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“I once had a very good professor who gave me very bad advice,” UC Berkeley sociologist Troy Duster said Friday, standing behind a lectern at Booth Auditorium. “‘Don’t read newspapers. Don’t listen to the news. It’s simply a daily phenomenon that will get in the way of scholarship.’”
The young graduate student ignored the advice, rejecting “this notion that one celebrates the scholar who is disengaged from the world, that the high-status theorist — whether in anthropology, sociology, political science — was one who wasn’t immersed in the daily turmoil of life, but had almost an ivory-tower rendering of self.”
Duster, in fact, went on to become the epitome of the engaged scholar — writing landmark works on the racial implications of drug policies and genetic research, founding what is now the campus’s Institute for the Study of Societal Issues and mentoring scores of doctoral students who would themselves become leaders in the fields of public health, law and public policy, education, medical anthropology and theory of social inequality and social change.
So it was fitting that during...