Obituaries/Transitions
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Obituaries/Transitions will remain posted for 1 year.
Ellen Pence
Ellen Pence (1948-2012) was a scholar and a social activist. She co-founded the Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project, an inter-agency collaboration model used in all 50 states in the U.S. and more than 17 countries. A leader in both the battered women's movement and the emerging field of institutional ethnography, she was the recipient of numerous awards including the 2008 Society for the Study of Social Problems Dorothy E. Smith Scholar Activist Award for significant contributions in a career of activist research.
Known for her generosity, quick wit and sense of humor, Ellen learned from battered women and has worked with and trained thousands of professionals in the domestic violence field. Her work with men who batter is the basis of DAIP's Creating a Process of Change for Men Who Batter.
Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Pence graduated from St. Scholastica in Duluth with a B.A. She was active in institutional change work for battered women since 1975, and helped found the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project in 1980.
She is credited with creating the Duluth Model of intervention in domestic violence cases, Coordinated Community Response (CCR), which uses an interagency collaborative approach involving police, probation, courts and human services in response to domestic abuse. The primary goal of CCR is to protect victims from ongoing abuse.
Pence received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Toronto in 1996. She used institutional ethnography as a method of organizing community groups to analyze problems created by institutional intervention in families.
She founded Praxis International in 1998 and was the chief author and architect of the Praxis Institutional Audit, a method of identifying, analyzing and correcting institutional failures to protect people drawn into legal and human service systems because of violence and poverty.
Ellen died of breast cancer on January 6, 2012.
(Posted 1/6/2012)
Raymond W. Mack
Raymond W. Mack, a former provost at Northwestern University who in 1968 was a founder of the University’s Center for Urban Affairs, now the Institute for Policy Research (IPR), died Aug. 25 in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 84.
“It’s hard to imagine anyone who has had such enduring influence on race relations and urban policy as Ray Mack,” said John McKnight, the first associate director of the Center for Urban Affairs and professor emeritus of communication studies. “His disciples are everywhere building on the foundation he provided us. We are academics, activists, socially oriented business people, appointed and elected officials -- each a grateful part of Ray Mack’s legacy.”
A professor of sociology for 40 years and a highly regarded expert on race relations and inequality, Mack also will be remembered as a transformative administrator -- as well as a “pretty good drummer.”
Mack, who served as provost under President Robert Strotz, was a key leader in founding and supporting many of the University’s early interdisciplinary programs and centers.
“Building upon the foundation laid by Payson Wild, his predecessor as provost, Mack worked to bring Northwestern into the top group of American research universities,” said John Margolis, professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and former dean of Northwestern University in Qatar. “His own scholarship led him to nurture interdisciplinary teaching and research that have become hallmarks of Northwestern. Beneath his consistently jolly public face was a scholar and administrator of deep principle and uncompromisingly high standards.”
He also was a knowledgeable jazz aficionado.
“Ray Mack was a pretty good drummer, a very good sociologist and the world’s greatest university administrator,” said Howard Becker, professor of sociology at Northwestern from 1965 to 1991. “He was smart, sensitive, fair and always worked to get things done in a way that advanced the common good.”
After Mack helped found the Center for Urban Affairs in 1968, he became its first director. For the first time, researchers from a number of disciplines around the University came together under one roof at Northwestern to understand the real-world sources and consequences of urban poverty and problems. The center was founded, Mack recalls, because “we needed to be addressing urban problems and expediting teaching, research and action on those issues, something not easily done within a departmental framework.”
“Ray Mack transformed the social sciences at Northwestern University,” said Andrew Gordon, a faculty member at Northwestern for 19 years and professor emeritus of public affairs at the University of Washington. “From the time of his elevation to chair of the sociology department, he pursued the twin goals of excellence and relevance uncompromisingly, earning respect for his efforts and talents throughout the University -- and the world.
“Of all the many urban research centers founded with support from the Ford Foundation in the late 1960s, Northwestern’s Center for Urban Affairs, now IPR, is by far the most successful and longest surviving -- due almost entirely to the design implemented so skillfully by Ray Mack. He was one of a kind, and he will be missed, including by many who benefit from his legacy but do not know his name.”
Mack joined the Northwestern faculty in 1953. He was director of the Center for Urban Affairs from 1968 to 1971. Mack served as the University’s vice president and dean of faculties from 1971 until 1974 when he became Northwestern’s provost. In 1987, Mack left administrative work and returned to full-time teaching and research. He retired from the University in 1992.
Mack wrote numerous articles and reviews for professional journals, especially on topics relating to social class, race relations, industrial conflict and occupational specialization. He also wrote, co-authored or edited several books: “Sociology and Social Life” (with Kimball Young, 1959), “Principles of Sociology: A Reader in Theory and Research” (also with Kimball Young, 1960), “Race, Class and Power” (1963) and “Social Change in Developing Areas” (1965).
Mack received an A.B. degree from Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, in 1949. He received his M.A. (1951) and his Ph.D. (1953) from the University of North Carolina. Mack taught briefly at the University of Mississippi before joining the faculty of Northwestern.
Mack is survived by his wife, Ann; son, Donald (wife Susan); daughters Meredith, Margaret Hart (husband Allen) and Julia (partner Debbie Hill); two grandchildren; and his sister, Betty Mack (partner Carol Taylor).
A memorial service will be held at a later date. In lieu of flowers, donations in Mack’s name can be made to the Chicago Urban League, where he was a board member. The address is 4510 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60653.
Published in the News Center of Northwestern University. Written by Megan Fellman
(Posted 8/30/2011)
James B. Wozniak
James B. Wozniak, age 68, of Toledo, passed away at home on Sunday, May 22, 2011. He was born on September 26, 1943, in Toledo, OH, to Ollie and Irene (Gomolski) Wozniak. A graduate of the University of Toledo, James taught in colleges in Indiana and Pennsylvania. He also worked for many years as a sales consultant in the Menswear Department of both the Lion Store and Dillards Department Store. A member of the Toledo Opera Association, he supported the Toledo Symphony as well. James enjoyed getting together with friends in the Tuesdays Men's Group. He was a parishioner of St. Pius X Catholic Church. James is survived by his special cousin, Corinne Burzynski and numerous other cousins; good friend, David Macy; and many other friends in the community. His parents, Ollie and Irene, preceded him in death. Please view and share condolences and memories at www.sujkowski.com
Published in Toledo Blade from May 25 to May 26, 2011
(Posted 6/23/2011)
Egon Bittner
Egon Bittner was born in 1921 in Silesia, a part of central Europe which was then in Czechoslovakia, but which at different moments in Egon's youth had been Polish and German. Egon was from a Jewish community decimated by the Holocaust, and he was a rare survivor. It is hard to know whether his extraordinary generosity, compassion, modesty, and ability to recognize and live with difference and diversity came from this upbringing or this horrible experience, but these were among the qualities that family, friends, and colleagues cherished. These were also the qualities that made him an extraordinary social scientist. Egon loved books, ideas, reflecting on the complexity of human behavior, and was inhabited by the skepticism of received wisdoms that truly probing minds must possess.
That Egon became a sociologist was no accident, therefore. He had a vocation to comprehend and analyze the mysteries of lives in societies. He devoured and internalized the corpus of sociological theory. Conversations with him were adventures in intellectual history. It was his reading of this corpus that led him towards phenomenology and eventually ethnomethodology and to the University of California at Los Angeles where he did his PhD with Donald Cressey. Ethnomethodology is a complex enterprise, but its premises are, in the words of Anne Rawls, "... that the meaningful, patterned, and orderly character of everyday life is something that people must work constantly to achieve, then one must also assume that they have some methods for doing so" and that "... members of society must have some shared methods that they use to mutually construct the meaningful orderliness of social situations" (Rawls, in Harold Garfinkel<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Garfinkel> (2002), Ethnomethodology's Program (New York: Rowman and Littlefield), 5. This approach, which combined reverence for and skepticism of existing social theory, sought the micro-foundations of social life.
Egon joined the Brandeis Sociology faculty in the late 1960s, a moment of extraordinary political and intellectual turbulence. His questioning, calming, reflective, and tolerant presence was central to the department's navigation through these complicated times. As Harry Coplan Professor of the Social Sciences, he taught numerous undergraduates, mentored doctoral students and, more generally, led the department on a quest for new approaches. As chair of what was occasionally a fractious group of colleagues he nourished cooperation through magnanimity, understanding, respect for difference, and a wonderfully whimsical sense of humor. As a distinguished member of the broader Brandeis community he was known as a bastion of sophisticated rationality with a deep belief in the Brandeis mission and its vital importance to the society beyond it.
Egon was active in the sociology profession and served, among other positions, as president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. His presidential address to the SSSP in 1982, which reflected on the implications of computers for human futures, was a classic of the genre. Among sociologists he was best known for studies of the relationships between police and society. These studies, which elegantly bracketed conventional stereotypes of the police, including those of the social sciences, proceeded from, but were not limited by ethnomethodogical premises and led Egon and many of his students to cruise about in squad cars and hang out in police stations to gather data. Among his many publications on police-society relationships are The Functions of the Police in Modern Society (1970), Aspects of Police Work (1990), The Capacity to Use Force as the Core of the Police Role (1985), Florence Nightingale in Pursuit of Willie Sutton A Theory of the Police (1974), and The Police on Skid Row (1967). (For further information see Wikipedia entry.) Egon knew that the use of force was the unavoidable basis of most police work and that professional discretion and sensitivity were essential for this to be acceptable. His research sought the behavioral bases of the uses and abuses of this application of force. The results were profoundly humanist as well as empirically useful. His new ways of understanding how police roles might be better conceived were recognized by scholars and police professionals themselves. His contributions to police scholarship earned him the Police Executive Research Forum Leadership Award, for example. Egon also served as commissioner in the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA) from 1979 to 1988. In recognition of the importance of his work, CALEA established the Egon Bittner Award, annually presented to leading police executive officers in recognition of distinguished service in law enforcement. Egon's sociological writings on police work remain a benchmark for today's scholars researching the police.
Egon retired from Brandeis in 1991 and then moved, with his beloved wife Jean, to the Bay Area to be closer to his children Debora Seys and Tom Bittner and enjoy life in a corner of the world that he loved. He died there May 7, 2011. Egon was a profound scholar from whom many learned by reading his work, in his classes, and conversing. Oftentimes, after engaging him on the simplest of issues, one emerged, after reflection, with new ways of apprehending and understanding very large parts of the world. He was also modest, an attribute which probably kept him from becoming one of paramount stars of contemporary sociology, a status reserved for more aggressive individuals. It was this modesty that made him all the more approachable and attractive, however. He was a renowned and beloved PhD advisor and a terrific colleague. He will be deeply missed. Our sympathy goes first to Jean and his family, but we are all bereft at his loss.
(Posted 5/25/2011)
