Annenberg Community Shares Their Reflections About Monroe E. Price

Yesterday, Dean Sarah Banet-Weiser shared a tribute to the legacy of Professor Monroe E. Price. Members of our community are also sharing their reflections and the many ways their lives were impacted by Professor Price.  If you would like to share a comment or a photo, please email news@asc.upenn.edu.

"It’s impossible to imagine a world without Monroe. He was a brilliant networker who pivoted institutions, including Annenberg, into the world at large and helped keep them there, an original thinker who showed time and again how wide-ranging concepts and fields of study belonged together rather than apart, a big-hearted mentor of the highest order who took genuine interest in everybody he met, a dedicated institution builder energized by bringing centers and margins together,  an insightful scholar constrained by no convention and a much-beloved husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather. He was also one of my dearest friends. Never missing an opportunity to be supportive, he changed my life in multiple ways. He will be missed all over the world, but it is the unsurpassable combination of his energy, intellect, generosity, wicked sense of humor, keen eye for detail and sharp understanding of how things work that remains in each of us who had the good luck to know him." 

Barbie Zelizer, Raymond Williams Professor of Communication; Director, Center for Media at Risk

“Some of my favorite moments with him were our small rituals, roaming through the Fisher Fine Arts Building, the Institute of Contemporary Art, or the Arthur Ross Gallery together, pausing in front of a piece that caught our eye, trading quiet reactions that often led to long, wandering conversations. We’d pick out student work to bring back to 3620 Walnut Street, but the real joy was sharing that spark of discovery with him. He had this effortless way of turning encounters into friendships, of spotting potential in people the same way he spotted it in art. Even after he retired, we kept up our tradition from afar. Sending each other exhibitions, installations, or images that we thought the other might love. I will miss his insight, his warmth, and the way he made the world feel just a little more vivid.”

Kelly Fernández, Chief of Staff & Senior Director of Faculty Affairs

“Monroe Price was the architect of global communication research at Annenberg, building a transnational network of scholars and practitioners through the Center for Global Communication Studies. But perhaps his most lasting gift as the way he invested in people — especially in early-career researchers from across Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia, many of whom found in Monroe an eager mentor who took their work seriously, made time for them, and believed in their potential. As former ASC Dean Michael Delli Carpini pointed out, Annenberg had become a truly global institution "thanks in no small part to Monroe Price's founding and energetic stewardship." The scholars he championed carry his influence far beyond Philadelphia. Today. the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication carries forward his legacy — deepening the critical, interdisciplinary, globally engaged scholarship he made possible."

Aswin Punathambekar, Professor of Communication; Director, Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication

“As Bob Hornik said in an email today, Monroe ‘led an extraordinary life before he joined us, and then with us.’ A child refugee from Vienna, Monroe settled with his parents in Ohio. After graduating from Yale University and Yale Law School, he clerked for U.S. Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, was assistant to the Secretary of Labor in the mid-1960s, and worked as a researcher for the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of President Kennedy. His subsequent accomplishments are genuinely too many to mention. Monroe and his wife Aimée enjoyed decades of art collecting that reflects their broad, international interests. Monroe was a brilliant conversationalist with endless curiosity. He enjoyed being around faculty and students and contributed greatly to Annenberg’s intellectual culture.”

Joseph Turow, Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Media Systems and Industries Emeritus

"Monroe was an alchemist. His chemistries were concepts, people, places, things. He had an amplifying effect on whatever made someone unique, what their latent talent was, what could be evoked. Disciplines, fields, worlds were his playthings. He danced above doctrine, despised orthodoxy from wherever it originated, nothing was decided or settled, and everything was always up for excavation and remix. 
 
I first began working with him as a grad student and was struck by his unique teaching style which was to only ask questions. I believe this is the Socratic method, but I quickly learned to never answer Monroe's questions, or he would cut you off. His mind moved with such celerity he could see the end of your response before you could, and he wasn't interested in answers: only questions. So throughout working with him as a grad student and later as his associate director of CGCS, I would answer his questions with questions. 
 
I saw the world because of Monroe. He sent me into one impossible situation after another. We bonded over his time in Alaska and his work on the native council land. He got me involved on all things China and we put together multiple conferences that resulted in an edited book and Penn’s first summer school in Beijing. I left ASC before completing my Ph.D., and upon returning from living in Iran, he plucked me back into CGCS and handed me way more than I thought I was prepared for, honing my skills through trial by chaos. His lack of micromanaging might have looked like inattention but looking back from a much older vantage point, it was trust and an understanding of people's personal capacities: he was a remarkable and gimlet-eyed judge of character. 
 
The first time I had a formal meeting with him, he drank out of my coffee cup. He would stick his fingers in whatever I was eating. Whatever anyone was eating. As with conceptual boundaries, he had no interpersonal ones, which I loved. When we flew together, he would wander the aisles because his long legs needed motion. He would strike up conversations with passengers and appear at my seat at 2 a.m. for an impromptu, stressful question session on some project or another. I'd sweep crumbs from his clothes before meetings and make sure he had refreshments when I could tell his blood sugar was getting low. He would call ten times a day or night for every thought that popped into his head, and I would listen with the understanding that he was having a conversation with himself with me as a medium or scrim on which to project. The way he would abruptly end all conversations in person or on the phone. The way he knew someone everywhere. The way he was still connecting people and having ideas and writing me about Iran until he physically couldn’t.
 
He taught me how to make cake out of ingredients for soup. Concrete from the filaments that constantly spun forth from his brain. Wandering with him was prelude to serendipity: Zigzagging around hutongs in Beijing hunting for propaganda posters together, or rare lithographs in Vienna or Budapest. He honed an open energy in me — that to surrender to circumstance and happenstance was a type of power, was something to be cultivated. To be able to walk into any room and make conversation and think on my feet. To think laterally between things that on their surface have nothing to do with one another. To cold call. To have the audacity. To interlope right into someone's world and ask them if they want to collaborate. To predict synergies between people and to take a chance on ugly ducklings and the thing that doesn't belong here. These are gifts he left me with. And he left me with the gift of all the people he connected me to, the rich world of his network; we have all intersected with one another in the tapestry he was constantly weaving. He planted seeds everywhere; we live in his perpetual garden."

Briar Smith, Associate Director of the Media, Inequality & Change Center

Guobin Yang, Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology, wrote the preface to the Chinese edition of Professor Monroe Price’s memoir, "Objects of Remembrance: A Memoir of American Opportunities and Viennese Dreams." The Chinese edition was translated by Professor Yun Long of the Communication University of China and published in Beijing in 2017. Below, an excerpt from Yang's preface:

"Professor Monroe Price is a senior scholar I deeply respect—as well as a colleague and a friend. He lives in New York and takes the train to Philadelphia for work, a commute of about an hour and a half each way. Yet he always moves back and forth with remarkable ease, in wind or rain. It is as if he were simply out for a stroll. Once, when we were leaving the office together to catch a train, he told me there was no need to rush: walking to the station would take exactly seventeen minutes. So we timed our departure accordingly and boarded right on schedule. Only after I read his autobiography did this effortless movement between two places suddenly take on a much richer symbolic meaning….

Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1938, Monroe fled to the United States with his parents as Jewish refugees not long after his birth, beginning a lifetime of journeys far from home. His memoir records his career, his life, and his upbringing and family history. It is not an ordinary autobiography; it is the intellectual testament of a traveler and a sage reflecting on the turbulent twentieth century.

...The everyday details in the book touch on enduring themes: the lingering bitterness of displacement, the inheritance of tradition, memories of time and space, the wounds of history, religious faith, and more. Though these issues unfold from the author’s personal experience, they resonate with ordinary readers. This is because the experience of exile and migration in Professor Monroe Price’s life and family is, to varying degrees, something that many families in modern society have also undergone. The choices his parents faced and the uncertainty of their future likewise mirror the condition of modern life. Monroe’s displacement led him to spend his life exploring the meaning of a life in motion, and it also enabled him to better understand—and strive more earnestly to understand—the people around him. This is why, in his everyday interactions, he shows particular care and warmth toward students and scholars from distant lands."

"Some encounters don’t require meeting face-to-face.

The two years I spent at Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication were the years that profoundly transformed my academic career. I still vividly remember the first time I walked into the conference room. There, hanging prominently on the wall, was a copy of the Great Ming Amalgamated Map (Da Ming Hun Yi Tu) from China. It’s one of the oldest surviving maps from East Asia. 

Standing before that map, I felt at that time, for a profound sense of academic inclusivity that transcended geographical and disciplinary boundaries. I later learned that it was Dr. Monroe Price who brought that map to CGCS. 

Then over time, I learned that Dr. Monroe had long been dedicated to bridging the academic dialogues between China and the world. The seeds he sowed decades ago have since grown into a vast forest, offering shade to generations of scholars who followed. 

To me, this photograph is more than just a record; it is a reminder. True academic legacy is when your vision continues to empower people you have never met, long after you have left the room.

My time at CARGC was the turning point of my journey into global communication, and it remains my intellectual home in many different ways. My deepest respect to the pioneer who came before us—thank you for these encounters that span across time and space. Thank you for shaping futures that extend beyond your lifetime."

Jing Wang, Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and former Senior Research Manager at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication