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Date: Fri, 16 May 1997 00:06:11 -0600 (MDT)
From: Jay Watterworth <watterwo@sobek.Colorado.EDU>
To: Jill Marie Stein <jstein@ucla.edu>
cc: Sociology Graduate Students -- International <socgrad@csf.colorado.edu>
Subject: re: Harold Garfinkel
In-Reply-To: <2.2.16.19970515110735.08f7d126@pop.ben2.ucla.edu>
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Nice way of putting your experiences.  
Jay

On Thu, 15 May 1997, Jill Marie Stein wrote:

> As a student of Harold Garfinkel's here at UCLA, I can't resist telling some
> HG stories myself, from one who "sat at the foot of the master".  Personally
> TR, I like to think of Harold as being more of a "character" than an
> "ass-hole", but either way he is definitely NOT an easy person.  When I
> decided to enroll in his grad course on Ethnomethodology, I did so knowing
> that there was as much a chance of getting an "F" as an "A", (he had been
> known to fail otherwise excellent students) and that I was willing to risk
> that just for the experience of working with him.   The entire class was
> like an experiment in EM.  I had the sensation the whole time that I was
> chasing a mirage... just as I started to come upon something that I could
> grasp, my previous understanding would disappear as I took another step
> forward.  It was absolutely exhilarating.  Harold often created his own
> vocabulary for referring to things (I suppose he found the given language
> too constraining), and once you got the meaning of the words, he would make
> up new ones.   He would give us vexing assignments (ie: go home and watch
> the phone ringing), which he would rarely explain or discuss even after we
> completed them.  He patently disavowed not only others' interpretations of
> his work (and their own EM studies), but the value of almost anything he had
> ever done up until what he was currently working on (scientific discovery).
> During the semester he took each of his students (only a half dozen or so
> had survived past the first weeks), individually, to lunch and discussed
> what we were interested in.  His encouragement to continue in radical or
> controversial pursuits was something I will always treasure.  He told me to
> learn to play the game but to look for those (subversive) compatriots where
> I could find them.   His final assignment for the course was for us to write
> a "Dear Harold" letter telling him what we got out of it.  I called him to
> ask whether I could turn the paper in late and he hung up on me.  I took
> that as a "no" and made the deadline.  I won't say here what grade I got, it
> wasn't the point.  What I can say is that studying with him was one of the
> great highlights of my career as a sociologist, and perhaps beyond.  JILL
> 
>