BY HANK REICHMAN

Victor Garlin, professor emeritus of economics at Sonoma State University, who served four terms as president of the Sonoma State chapter of the California Faculty Association, passed away at the age of 87 February 26 after a brief illness.

Sonoma State professor emeritus of political science Andy Merrifield, who succeeded Victor as chapter president and served as a statewide officer of CFA and a bargaining team member, wrote this about Victor:

Vic was the president during a period of broad expansion, and significant challenge of CFA in the late 1990s and early 2000s.  Vic had all the necessary qualities that helped ensure that Sonoma served as a model campus for the union during those exciting and troubling times.

As a speaker, his semi-annual presentations at the faculty convocations laid out the union positions and concerns with clarity, detail, eloquence and fire. . . .  He brought the same qualities as a speaker to special meetings and demonstrations on the ongoing struggle for fair contracts etc.  Further, as an elected member of the faculty senate for his school or at large, he spoke often and with equal passion, on behalf of all faculty.  No one played a more critical role in that body in confronting campus managers, most especially the campus presidents.  In innumerable meetings, he made sure that the campus president had to justify the actions of his administration and the actions in Long Beach that put students and faculty last, instead of first.

In addition to being the main spokesperson for CFA at Sonoma, Vic played an active role at the statewide level, both as a representative of the chapter and as a representative of faculty interests statewide.  He never failed to convey the campus concerns, and always remembered that his primary role was to show concern for all CSU faculty.  He never acted provincially.  This attribute of thinking expansively also meant that in CFA, whether an academic professor, a lecturer, a counselor, a librarian or a coach, all our faculty.  Vic worked tirelessly for faculty regardless of rank or job.  This work included recruiting and mentoring campus union leaders in all ranks.  Vic also delegated to these leaders so that the chapter could effectively run smoothly and step up when needed.  People that he worked with on campus continued to provide leadership and organizing skills years after Vic left his position as president.

After four plus two-year terms as president, Vic never became the eminence gris that former presidents often rightfully become.  That would suggest that he became an occasional advisor.  Vic stayed in the middle of the fray, as a leader without portfolio, as a continuing voice for the union in the senate no matter what chair he sat in, and as a reliable organizer, who never failed to show up on the picket line, but never crossed one.

I was fortunate to count Victor as a neighbor (he lived just a few blocks from me, about midway between my home and that of my late mentor, the Russian historian Reggie Zelnik) and a friend.  Once, when the late sociologist and progressive activist Stanley Aronowitz was in town and staying at Victor’s house, several CFA union activists gathered there for an evening of drinks and conversation.  There was Victor, who taught at Sonoma, a colleague who taught at Sacramento State, another who taught at San Jose State, and me, who taught at what was still then CSU Hayward (look at a map to see how dispersed these campuses are).  All four of us, however, lived within just a mile of each other in north Berkeley!  Such was the pull of that campus, where we all had studied, although today, sadly, CSU faculty can rarely afford homes in the neighborhood.  Heck, increasingly UC faculty can’t either.

Victor Garlin and a 1952 Jaguar he restored.

I would regularly drive past Victor’s house and marvel at his collection of lovingly restored classic Jaguars.  It was a hobby that seemed to clash with his origins and maybe his outlook.  Those origins are themselves remarkable.  Vic was more than just a “red diaper baby.”  He was born in 1935 in the Kremlin polyclinic in Moscow, the child of either American Comintern workers (as he told one colleague) or (as he told me) because his father was then serving as the Moscow correspondent of the Communist Daily Worker.  It might well have been both.

When Victor entered the University of California, Berkeley, as an undergraduate in the 1950s, he told me, he majored in History, but when he was applying to grad school he was advised that the historical profession would not only look askance at his left-wing political background but that it was still a hotbed of antisemitism.  In the 1950s there were no Jews in the Berkeley History Department.  Better to go into economics, then more open to Jews, if not necessarily to leftists, he was advised.  But by the time Vic finished his economics PhD, not long before I was applying to the Berkeley history department, the situation had changed dramatically.  Indeed, when I arrived in 1969 some of that department’s most eminent members — Leon Litwack, Lawrence Levine, Irwin Scheiner, and the young and upcoming Reggie Zelnik, to name a few — were Jewish. [UPDATE: I’ve been reminded that in the ’50s the Berkeley history department did hire one Jew, the brilliant sinologist Joseph Levenson, who tragically died at age 48 in a 1969 boating accident.]

But in his scholarship Victor maintained an historical perspective, as evidenced in his co-authorship in the early 1970s of one of the paradigmatic manifestos of progressive economics at the time, “Towards a Radical Political Economics.”  It’s a tired cliche, I know, but I think it applies to Victor — they don’t make ’em like that any more!

[For a full obituary by Vic’s family go to https://www.berkeleyside.org/2023/03/13/vic-garlin-obituary]

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and president of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019.  His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October, 2021.