Download IN MEMORIAM Sheldon Messinger

IN MEMORIAM
Sheldon Messinger
Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt Professor of Law, Emeritus
UC Berkeley
1925 – 2003
Sheldon (Shelly) L. Messinger was born in Chicago on August 26, 1925. He was afflicted with a number of
serious ailments in his latter years, although he remained active almost to the end. He died of leukemia in
Berkeley on March 6, 2003.
Messinger was raised in the Hyde Park area on Chicago’s south side and enrolled at the University of
Chicago, but his undergraduate career was interrupted by military service in World War II; he served in the
army in Italy with distinction. After the war he found himself in Los Angeles, where he worked as a liquor
salesman and a car bumper protector salesman up and down the southern California coast. Eventually he
enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) under the GI Bill, graduated with a B.A. in
sociology in 1951, and then stayed on for graduate study. He spent academic year 1956-57 at the Center for
Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, he
was part of an interdisciplinary group that studied women hospitalized for mental illness and their families.
Following this he joined the research staff of the California Department of Corrections.
He came to the University of California, Berkeley in 1961, at the invitation of Philip Selznick, and helped him
found the Center for the Study of Law and Society, which over the next decade supported interdisciplinary
scholarship in the law and the social sciences. He eventually completed his dissertation and received his Ph.D.
in 1969. In 1970 he was appointed professor in the School of Criminology and almost immediately was
named its dean. His tenure as dean was a stormy one. Several faculty members in the school were active in
the antiwar movement, and Shelly had the unenviable task of brokering conflicts between them and campus
officials. A short time later the School of Criminology was disestablished, and he had the likewise unenviable
task of presiding over its dissolution. Not surprisingly, this generated deep divisions and intense feelings of
anger. That Shelly continued to be respected — indeed, admired — by almost everyone involved in this
controversy, is testimony to his many abilities and fine character. Shelly went on to help establish and become
a founding member of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program
housed in the School of Law, served effectively on and off as its chair, and supervised the dissertation work
of a number of students, including two of the undersigned.
Shelly’s dissertation, “Strategies of Control,” though unpublished, was widely read, and deeply influenced
two generations of scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. Drawing on his work on mental hospitals and
prisons, his thesis and still earlier publications anticipated Erving Goffman’s (and Foucault’s) writings on
“total institutions” by many years. Indeed, this work anticipated themes that only years later would become
influential in criminology and sociology, in part because younger scholars read his thesis and in part because
of his generosity with his time.
During Shelly’s graduate student years at UCLA, its Department of Sociology was recognized — as it still is
— as a leading department in the field of symbolic interactionism, that branch of sociology influenced by the
late nineteenth century phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the organic sociology of Emil Durkheim.
During Shelly’s graduate student years at UCLA, its Department of Sociology was recognized — as it still is
— as a leading department in the field of symbolic interactionism, that branch of sociology influenced by the
late nineteenth century phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the organic sociology of Emil Durkheim.
Messinger thrived in this environment and connected his experiences there with his earlier interrupted training
with the Chicago School sociologists and social workers. Still, as his UCLA and later Berkeley colleague,
Philip Selznick, has said of him, “He did not question the reality or importance of ‘performance’ in social
interaction, but [in his own work he found that people] were keen to distinguish their ‘presented’ or
‘projected’ selves from the ‘real’ or ‘natural’ selves.” Indeed it was his reserve and ability to stand back and
appreciate the multiplicity of perspectives that made Shelly such a valuable colleague, mentor, and scholar.
Shelly’s record of writing is substantial and the scope of his interests varied widely. We have already
mentioned his famous unpublished dissertation. He also wrote a score of influential articles. However, Shelly
was at his best with collaborators. He coauthored several books, including The State of the University (1970,
with Carlos Kruytbosch); The Story of C- Unit (1968, with Elliot Studt and Thomas Wilson); Civil Justice
and the Poor (1967, with Jerome E. Carlin and Jan Howard); and a number of seminal articles, including “The
Criminal and the Sick” (1958, with Vilhelm Aubert); “The Inmate Social System” (1965, with Gresham
Sykes); “The Micro- Politics of Trouble” (1977, with Robert Emerson); and “The Foundations of Parole in
California” (1985, with Richard Berk, John Berecochea, and David Rauma).
Despite this impressive scholarly record, Shelly’s most profound intellectual contribution might best be
assessed by his direct influence on his vast circle of distinguished collaborators, colleagues, friends, and
students — groups that cannot really be distinguished from each other. He was a scholar’s scholar and a
mentor to a host of distinguished social scientists throughout the United States and abroad. He was a master
teacher and exemplary colleague. Apart from his generous nature and keenness of mind, much of Shelly’s
influence was due to his extraordinary capacity to listen. He could grasp the underlying structure and logic of
a complex argument long before anyone else could, often including the person who was speaking. Legions of
students and colleagues sought him out for advice as to how to proceed with their research and develop their
writing, and countless numbers of them heard him respond to their inarticulate efforts with something like,
“In other words, what you mean is….” At that point, recipients of this wisdom were likely to reply, “Yes, yes,
exactly. Now wait a minute until I write that down.” He was celebrated across at least two continents for this
ability to help colleagues transform vague ideas into well- developed and sustained arguments. Indeed, those
of us who knew Shelly well recognize a great deal of him in our own work and the work of many
distinguished social scientists around the world. He was deeply appreciated for this generosity. As an editor
and intellectual advisor he was acknowledged as a crucial reader in the prefaces of a great many of the most
influential books in our field.
One measure of this esteem is that former student Thomas Blomberg named his endowed chair the “Sheldon
L. Messinger Chair” at Florida State University. Another is that the Festschrift published upon his retirement
went into a second edition — perhaps a first in the history of this genre!
In addition to being a distinguished scholar and mentor, Shelly was an exemplary citizen of the state and of
the University of California. He held numerous administrative positions on this campus, advised state
officials, and held many offices in professional associations over his long career. He served as the vice chair
of the Center for the Study of Law and Society from 1961 to 1970, was the dean of the School of
Criminology, was a founding member and occasional chair of Boalt Hall’s Jurisprudence and Social Policy
Program. He was a founder and first president of the Association for Criminal Justice Research (California)
and was the recipient of numerous awards for his outstanding contributions to criminal justice research,
including the Richard McGee Award from the American Justice Institute, the Award of Merit from
California’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, and the President’s Award from the Western Society of Criminology.
After retirement in 1991, he was the founding chair of the policy board for the UC Berkeley Retirement
Center and chair of the UC systemwide emeriti association, and one of the principal architects of the Health
Care Facilitator Program, which provides advice to faculty and staff about UC’s health care options, provides
advice about patients’ rights, and helps resolve coverage and access problems.
Shelly was married for 53 years to his childhood sweetheart Mildred (née Handler), who passed away in
2000. He is survived by two children, Adam of Berkeley, and Eli of Oakland, and a brother, Jay, of Chicago.
Malcolm M. Feeley
Lauren Edelman
Rosann Greenspan
Jonathan Simon