In memoriam: Tom Garvin MRIA
It is with great sadness that we hear of the death of our longstanding colleague, mentor, and friend, Tom Garvin. To say that he was an outstanding scholar and a true intellectual with deep and wide-ranging interests is only to capture a part of what made him so important to so many of us. He had a wicked wit and a quick and penetrating sense of humour. His lively irreverence as much as the astonishingly wide range of his knowledge stimulated many generations of students to enlarge their intellectual horizons beyond anything they might have anticipated, and made him among their most loved and most highly respected teachers.
Tom was born in Dublin in 1943 and was educated in Belvedere College and UCD. He grew up in a bookish home: his father, John Garvin, a distinguished and independent-minded civil servant and policy maker born in Sligo, was secretary of the Department of Local Government 1948-66, and an acknowledged Joyce expert. Tom’s interests leaned more toward the puzzles originating in the rapidly-changing world around him. He spent some time at first in the Institute of Public Administration, Dublin, and in the Irish civil service, before taking up a position in the then Department of Ethics and Politics in UCD in 1967. With characteristic intellectual ambition he sought out a full professional formation in the USA in the newly-rigorous discipline of political science. He was awarded his PhD at the University of Georgia in 1974 for his thesis entitled Political Parties in a Dublin Constituency: A Behavioural Analysis. He was appointed Professor of Politics and Head of Department in 1991 and remained in that role until 2005. In 2003 he was elected as a member of the Royal Irish Academy.
Tom was a prolific author, writing extensively on political development and the political history of Ireland in comparative context. He published 11 books (a number of them in multiple editions) and over 60 articles and book chapters covering a wide range of topics, among them the institutional development of the Irish Senate, nationalist revolutionaries in 19th century Ireland, the development of nationalism in Ireland, and the role of political myths in the development of the state, to name a few examples. He found the big knotty questions the most compelling, not least his intriguingly titled Preventing the Future: Why Ireland Was So Poor For So Long (2004).
Tom’s intellectual curiosity infused his teaching: he was comfortable lecturing on topics that were not central to his own research, whether it was the politics of the USA, or his very popular course on comparative political development, or indeed his pioneering role in introducing the teaching of research methods. His students were introduced to the latest political science research, and encouraged to read from the top political science journals in a way that would be perfectly normal today but was pretty radical in, say, the 1970s or early 1980s. He was very well connected with the international world of political science scholarship and he offered warm encouragement to a long series of graduate students to do likewise.
During Tom’s tenure as Professor and Head of the Department of Politics, the characteristic features of the School of Politics and International Relations as we now have it were laid down - a place where the methodological and substantive pluralism among our academics is welcomed and celebrated, in a growing and increasingly diverse academic centre that has deservedly taken its full place among the top departments in the world. Tom was as sceptical of academic bureaucracy and hierarchy as he was of any other, and the Department also became what it continues to be today: highly collegial, mutually supportive, and characterised by a lot of good humour and sociability.
Tom’s interest in enabling collaborative academic relationships did not stop with the department: he also played a key role in the foundation of the Political Studies Association of Ireland in 1982, and was active in the early years of the European Consortium for Political Research, the largest political science association in Europe.
Although he retired in 2008, Tom continued to write extensively on Irish politics and political history. In 2007, he co-authored (with Andreas Hess) a widely regarded introductory chapter to the English translation of Gustave Beaumont’s account of Ireland under British rule. He was still often to be seen in the School of Politics and International Relations and the Institute for British-Irish Studies, on a strict regimen of writing a set number of words each day. A solitary and productive day of work would often lead on to extended conversations with a loose network of like-minded colleagues in the (late lamented) Common Room, where ideas and insights from many disciplines provided fertile cross-pollination and many a new line of inquiry would blossom.
During his later years at UCD, Tom grew increasingly alarmed by the erosion of collegial academic self-governance in Irish universities, which was being supplanted by a hierarchical bureaucratic managerialism modelled after certain post-Thatcher British educational institutions. In an influential opinion piece in the Irish Times on 1 May 2010 that sparked an important debate on the role of the university in contemporary Ireland, he argued that Irish academia had fallen into the hands of a managerial class of “grey philistines” corrosive to the values of humanistic education and the pursuit of knowledge as an end in itself.
To mark Tom’s retirement a conference was organised in his honour in 2009, hosted by the UCD Institute for British-Irish Studies. The proceedings of the conference were published in 2010 in a special issue of the Economic and Social Review (Vol. 41, No. 3), a journal that Tom himself had edited in 1985-87, on ‘Reappraising Irish developmentalism’.
We remember him with great fondness and warm admiration for his many achievements, and with deep regret that he is no longer among us. Our sympathies go to his wife and family and to his many friends and former students and to the very many whose lives he touched in immeasurable ways.
Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam uasal.