One Year

A year ago today, my friend John Sabini died. He went from being fine to being in the hospital to dying in the space of little more than a week.

It was a devastating loss.

He was brilliant, funny, kind, generous, and one of the most moral people I have ever met -- and by that I do not mean moralistic, but simply someone who was committed to doing the right thing, always. On a typical work day, John and I spent at least a couple hours together -- teaching our research course, eating lunch, collaborating on research, just talking.

Ours was an unusual friendship in some ways. For one, there was a 25 year age difference between us. And for another, academe is in some ways a solitary profession, and people typically do not spend that kind of time with their colleagues, especially their senior colleagues.

I am profoundly grateful that Mike and I decided to move when we did -- ironically, it gave me a kind of time last summer with John that I would not have had otherwise, time when I wasn't worrying about my tenure case and he wasn't one of the people in charge of that tenure case.

There is so much that I could say, so many vivid memories. But in the end it boils down to this: I loved him. I miss him. I probably always will.

Words can't really capture what John meant to me and others in his life. (He was a major presence in our department, and left behind a wife and young daughter.) But here is my attempt, my part from the department memorial for John last December.

Click here to read more.

"I didn’t have the privilege of knowing John for as long as some people here, but I was fortunate enough to spend quite a bit of time with him over the past several years. We taught a research experience course and the social psychology proseminar together for four years, collaborated on research, and had countless lunches together. John was my closest colleague at Penn, but more than that, he was also a mentor and a friend.

Teaching with John was wonderful. He had encyclopedic knowledge, a gift for storytelling, and the organizational and motivational prowess to keep multiple student projects moving ahead. Students loved John, even the ones who were foolish enough to admit that they were Red Sox fans. John attracted some of the brightest students – students who won university awards and were snapped up by the best graduate schools – but he cared about all of his students, and in fact, believed that we as teachers could do the most good for students who didn’t necessarily have an instinctive talent for research, the ones who came in not quite understanding the link between data and conclusions, or how statistics fit in to this process. Getting some of these students to really understand scientific methods was a real contribution.

John was a person of the highest moral character; as far as I know, he always did the right thing. Just one example: every year, we had our students go to 30th Street Station to collect data, asking people to fill out brief questionnaires. This worked fine until last year, when two of our students were told by station personnel that they couldn’t do that. Well, perhaps not coincidentally, these two students were black. I wasn’t quite sure what to do when faced with this, but John didn’t hesitate: he immediately called the station, got a hold of the person in charge, and got the situation resolved, with an apology for the students.

John loved this university and this department, and he knew it inside and out. You had to be careful when asking John a question about how things were done or why something was the way it was: the answer would go back through the history of the department, who had argued for what, and how we arrived where we are. When someone’s name came up, John would remember if that person had been a job candidate in the department, or had given a colloquium here, or had some other connection to Penn.

John even shaped the way we talked. You didn’t email something to John; you zapped it to him. We didn’t have research presentations for incoming graduate students, we had the dog and pony show. Our research students learned that factor analysis was one of the Dark Arts, a tribute to John’s love of the Harry Potter books.

John was a supportive and generous mentor. John was an incredible mentor to me in particular, and to Rob, to some of our other colleagues (both junior and senior), and to his students – John was the first one we turned to with almost any kind of question. I don’t think I realized quite how many people regularly relied on John in this way until after his death, when person after person recounted dropping by John’s office for “just a quick question.” It’s amazing that he was ever able to get his own work done! (But of course he always did, because with John things were always done either on time or early.) There are many smart people at Penn, but John had a rare wisdom. He understood institutions, he understood the dynamics of the department and the university, and he seemed to always be able to see a few steps ahead of anyone else. That clear vision extended to the scientific domain: if you ever discussed a job talk or a colloquium with John (or read his excellent textbook!), you already know one of his many talents was the ability to find the most interesting and important parts of someone else’s research, and he could very often describe that research even better than the person could themselves.

As part of his mentoring, John was always trying to convince me to say no to taking on commitments. He wanted me to protect my time for research and not be pulled into too many service obligations. But whenever he would tease me about my inability to say no, I always replied that he wasn’t setting a very good example. Every time I turned around, John had agreed to chair another committee, or adopt another struggling graduate student, or take on some thankless task that was essential to the department’s functioning. And he imbued even bureaucratic tasks with his own style and sense of humor – a graduate group memo from John would have, amid the useful information and the inevitable typos – some wonderful one-liner or turn of phrase.

John was part of the social glue of the department, part of what made Penn a humane place to be. He anchored the regular lunch group first on the fourth floor, when we were back in [our old building], and then on the C floor when we moved to the lab building. He declared emergency happy hours. He organized “expotitions” to explore new restaurants. He didn’t hesitate to celebrate accomplishments, whether it was the publication of a paper or the completion of a dissertation.

Because John did so much for the department, the university, his students, and his colleagues, people sometimes forget about his scientific contributions. But he was an active contributor to the social psychology literature -- just in 2005, John had eight articles published in highly respected, peer-reviewed journals. He advanced our understanding of the social emotions – embarrassment, jealousy. I was fortunate enough to be able to collaborate with John. Doing research with John was, above all, a lot of fun. John’s friend Maury has described this as “playing together,” and that’s exactly right. Besides being brilliant, John had an infectious curiosity.

I could go on, but to close, let me put it simply: John was one of the finest human beings I have ever known. It was a joy and a privilege to spend time with him."