Honoring and Remembering Deb Kaplan
1952-2006

The Family of Deborah Noel Kaplan has endowed a memorial fund in her honor at the Department of Communication, University of Washington:

The Deborah Noel Kaplan Endowed Fund

“To support narrative journalism and graduate student research on social issues, with preference for field research”

Read more about the Deborah Noel Kaplan Endowed Fund...

On November 29, 2006, members of our community gathered to celebrate the memory of Professor Deborah Kaplan. Collected here are the words of her colleagues and friends, as well as a record of her scholarly work and the Seattle PI article on her death.

Jerry Baldasty, Professor and Department Chair:

We gather here today to honor and remember a colleague, mentor and friend — Deborah Noel Kaplan. This is not an easy thing, for Deb left us far too young, far too soon; our loss is compounded by the shock of her sudden death.

We are here today to honor and remember her, and we’ll do that by recalling some of the major points of her career. And we also invite any one here to talk — to share their memories and thoughts.

Deborah Kaplan joined the faculty of the Department of Communication just 3 years ago — in autumn, 2003. By then, though, she’d already had a rich career as a journalist, teacher, and activist.

In the 1970s, she worked in a series of journalism jobs, including

• Editor of a weekly newspaper in Illinois
• City hall reporter for the San Diego Sentinel
• General assignment reporter for the Fort LauderdaleSun Sentinel
• and as a staff writer for the Columbia, Mo, Daily Tribune.

In the 1980s, she was a stringer for Time magazine, working from the magazine’s LA bureau. For Time, she covered national and regional politics, including the 1984 LA Olympics. She was proud of a bylined article with feminist author Jane O’Reilly on a story about Title IX supported women champions.

She also was proud of several enterprise stories from that period, including a story on outlaw bike gangs that had organized to corner California’s methamphetamine market.

• A freelancer for Vanity Fair, California, Fortune, Money
• A staff writer for the Detroit Free Press, where she wrote lead features and investigative articles
• News editor of Metro Times, an alternative weekly in Detroit. Under her editorship, the paper won awards for excellence in environmental journalism.

In the early 1990s, she was the founding executive director of Motown Teen, a 20K circulation tabloid produced by inner city teens in Detroit. She recruited a volunteer staff of 20 inner city teens and 15 local journalists to serve as mentors — training the teens on the basics of journalism and production.

Deb wrote about these years, and her decision to return to college, when she applied for a job here in 2003. She wrote:

A word about my personal history. I am a non traditional student, having toughed my way into newspapers without the benefit of a college degree, and made something of a name for myself in Detroit as a social issues reporter turned union and community activist. I founded Detroit’s first youth-run, mass circulation tabloid while speeding through an accelerated undergraduate degree program at one of the country’s first ‘university without walls,’ the Union Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio. I returned to college at age 40, when I was at mid career and increasingly frustrated by the routines of reporting. I had determined at the time to earn a Ph.D., so as to have the opportunity to do thoroughly going research as a second career.

The early years of that second career took her to

• The University of California – Irvine, where she earned her MA in Social Science in 1998,
• Then a year at University of Arizona studying sociology,
• and then to the University of North Carolina, for doctoral studies. “for a more focused study of the media and their power to shape public discourse.”

At Chapel Hill, she stood out as articulate and thoughtfully critical. Her dissertation adviser, Jane Brown, recommended Deb for our job here, writing,

Deborah is one of the most intelligent students I’ve worked with over the past 25 years. She is one of the rare media professionals who has been able to return to school and build intellectually on what she has learned from being a practicing journalist for 18 years in a number of different venues. …Deborah is as comfortable teaching practical journalistic techniques as she is theorizing about the role the global media play in the lives of the homeless.

Jane and Deb kept in touch since Deb came here, and Jane has sent a short note for me to read today.

Deb Kaplan was first my student, and then my colleague and friend.

I remember the first day I met her. She sat in the back of the graduate seminar in communication theory and started asking questions right away. Would we be talking about Bourdieu? Weber? Political economy? or only the mid-level theories?

“Uh-oh,” I thought, a student who probably knows more than I do! That “uh-oh!” soon turned into an appreciative “oh, so, Debbie, tell us more about that…” as it became clear that Deb knew a lot about social theory and was willing to share it in a clear and compelling way.

I am especially sad about Debbie’s death because it looked to me like it was all about to come together for her now. She wasn’t always sure that she was cut out to be an academic. Most of her life she was a social activist in one guise or another, and the academy seemed too lifeless in contrast.

But she was learning to accommodate. She had a contract for a book based on her unique and important study of the homeless in Tucson, Arizona; she was growing more confident about her abilities to teach at both the graduate and undergraduate levels; and she finally had a car that worked and allowed her to explore her beautiful surroundings.

I will miss our sporadic phone calls in which she would describe something that happened and I would help her reinterpret it in a more positive way.

I will miss her coaching of me to have a more sociological and political take on the world.

I will miss her remarkable intellect and clear writing about important things.

Deb’s brother described her as always a voice for the voiceless. I will miss Deb’s voice.

I am sorry more people will not have the chance to hear it.

Another of Deb’s mentors in grad school was Naomi Quinn, an anthropology professor at Duke University. Professor Quinn writes:

Deb was my friend. She was not always an easy friend, occasionally moody, always outspoken, and forever smoking. But she brought to our talk and our shared experiences an intense almost reverent delight in the moment. One of my best memories is both of us rapt, in the bow of a boat on a fjord outside of Juneau, Alaska, a few hundred feet from a glacier that was calving, and calving, seemingly just for us. I am grateful that we had that trip. Deb's favorite reading was apocalypse books, like the one on how the world was going to run out of energy. Her politics were committed and informed. She was justly proud of her first career as a reporter. What stood out in the course on cultural analysis of discourse she took from me were her superb ear for talk and her eye for analysis of that talk. She had gathered some wonderful material from homeless people in Tucson, Arizona and her analysis of that talk is in her dissertation, and would have made its way into the book on homelessness she was beginning.

Here at Washington, Deb was a valued colleague, mentor, and friend.

Barbara Warnick, long a member of our faculty and now at Pittsburgh, got to know Deb well. Barbara has sent this note:

Deborah was a highly valued colleague and friend. She cared deeply about her work and her students, and she worked tirelessly to make her courses better. Furthermore, she was a trusted friend and confidant to many of our graduate students--always ready with an encouraging word, or just ready to listen. There was a graduate student in her office almost every time I walked by.

She had a deep sense of what was appropriate and compassionate when dealing with other people. I always wanted her on the committees I worked on, and she provided attentive, useful advice on the undergraduate studies committee, and also in faculty meetings. When I saw a concerned look on her face, I stopped to asked her for her input because she was sensitive to issues that we others in our academic haste might miss.

She and I shared lunches and many conversations (although, in retrospect, not as many as I would have liked) about teaching and life in the department. Deborah was a very positive force in our community and a close friend to many. Her altruism and caring for others was something rare in the academy, and her
loss is a great loss for the department.

I will miss her very much.

Patricia Moy, Deb's teaching partner during Autumn, 2005:

I had the pleasure of team-teaching the introductory core graduate seminar with Deb last autumn.

Team-teaching is one of those endeavors that succeeds: when there is a sense of mutual respect; when each instructor supports the other’s work, yet can review it critically, when both instructors engage in intellectual debate without losing sight of the students’ learning, and when both just have fun teaching together.

One day we were supposed to return a set of response papers to students. I went upstairs to collect Deb before class. She showed me the response papers and I asked her, “Just how stressed out were you?” She gave me this bemused look, took the stack of papers, and all of a sudden, a light bulb went on. She looked at me and said, “What are we going to do?? We can’t return these papers like this!” Deb and I brainstormed frantically for a makeshift solution, and we ended up furiously peeling half a dozen satsumas over the response papers, hoping that the spray from the rind would land on the papers and offset the smell of cigarette smoke.

Deb liked to work at home, and I preferred the office, so we compromised and often met at a Thai or sushi restaurant close to home. It was there that she spoke often and highly of her brother Gordon, and how different they were — he was the successful sibling, enjoying life in San Diego, while she was the sister leading — as she put it — a hardscrabble life as a journalist-turned-academic.

It was Deb’s experiences, not the smell of satsumas, that drew students to her. Deb asked hard questions, made them think, and raised issues from readings that few people were used to discussing. Students were drawn to Deb’s sense of humor, her very strong sense of social justice, her practical experience, and her ability to see them as individuals with individual needs and individual goals.

Two weeks ago, the Department of Communication lost a valued member of its community, someone who reminded us that there is and should be a place for academia outside the ivory tower. We collectively express our sincerest condolences to Deb’s family in this very difficult time."

Rebecca Clark, Ph.D. student, speaking on behalf of Deb's COM 500 students:

Thank you for the opportunity to share about Deb. I’m speaking not only on my own behalf as a student of Deb’s, but I also have the honor of speaking on behalf of the COM 500 class, which, for those who don’t know, is the class Deb was teaching this quarter. We have had the privilege of being the first cohort, and the deep regret at being the last, to take the COM 500 course, designed and taught solely by Deb, though I know some of you took it with her when it was team-taught with Patricia.

Most of us in the class are in our first year here in the communication department at UW. Some of us, like myself, are returning to graduate school after a spending some years out in the professional world. COM 500, the Introduction to Communication Theory, is part of our initiation to graduate school. It’s an initiation in the orientation sense, but also perhaps in the “trial by fire sense”, as we have tried to wrap our head around epistemologies, Stuart Hall, and the various circuits of meaning and knowledge.

Deb has been such an important part of this process for us. A fellow student, Fahed, summarizes what many of us immediately admired about Deb from our first day of class: that she seemed very down-to-earth and accessible. “Qualities,” Fahed describes, “that as an incoming grad, he was grateful to see.” Deb had a great sense of humor, but also a sense of purpose that drove her course, lectures, and reading selections. Jamie remembers that Deb was always passionate and encouraging. And, he adds “she had the eyes of a hawk! That woman could spot troublemaking at 50 yards!” This perhaps cut into some of Jamie’s more entertaining classroom antics, but I’m sure kept the class moving forward in a productive manner!

I have personally experienced Deb’s encouragement and sense of humor when I wrote the first paper for COM 500. One of my fears of getting a PhD is that I’ll have to start taking myself too seriously, So when I read in one of our assigned articles the sentence:

“the bumper sticker says, “shit happens, but it’s socially constructed,”

I couldn’t resist using the social construction of “shit happening” as a metaphoric vehicle to discuss interpretive and critical perspectives. I held my breath when I turned in the paper, thinking I was about to be thrown out of graduate school. But Deb’s comments on my paper were: “excellent job. And Thanks for the good laugh!”

This response was so amazingly affirming. She validated to me that I could fit in here. My language and academic writing style may become more refined, we hope, as I go through this schooling process, but Deb was able to see me, to acknowledge me, and to meet me precisely where I’m at. Thus, she truly welcomed me back to academic life.

Vanessa really appreciated this encouraging quality of Deb’s as well. She says:

Coming to a "research 1" university from a teaching university was a bit daunting. We've been told that we'll need to learn how to take criticism and so I braced myself. I came here expecting professors to use praise very sparingly. I thought maybe they'd want to toughen us up and make us work harder. But I remember there were a couple times where Deb reserved a good amount of class time just to tell us how impressed she was with us, how we've really grasped the concepts we've learned in class, and how much she appreciated our effort. I was really touched that she made a point of saying these things to us. She truly was a compassionate teacher.

Jennifer agrees. She says:

Beyond being a fantastic instructor and an amazing public scholar, Deb showed a lot of respect and support for her students and their lives within and out of academia. In other words, she never forgot that students were human beings and had lives of their own.

Lie adds:

What impressed me most was Deb's respect to each of us in terms of academic interests. She encouraged us to think critically and pursue our research enquiry bravely. She led our way to discover the beauty of communication research.

Michelle loved Deb’s great mind and huge heart, both personally and academically. According to Michelle:

Our learning was really really important to Deb. She was always available, any time, her door was open, for whatever reason, personal or academic, course-related or not. I popped in to her office one day, not during office hours, I had no appointment, and she dropped what she was doing and made the time to discuss with me an unrelated research project I had spinning around in my head. “

Peg also remembers having a pretty great talk with Deb about "re-entering" school after a journalism career. But it was one of Deb’s responses to an e-mail that really made a mark on Peg. “it made me laugh,” Peg said. “I had written to Deb to say "thanks" for a particular lecture — I think the first time the Kaplan circle came up — and I said "I feel like I [finally] have my head above water" — Deb’s response — which I’ll never forget, — was "don't forget to breath!"

Laura remembers the sparkle in her eye and her laugh, the way that Deb, like Laura, snorts when she gets a good laugh going. And we all fondly remember her notoriously poor attempts at saying our names, with Penne – Lope for Penelope and Tab-ee-tha for Tabitha. When we reached the French postmodernists in class lecture, Deb pretty much gave up on pronunciations.

Tabitha adds:

In the short time that I knew Deb from our 500 class, it shone through very clearly how passionate she was about helping people through her research. She seemed like someone who really believed in the power of academic research to better real people's — often the most disadvantaged people's — lives. That was inspiring.

We will all miss her as a teacher and a scholar, and feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to begin to get to know her, though it was only for a tragically short time. As a student with a sometimes fiercely critical perspective, I often have had to translate, explain, and defend my perspective during my academic journey. But intellectually and politically, Deb and I spoke not only the same language, we spoke the same dialect. I can’t even begin to overestimate the value this had for me, re-entering graduate school, full of nervousness and hesitation. It created for me such intellectual relief, such ease, like meeting a fellow countryman, or coming home, after living of years abroad.

They say that the purpose of a memorial is really to celebrate the values of Deb’s life for those of us still living. I’m sure today we will get many take-aways, as we hear story after story about Deb’s passion and integrity as a scholar, journalist, activist, and friend. But perhaps what you might take away from those of us in the COM 500 class is never under estimate the impact you can have as a teacher, even in 7 short weeks.

Closing, Tara Kachgal:

Intensely curious, bright, warm, genuine, outgoing, a survivor. This is how I will always remember my friend Deb Kaplan. An in-the- streets reporter, then a forty-something college student and later a driven graduate student, and finally a well-loved professor. She did a lot in the time she was here. Deb never wanted to just get by, and she had no use for artifice: She held herself to the highest standard available: She wanted to really know and understand social life, and she wanted to transform the world to make it a better, more just place. Her life was amazing. It's so, so sad knowing that she's no longer with us. It's uplifting and inspiring, though, to read how she touched so many of our lives as a teacher, student, journalist, activist, colleague, and researcher. She died far too young, yes, but she left a big imprint. Rest in peace, Deb Kaplan. You were loved, and you will be missed.