![]() His classroom demeanor was intense and demanding-and what serious students wanted. Tom also channeled his devotion to research into a passion for teaching. Tom also served on Committee A of the Association of American University Professors from 1993 to 1996, which takes action on that organization’s most basic purpose: the defense of academic freedom. Tom played a central role in developing the faculty-run process for addressing severe sanctions against Rice faculty, including terminations. For more than a decade, he challenged the place of athletics at Rice, which also involved deeper questions about the university’s admissions practices and its allocation of funds. In all of these roles, Tom was not afraid to make people uncomfortable by raising difficult questions. As a member of Rice’s faculty, Tom served as chair of the Department of History, as speaker of the Faculty Council, and as the director of the university’s Center for the Study of Cultures (now Humanities Research Center). ![]() He was a founding member of the Intellectual History Group, which now publishes the journal Modern Intellectual History. Tom was an invaluable citizen of the community of scholars. This essay also lent its title to the collection of Tom’s writings published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1998. This commitment was perhaps best expressed in an essay from 1990, “Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Rhetoric Versus Practice in Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream,” which offered a defense of the search for truth, regardless of consequences, and argued that this search, properly understood, need not slight moral concerns. Underlying all of Tom’s arguments was a commitment to put the search for truth first. Tom also took on arguments that viewed the anti-slavery movement as a functional defense of capitalism, suggesting instead that anti-slavery campaigns primarily originated out of a humanitarian ethos that gestated in free-market capitalism. It was piece that set him at odds with some feminist historians, whom he criticized for putting political goals above historical truth. In an article (co-authored with Sanford Levinson) from the 1980s, Tom criticized the reliance on statistics to make a case for a history of discrimination in a landmark class action suit against Sears regarding women’s employment. His sharp, critical interventions continued in other arenas. It was as a contributor to the New York Review of Books that Tom made his first mark in scholarship, writing a critique of Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross in 1974 and offering his assessment of the debate sparked by the book in 1975. His dissertation, later published as The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority, continues to be cited today. He entered graduate school in the history program at Stanford University, where he completed his PhD in 1973. ![]() He served in the United States Navy from 1961 to 1965 as executive officer of a minesweeper in Japan and as a naval adviser in the early years of the Vietnam War. He attended Princeton University, from which he graduated summa cum laude in 1961. He had taught at the university since 1970, where he was a thought-provoking scholar, inspiring teacher, and a leader in faculty governance. ![]() McCann Professor Emeritus of History at Rice University, died on July 12, 2017, at the age of 78. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |