Professor Donald Armour Clelland

1935 - 2021

Professor Donald Armour Clelland

Knoxville - Professor Donald Armour Clelland (1935-2021) had a joyous healthy day on 21 April 2021, but he died early the next morning at home, too suddenly to be aware of what was happening. To paraphrase the poet Dylan Thomas, Don did "not go gently into that good night." He struggled for three decades with horrible allergies and debilitating symptoms for which doctors had no name and no treatment regimens. He was sometimes belittled and stigmatized by uninformed people who cruelly told him his symptoms were only "in his head." He was repeatedly abandoned by doctors who comprehended he was very ill but did not know how to help him. One prescient doctor termed him "the yellow canary of western civilization," alluding to the birds used in coal mines to test for deadly gases. What others could easily tolerate often made Don deathly sick for days and caused his brain to "misfire." Despite that grinding pattern of illness, he was resilient and optimistic about the future. If he were ill today, he was convinced he could get better tomorrow. That strength helped him to hide from others how ill he really was over the last decade.

Don is preceded in death by his parents, Rev. John Paul Clelland I and Winifred Armour Clelland, by his sister Ann Vanderploeg, by numerous extended Clelland and Armour kin in the Grove City, Pennsylvania area, by his much-loved mother-in-law Della Dunaway, and by his dear friend and world renowned scholar Immanuel Wallerstein.

Don is survived by his soulmate-wife Wilma A. Dunaway, his sons Fred and Daniel Clelland, his granddaughters Emily and Mary Catherine Clelland, his sister Jean DeKryger, his sister-in-law Betty Farmer and her family, his daughters-in-law Mary Ann and Chelsea, his former wife Joanne Van Dyke Clelland, his brother John P. Clelland II, his close friends Michael Betz and Tom Hood, and by numerous cousins with deep roots in the Pennsylvania Clelland-Armour family tree.

Don earned his BA from Calvin College (1958) and his MA (1960) and Ph.D. (1970) in sociology at Michigan State University. His academic career spanned more than 30 years at Wayne State University (Michigan) and at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. He touched the lives of more than 6,000 undergraduates, as classroom teacher, adviser, and as a faculty member whose door was open to them anytime he was on the 9th floor of McClung Tower at UTK. When he retired, the UTK Sociology Department presented him with a plaque to recognize his "beyond the call of duty" service to chair 28 doctoral and master's committees. Fourteen of his Ph. D. students became department chairs in American and nonwestern universities. Several of his former doctoral students defined Don to be the shaping force in their careers. Former doctoral student Ken Tunnel (Foundation Professor Emeritus, Eastern Kentucky University) captured the memory of many who have told us that Don had more impact on their intellectual development than any other university professor. "I can easily picture him, me and my fellow graduate students sitting in a small conference room and hanging onto his every word," he wrote. "Staying after class a few of us would question him further as we took in the wisdom from this intellectual giant. Everything that I became as a university teacher and writer is owed to him."

But students did not just appreciate Don because of his intelligence and teaching style. They remembered Don as a faculty member who was willing to challenge inequitable administrative policies that disproportionately impacted minority, female, older return and international students. According to former doctoral student Chris Baker (Walters State Community College) "Don pushed many of us to work with marginalized students, where his worldview and depth of knowledge changed vulnerable lives." For all these reasons, students affectionately addressed him as "Doc," breaking with stiff professorial etiquette to use a nickname while also exhibiting their respect. One former graduate student commented that all the faculty may have been "doctors," but there was "only one Doc." Several former students recalled that Don was "the winningest softball pitcher in the history of UTK intramural sports." From the 1970s until his retirement, he organized softball, volleyball, and basketball teams that merged students and faculty outside formal settings. Prof. Paul Prew (Mankato State University) wrote that he had been "thoughtfully honoring Don's legacy" during the two weeks before his death by "serving as a safe space for students" in the ways he learned from Don.

Colleagues who worked most closely with him pointed to his quiet, unsolicited, behind the scenes efforts in their behalf. For example, former UTK colleague John Gaventa (Institute of Development Studies, UK) wrote that Don's "actions gave a concrete, tangible way for me to link my academic and activist work [at Highlander Center] at a critical point in my life, shaped my journey until today, and was an illustration of the way that Don quietly facilitated pathways for others."

Former students and colleagues pointed out two additional aspects of Don's teaching and research. Along with several others, Prof. William I. Robinson (University of California, Santa Barbara) emphasized Don's "uncompromising commitment to human liberation" According to Ethiopian scholar Asafa Jalata (UTK), "Don was truly revolutionary, and he was always concerned about the oppressed groups and classes." Prof. Tony Ladd pointed out that it is "so appropriate that Don passed away on Earth Day. Without his encouragement, wisdom, and mentorship, I would have never become an environmental sociologist. Indeed, Don always had a great passion for all the ecological issues facing the planet, but it was his extraordinary understanding of the political economy of energy production that most impacted my academic career as a teacher, scholar, and activist. Rarely have I ever lectured on energy problems without mentioning my enormous intellectual debt to Don."

Don wanted to be remembered for four other elements of his long, productive life. We have ranked these points in the order he preferred. An academic friend once asked him what he considered to be the greatest accomplishment of his life, expecting his answer to be about intellectual or academic work. Without a moment to think, he replied, "I experienced the miracle of holding my two baby sons in my hands, tending to them as children, and watching them mature into loving men who are so much more humane toward others than most people are these days."

Second, Don was a Presbyterian "preacher's kid" whose father pastored congregations in Wilmington, Delaware, Valdosta, Georgia, and Troy, Alabama. Don often recalled that he learned from his father how to be a revolutionary thinker oriented to working for positive change. Don's father was part of the small resistance movement that formed the dissident Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

Third, Don was shocked by the racist and sexist inequalities and the narrow theoretical dogmas within the American and Southern sociological associations in the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than empty complaining, he organized and coordinated the country's only "Radical Caucus" to create an institutional space for colleagues whose concerns about race, gender and class inequalities and about theoretical exclusions were silenced within traditional committees. Between 1976 and 1995, the Caucus consistently carried petitions for change to professional annual meetings. In 1994, the Caucus undertook a nationwide survey to identify Black and White sociologists whose roles in the Civil Rights Movement had been ignored by the profession. In 1995, the Caucus organized a gathering to celebrate those scholar-activists and to present a lifetime achievement award to Prof. Charles Gomillion (1900-1995), a son and grandson of slaves who effected a 1960 Supreme Court ruling that outlawed racist gerrymandering of voting districts and who battled to break racial barriers in the national and Southern sociological associations.

Fourth, Don's death represents the loss of a great mind whose silence we will not be able to fill because his work was unique and ground-breaking. Even before he had finished his education, Don's master's thesis research was published in the American Journal of Sociology, a rare occurrence for such a young graduate student. Over the years, he offered theoretical revisions in several areas, but he was proudest of the work he did in international political economy which continued until the day before he died. In 2015, he co-authored a controversial article that challenges the tendency of western scholars to impose on the rest of the world their theories about race in the USA. He called for the development of new 21st century theories about race and ethnicity that shift the theoretical lens to that majority of the world's population that reside in the Global South (SEE https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/598). But, his theoretical work about dark value in global commodity chains has attracted the greatest attention in his retirement years (SEE https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/564). He argued that global commodity chains transmit goods to the rich countries that are "cheap" because of the unpaid and underpaid labor, natural resources and externalized costs to Global South societies and households. As a result, a majority of the people who work in those commodity chains grow poorer, lose control over their land and natural resources, and produce goods for export that they can never afford to consume themselves. In 2015, two of his ground-breaking articles were awarded prizes by two sections of the American Sociological Association. Don's intellectual website can be accessed at https://sites.google.com/site/surplusdrain/home.

All of Don's extended family of kin, former students, colleagues and friends are thankful to have shared our life journeys with this loving, multi-layered man of strong principles and ideas about how to build a more equitable world. In the words of William I. Robinson, "Don touched us in so many ways, leaving an indelible and lasting stamp." The family thanks all those former students and professional colleagues who have emailed memories about his contributions to their lives. We invite you to post memories and comments at the Click Funeral Home website (https://www.clickfh.com/obituaries/obituary-listings). Memorial donations may be sent to GLOBAL LABOR JUSTICE (1634 I Street, Suite 1000, Washington, DC, 20006, or online at

https://globallaborjustice.org). The family plans to organize an outdoor summer celebration of Don's life; please email wdunaway@vt.edu if you would like to be notified.

"Rest in power, rest in peace, comrade Don" (Walda Katz-Fishman, Howard University). We "wish you eternal happiness" (Prof. Saleh Abdelazim, Ain Shams University, Egypt ).