Dear Norm

Dear Norm,

I write to you because I believe you are still somewhere where you can hear me. I never thanked you for all you meant and all you did for me. And I thought you’d be around for a long time.

I wanted to thank you for being you. I met you when I joined the faculty at ICR (Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois) in 1994. Cliff Christians, who then directed ICR, shared your vita with me as a way of introducing you. Instead, I freaked out! There was no way that I could envision ever having such a thick and distinguished vita, with hundreds of publications. I was afraid to meet you in person because I wasn’t sure how I would interact with someone with such a huge vita.

I need not have worried. From the time I met you, you were a supportive colleague. You always had a smile, with a little twinkle in your eyes, like you were up to some mischief—in the good of humanity, social justice, and expansion of academia—but mischief nonetheless. I realize you had many battle scars from dealing with the university and the field of sociology. You put that experience into unbridled energy to move fields and scholars on a path forward. I admired the way you mentored and supported graduate students. You also mentored the junior faculty. I was one of the privileged ones to benefit from that. You encouraged me to submit my work to a major journal and edited it toward successful acceptance. Your kind and gentle questions brought the article to a much more nuanced analysis and conclusion.

Whenever I received a grant or a fellowship, you would send me a nice congratulatory note. I was awed by your academic productivity, and many times when I would run into you I would ask you to stop writing books so I could catch up on the previous ones you had written. When there was bullying going on in our faculty and you found me hiding with my lights out in my office you came in, turned on the lights and admonished me not to hide, to assert presence because I belonged in the faculty, not to let the bullies win. When one of the bullies briefly became a director and decided to change my faculty line to another department without my consultation, you and Dr. Christians stepped in and declared that to be an unprocedural and unacceptable move—which was swiftly reversed. I witnessed how you pushed back on thinly veiled racially insensitive questions from other departments when we were establishing the Cultural Studies proseminar. I so appreciated your forceful defense of ICR at college meetings.

This does not mean we always fully agreed. There was that one time when I was not sure a dissertation defense was successful. You raised your voice and defended your student. I was shaking but stood my ground, partly because you’d taught me how to do it. There were a couple of other times when I asked questions of students that you clearly did not approve. But such students defended successfully, and their brilliant careers are a testament to our fruitful engagement with social justice theories, methodologies, and projects.

Your trajectory at the College of Communications [now the College of Media] flowed from Research Professor, to Head of the Advertising Department, to Director of Graduate Studies at ICR, to Professor Emeritus. I was only too glad to craft your post-retirement agreement with you—granting you office space while you ran journals and a conference while financially supporting graduate students. It was a win-win situation. Thanks for always inviting me to the QI conference and dinners. Late May brought the rush of scholars from all over the world to campus, and those of us here at UIUC were the fortunate recipients of this massive wave of intellectual pursuit. Creating A Day in Spanish and Portuguese (ADISP) was pure genius, and I repeatedly run into scholars who have benefited from this innovation.

I am afraid the CoVid marked the before and after. I last saw you in person after a concert at the Krannert Center for Performing Arts in 2022, I think. To me that meant the CoVid was over—all was well in the world, Norm was around. But alas, that is the last time I saw you.

I attended the 2023 QI conference. Attendance was down, understandably after the CoVid. Everyone, including myself, was asking for you. Michael Giardina and James Salvo must have fielded hundreds of inquiries about your whereabouts. I thought to myself, I wonder if it’ll be all right to try to visit? But magical thinking got in the way, and I thought I’d give you time to heal. At a dinner party the week before you passed, some faculty mentioned you were not doing well. Rest assured dear Norm that you live on! You taught so many of us how to be ethical yet progressive scholars and teachers. Your research is referenced and quoted across many fields. Your former students span the globe. You created new organizations and methodologies. I prefer to think you are not gone—because you aren’t.

Warmly,

Anghy Angharad N. Valdivia