Rest in peace

Charles (Chuck) Tilly (who died yesterday) was one of the intellectual giants who towered over the New School for Social Research during my seven years as a grad student in residence there. I took several seminars with him and ultimately his then-wife – Louise Tilly – but not he – served (and in fact chaired) my dissertation committee. (He and Louise were two of several key leading scholars whose arrival at the New School soon before my arrival helped persuade donors to cough up the funds that paid my New School university fellowship and made the place a very exciting intellectual place at the time.) I learned a lot from his approach and ideas, dabbled in one of his datasets, and appreciated his drive (he worked from about 7 a.m. to about 10 p.m. with two meal breaks at the Center for the Studies of Social Change during the early 1990s while I was there – talking, teaching, writing, and especially reading) and his willingness to drop everything to talk with students and to attend to small things like making sure the coffee got made at the Center to keep that place going. I remember the nights I spent the night in the Center – either working or, ultimately, sleeping on the floor of my office – I worried because I rarely set the alarm – which might worry the Tillys when they came in – or because someone might walk in on my sleeping, as Louise once did. However, I occasionally butted heads with Chuck since I felt like a more cultural approach – which he tried to develop/embrace – was appropriate. But his unwillingness to put up with fuzzy concepts or false dichotomies and his determination to link grand theories with operationalizable concepts and empirical research are things I learned a lot from, and my own dissertation research started out as a (regional) three-way comparison much like one of his first grand projects, which he carried out with Louise and his brother.

(A turning point in my New School career came in my second year when the Tillys – directors of one of the two programs I was in but with whom I had had little contact because they were both on leave my first year – read an M.A. exam I wrote on proletarianization and the protoindustrialization hypothesis – which drew heavily on their work – and Chuck Tilly battled another intellectual giant in one of my departments, Andrew Arato, whose ideas are also throughout my dissertation but who I also found too intimidating (and perhaps doctrinaire) to ask to serve on my committee, defending what I had written against the charge that it (along with historical demography, one of the Tillys’ many subfields) was not “sociology.”) (Tilly also stood by his principles when – since much of work revolved around predicting revolutions – he consistently rebuffed CIA interest in his collaborating with him.) (Some of my most vivid memories of grad school – which I recount in my dissertation acknowledgments – are of watching the Soviet coup and Tiananmen Square events on the TV at the Center, along with that (bittersweet) 1992 Election night party when Tilly officially won the election pool (predicting who’d win what states) but everyone knew my friend Andrew had actually won (though disqualified because he was not part of the Center).)

Tilly was the only professor around who had a big grant-funded research project, which could get people jobs. He was also probably one of the few professors around who could get someone a teaching job with just a phone call. However, I liked working independently, I found him intimidating and questioned some of his approaches, and so I ultimately put together a dissertation committee of very smart people who I figured would give me guidance but leave me more on my own (and who didn’t intimidate me and whose ideas/approaches jibed more with mine). Louise chaired the committee, until health problems – health problems which worsened as Chuck left her – encouraged her to depart from the committee on the eve of my dissertation defense. (So Chuck Tilly never signed off on my dissertation research, and hesitated about making those calls for me – I asked once –without having done so.) I enjoyed my dissertation research, I met my immediate family, I’m proud of the research I’ve produced, but I spent a long time working on it (and amassed a big debt), I didn’t land the kind of academic job that would let me focus more on research, and I have ultimately (for now) gone into applied research. It’s hard to know whether many of those things would have changed had I clicked differently with Chuck (who if I remember right even took the time out to talk with me on the phone when I was a prospective New School grad student, mulling over going to that school or elsewhere).

While health problems encouraged Louise to retire (I visited her during my last full month in Illinois in 2004), Chuck has worked throughout tough bouts with cancer. I remember I got a post card from him around the time I saw Louise. I spent a few minutes watching/listening to a methodological presentation he gave at the sociology meetings in New York City this past summer (with hair loss no doubt due to cancer treatment), but I have not spoken with him for quite a while (of course, now I wish I'd taken the time to say hello and talk with him). A hard worker, a brilliant person, but a person who I found challenging to deal with (and whose decision to leave his wife made me wonder). Rest in peace, Chuck Tilly.