This page has been created as a space to share tributes and memories about Professor Hayden White.
Use the comments section of this post to add your own remembrances of Professor White.
Honoring Hayden White
This page has been created as a space to share tributes and memories about Professor Hayden White.
Use the comments section of this post to add your own remembrances of Professor White.
Dear all,
It’s just too hard to believe that the one we called the Great White Daddy is gone!
He was such an inspiration, not just intellectually but politically — he was more out there than many of MY contemporaries — and always generous and respectful in terms of the way he conducted relations with staff and students.
In tears,
Zoe Sofoulis
(Graduated 1988)
Hayden. He was a storied fellow. For my generation of HISCON students, I remind of the tale on October 17, 1989 as we sat with him in Theory and Methods. Hayden pronounced to us that “history is dead”. It was his last comment to the class. He left and we all sat quietly absorbing when suddenly at 5:01pm the Loma Prieta Earthquake hit and the Kresge building we were holding class in swayed mightily while Teresa stood in the doorway and Will Roscoe and I shouted to our peers, “get under the tables!!”
may he travel in peace.
Ilene ( Feinman) (grad 1997)
Tears still streaming.
In case you did not know …
While a Ucla faculty member, he brought a lawsuit as sole plaintiff against the LAPD: “… This case set the standard that determines the limits of legal police surveillance of political activity in California; police cannot engage in such surveillance in the absence of reasonable suspicion of a crime …” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayden_White
Sharon Traweek, 1982
Hayden shaped my whole career. He taught at Wesleyan when I was an undergrad. I never had a class with him then, but he was so impressive to everyone I knew who did take his courses that when I heard he had left Wesleyan for HistCon, I followed him there. With Donna Haraway and Jim Clifford, he made HistCon into an intellectual powerhouse, unique in the world.
We were never close, yet I had a sweet email from him in 2012 congratulating me on a book prize – typical of his generous spirit.
I’ll never forget that twangy Michigan accent or his specialty, the terse crack, always delivered with a sardonic grin. I remember him giving the keynote at a conference on William Blake. Opening line, delivered in exactly that sardonic tone: “I don’t like Blake.” Classic Hayden.
Or the time in Theory and Methods, teaching with Jack Schaar, when he opened a session with “Jack, you fascist pig…”
– Paul N. Edwards, 1988
Paul’s stories remind me of a few I have been thinking about all day, with fondness and sadness.
At the 30th anniversary of Metahistory event, in 2003, Hayden became predictably irritated with the accolades and tributes to him, and went off on a little tirade, starting off with, “I became a Marxist at 7”
in narrating the early years at Santa Cruz, how he and other men were challenged by feminist interventions into the curriculum and elsewhere…
“so, I became a feminist…” the crowd leans in, feeling good, we helped Hayden become a feminist!
pause….. “well and then I became a lesbian”
Later my spouse, who had only known Hayden through his writing, said to me, you never told me he was like a marxist stand up comedian…
Marita Sturken
In thanking him in the acknowledgements of my Racial Situations book, I referred to him as Original Hillbilly because he grew up in the poor Detroit neighborhood where I did fieldwork on urban Appalachians. He somehow managed to get into Wayne State University and studied Medieval poetry—about as far as he could get from his hillbilly roots as possible. But yes, that “Michigan twang” remained as did his crotchety delight at assailing pretense. He remained a cantankerous product of Detroit through all of his academic adventures and I’ve been missing him terribly for some time,
John (Hartigan)
Hi all, in our grieving Histcon networks,
Thanks for words like cantankerous and crotchety, John and Paul, reminding me of his sharp side. I guess the ‘respect’ I referred to was more about how he was with students. Did not work through intimidation or shaming etc. and I felt he took our intellectual endeavours seriously.
There will never be such a Captain Hermeneutics again!
Zoe
A community in grief, one created by Hayden, grand daddy of that remarkable program we were so fortunate to be a part of. I love the memories of Hayden’s manner of teasing and poking and learning how to adapt. The anecdote about “Then I became a lesbian” is hilarious. I remember the parties he and Margaret used to throw my first year in Hist Con—at their house where I danced with Donna and Jim and we all engaged in ritual face painting— not a bad way to get to know your professors. And Hayden set that tone.
Thyrza Godeve
Thanks to this grieving Histcon network for sharing memories of both Hayden’s sharp edges as well as some of his more hilarious moments. As a fearless Big Daddy he and the other faculty helped shape the unlikely and somewhat unruly direction of our academic lives. I love Zoe’s comment that “There will never be a Captain Hermeneutics again!” Touché! He will be terribly missed.
Lisa (Bloom)
Dear all,
What I remember most is feeling so lost and out of place in my first year at HistCon and walking into Hayden’s office to be met with amazing warmth and interest. He was the most inspiring teacher and a dear, dear man.
love to all,
Laura Chernaik
I am very sad to think Hayden has left us. He was a complex and inspiring teacher. I was lucky to TA for Hayden (with Che) and still remember his vulnerable delight in teaching his first undergraduate course in years. Hayden also, in his capacity as Universal Life minister, was gracious enough to do the legal paperwork when TV Reed and I were married. His intro seminar with Jack was an amazing initiation to HistCon! He will be much missed.
Noël Sturgeon
Here’s something extraordinary — shared by an old Santa Cruz friend on FB.
Hayden also was the plaintiff in White v. Davis, which put a stop to police employing undercover agents who posed as students at UCLA in order to gather “intelligence” on students and faculty in the early 1970s. The holding in this case helped to shore up freedom of expression and consolidate the right of privacy in California.
Here’s the website: https://law.justia.com/…/supreme-court/3d/13/757.html
So grateful for the comfort of our shared memories.
What an incredible, irreverent mind evidenced in all of these posts–uttering “History is dead,” followed by an earthquake; coming out as a lesbian; starting a keynote on Blake with “I don’t like Blake”; commencing a seminar with “Jack, you fascist pig…”
Nearly every day of teaching and thinking feels shaped by what I learned in a semiotics seminar with Hayden (Captain Hermeneutics!), in which he shared his sharp quip of describing the power of signs as conveying various “effects”–for example, “the truth effect.” (How I would like to discuss with him what is happening with ‘fake news’ right now, and the ‘news effect’… )
In 2010, Chela, Zoe, Sharon T. and I interviewed Hayden to fill out our interviews of HoC faculty and students following Donna’s retirement. How incredibly generous he was, opening his home and giving us his time. Zoe and I subsequently spent hours with him on Skype from Australia, in a follow-up discussion about how we might shape this opus on the HoC legacy.
I learned this news early yesterday, and filled with grief, had to carry on to teaching–and ironically, we were reading my first published essay which acknowledges Hayden, who was among the first to read it and provide encouragement in 1987.
I’ve been dreading this news for some time, and the last 36 hours so filled with grief. As one of us remarked: “Hard to believe that brilliance dies.”
I take heart, knowing we all carry on his revolutionary and generous spirit in countless ways.
Love, Megan (Boler)
PS. While researching material related to Hayden’s influence while we were doing the interviews, I came upon the Stanford UP book Refiguring Hayden White (2009) which is so rich. I recommend this chapter on his pedagogy and philosophies, which echoes the portrait of Hayden we all describe:
http://www.staff.amu.edu.pl/~ewa/Domanska,%20Hayden%20White%20An%20Academic%20Teacher.pdf
“Thus…there is no “school of Hayden White” because the knowledge he disseminates is supposed to liberate his students as coworkers rather than restrain them. White does not want his students to absorb and apply his theories but to develop their own approaches and modes of expression. HistCon is a proof of this attitude.
Hayden White has many independent disciples who continue and extend his mode of studying history and also, more importantly, his way of thinking about people and the world, as well as his way of teaching. Above all, White teaches his students how to rebel, so that in the future they can create a world in which human beings can be themselves. White approaches education as the practice of freedom.”
A few weeks into our second quarter history and methods, Hayden and I were talking during our break. I told him how much I thought of him as a teacher, something like “You are a wonderful teacher.” He replied, “You may not think so in a few weeks.” To which I instantly replied, “That won’t change what I am saying now.”
He managed to accept the compliment without deflecting it.
Why is it I remember these in the main moments and fewer of the theory discussions? Working the semiotic square/s for my dissertation/book was unforgettable. He told me only a few people in the world could really run those squares. True. But I managed to get some of my classes to really absorb them, not that I am one of those few. Without him to help, I make huge logical mistakes.
If humans don’t manage to destroy the planet for themselves, Hayden will be given his due in greater and greater doses as time goes on.
Crying all through this second day.
Ramona (Fernandez)
Thanks, all, for your emails here.
They have been a balm to a very particular feeling of loss.
I fell in love with Hayden’s work in my master’s at Tufts, and when I got to HistCon he was already emeritus, but I met with him a few times and he chaired my “Koalafication” exam (thanks Sheila for that sticker board! Wherever did it go?).
I have three memories that have kept coming back to me over these past few days, two actual and one perhaps apocryphal.
I remember interviewing him at length on the history of the history of consciousness during my 3rd year. He was generous, interesting, and exciting to be around. I have to dig out that recording. If I find it, I would be happy to share it.
I remember his final “Classic Hayden” question to me, after hours of defending my thesis: “So Natalie…why feminism?”
I didn’t know what to say.
In one fell swoop, he pointed out my big blind spot — the assumption of feminism and feminist theory as a “good” — and incited me to deepen and strengthen my articulation of feminist theorypractice in ways that changed my writing from then on.
I also have a memory of being told a story about Hayden (as HistCon students loved to do, passing down the oral histories). The story is of Hayden teaching the Interpretation of Dreams and, as a pedagogical move, ripping the book up in front of the class.
Was anyone on this list in that class? Is it true? It has become a story I like to share when discussing passionate unconventional pedagogy, but I’ve never known if it actually happened.
Natalie (Loveless)