Remembering Todd Gitlin as PhD advisor and mentor

I met Todd in his first year at UC Berkeley, when he started as an assistant professor of sociology and mass communication – the new program he started – so many years ago that I almost don’t want to reveal the year. As a second-year graduate student, I had not yet honed in on a dissertation topic, nor an emphasis. Then, enter Todd. There was generalized excitement amongst the graduate students when Todd Gitlin joined the faculty at Berkeley, which to my recollection happened in the fall of 1979, when I believe he had just finished his dissertation working with William Kornhauser. That moment inaugurated what was then a new field of study for us pedestrian sociology students. We had not had media or culture as an area of sociology, there was no “sociology of culture” subsection, it was not yet an actual field within sociology.

Todd’s students were passionate media fans, as was I, and we had a weekly group to discuss media and readings about it (and to make each other dinner). That year our group took Todd to a Bruce Springsteen concert, which was quite an event. I remember that when joints were passed Todd refused to smoke, which was so remarkable – no one refused to smoke at that cultural moment, so it was odd. And I remember thinking, “OK, he’s going to be president someday,” or something. He just seemed to know something the rest of us didn’t, but that was always true.

I’ll never forget Todd’s first media sociology graduate seminar that year, with Herman Gray traveling up from UC Santa Cruz, as well as students from UCSF and all over the various academic departments at Berkeley. I especially remember the moment when fellow sociology graduate student Lisa Heilbronn (today a US State Department employee) covered the chalkboard with the Dallas family tree, explaining all the family connections to us. We were mesmerized. The idea that we were studying TV in the classroom was so entirely new. Todd was riveted as well. I don’t think he had realized the passion that could coalesce around popular culture; he remarked on it at that time, saying this was unlike any other seminar he had been in, that the enthusiasm and passion of the discussion was really noteworthy. One time I played an episode of I Love Lucy for the seminar; this one was all about Lucy trying to break out of the housewife role and enter showbiz. It was such a feminist discourse, and he turned to me and said, “Are they all like that?” Todd had not had the misspent youth that I had had, although where popular culture was concerned, he was, of course, certainly a child of the 60s. He regaled us with stories, like the one of the time Bob Dylan attended an SDS meeting, sitting in the back row and saying nothing until the end, when he said something like “Keep up the cool work guys!” – but I guess he never came back.

I had the privilege to serve as Todd’s research assistant when he wrote his pathbreaking television book Inside Prime Time. As he told it, armed only with UC Berkeley stationary (an armament in those days, I guess), he showed up in Los Angeles trying to get those involved in television production to talk to him, and to let him in on the inside of the production process. And it worked! He became friends with some of the main producers and directors involved in the production process – people like Steven Bochco, Greg Kozoll, and Gregory Hoblit, who were producing Hill Street Blues at the time. Its hand-held camera work made it by far the coolest show on television at the time. They all came to speak to us at Berkeley that year. It was very exciting.

Todd gave me explicit advice about the writing process. There was one I’ve always remembered and wished I had taken: “Begin writing before you’re done with the interviews.” It’s great advice, but it’s never easy to do – it’s much easier to put everything off, and think that the research process has a natural end … but of course it never actually has a natural end. His process enabled him to make important theoretical contributions to media sociology, work which remains relevant (and widely cited) in the early days of the field and in our own time. His piece “Prime Time Ideology” (Gitlin 1979) has guided the field of television studies either as a major influencer, or as a force that needs to be resisted. My own first book, Women Watching Television (Press1991), was written in his tradition. This prompted the Village Voice, in their review, to mention my “courage” – given the corpus of emerging television studies, which tended to celebrate popular culture – to talk instead about television as having had a pernicious influence on my own development. But the courage was actually an intellectual honesty that I had garnered from my association with Todd.

Particularly influential for me as a developing academic was Todd’s pathbreaking article “Media Sociology: The Dominant Paradigm” (Gitlin 1978). While some may consider his argument about the broad range of media influence being so overwhelming it cannot be meaningfully studiedtoo extreme – this was emblematic of Todd’s style, his rhetorical flourish. I came to respect the work of Elihu Katz, work which Todd explicitly targeted in this article as part of his broad-ranging critique of social science research. Still, Todd’s argument spoke to my own concerns about what we are all about in the academic enterprise. At some level we cannot lose sight of the fact that we can’t actually know what we are trying to know through academic methods. Unlike many academics, Todd never lost sight of that fact. So he always retained the ability to speak clearly and coherently, to use rhetoric effectively to make impassioned committed points about the media and our values as a society, even when his claims couldn’t be explicitly supported by academic research. This put him in an entirely different category from most of us, and ensured his role as an effective public intellectual force. In doing so, he became a model to which I’ve always aspired.

Todd would often generously give journalists my name if they wanted some feminist commentary. They’d call me and I’d say, “Well, you know, this research says this, and that research says that,” and they’d just hang up and call Todd again. He’d give them the one word that captured everything that they could use. It’s a rare talent to be able to use rhetoric so effectively, and to translate academic research into comprehensible and powerful public discourse. It also differentiated him from other giants in our field. Elihu Katz, as was discussed at the Elihu Katz preconference here [at ICA], was all about eschewing theories of large effects and small effects in favor of the contingent. But Todd was the spokesperson for the large, and you imagine them, as Sonia Livingstone was saying yesterday [at the preconference], arguing today at the pearly gates, since they both left us at about the same time. Perhaps they are continuing what had become a fruitful dialogue-one which defined the field of media sociology and informed the intellectual scene in which many of us here came of age.

I do take a little credit for his book, The Sixties (Giti 1993), but let me explain: Todd took me out to dinner the night he finished Inside Prime Time (Gitlin 1983). By the way, as those who knew him knew, Todd was very frugal – grad student dinners and beer gatherings always had a to-the-penny reckoning when the bill came, as I recall. (None of this crazy “you’re students, so I’ll pay” attitude that some professors have.) He had promised to take me to Chez Panisse, the famous Berkeley gourmet restaurant, very expensive – but it was Monday so it was, conveniently, closed. We went instead to the local Thai place. At that time I remember saying to him that people are always asking you about the sixties and truly, every single person when they met him would say “tell us about the sixties.” So, in less time than it took me to pack up and leave Berkeley for my first job, he wrote that book.

I was hired to caretake his house when his tenure letter came. He was on vacation in Crete, and I remember asking him in this bygone era of snail mail, “Do you want me to open the letter?” He said no, and we didn’t open the letter. When he came back, Todd found out he had gotten tenure, at which point I remember him saying, “Now, I’m going to write novels. That’s what they’re all afraid of.” And of course he did write several novels. And although he did publish novels, Todd did in later years reaffirm his commitment to the political. In this era of Todd’s life, I came to admire his courage, especially when he spoke out repeatedly against cancel culture. I’ll never forget his phrase, “the Right is taking over the White House, while the Left is taking over the English department” – an observation that’s become increasingly true in this current spate of culture wars, although in fact it seems the Left is now losing the English department as well. I also love this notion he put forth when we were together at Elihu Katz’ retirement conference in Jerusalem, where he coined the phrase “the public sphere has descended into sphericules.” This again illustrates his unique ability to distill complex academic concepts into pithy words and phrases suited to journalistic writing. I will miss Todd’s trenchant criticism. I think everyone will.