Michael Katz and the Academic-Activist Tension

All Dr. Katz's students admired how quickly he expressed a point, often through tidy lists. In honor of that style, I want to focus these remarks about Michael Katz and activism on four dimensions: (1) his understanding of the activist/academic tension; (2) how he advised his graduate students to wrestle with it; (3) how he engaged nonhistorians; and (4) how his work's prognosis of the prospects for social change transformed markedly in the last five years of his career.

Let me start with the first. I don't think there's any close colleague or student of Katz who didn't wrestle with one version of questions like these: "What am I doing in this archive, in this classroom, in this office writing all day when the world around me is blowing up?" Or, "What more can I be doing when I'm not?" Dr. Katz articulated the dilemma in his most personal book, Improving Poor People, where he asked, on its very first page: "Would historians committed to social reconstruction give more to the causes they champion with degrees in social work or public policy or as public interest lawyers?" (Katz 1995: 3). It was the problem, in other words, of trying to figure out the exact nature of that taut line between the activist and the academic roles.

I often discussed these existential questions with my fellow graduate students in Katz's orbit. In the wake of his death, several of us corresponded as a means of processing our emotions. One message that has stuck out came from Dan Amsterdam, urban historian and Katz advisee, who wrote only a few but powerful short lines. Dan's e-mail began with a quotation from Katz's first monograph: "This book tries at once to be a scholarly historical study and a piece of social criticism. … For the often partisan nature of my argument, I offer no apologies; the crisis in our cities must arouse a passionate response in all those who care about the quality of American life." Then back to Dan: "M.B.K. in March 1968, on the eve of his 29th birthday, on the first page of his first book. Love it." (D. Amsterdam, pers. comm., August 19, 2014).

The "passionate response" that the young Katz defended, of course, infused everything he wrote. Those writings showed me and so many of us that there were more ways of doing activism than the typical images that might first come to mind when we hear that word. All of Dr. Katz's books mapped onto the most pitched issues of the postwar period: urban education; the persistence of inequality and class structure; political avoidance of root causes of poverty; demeaning labeling by policy makers; and above all, the civic obligations of all of us to each other.

And his work traveled far beyond the academy and into the hands of policy makers but also activists. On this point, I remember a small and quiet moment—one that nonetheless looms large in my mind—when he told me that he was considering the major revision of his 1989 book The Undeserving Poor. He noted that it'd take a great deal of work, and he wasn't sure he wanted to revisit it. However, he mentioned one big motive was that he'd get random letters about Undeserving, people he bumped into would tell him that they'd read it and how much it meant to them, and these people were not just historians, not just academics, but people who felt they needed some kind of scholarly compass to situate what was happening to the American welfare state in the Reagan era and beyond. That comment taught me that even if one spent most of his or her time producing scholarly work—and occasionally wondering what would happen to it—your work could and would often find its way outside into the right hands. Many activists, too, are searching for intellectual resources to help them find their way. His humble hope, Katz said in one of the last conversations I had with him...