My father, Dan Clawson, died unexpectedly early Tuesday morning, May 7, to my enormous grief. As yet my heart is too shattered to say anything very coherent or personal about him, but I wanted to share with this community a few things other people have said about him as both a left academic and an activist and organizer, and some key insights from him on both fronts.
First, though, he did pop up at Daily Kos a few times. His diary about being arrested at Occupy made the reclist in 2011, and if you remember way back to 2007 when former George W. Bush chief of staff and Iraq War salesman Andrew Card was booed for nearly two minutes as he was given an honorary degree at the University of Massachusetts commencement, well, my dad helped organize that protest. (For the record, he was staunchly in favor of debate and free speech and wouldn’t have tried to drown out Card giving an ordinary speech—the protest was of Card being honored by the university. Though he probably would have done some informational picketing outside a Card speech.)
Within literally the last week of his life, my father helped organize UMass departments to defend academic freedom by co-sponsoring a student-led event on Palestine that was facing opposition by outside groups, and he attended the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, where he was an executive committee member. As the Public Higher Education Network of Massachusetts, of which he was a founder, described his involvement:
Most fundamentally, Dan was an organizer. He never sought the limelight, but rather built and promoted organizations, caucuses, movements and candidates he thought could help support an “upsurge” in militant social justice movements, especially those rooted in labor unions. Just days before he died, he was busy helping elect progressive candidates at MTA’s Annual Meeting, and helping to pass a call for a national strike for the Green New Deal.
As much as he was an activist, though, he was a scholar and teacher—bringing the same class analysis and concern for justice to teaching and research as he did to organizing for change. His books included Unequal Time: Gender, Class, and Family in Employment Schedules (2014, with Naomi Gerstel); The Future of Higher Education (2012, with Max Page); The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements (2003); Families at Work: Expanding the Bounds (2002, edited with Naomi Gerstel and Robert Zussman); Dollars and Votes: How Business Campaign Contributions Subvert Democracy (1998, with Alan Neustadtl and Mark Weller); and Bureaucracy and the Labor Process: The Transformation of U.S. Industry 1860-1920 (1980).
Drawing on that recent research about work schedules, class, and gender, he and Naomi Gerstel connected struggles over paid sick leave and family leave, “just in time” scheduling, and more, pointing out that U.S. workers have gone from working similar hours to European workers in 1960 to working hundreds of hours a year more now.
Today, struggles over work time are more defensive than offensive. Some workers want more hours, while others want fewer. Still others are campaigning for paid family leave.
People don’t always understand these struggles as connected. But we see a principle that underlies them all: everyone wants more say over when and how much they work.
As a teacher, ”I appreciate his compassion for students, especially those who have not had quite as linear paths,” said one of his colleagues, Prof. Sancha Medwinter. “I felt like HE really got it. He understood how important a mission it is to ensure that students who come from impoverished or working class backgrounds needed to get through so that they can be a resource to their communities. He got that.”
That spirit of concern and connection and building power ran through virtually everything he did. After a victory in the election to replace the term-limited Barbara Madeloni, the insurgent Massachusetts Teachers Association president instrumental in changing education politics in the state, and in whose original campaign my father had been critical, he wrote about seeing a movement coming into its own:
The postelection gathering/celebration was the most remarkable event I’ve encountered in more than fifty years of left movement activity. Joyous? Absolutely. Affirming? Without a doubt. But it was more than that. There was a sense that we supported each other, cared for each other, grew with each other. And it was not just the inner circle of 2014; there were sixty or seventy or eighty people in the room, including a great many who were largely unknown to the “old guard” of [Educators for a Democratic Union]. After the opening remarks, a series of people took turns to pay tribute to one or another of their fellow members. What began as a single testimonial couldn’t be stopped, as person after person had to have their say, creating a justified sense that five, ten, twenty, forty, a hundred people had made vital contributions to our victory, were central to building our movement, were loved by others, and in turn supported others.
All left feeling joyous, supported, eager to continue, wishing that this or that other person had been there. Any movement that doesn’t create at least the shadow of that — any analysis that doesn’t factor that in — is the poorer for it.
More recently, many professors at Hampshire College, which had been in danger of closing, credit my father’s organizing training as a key factor in their promising drive to save the college. You can hear more about that on this episode of The Bill Newman Show and in the Daily Hampshire Gazette.
He leaves a heartbroken family and many friends.