Paul Stevenson Gray: A Teacher, Mentor, Friend, and Icon of Engaged Scholarship
Paul S. Gray standing next to the author (holding a flower bouquet), and panel of faculty members from the Sociology Department at Boston College, May 2002
We remember those who meant much more to us than we realize only when they pass.
Paul Stevenson Gray is one of those. He held a light to my life for three years as a graduate student. He was the chair of my dissertation committee in grad school while I was pursuing my PhD in Sociology. I was his teaching assistant for an undergraduate course, Sociology of the Third World.
No one could have taught the course better than Paul. He lived in Ghana in West Africa for a year for his doctoral fieldwork. After that, he returned to Yale to write his dissertation on Ghana's trade unions. He delved into the world of trade union leaders and members to illustrate how social conflicts are engendered by the processes of modernization in many countries of the Global South, which was then referred to as the Third World.
I pored through the manuscript of his dissertation at the O'Neill Library at Boston College to appreciate his understanding of development from an African lens. It was all of 582 double-spaced typewritten pages --- a kind of Jurassic Park document in the age of computerized technology. Many of the microfilm-captured pages were off-center. The minuscule Pica font brought Paul's writing into non-squinting view through a knob that turned counterclockwise. I read portions of them in the library during the late autumn afternoons before our class. I joked about the leftward tilt of my head, not to mention an oncoming stiff neck after I finished reading all two volumes of his dissertation. He recommended Yoga. "Free classes on campus," he joked in return.
His guiding hand was firm though collegial. My quest for a Ph.D. took too long to remember the painstaking journey towards appending those three letters to my name. Paul appreciated the pursuit. He was determined to see me to the finish line. He knew this was my unfinished business, an identity quest that would culminate in the three-hour thesis defense on a May morning in 2002. Completing my doctorate after a circuitous route through three universities was an academic marathon that Paul was committed to see to the end, for me. He did.
But not before he admonished me on a bitterly cold February morning in 2002. I lay in bed for days, unable to get up, less for the biting winter winds that Boston is famous for, but for the grief that engulfed me with the death of my father. Sorrow had paralyzed me. I was losing steam again.
Paul phoned me mid-morning. His voice was sympathetic, even against the background of dark grey clouds and my dank mood. But he was also purposeful. Either I go on academic leave and return home to grieve with my family, he said, or seek grief therapy that would help me cope, and move forward, however slow, to embrace the loss and befriend the emotional abyss that my father's death left behind. That was his bargain.
I did twelve weeks of counseling on campus --- a firm commitment to show up three times weekly. Each hour-long conversation lifted the clouds. My writing proceeded apace. I gave lectures with Paul to our undergraduates, graded and commented on their papers, administered final exams, wrote my dissertation, and did the final defense to a panel of three faculty members, an audience of friends, classmates, and visiting family. And cried aplenty in between, quietly, privately, far from the campus and the classroom. Paul was right: grief is love that has nowhere to go. Mine found a place, somewhat awkwardly, on the first page of my dissertation, which I dedicated to my father.
In the years after I left Boston, Paul would reappear intermittently. He wrote glowing recommendation letters, nudged me about turning my dissertation into a book, and, of late, commented on my blog. He became a reader and a follower of Asian Stories.
Until two days ago. Now, it is time to grieve again. Paul passed away from a prolonged illness. Some 46 colleagues who knew Paul coalesced on Gmail to express sadness at his passing. There was, before his demise, a plan for an October reunion in Boston.
Perhaps it may still happen. He won't be there as intended, but it will be the occasion to gather Paul's kindred spirits, those of us who came under his wing, those whom he fashioned into sociologists committed to a higher purpose beyond obtaining the coveted title next to our names.
I look back to two decades of Paul's silent though enduring presence in my life. As always, he was a champion and a cheerleader, someone who urged me to carry the flame for sociology as engaged scholarship. Knowledge, he said, was never neutral but always contested. Sociology was not only a craft but also a vocation.
The sociology department at Boston College has always championed global justice. This was their rallying cry and the organizing theme for all their courses. Every faculty member I met during my tenure as a grad student wore their invisible badge as a critical sociologist: by interrogating the social world through the inequities of race, class, and gender; by examining one's positioning in this vast grid of human interrelationships punctuated by social hierarchies, cleavages, divisions, and dissensions; by practicing reflexivity; and by using our knowledge to speak truth to power, to change the world, one corner at a time.
In my long career as an educator, I cannot adequately repay my intellectual debt to Paul Gray. Except perhaps to carry the torch he left with us, his advisees, and students. In time, we will do the same. Across the globe, in numerous sociology classrooms for many more years ahead, Paul Gray will live through us.
He has taken leave and gone to rest. May he fly with the angels.
An Irish poem shared by one of our colleagues who described it as a “most loving and evocative statement about loss” is a tribute to Paul.
A most beautiful tribute to love, work, and loss. I am grateful to Tess for naming the loss, to her mentor and friend, Paul Stevenson Gray, and to the melancholic purveyor of lost worlds and love, John O' Donohue.