Remembering Todd Gitlin as teacher

A few days before Todd Gitlin died, I taught a session of his class, the “dissertation seminar” that he had taught every year since at least 2009 when I became a full-time professor at Columbia. Richard John and Andie Tucher coordinated the class (this was spring semester, 2022) and called on many of our PhD graduates to come in and discuss life as a doctoral student at Columbia. For the session I taught, I assigned “On Intellectual Craftsmanship,” C. Wright Mills’ (1999) celebrated appendix to The Sociological Imagination, as well as Todd’s own afterword to the 1999 re-issued volume. There Todd wrote that Mills was “a restless, engaged, engaging moralist, asking the big questions, keeping open the sense of what an intellectual’s life might be.” That could have been an epitaph for Todd himself and the role he played in the PhD program.

And that’s what I want to talk about now, Todd-as-teacher, letting our students, past and present, speak for themselves as they wrote in Todd’s memory on our PhD program listserv. I should say, with some embarrassment, I did not fully understand the magic of Todd as a teacher myself. I learned a lot from these tributes:

One of the first came from Danielle Tomson:

The beauty of studying with Todd was feeling like an insider to the gossip of the recent past. “Spilling tea” on great names during his office hours suddenly felt like you too could make your mark in time because you were in on the secret: that behind all of these words we study were just people—flawed, brilliant, ugly, beautiful, hedonistic, and human. Wrestling with that complex humanity feels timeless. The possibility of creating knowledge felt less daunting after talking with Todd and more like a higher calling, an act of devotion.

From Julia Sonnevend:

Whenever as a graduate student I visited Todd’s office, he was only interested in the big picture. What do I argue? What difference will this make? How could I understand an important piece of everyday life through thinking and writing? Meetings were never shorter than ninety minutes with him. He patiently followed my shifting interests. He was interested in all my classes—whether they were in sociology, communications, architecture or art history.

In my first year I was tempted to leave Columbia for Yale as there was a professor I was working with there. Todd’s method of keeping me in the program was taking me out for a glass of wine [to the local restaurant] Le Monde and telling me about Susan Sontag. He did not mention the choice I was facing even once in that conversation. It was a powerful method!

From Ali Raj:

Each week or so, doing an independent study last fall, Todd and I would sit in the tent outside and talk about everything under the sun. He did for me what he did for so many of us in the department with such remarkable ease—putting faith in our work, giving us hope and making us believe that everything will be alright. Our last conversation in retrospect seems almost like a farewell, like he knew that he was going. We spoke at great lengths about being children of parents and grandparents who were forced to migrate in difficult circumstances … . It was a version of Todd I had never seen before, so vulnerable and innocent and pure. I will cherish those moments spent with him for the rest of my life.

From Efrat Nechushtai:

Todd was such a giant, and at the same time, so incredibly generous and warm. I remember many wonderful conversations in his office on media, history, politics, art (and then politics again) … I never ceased to feel ridiculously lucky for being able to talk with him regularly. Yet somehow, Todd made you feel like he had all the time in the world for you.

Todd did not have all the time in the world. None of us do. But he did keep reminding his students, not to mention his colleagues, of the big questions and he kept open for all of us a sense of what an intellectual’s life might be.