Stanley Aronowitz, Labor Scholar and Activist, Dies at 88

Professor Aronowitz taught at Staten Island Community College (now the College of Staten Island) from 1972 to 1976 and was an associate professor of social science and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine, from 1977 to 1982. He retired from the City University of New York in 2017.

As a founding editor of the Duke University journal Social Text and a force behind the creation of the Center for Cultural Studies (now the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work) at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, Professor Aronowitz lamented what he called the decline of the public intellectual.

Complaining that “almost nobody in the social sciences deals with the question of power,” he said: “What we do not have is an organized left. If you do not have an organized left, you do not have an organized political public intellectual.”

His marriage to Jane O’Connell ended in divorce in 1962. In addition to his daughter Kim O’Connell, he is survived by his son, Michael O’Connell, also from that marriage; his daughter Nona Willis-Aronowitz, an author, from his marriage to the writer and cultural critic Ellen Willis, who died in 2006.; two other children, Hampton and Alice Finer; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

“Before Occupy Wall Street, before Bernie Sanders, before the Squad,” Ms. Willis-Aronowitz said by email, “there was Stanley Aronowitz, singing me ‘Solidarity Forever’ as a lullaby, running for New York governor under the slogan ‘Tax and Spend,’ at a time when it seemed like everyone on the left was trying to out-moderate each other.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/21/us/stanley-aronowitz-dead.html