March/April 2011
Around the Quads
In Memoriam
BELL: Daniel Bell ’60 GSAS, one of the greatest post-WWII academics and a Columbia professor from 1959–69, died on January 25, 2011, in Cambridge, Mass. He was 91.
A prolific writer, Bell authored two of the 20th century’s most influential books on social science, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1978) and The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (1960), which was published while he was teaching at Columbia. In much of his work, Bell, who earned a Ph.D. in sociology from GSAS, predicted trends and outcomes that would come to fruition decades later. The End of Ideology addresses the fall of communism, and he also wrote about the shift to a service-based economy and the creation of “a national information-computer-utility system, with tens of thousands of terminals in homes and offices ‘hooked’ into giant central computers providing library and information services, retail ordering and billing services, and the like.”
Bell also was an influential editor of periodicals, starting with The New Leader, a small social democratic publication that he referred to as his “intellectual home.” He joined Fortune magazine as its labor editor and in 1965 helped found and edit The Public Interest with City College classmate Irving Kristol, who died in 2009.
Bell left Columbia in 1969 for Harvard, where he became the Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences in 1980. He is survived by his daughter, Jordy; son, David; four grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.
HABOUSH: JaHyun Kim Haboush ’78 GSAS, the King Sejong Professor of Korean Studies, died on January 30, 2011. She was 69 and lived in New York City.
Haboush, who had a reputation for treating students and junior faculty with the same respect and interest as well-known researchers, earned an M.A. from Michigan and a Ph.D. in East Asian languages and cultures from GSAS. She had taught at Rutgers and Illinois and in 2000 returned to Columbia, where she taught 16th- to 19th-century Korean cultural history in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures.
Haboush is survived by her husband, Bill.