Thomas Stephens Lough Ph.D.

Professor of sociology and professional jazz pianist. Radical feminist, sociologist, and peace activist, Thomas Lough, one of the "Kent State 25" died on Saturday, (October 11, 2008) from heart failure. He was 80. Tom was a professor of sociology at Sonoma State University, where he taught, among other courses, Social Movements, Political Sociology, Social Psychology and Globalism. He was an evaluator for Sonoma State's Project Censored, where last year he was named one of four new national judges. Most recently he was named to the Project Censored Hall of Fame in perpetuity. His research included the energetics of social structure and the relationship among agriculture, patriarchy, genocide and ecocide. In May 1970, Tom was an associate professor of Sociology at Kent State University. He was faculty advisor to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and was on the steering committee of the Concerned Citizens of the Kent State University Community (CCC). Tom was the only professor indicted by the Grand Jury following the Kent State Massacre, in which four students died and eleven seriously injured protesting the invasion of Cambodia and the Vietnam War. Both local evidence and FBI internal documents would later show "that allegations of improper conduct on the part of Prof. Thomas Lough were unfounded...(Shirley Bills and Scott L Bills, Kent State/May 4: Echoes through a Decade. Kent Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1988, p. 305). Bills and Bills authoritative account of the Kent State Massacre includes an excerpt from a letter Tom Lough wrote to his students after the University closed down in the wake of the shootings: It is tragic that only after our tragedy do the nation's campuses rise to confront the issues students have long tried peacefully to present. But now many are realizing the obvious connections between the National Guard on the campuses and the natural guard in the ghettos, the rule of military violence at Kent and the rule of military violence overseas. Kent's sorrow has become the nation's outrage, and you were there. Don't forget it (Ibid). Before joining the Kent State faculty, Tom served in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Department of State, U.S. Government, and subsequently as Senior Foreign Affairs officer in the Disarmament Affairs Division of the United Nations. Tom held and earned BSME in mechanical engineering, an AM in Sociology and a Ph.D. in Sociology, all from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Tom was a passionate teacher committed to his field, to activism and above all to his students. He was also an accomplished ragtime jazz pianist. He is survived by his wife, SSU sociologist Dr. Elaine Wellin; by his sister Evelyn Montgomery; by four children: Alex and his partner Jacquita, Martha and her husband Richard, Janet, and Joseph and his wife Kirsten, and by seven grandchildren. An open memorial service and potluck to celebrate his life will be held on Saturday, November 22nd, 1:00 p.m. in Youth Annex, 425 Morris Avenue, Sebastopol, next to the community center. Tom's family has invited those who wish to make a donation in Tom's memory to donate to Project Censored, Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, CA 94928 http://www.projectcensored.org