Alumni Book

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

I arrived in Berkeley in 1967. I felt I had little in common with the other graduate students: I had just turned 21, while they seemed much older; I had spent my life in the Midwest, but they all seemed to comefrom one coast or the other; and they dismissed my liberal politics as wrongheaded. I had a fellowship in John Clausen's NIMH training program, which became my home within the department. Changes in the draft law had made my situation precarious; I rushed to complete my course work and my oral exams. In 1969, I resigned my fellowship and started teaching full-time.

The Berkeley department had been admitting dozens of graduate students each year, but graduating only a handful of Ph.D.s. It allowed great freedom--if you loved sociology and had a sense of direction, there were tremendous opportunities. The disadvantage, of course, was that you were on your own; most of us did not get much mentoring.

I have followed a fairly standard academic career. While at Berkeley, I became interested in deviance, and most of my research has centered around deviance and social problems. Currently, I am working on what I expect will be my 14th book. In working with my graduate students, I try to give them the sort of freedom I was granted, yet provide considerably more coaching than I received.

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.

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!

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.