Marc created the intellectual and emotional space that made my graduate school experience life-changing. A group of us spent much of the 1980s in the Michigan program, and Marc was instrumental in ensuring we experienced “the life of the mind”—especially left politics–and that we believed we had a right to think of ourselves as intellectuals. Our friendship group—which spanned a few cohorts—talked about things that mattered, repudiated competition, and engaged in a great deal of learning outside the classroom. We had a real esprit de corps, and much of it was thanks to Marc.
I’ve been reading the tributes of his students describing how Marc cared about them and made them feel like they belonged, and I can attest that he has been that way for at least 40 years! My first year of grad school was hard, as I felt didn’t belong in such an intellectual place (despite the Smith degree that I see many on this site share), and he convinced me that I did. In response to my “Fitting in sure doesn’t seem hard to you, Marc,” he said something like “I was toddling around eating sausage hors d’oeuvres at faculty parties since I was five!” His using cultural capital theory casually was typical of how he would use theory in everyday life and one of the things that made me realize that yes, theory is not opaque, and I can do this, too!
Encouraging people was a gift he gave freely, and it mattered. The people he has loved and who loved him in return are many, and we will miss him terribly.