Donald Hayward Sanborn Jr.

Donald Hayward Sanborn (Jr.) died on May 16, 2025 in Elgin, Illinois. He was born October 18, 1937 in Washington, D. C., the son of Donald H. and Martina P. Sanborn.

After eight years in Beverly Hills, Virginia, his family moved to Springfield, Illinois. Graduating from Springfield High School in 1955. Sanborn studied chemical engineering for two years at Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he became a member of Theta Xi Fraternity and ran cross-country and track. He was briefly employed by the Illinois Division of Highways, as an Engineering Technician in the Cement Lab at the Bureau of Materials in Springfield.

Transferring to the University of Chicago in 1958, Sanborn received a joint BA in Philosophy and Humanities in 1961. His BA thesis examined the possibility that visual memory images were identical with brain processes, a view he later rejected as inconsistent with a Pragmatist instrumental philosophy of science. During later graduate work at UC, Sanborn, worked for a time as a Clerk/Dispatcher in the UC Security office. He earned an MA in Philosophy, going on to complete all doctoral work but the dissertation in philosophy in 1967. A minor in Psychology at UC led to more practical lifelong concern with the bodily basis of memory in the Freudian psychoanalysis of repressive inhibition. Years later, in retirement, he came to see that fully effective self-knowledge depended crucially upon insight-oriented bodywork, of the kind found in newer psychotherapeutic disciplines such as Bioenergetics.

Sanborn taught philosophy and general humanities for 32 years in the City Colleges of Chicago, a multi-campus community college system. He served in the Humanities Department at Wilbur Wright College (1968-76) and then (1976-2000) at Harold Washington College (formerly known as Loop College) in downtown Chicago. During 1972-74 Sanborn was also part-time lecturer in Philosophy of Education at Indiana University Northwest, in Gary.

In summer 1973 he returned to UC on an NEH grant for study in the Education Department, focusing on J. S. Mill's philosophy of general education. His later UC studies included campus workshops on dream interpretation and hypnosis (1992), along with Downtown Center work on problems of consciousness (1996) and philosophy of mind (1997).

As a teacher at Harold Washington College, Sanborn introduced students to philosophy by using worksheets to help them organize and write their own Socratic dialectics, on the model of Plato's dialogue Euthyphro. By student request, he organized a philosophy club at HWC that discussed works of particular interest to the students, including Plato's Republic. Sanborn also adapted John Dewey's logic of inquiry to the study of all the arts covered in a pair of introductory general humanities courses. He got students first to understand the kinds of problems unique to each art and then to solve problems of meaning presented by each work discussed in class. Sanborn favored essay tests that stressed support of interpretation by detailed analysis of works presented.

At retirement from the City Colleges of Chicago in 2000, Sanborn was Associate Professor and Chair of Humanities at Harold Washington College. During his CCC career, he served on local and system-wide faculty councils and curriculum committees, also chairing system-wide committees on master-planning and on general education. Sanborn also made two trips to England with CCC faculty who helped City Colleges Birmingham develop a two-year general education transfer program. He was a member of national philosophy and humanities associations, as well as AFT Union Local 1600 in the CCC.

Sanborn was particularly proud of being a founding member (1976) and past president (1987-88) of the Association for Development of Philosophy Teaching. ADOPT was an outgrowth of the Illinois Task Force for Curriculum Articulation in Philosophy (1974-76), that brought together professors from community colleges, colleges, and universities who had discovered a common interest in the relation between scholarly work, teaching and curriculum. Once statewide, ADOPT in recent years has met mostly in the Chicago metro area, widening its agenda to include philosophical aspects of current issues of public interest. Sanborn remained active in ADOPT during retirement, presenting papers on topics as diverse as peak oil, death and dying, the radical politics implicit in ecological ethics, democracy's conflicts with capitalism, and dissolving the mind/body pseudo-problems. His paper on mysticism was later published in the journal Sacred Web, Issue 25.

In 2023 Sanborn was predeceased by his wife, Georgia P. Winston of Springfield. The couple was married in Springfield in 1962, and celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in Geneva in 2012.

The couple traveled widely throughout the US, maintaining a small circle of lifelong friendships. With friends they visited several ancient Maya sites in the Yucatan of Mexico, traveling also in Canada, England, Greece and the Greek islands, Turkey, and France.

Sanborn is survived by a son, Donald H. Sanborn III (Jennifer) of Princeton, NJ, and twin grandchildren Sophie Elizabeth and William Gordon Sanborn. An avid player of table tennis and also pool, Sanborn valued time spent with each of his former table partners at venues in Wheaton, Aurora, Lombard, St. Charles, and Geneva.

During his final year he was a resident at the Sheridan at Tyler Creek in Elgin, where he was an active member of the chess club.

A private burial of his ashes will be held at Stoney Point Cemetery in Anna, Texas. In lieu of flowers, please consider making a donation to the American Civil Liberties Union.

As a fervent defender of a common core of liberal arts studies for all college students, Sanborn wished to be described (on a family monument at a Sanborn family plot in Mount Hope Cemetery of Bangor, Maine) as "a soldier in the army of General Education."