Passing of Professor Daniel Mulholland

Message on behalf of Professor James Rice

Dear Colleagues,

I am sorry to convey the sad news that Prof. Daniel Mulholland died on 18 December 2023, after a brave battle with cancer. Many of you knew him; for those who did not, Mulholland was educated at Oxford and Harvard, and taught at UC Davis and Wellesley before coming to Tufts in 1969. His teaching and scholarship focused on Russian history. A dedicated and popular teacher, Mulholland was chosen as the faculty speaker at the legendary alternative commencement of 1970, and was a mainstay of the History Department for forty-six years before his retirement in 2015. Daniel and his wife, Ramona Boyle, did not want an obituary or a memorial service, but I would like to share Howard Malchow’s thoughts about our colleague:

“When I arrived in 1974, Dan was already an associate professor teaching courses on Russian and German history, with a special interest in the Russian Revolution and in revolutions and radicalism generally. He and his family lived on campus, as many faculty then did, and ran out of their house on Professors’ Row a food collective (it was the early seventies!) for purchasing and distributing local farm produce. As the junior-most member of the department, I found him somewhat intimidating, not because he was unfriendly—quite the opposite—but because he appeared to know everything. He was current with a wide range of the literature IN MY OWN FIELD, and I was often in a sort of panic at his challenging critique of authors I had not yet read. Dan was perhaps the most literate colleague I have known. He had a dry ironic wit, sometimes verging on sarcasm—he did not suffer fools gladly, especially administrators and political scientists. He also brought to department and university faculty meeting discussions not only a wide range of knowledge and a sense of humor but a commitment to faculty participation at both levels. Service—on university and department committees or as chair when his turn came round—was uncomplaining duty rather than a route to academic and administrative influence and visibility.  He was uncomfortable with university bureaucracy and jealous of the role of faculty (in his view, the university WAS its faculty) in an environment increasingly top-heavy with administrators.

“Dan was a man of the Left, had perhaps been something of an activist on campus and off in his earlier years, but by the late seventies and eighties was increasingly scornful of American (academic, local, and national) politics. Interesting, serious, and sometimes difficult, students found in him a patient listener and guide, someone who neither preached at them nor infantilized them; he attracted a loyal coterie who idolized him.

“Dan’s attitude and career suggest something of the kind of British academic (he had spent post-graduate time at Oxford) who was devoted to college life and tutorials rather than to the expected American routines of academic publishing and building a career. That he did not produce a stream of books and articles was not simply because he was content to be a serious teacher, a conscientious departmental colleague, a wise if sometimes sharp critic, and a concerned advisor. It was also because Dan, as a scholar, was, perhaps, his own severest critic and scorned to add to a growing mountain of yearly publications out of mere ambition or to follow the dictates of career-building administrators.”

I also recommend the lovely retirement resolution for Dan, co-written by Beatrice Manz and Howard, that was (as is customary) read into the official record at the final Arts & Sciences meeting of the year.

With warm regards, and condolences to those who knew Daniel Mulholland as a friend and colleague,

James Rice
Walter S. Dickson Professorship of English and American History