a forthcoming really wild book that falls in between 'activist journalism' and 'expert scholarship', Buddhism in India; Challenge to Brahmanism and Caste; I'm also getting into translation from Marathi ­ Growing Up Untouchable: A Dalit Autobiography, you can use it for all kinds of introductory courses!

I arrived at Berkeley midyear in 1964, after graduating from San Francisco State College. Being a Mexican-American born in Berkeley and raised in Oakland, going to graduate school at Berkeley was an intimidating experience in terms of the repute of the faculty and the backgrounds of fellow students, who were from all over the country, as well as being bright, articulate and especially well read. The intellectual environment of Berkeley provided an exceptional opportunity to be a symbolic interactionist, a structuralist or a Marxist and to move fluidly among these ideologies. Blumer, Bendix, Glock, Goffman, Matza, Clausen, Lowenthal, Smelser and Selznick created an intellectual environment rich in ideas and embracing of theoretical exploration.

In the midst of this intellectual feast, however, two events proved exciting, yet disruptive. The first was the Free Speech Movement, and the second was the Vietnam War and its protests. For those of us who experienced the former, I think we were different students than the cohorts before us, for no matter what we focused on in our individual studies, we were all students of social movements, institutions and politics. Unfortunately, some of the cohort did not survive -- finding the Era of the 60's too disruptive and chaotic. As a first year student it was difficult knowing whether to cross the picket lines or not, and if you did, not knowing whether the faculty would be in class.

The second event was the Vietnam War. My time at Berkeley was cut short because I selected an alternative service rather than be drafted. In one respect it was beneficial because I was assigned to NIH and was able to collect dissertation data. Yet, I missed not being at Berkeley with my cohort, fellow students and the faculty. John Clausen, however, was the most reliable distant dissertation advisor anyone could have. He was so quick in reading chapters I called him 'The Flash.'

I completed my dissertation while at De Pauw University and when finished I came to Ohio State University where I have enjoyed a quiet career of health research and teaching greatly informed by my work with Blumer and Goffman and my all too brief years at Berkeley.

I arrived in Berkeley in 1973 after living most of my life in the Illinois and Tennessee, having previously studied at Swarthmore, North Carolina, and the London School of Economics. I had never seen anything like the fog, the bay, the Free Speech Movement, and the arrests. Within the Department, Nat Glazer proved a careful adviser and I passed three of five required courses by exemption exam before classes began. Later that year, Leo Lowenthal let my skimpy German by for the second language.

I wanted to reform the theory of pluralism, and hung onto as many words as I could in a joint course offered by Kornhauser and Selznick. But as the year wore on, several of my mentors left for other positions, having taken the "wrong" side in the FSM conflict. And several others went  through  massive changes of political and personal life, rendering them of little use as doctoral advisers. I remember one grim summer in Berkeley when I worked on a dissertation proposal to absolutely no avail, finding solace in radio broadcasts of the games of my beloved baseball Giants. Like so many other students, my doctoral work was ultimately redeemed by the ever-solid support and counsel of Bob Blauner.  In 1970, after a year of teaching at Purdue and five years at Swarthmore, I was awarded my Berkeley doctorate.

I went on to build a career in an urban studies department at the Camden campus of Rutgers University, to write or edit nine books (mostly in voluntary action research, which I helped develop as an interdisciplinary field), to edit the major journal in that field for 12 years, and to win a career award from ARNOVA. I use my sociology now in action research on youth as resources, both in the U.S. and in Northern Ireland.

I came to Berkeley in summer 1964. The previous year I'd been a grad student in psychology at Stanford; I was interested in personality and cognition but they assigned me to work in a rat lab, so I decided to switch to sociology across the Bay. Spring and summer 1964 were the time the civil rights movement hit the North. There had been big sit-in demonstrations and mass arrests in San Francisco to integrate hiring at auto row and the downtown hotels. At Berkeley I joined campus CORE, and through it met some Trotskyite "cadres" with whom I took part in various clandestine plottings. CORE, along with SNCC and a red-diaper-baby outfit called SLATE, were developing a plan to picket UCB in the fall to integrate their hiring.

UC beat us to the punch. We had the custom of setting up tables on the sidewalk at the Telegraph Ave. entrance to campus to drum up support for our sit-ins; the university (apparently under local pressure) tried to force us off the sidewalk. In response we took the offensive and set up our tables in front of Sproul Hall, and waited to get arrested.  I was in the group of 20 or so at the tables when the campus police brought in a patrol car to arrest one of us, who was not registered as a student that term. It was a big tactical error, because we'd been doing non-violent sit-ins all summer, and we spontaneously sat down to block the wheels and trapped the car.  The rest is history -- big crowds gathered, various people started getting up on top of the car to make speeches (thereby making a reputation with the media as if they were the 'leaders' of the movement), the fraternity boys came down in the middle of the night to try to break up our demo; next day the Oakland police showed up in  menacing formation, revving their motorcycle engines like a bunch of Hell's Angels, whereupon a last minute agreement was reached. And so on. I was on the coordinating council of the FSM, the coalition of campus organizations that came out of that confrontation; went to innumerable rallies; got arrested in the Sproul Hall sit-in; in the next few years, got heavily involved in the anti-war movement. Then when the non-violent movement got hijacked by the more violent and doctrinaire wing, I gravitated, like many others, into the psychedelic wing of the counterculture, got interested in Asian religions and psychotherapy groups. Good choice, I think; some of those who stuck with the political trajectory disappeared into Weatherman and a whiff of dynamite.

Through all this, somehow I managed to go to classes, soaking in the influence of a very inspiring group of sociologists:  among the most impressive to me personally were Blumer, Goffman, Philip Selznick, and Leo Lowenthal.  I worked as an R.A. for Joseph Ben-David, then visiting from the Hebrew University, and got launched on a series of publications in the sociology of science; this early work, decades later, culminated in my 1998 historical-comparative book  The Sociology of Philosophies.   I was in a group of graduate students putting together a reader in comparative political sociology, franchised out by Reinhard Bendix as editor; writing up the theoretical  chapter for the volume launched me on a path of developing a left-wing version of Weber as a multi-dimensional theory of social conflict. Putting together Weberian conflict theory with the radical micro-sociology inspired by Goffman, led to my 1975 book  Conflict Sociology;  systematizing the micro-macro connection led to subsequent work including my 2004 book Interaction Ritual Chains. I did my dissertation under Harold Wilensky, analyzing comparative organizational data to show that rising educational requirements for employment were not due to technologically-driven demand for skills, but to changing standards of cultural respectability; this later became my 1979 book The Credential Society.

I left Berkeley in 1968 and received my PhD the following year. My career has taken me to Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison, UCSD, Univ. of Virginia, UCR, and Univ. of Pennsylvania, with visiting stints at Chicago, Harvard, and Cambridge, and at various universities and institutes in Europe, China, and Japan. Taking my own argument against educational credentialism seriously, I dropped out of the academic world for a while in the late 70s and early 80s, published a novel,  The Case of the Philosophers' Ring, and did a lot of free-lance writing. My intellectual trajectory was laid down by the time I left Berkeley; the rest has been largely extensions.  I'm still working on it; my next book is a radically micro-sociological theory of Violent Conflict.

Berkeley in the sixties. What an amazing time that was for a politically naïve girl from Willowdale Ontario. I did my undergraduate work at Berkeley with some of the best: Smelser, Lipsett, Glazer, Matza, Kornhauser, Skolnick, and an honor seminar with Ken Bock. On to graduate school to study population and urbanization with Petersen, Davis, Blake, Goldscheider and others. Tempted by an international career in the population field, I chose marriage and teaching instead and spent the next 18 years at UC Davis. Then, in the midst of grading midterms one weekend, I realized I wanted to get another life. I resigned from Davis in 1988 and in 1992 moved to Costa Rica with Norma Wikler (Berkeley 1973) to grow coffee and organic pineapples for export.

My sociological obra (aka oeuvre) involves writing and consulting in the area of women's rights and marriage/fertility/family planning; women's employment; and sexual and reproductive health, with a special interest in South and Southeast Asia. A few books along the way, including Rural Women at Work: Strategies for Development in South Asia (1978); Women's Work in Third World Agriculture (1985); and Population Policy and Women's Rights (1993). I still consult with organizations such as the International Women's Health Coalition in New York and, most recently, WHO, and have just finished a new book on Abortion and Common Sense. Toucans croak in the trees and an iguana waddles past the open door as I write. Costa Rica is pura vida.

I entered the Ph.D. program in sociology at Berkeley in September 1965, spent four exhilarating years there, left for Montreal in 1969, and finally got my Ph.D in 1975. My thesis was published in 1981 by U.C. Press under the title Papal Power. Vatican Control Over Lay Catholic Elites and received over 25 quite good reviews. Since 1979, I have been assistant (1969-1976), associate (1976-1983) and full professor (1983- ) in the sociology department at the University of Montreal, which I chaired from 1984 to 1987. I was a visiting professor in four other Quebec Universities over the years, and also at the University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil (1997) and at the Architectural University in Hanoi, Vietnam (2000 and 2001).

From 1976 to 1980, I was city councilor in the town of Dunham, Qué, where I had built my own house in the early seventies. I have a daughter, Véronique, who is now a practicing social worker and psychotherapist in Houston, Texas. My favorites activities consist of taking care of my tree farm in Dunham, writing in the areas of sociology of the environment and of religion, mentoring students and/or activists and travelling abroard to visit family and friends, to give papers at conferences and lectures at various universities.

My major fields of interest are political sociology, sociological theory, sociology of religion and especially sociology of the environment which I call ecosociology. Over the years, I have authored, edited or co-edited 25 books or special issues of journals, nearly all in French, mostly in the field of ecosociology. Although my original training was in organizational and political sociology, and sociology of religion, my more recent books have been on social movements (peace and especially green movements), and in ecosociology (sustainable development, human dimensions of climate change,energy, acid rain, water). I have remained quite involved in peace, environmental and international solidarity groups over the years, and I have labored to promote interdisciplinary and socially-relevant approaches in the social sciences. I have started thinking about retirement, but I am not quite ready for that yet, because I love my work and feel I have a few more productive years ahead of me.

My four years at Berkeley were among the best years of my life, and I remain deeply grateful to my professors (Glock, Schurmann, Selznick, Bendix, Vallier, Smelser, Somers, Lowenthal, Blumer and others) for their dedication, and to many students in my cohort who have also helped and inspired me, and whose friendship remains precious to me to this day. The Sociology Department at Berkeley was the place to be for a young sociologist in the late sixties, and by what I can now see and hear, I still think it remains to this day one of the best places in the world to get a graduate education in sociology.

On July 22, 1975, Maurice Manel died in Montreal at the age of 35. A fertile, scholarly, and ironical mind, he is greatly missed by his friends at the University of California, Berkeley where he had just received his Ph.D.; his colleagues at Atkinson College of York University in Toronto; and those who knew him at Johns Hopkins and McGill, where he also did graduate work in sociology.

Maurice's sociological interests were diverse. During the last few years of his life he was beginning a series of papers on what might be called the sociology of the extreme emotions. He was interested in the structural underpinnings of ecstasy, depression, feelings of vulnerability and intimidation, shyness, loneliness, etc. In contrast, his dissertation, which reflected an earlier concern with politics and survey methods, dealt with the conditions that would promote loyalty to the moral order of laissez-faire capitalism on the one hand and welfare-oriented capitalism on the other.

For all the complexities of his mind, Maurice remained loyal to certain passions of his Montreal boyhood ; Grade B movies, Borscht Belt comedians, hockey, football, chess, and the like. Similarly, although he never married, Maurice liked children and they responded to his warmth.

Maurice's wit and humor enlivened many social gatherings. He was able to see absurdities and foibles in both himself and others truly a rare quality. It is thus with sadness that we make these remarks about this open, ardent, restless spirit who was our friend. Certainly our lives were enriched by having known him.

From: Footnotes (November, 1976) of the American Sociological Association, written by Ayad Al-Qazzaz, S.A. Longstaff, Samuel P. Oliner, and James L. Wood

Obituary taken from The Arizona Engineer (University of Arizona)

John Sevier, former University of Arizona associate dean for external affairs at the College of Engineering and Mines, died Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2002. He was 67.

A celebration of John's life was held on March 4, in the Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Building Auditorium. Sevier's wife, children, and many of his friends from the college and industry attended.

Sevier served as associate dean at UA for 10 years. In that role he worked closely with industry and helped coordinate numerous university/research partnerships involving faculty in the college.

The Industrial Advisory Council of the college expanded significantly in scope and size during his tenure. He was instrumental, with Charles Elliott at ASU, in developing the JACMET program, which provides continuing education opportunities for working engineers.

Sevier earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in petroleum engineering from Stanford University, received his masters in business administration from Harvard in 1961 and a doctorate in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1974.

He retired from the UA in June 2000, and lived in Tucson with his wife, Peggy.

Ted Bradshaw, a UC Davis professor of community development who helped California communities grapple with base closures, energy issues and creating healthy social systems, died Aug. 5 (2006) while jogging near his home in Oakland. He was 63.

Trained as a rural sociologist, Bradshaw came to the Department of Human and Community Development as an assistant professor in 1995 after a nearly 20-year career as a researcher andlecturer at UC Berkeley. He made full professor in June.

Bradshaw was a leader in the areas of rural development, community development and energypolicy. Most recently, he chaired the effort to establish the new Center for the Study of Regional Change and was appointed last year as director of the Gifford Center for Population Studies, which focuses on population issues in California's Central Valley.

Written by Susanne Rockwell for UC Davis, News and Information

In 1966, with a Masters in Economics from the Bocconi University of Milan, I won a two-year Harkness fellowship that had several appealing features (it was prestigious and hard to get, it required foreign students to make a three months trip all around the U.S., and let winners choose where to study). I chose Berkeley because it had an impressive sociological faculty, an active student movement, and I wished to discuss with Smelser my translation and my introduction to the Italian edition of Parsons'-Smelser's Economy and Society. I had planned to spend the second year at Harvard, but I was so happy in Berkeley that I spent all the time there.

I finished my introduction to Economy and Society, I took a Masters Degree in Sociology and the Ph.D.orals and started working for my Ph.D. dissertation on Structural Contradictions and Organizational Response in American Higher Education. I did many other things, such as getting to know the complexities of American society, participating in antiwar marches, making several good friends among Berkeley students and professors, writing the first essay on Gramsci's thought ever to appear in a U.S. sociological journal -- the Berkeley Journal of Sociology, etc.

I came back to Berkeley, San Francisco and the Bay Area with my wife and son in 1972, 1973, 1974, 1981,1990 for a few months each year -- as visiting scholar at the Institute of International studies -- and a few other times on shorter trips. Berkeley's intellectual style left an imprint on my way of teaching and the way I conduct research and on my continuous effort to combine scholarly rigor and social responsibility.

My commitment to international scientific cooperation in the International Sociological Association, my research interests, the academic path I took (Professor of Sociology and Political Science, and Dean of the School of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Milan), have all been in various degrees influenced by my experience at Berkeley.

Norma arrived in Berkeley in the mid-sixties with an undergraduate degree from University of Michigan in nursing, which she hated. Having never taken a sociology course, she plunged into graduate school to study social movements and social change, inspired especially by Herbert Blumer. Active in the anti-war movement, Norma wrote her dissertation on 'Vietnam and the Veterans' Consciousness' with William Kornhauser and Arlie Hochschild as committee members.

Norma taught at UC Santa Cruz from 1971 to 1990. Her co-authored book Up Against the Clock: Career Women Speak on the Choice to Have Children (1979) and her articles on reproductive technology are still timely. Combining her sociological skills and activist concerns, she became founding director from 1980-82 of the National Judicial Education Program on Gender Bias in the Courts, a project of NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund and wrote extensively on women in the courts. She continued speaking, organizing conferences, and consulting with state task forces after moving to Costa Rica in 1992 to grow organic pineapples.

Norma was an intense, vital, funny person and a brilliant organizer. She never flagged in her commitment to the 'class struggle.' In 2001 she moved to New York to search for a place for herself in the cause, but it wasn't there. Refusing to compromise, she took her own life on May 27, 2002. A bench in Central Park is dedicated to her memory. The plaque reads Norma Juliet Wikler. Outraged and Outrageous.

Plotting to avoid Vietnam, I went to U. Michigan where recent Berkeley graduate John Lofland convinced me to switch to Berkeley. I spent most of 1966-1968 on a spiritual/psychedelic journey, and was an indifferent student at best. After a year of world travel I returned briefly, but since I didn't 'love' America I left it. Four years in South America, farming, and abusing my body, propelled me to a missionary hospital where, rather than dying, I was reborn. So I returned to Berkeley in 1974 and finished up with a study of ways Americans adapted to life in Ecuador under the amazing guidance of Arlie Hochschild. Still skeptical of the value of intellectual pursuits, I worked in K-12 education for 12 years in California, Oregon and Peru.

Returning from Peru, I spent three years researching and writing several books on Christian missions. My sociology (of religion and knowledge) was beginning to pay off! Then a four year stint as an intercultural communication trainer (experiential sociology!) led me back to academia.

I have invented my own sociology, (major influences: Dooyeweerd, Goudswaard, Girard, Ritzer, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Derrida, Ellul, Taoism, and of course Goffman, Durkheim and Weber ; not to forget the Bible and Alcoholics Anonymous) written an intro textbook (none of my books are published), and labor at prying students away from the postmodern condition (nothing) so they can be useful to their fellow humans. They have been! It has been rewarding! I'll probably do this until I die.

Reading the other bios, I?m not that different. I teach with slides, music and video clips (documentaries, feature films, Simpsons) to avoid lectures. That way they pay attention. I never test; rather students have to perform 'experiments' using their sociological knowledge.

Being present at the birth of the culture war was the most profound way Berkeley affected me. The up-close observation of the quintessential Leftists has been invaluable for my teaching and writing. (I realize that their descendents deny that there is a culture war.)

The 'sociology' I have invented seems to click with my students, who come to Asbury College seeking a way to make the world a better place but, before they can become co-opted by conventional 'solutions' to human problems, form a new identity and commitment to being real and living real. But let me ask you, whom do you serve? Bob Dylan sang, 'you're gonna have to serve somebody.' And we all do.

I entered the sociology graduate program in 1966 in my mid-30s. I had a law degree and had been working in law-related jobs for ten years. From law school on, I had been fascinated by the curious nature of law, and I was looking for an appropriate academic discipline from which to study it from the outside. Berkeley in the late 1960s was an exhilarating place for me, although I found myself a full half generation out of synch with the passionate young Marxists who seemed to make up most of my classmates.

My most interesting academic experiences were courses with Erving Goffman; two historical studies I did (law of early Puritan Massachusetts; law in the French Revolution); my struggle to put together coherently the wildly different perspectives in social theory; and the field work for my thesis. I owe a debt of gratitude to Philip Selznick, Philippe Nonet and Sheldon Messinger for guiding my work.

It took me an unconscionably long time to get my Ph.D.; I did not finish until 1981. By that time much of my interest in both law and sociology had drained away and I was moving my life in very different directions. I moved from Berkeley to Ashland, Oregon in 1976. I met my present wife here. We started a business together, doing editing, research and contract writing. One client has been the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, for which we have written articles for one of its publications for many years. I am currently at work coediting a long and absorbing novel.

We have two children, a boy and a girl, 19 and 15, both great kids.

In many ways, life began for me at age 50 and has continued to be happy and surprising for the 23 years since. I am proud of my Berkeley degree and feel remiss that I have made no professional use of my sociology training, but that is the way my life has gone

I would be delighted to hear from any graduate school contemporaries.

LILLIAN RUBIN DIES AT 90

by Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times, July 10, 2014

Lillian B. Rubin, who at midlife became a sociologist, psychotherapist and best-selling author of books that examined race, class and the sexual revolution from the viewpoint of those caught in society's shifts, died June 17 at her San Francisco home. She was 90.

A prolific writer well into her 80s, Rubin wrote a dozen books, including "Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working-class Family" (1976), a classic sociological study exploring the strains and struggles in blue-collar life; "Intimate Strangers: Men and Women Together" (1983), about how differences between the sexes affect matters such as sexuality, work and parenting; and "Quiet Rage: Bernie Goetz in a Time of Madness" (1986), about racism's "new respectability" in the wake of the sensational "subway vigilante" case of the early 1980s.

Raised in poverty by an abusive mother, Rubin had a deep personal connection to some of her subjects, particularly "The Transcendent Child: Tales of Triumph Over the Past" (1996) and "Tangled Lives: Daughters, Mothers and the Crucible of Aging" (2000).

"What strikes you is the variety of her work, but I think her driving interest was social class, and then race," said longtime friend Arlie Hochschild, a retired UC Berkeley sociologist known for her scholarship on women, gender and work. "She had an eye for those who got stuck, lost and left behind."

Rubin could have been one of the lost. Born Jan. 13, 1924, in Philadelphia, she was one of two children of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. Her father, a furrier, died when she was 5. Her illiterate mother moved the family to New York where she did piece work in the garment industry.

In "The Transcendent Child," Rubin described her mother force-feeding her vegetables until she choked, swallowed or vomited. Her mother favored her brother, Leonard, and frequently told her "Girls shouldn't be born."

"I was seven years old when, bewildered by her rage and hurt by her rejection, I began consciously to remove myself psychologically from the family scene," Rubin wrote. "It was then that I first said to myself clearly, I won't be like her."

She could not brook people who tried to talk about the glories of aging. Her last year was really bad. - Marci Rubin, Lillian Rubin's daughter

She graduated from high school at 15,married at 19 and had a baby soon after. In 1952 she moved with her family to Los Angeles, where she managed congressional campaigns for progressive candidates. In 1959 her marriage ended in divorce.

Through her political work she met Hank Rubin and married him in 1962. They moved to the Bay Area, where he wrote a wine column for the San Francisco Chronicle and ran restaurants that helped spur the Berkeley food movement.

In 1963, Lillian Rubin launched the next stage of her life: At 39 she entered UC Berkeley as an undergraduate. She earned a bachelor's degree in 1967, followed by a master's in 1968 and a doctorate in sociology in 1971. She worked for many years as a research sociologist at the university's Institute for the Study of Social Change.

She and her daughter were students at the university at the same time. In 1967, as anti-Vietnam War protests were heating up, they joined a peaceful demonstration at the Oakland induction center and wound up in jail along with 70 other women, including folk singer Joan Baez and her mother. The Chronicle's Herb Caen noted the arrests of "Hank Rubin's wife and daughter" in his column.

Rubin began to think of herself as a writer while in graduate school. Her dissertation on the era's battles over busing turned into her first book, "Busing and Backlash: White Against White in a California School District" (1972), which focused on Northern California's Richmond Unified School District. "I'm probably one of the few people in the world who thought that the year spent writing her dissertation was one of life's greatest moments," she once wrote, "because, in that private process of thinking and writing, I found a calling."

She was a formidable person. "She was someone who had very strong opinions and no difficulty in expressing herself," said Troy Duster, who directed the Institute for the Study of Social Change at UC Berkeley when Rubin was a research associate there. "Some people found that difficult and shied away from her. Some people found it refreshing."

Her forthright style was on display in one of her last books, "60 on Up: The Truth About Aging in America," published in 2007 when she was 83. Clearly not a subscriber to the idea that 60 is the new 40, she wrote unsentimentally about the physical and emotional trials of old age. "Getting old sucks! It always has, it always will," she wrote in the opening lines.

In her last years Rubin wrote about death, including a 2012 piece for Salon in which she disclosed her plan to end her life if illness or frailty made it unbearable. Blind in one eye and in pain from a number of ailments, she did not want to wind up like her husband, who died in 2011 after a decade-long decline into dementia.

"She could not brook people who tried to talk about the glories of aging. Her last year was really bad," said Marci Rubin, who survives her along with a grandson and a great-grandson.

Her suicide plan was, in the end, unnecessary. On the day before she died, she had taken a bus and a cab to the doctor's office by herself, then spent the afternoon in long conversation with an old friend, Anita Hill, before having dinner with her daughter. She died in her own bed of natural causes.

LILLIAN RUBIN REFLECTS ON HER YEARS AT BERKELEY

My entry into Berkeley's graduate program in sociology when I was already a well-formed forty-two-year old adult proved to be a transforming event in unexpected ways. Until then I had lived the public life of a political activist and organizer, managing political campaigns in Southern California. And although the tumultuous political climate of my graduate student years (1968-72) gave me plenty of opportunity for political action, all of which I took, the years of study opened up the more private, scholarly part of myself that I hadn't known very well before.

Seeing the world through the sociological lens came naturally to me, since, as a child of poverty, I understood very early how powerfully the social context determines life's chances. But it was only in graduate school that I came to understand fully how closely the development of the self is tied to the institutional structures that frame our lives. That knowledge, however, left me with a series of questions: If that's true, how does social change come about? Why and how do some people manage to break free of those structural forces? And how free are they? Questions that led me to enter a course of study and training in clinical psychology.

I'm probably one of the few people in the world who thought that the year spent writing her dissertation was one of life's great moments because, in that private process of thinking and writing, I found a calling. In the ensuing years, I've taught from time to time, lectured all over the world, spent 12-15 hours a week doing psychotherapy, but my heart work has been in writing. I've produced twelve books, each in its own way an attempt to bridge the gap between sociology and psychology, to fill in the blanks that each discipline leaves to the other.

As a college freshman I made three vows: never to earn a Ph.D., never to study Sociology, and never to teach. With the help of UC, Berkeley, I violated all three. After completing my AB from Stanford in History in 1964 and my MA in International Relations from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1965, I returned to my hometown, Berkeley, searching for a career. I took a job as a research assistant at the Institute of International Studies, working for the late Ivan Vallier and becoming close friends with sociology graduate students, Jim Wood and Norma Wikler, before I even considered earning a Ph.D. myself. In this environment I learned that Sociology was the field that would allow me to synthesize my love for history, my fascination with religion, and my interest in comparative societies and world politics. In 1967 I entered the Berkeley Ph.D. program which I completed in 1973. I owe much to the many faculty members who gave me time and inspiration John Clausen, who lent me his office to write in, Robert Bellah, Leo Lowenthal, Ivan Vallier, and Neil Smelser who helped me through all stages of my Ph.D. (I must mention, too, David Mandelbaum from Anthropology and Joseph Levenson from History who also guided my comparative studies.) Herbert Blumer sent me to Sonoma State to apply for a teaching position in early 1970. Miraculously, Sonoma State hired me, and I have been teaching (in all of my beloved areas) there ever since.

Berkeley shaped me even more after I left than while I was there as a graduate student. Robert Bellah, Reinhard Bendix, Arlie Hochschild, Neil Smelser, along with Leo Lowenthal's informal seminar on culture and an inspired group of fellow graduate students, taught me that culture and ideas can reshape history. I arrived at Harvard to find that the 'sociology of culture' was just coming into being. I moved to Stanford only to be told that it didn't exist. This confrontation with the world-outside-Berkeley led me to think about culture more clearly, leading to 'Culture in Action' (ASR 1986), and, after I returned to Berkeley, my second book, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (2001). My other good fortune was collaboration and sustaining friendship with what became the Habits-of-the-Heart group (Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, Bill Sullivan, Steven Tipton, and myself). Berkeley style, we allowed ourselves to think as deeply as we could about failures of American culture and institutions and about rebuilding the basis for a more just and inclusive society. An all-Berkeley group of colleagues wrote Inequality by Design (1996), examining how America's policy choices amplify inequality. Now, pursuing similar interrelations of culture, institutions, and collective capacities, I am investigating variations in response to the AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa.

Robert William Miller arrived in Berkeley in 1967; he held a fellowship in John Clausen's NIMH Training Program in Social Structure and Personality.  Bob's fellow students appreciated his insights and his wry sense of humor.  He completed his dissertation - an ethnography of elementary school classrooms - in 1975.  He taught at Coe College, and later at Penn State's Milton S. Hershey Medical Center.   Being located close to Three Mile Island made him interested in what he liked to call "man-made disasters."  He joined Missouri's State Department of Health, and studied social responses to and medical effects of the dioxin poisoning of the town of Times Beach.  Bob had struggled with health problems throughout his life, but died suddenly and unexpectedly in 1984.  He was survived by his wife, Jackie, and two sons, Adrian and Aaron.

My graduate years in residence at Berkeley (1967-72) were an exciting time, and I've always felt lucky to have been part of a generation that experienced both the thrill and efficacy of collection action. As part of a quite outstanding graduate student cohort, I was probably more shaped by my fellow graduate students--and by the study groups and debates we had--than by the faculty. In retrospect, I feel that I failed to take full advantage of the strengths of the Berkeley faculty. Wisdom, as they say, comes too late in life.

Nonetheless, my Berkeley experience set me on an intellectual and professional trajectory that I've found very satisfying. My interests in the political economy of development led to From Marshall Plan to Debt Crisis: Foreign Aid and Development Choices in the World Economy, and from there onto the study of globalization. Always an inveterate traveler--I left Berkeley in 1972 to travel around the world (including Afghanistan just before the monarchy was overthrown)--I developed along the way an interest in the complex changes being wrought by international tourism. Subsequently, the French anthropologist Michel Picard and I edited Tourism and Ethnicity in Asian and Pacific Societies, and I've explored these and other connections in a range of articles.

A less predictable thing that happened is my fascination in the past decade with the pedagogical possibilities of the internet and instructional technologies. Teaching has always been my first love as a sociologist, and somehow I morphed into something of a instructional technology guru. It's been a lot of fun, and has brought a kind of recognition that has meant a lot to me.

My first academic job was in the new and rapidly expanding Department of Sociology at Warwick University--I was appointed specifically to develop a joint history and sociology degree. After 15 years at Warwick I moved to Glasgow, at first to co-direct the John Logie Baird Centre for the Study of Film, Television and Music, and then to chair the Department of English Studies. After 12 years there, in 1999, I moved to Stirling University as Professor of Film and Media, which is where I am now. I still regard myself as a sociologist, though I haven't been in a sociology department--or journal--for 15 years now. Berkeley did two things for me: it gave me a proper grounding in European social thought (not something I'd got from Oxford); and it meant I was in the right place at the right time to become a rock critic. Much of my academic career (at least the most enjoyable part) has been devoted to the development of popular music studies.

After finishing my Ph.D., I became Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, then Research Scientist at the Battelle Memorial Institute, and finally Professor of Management and Policy at the University of Southern California School of Policy, Planning, and Development. I'm also Clinical Professor at the University of Washington School of Public Health. I have a nation-wide consulting practice in health care, policing policy, and minority issues. I commute between USC campuses in Los Angeles and Sacramento, and live in Seattle.

I've published two books on cancer treatment and survival. My most recent book, Health For All: Making Community Collaboration Work, is based on my experience as a practitioner and evaluator of community organization. I'm now completing a textbook on organization theory.

Berkeley provided me with the tools of the trade: Hal Wilensky, how to write scholarly narrative and grant proposals; Charles Glock, how to do surveys; Art Stinchcombe (by providing opportunity for practice), how to withstand criticism. For life-long perspective, I owe my fellow students: Ann Swidler for the dialectic; Richard Apostle for cool commentary on America; Russ Neuman for appreciation of empirical research; Steve Hart for general genius. The atmosphere of Berkeley in the 60s impressed me with the power of collective behavior over the individual. The outlook through which I see the world today, one of social, economic, and cultural competition, matured at Berkeley.

I believe I have helped bring the sociological perspective to unaccustomed precincts: hospital board and operating rooms; police headquarters; the city council; the business pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Sociology affects my family life. It informs (inflames?) discussions I have with my wife, a psychoanalyst, about the sources of human consciousness. It impacts my children, to whom I am teaching survey research techniques by assigning them jobs in my various projects. It provides my kids with a term they believe expresses the character of this work: "exploitation."

After graduating from Columbia College (studying with Daniel Bell there) in 1967, I entered the Berkeley Sociology Department under a Ford Foundation Fellowship. At Berkeley, I found a sort of continuity with Nathan Glazer, another member of the 'New York school' whose style of discourse and research was well-presented in the documentary film 'Arguing the World'. These public-policy intellectuals sought to cast societal decisions in a non-ideological framework, as the title of one of Bell's books 'The End of Ideology', indicated. Their approach was ideologically engaged -- but not warped -- and informed by scholarship and science -- but not to the exclusion of common sense and empirical observation. They never let ideological or academic positions get in the way of lived experience. And for that style of learning I am profoundly grateful.

Erving Goffman's classic, 'The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life', made major contributions to our understanding of 'the things we take for granted' --the normal, everyday activities and modes of relating to one another that sustain our identities and group-memberships. As I listened to him 'think out loud' during his lectures, I was amazed at his ability to make new sense of the contingent reality we are all immersed in, as if he were a four- dimensional creature observing the three-dimensional world. He made it all crystal-clear, by questioning the obvious and, like an anthropologist among primitives, bringing out the underlying logic and structure of the goings-on. Each lecture was an extraordinary performance.

I also found a congenial atmosphere at the Center for the Study of Law and Society, where Philip Selznick and Sheldon Messinger assembled a fine inter-disciplinary group of scholars from law, political science, sociology, criminal justice, and other fields.

Berkeley during the late 1960s and early 1970s when I was there was a lively place. I joined a Food Conspiracy, which was a buyers' cooperative disguised as a plot to overthrow the State; participated in the takeover of People's Park; as a teaching assistant held classes off campus when the tear gas on campus was too thick; lived across the street from Patty Hearst; hung out at Moe's Books on Telegraph Avenue and made 'Moe-money' (store scrip) my currency of choice; listened to string quartets and piano recitals at 1532 Arch, a North Berkeley classical music venue; and to KPFA, the classical-music and earnest-commentary Pacifica Foundation radio station; and to KSAN, which gave a thoroughly iconoclastic version of the news; bicycled in the Berkeley hills, one of my favorites being San Pablo Road to an abandoned Nike site (missile base, not tennis shoes), where one could watch the fog rolling in across San Francisco Bay; dined at Pot Luck, the restaurant of wine connoisseur and Spanish Civil War veteran Hank Rubin, which was the origin of a restaurant genealogy leading to the present-day Chez Panisse. Berkeley also provided access to the incredibly rich scenic resources of the Bay Area and beyond, from Inverness and Point Reyes and Mt Tamalpais up to Mendocino and down to Big Sur; and inland to the Delta and Lake Tahoe.

By the time I received the PhD in 1974, academia was a less attractive place than when I had entered Berekely in 1967. Learning was being displaced by political-correctness, and speech codes, thought-police, and quotas and preferences were assembling the elements of the stifling bureaucracy they have since become. As I did not fit any of the categories preferred by academic quota-counters, and saw the handwriting on the wall, I was fortunate to find alternative employment across the Bay at Stanford Research Institute. My employment there coincided with the first of many 'Energy Independence' initiatives, which led me through the coal fields of West Virginia and Wyoming, the sociology of coal-slurry pipelines, the virtues of renewable energy sources(solar, wind), electricity pricing structures, the unstable politics of the Mideast, and many other topics that have taken on ever-greater urgency in the intervening years.

A chance assignment for Honda Motor Company in 1977 led to my first encounter with Japan. I helped Honda with their first American venture, an auto assembly plant in Ohio, and introduced other Japanese companies to American customs and folkways (for which, of course, my education in Sociology was excellent preparation, though I could not have foreseen that while at Berkeley).

My enchantment with Japan continued, and I moved there (here) in 1981, where I live now. I continued with the consulting business until 1991, when I started The Kamakura Print Collection (http://www.kamprint.com), a printmaking workshop specializing in photogravure etching. This transition was less abrupt than it may seem, since I had become familiar with ultraviolet light sources through a client, and had seen some examples of 19th-century photogravures a couple of years earlier. It gradually dawned on me that I could bring more happiness to people through artwork than by writing reports. To simplify: Art touches the depths of the human psyche in ways that ratiocination and exposition can never do.

These days I do three things: <1> travel, <2> exhibits, <3> copperplate etching and printing in my workshop. I've been trekking in Mongolia and Nepal, in virtually every prefecture of Japan, in Norway, Portugal, and other parts of Europe. There are many other places on my 'to-do' list. This year includes exhibits in France, Italy, the United States, Japan, and Russia. Photogravure etching is a technically very demanding process, unforgiving of the slightest error. Over the past 20 years, I have made 269 editions, not a very large number, but perhaps more memorable than the cheaper/faster images that can be produced in larger quantity. Visitors to exhibits sometimes ask why I go to all this trouble. My answer is: Look closely at the prints, their tactile three-dimensional quality, the subtle gradation of tones, the way the ink mixes with the fibers of the hand-made paper or washi, the unique ink-on-paper look combined with the spontaneity of the impression. Not everyone 'gets it', of course, but enough people do to keep the workshop going.

The website can only hint at the look of the original prints, but those viewers who would like to browse may do so freely at http://www.kamprint.com (there are links for purchasing as well). A new related site which allows searching by mood, ink quality, Series, and other characteristics is athttp://kamprint.com/xpress/ , and a blog is at http://kamprint.com/views/.

Comments are welcome!

Let's see, I arrived at Berkeley in 1967, which is just after the Free Speech Movement and just before the People's Park era and the peak of the Vietnam protests. A good time to study sociology. I studied with Charlie Glock, Jeff Paige, Bill Kornhauser and Arthur Stinchcombe, and with a number of the faculty in political science at Berkeley and in communication at Stanford. I worked at the Survey Research Center on the NSF sponsored political alienation project which managed unknowingly to hire Emily Harris as a staff assistant for her secretarial skills. As I understand it Emily and her SLA associates actually kidnapped Patty Hearst (two blocks from the Center on Benvenue Ave) while Emily was still on the Center payroll. I don't believe she managed to return to pick up her last paycheck. Interesting times.

I am currently the John D. Evans Professor of Media Technology at the University of Michigan on leave and serving as a senior advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy working on broadband policy and digital rights management issues.

My first job out of graduate school was in sociology at Yale. I left New Haven for MIT where I taught public policy and media technology in the Media Lab and department of political science for many years and then moved to Penn where I taught in the Annenberg School for Communication and Annenberg Public Policy Center in media policy.

My research and writing focuses on the twin areas of public opinion and communication policy. While I was at Berkeley I got interested in the dynamics of how the public manages to pay attention (or not) to fundamental political and policy issues. I guess I'm still at it. If I ever get this figured out, I'll let you guys know.

Since completing of my Ph.D. in 1970, I have been affiliated with the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

The main impact of Berkeley on me has been in both its radical, liberal mood and its academic discipline.

My main fields of research are: social change and modernization (particularly India), universities in non-western countries and youth cultures.

Like many of us, my time at Berkeley was a watershed experience. My life course at this time took a direction into academia which has proven very satisfying, although I was uncertain in the beginning if this was what I really wanted. I arrived in Berkeley after four years as an Army officer and started off doing course work at Stanford as an exchange student. Given my military background and the political posture of the campus in the late 1960s and early 70s, I kept a relatively low profile as a student. I essentially just did my work mostly in sociology, but also jointly in a program with education and psychology with a specialization in social psychology. This was a time when structural-functionalism was slipping into decline and I became a strong symbolic interactionist believing this perspective contained the "truth" about social behavior. I took everything Herbert Blumer and Norman Denzin taught and Denzin chaired my dissertation committee. Anselm Strauss at UC San Francisco also helped considerably with my dissertation. I enjoyed courses with Phil Selznick and Neil Smelser has been an important influence as well. My time at Berkeley was well spent.

While in school, the sociology department at the University of Wyoming offered me a job and I took it because I wanted to live in the Mountain West. I volunteered to teach a course in medical sociology and having put a course together, found I had the basis for a book. I went on to publish a medical sociology textbook with Prentice-Hall in 1978. Fortunately, this book became the most widely-adopted text in the world on the subject, has been translated into Chinese and Spanish, and the ninth edition will be published in the summer of 2003. In the meantime, I joined the sociology department and medical school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975. In 1991, the University of Alabama at Birmingham offered me a great salary and the resources to pursue my research interests in return for helping build a Ph.D. program in medical sociology. We have over a dozen graduates and they all have good jobs.

My intellectual orientation has changed dramatically to embrace more of a macro view and apply it to structural influences on health lifestyles. Most of my research has been in Europe and more recently in the former socialist states of the old Soviet bloc. I have found the downturn in life expectancy under state socialism to be an important question and due more to social causes (unhealthy lifestyles of middle-age, working-class men) than medical factors. I have a book (Health and Social Change in Russia and Eastern Europe, Routledge, 1999) and several articles on the topic, and am now working with new data from several former Soviet republics from the Living Conditions, Lifestyles, and Health project funded by the European Union.