Alumni Book

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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).

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 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.

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.

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.

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.