David Matza

1930 - 2018

David Matza

May 1, 1930 - March 14, 2018

Professor David Matza passed away on March 14, 2018 at the age of 87. He was a loving father and friend, and a gifted, highly regarded sociologist at U.C. Berkeley from 1960 until his retirement in 1992.

Born in New York City in 1930, David fondly recalled his childhood days in Harlem and the Bronx hanging out with his friends, playing stickball, and journeying to Ebbets Field to cheer on the Brooklyn Dodgers.

As a young graduate student at Princeton, David authored "Techniques of Neutralization" with Professor Gresham Sykes. This groundbreaking work provided a novel framework for viewing the motivations and rationales of people who commit crimes. David and Gresham's "hugely influential" theory continues to this day to be applied and analyzed by sociologists, criminologists, and legal scholars alike.

David received his PhD from Princeton in 1959 and, two years later, he joined the faculty of the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

In his first few years at Berkeley, David published Delinquency and Drift (1964) and Becoming Deviant (1969), two seminal works that had a deep impact on the fields of criminology and delinquency. The 2017 book Delinquency and Drift Revisited paid tribute to the enduring importance of David's insights.

At Berkeley, David was a devoted and beloved teacher and mentor, whose students praised his rare combination of brilliance and approachability. He was, in the words of colleagues and students, a "terrific mentor," an "extraordinary person," and a "wonderful teacher," who will be remembered for both his insightful work and his incredible support of his students.

David exhibited the same kindness and generosity with his family, and cherished his role as a loving and devoted father and grandfather. He made sure to pass along his deep love of books, politics, history and sports; an enthusiastic conversationalist, he truly valued the thoughts and perspectives of even the youngest family members.

David will be remembered for his humor, his generosity, and his remarkable capacity for empathy and understanding. His scholarship and his personal life alike were shaped by his keen ability to find common ground despite differences in roots or ideology, reflecting an "attitude of appreciation" he embraced from his earliest days in academia.

David is preceded in death by his parents, Morris Matza and Ester Cohn, his brother Abraham and sister Stella. He leaves behind his children Naomi, Karen and Daniel, his sons-in-law and daughter-in-law Bill, Jay, and Maura, and grandchildren Katie and Molly, Rosa and Miles, and Max and Timothy.