It is with sadness the Columbia Global Centers | Santiago communicates the passing of Todd Gitlin, activist, teacher and intellectual, and chair of the Columbia University School of Journalism's PhD program in Communications.
A native of Manhattan, in 1965 he helped to organize one of the first major protests against the Vietnam War in Washington, DC. He received his Master's degree in Political Science from the University of Michigan, followed by a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. He then taught at several schools before joining Columbia in 2002 as a professor of Journalism and Sociology.
Gitlin is the author of 16 books, many on social movements and media, including publications that cover the last century (“The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage”), the contemporary (“Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street,”), sociology (“The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left”), communications theory (“Media Unlimited”), and three published novels, including “Sacrifice,” which won the Harold Ribalow Award for fiction on Jewish themes. He was a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Washington Post, and many magazines.
In 2018, Gitlin was invited by the Santiago Center and Universidad Diego Portales (UDP) to participate in the Future of Journalism lecture series, an ongoing program led by the Santiago Center and UDP’s Journalism School. In his master-class, entitled “Journalism, Social Movements and the Reshaping of the Public Sphere," he spoke about the threats to democracy and journalism presented by the global rise of authoritarian figures. At other events during his weeklong visit, where he met with local intellectuals, editors of media outlets and academia, he discussed the role of social media in modern social movements and the impact of social movements in politics.
The Santiago Center express its condolences to Todd’s family, friends and colleagues for their loss.
