Canadian Journal of Sociology Online November-December 2007
In the 1935 movie, Mutiny on the Bounty, a sailor dives from the top of the mast into the sea. That was Gwynne Nettler. In 2003, a 90 year-old scholar publishes Boundaries of Competence. That was also Gwynne Nettler.
After a long and full life, Gwynne Nettler died in San Diego on October 5, 2007, at age 94. Although most of us knew Gwynne as a Professor of Sociology at the University of Alberta, his experiences over the course of his life were remarkable for their richness. Gwynne had been a Hollywood stuntman in the early Tarzan movies, a radio news commentator, a clinical psychologist, and a faculty member at 10 different universities in the United States and Canada. He was also an accomplished athlete. He was one of the first surfers on the California coast. He swam the Gold Gate Bridge span in San Francisco when he was in his 40s. He was a strong tennis and handball player.
Gwynne received his A.B. from UCLA in 1934, an M.A. in Psychology from Claremont Colleges in 1936, and a Ph.D. in social psychology from Stanford in 1946. Prior to his appointment at Alberta, he held positions at Stanford, Reed College, University of Washington, UC Santa Barbara, UCLA, UC Berkeley, Monterey Peninsula College, and the University of Houston. He had worked as an industrial psychologist in Mexico City and a clinical psychologist in private practice in Hollywood and in San Francisco as well as with the Reno Mental Health Center. Some of his clinical practice included marital therapy – the irony was not lost on Gwynne who married and divorced four times.
Gwynne arrived at the University of Alberta in 1963 in his TR 3. He had been recruited by Gordon Hirabayashi as part of the expansion of the Department of Sociology at Alberta. Nettler was promoted to Full Professor in 1966 and remained there until his retirement in 1978.
The 1960s and 1970s were times of rapid social change in our society and in our universities. Gwynne Nettler quickly became well-known among undergraduate students for two things. First, his undergraduate courses in Criminology were among the most exciting in the University. Second, his conservative views were quite at odds with the emerging liberal sentiments of academe. The result was that Nettler's courses were packed and they were lively.
Each day, Gwynne would arrive to teach in his crisp shirt, tie, and sports jacket, armed with a couple of three-by-five file cards with talking points. What typically ensued was a three-hour lecture that was tightly organized, clearly presented, and full of witty examples, stories, and experiences of Gwynne's life. Every lecture was a finely honed performance. He taught criminology, social psychology, social change, and theory construction – they were all stimulating and exciting. To this day, alumni from the University of Alberta still recall Nettler's courses.
Gwynne's impact on the graduate program in Sociology at Alberta was immense. He routinely supervised several M.A. and doctoral students. His influence on their careers was profound. He constantly suggested interesting projects for theses, even after students had selected a topic. He taught all of us how to write. He was the most thorough editor I ever encountered. We wrote, rewrote, and rewrote again. Gwynne also encouraged us to read, read, read! He recommended journal articles, books, novels, magazines. He trained a generation of sociologists and criminologists who have appointments at major universities across North America or who have risen to senior government positions in Canada. There is even a provincial Supreme Court justice among Gwynne's former students.
Gwynne's intellectual brilliance was most apparent in the many books and articles that he published over his academic career that spanned over 60 years. In the 1950s, a series of papers in the American Sociological Review, Social Problems, and Sociometry revealed Gwynne's willingness to challenge conventional sociological wisdom about free will and determinism, welfare policy, and the conception of crime as sickness or as antisocial behavior. These articles set the tone for much of his subsequent writing. He established himself as a sceptic of social science, an unyielding empiricist, and an unrelenting critic of constructionism. His 1970 book, Explanations, is a lively consideration of how some social scientists rely more on empathy than science to explain behavior. It contains many of Nettler's best anecdotes and retains much of the flavour of his lectures at the University of Alberta. Thirty-three years later, at age 90, Gwynne published Boundaries of Competence: How Social Sciences Make Feeble Science. This remarkable book distils a lifetime of thinking about the limits of social science.
Between these bookends, Gwynne wrote seven other books. Explaining Crime (published in three editions) was widely recognized as the most authoritative text on criminology in the world. It catapulted Gwynne to eminence among criminologists. His Social Concerns challenged the widely-held view of social difficulties as problems that could be solved. The four-volume Criminal Careers is a rich and engaging discourse in which Nettler proposes that lives of crime can be conceived to be careers. His 1989 book, Criminology Lessons, sums up what Nettler believed to know about criminal behavior. With this body of work, he was Canada's preeminent criminologist. In 1982, he received the E.H. Sutherland Award from the American Society of Criminology for outstanding contributions to research and theory in criminology. That same year, he received the Alberta Achievement Award and was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
After retiring from the University of Alberta in 1978, he returned to California which was his home base until he died. He lived in Carmel Valley for a few years before moving to the San Diego area. He continued to read voraciously in criminology, psychology, philosophy, and history. He wrote many letters to the editor of journals in which he was critical of the scientific rigor of the work that he read there. The letters are uniformly entertaining and challenging and display Gwynne's range of interests.
In thinking about Gwynne's extraordinary life, I conclude that above all else, he was a great teacher. He taught us about sociology and criminology, but more importantly, he taught us about life. He introduced some us to jazz. He introduced others to the pleasures of a fine cigar and a glass of scotch. He introduced still others to high performance gliding, to the glorious sights of the Monterey Peninsula, and to opera. His stories expanded our horizons and stretched our minds.
Gwynne Nettler lived life on his terms. Every 15 or 20 years, Gwynne would sell or give away much of his library and objets d'art so that he could start again. He found it "reinvigorating." His prodigious intellect, his keen appreciation of humor, and his unsentimental view of the world allowed him to savour life for over 90 years. Even at the end, he donated his organs and wrote his own brief obituary in which he jokingly noted that the donation was "an exercise in continuity."
Gwynne Nettler loved life. He lived long and he lived well. Salud, Gwynne!
William R. Avison
University of Western Ontario
http://www.cjsonline.ca/soceye/nettler.html
November 2007
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