Farewells
Master Mediator
A few years ago, a small group of alumni proposed putting up a statue honoring the Indian, Stanford’s former mascot. Some offended students wanted to demand that the issue be dropped, but Thom Massey, associate dean of multicultural education, insisted on conversation. Colleague Winona Simms remembers that one alum, slamming his fists on the table, told the group, “I will have my way on this.” Massey quietly but firmly told the man to sit down. “You need to know that I played football here, and all my degrees are from Stanford,” Massey said. “I even played as an Indian, and I have come to understand this. You need to sit down and hear the pain that these students are expressing.” The issue eventually just faded away.
Thomas James Massey, ’69, MA ’72, the resident fellow at Lagunita’s Naranja dorm, died January 1 at his home on campus of an apparent heart attack. He was 61.
Massey, a prominent member of the black community on campus, worked in a variety of roles in student affairs, including as assistant dean of student affairs and as assistant director of the Graduate Life Office. He co-authored the book Mediation: Transforming Conflict Through Communication, and started Faces of the Community, a New Student Orientation program highlighting diversity on campus.
Simms, director of the Native American Cultural Center, says that his gentle gift for working with students will be most missed. She recalled a time Massey helped a student who had been admitted to Stanford Hospital for intoxication. “She was despondent . . . and crying,” Simms recalls. “He took her hand, said a few magical words, and she opened up like a flower. She told him everything.” Massey and Simms worked with the student’s family to get her help.
Massey is survived by his son, Tajai, ’97, his daughter, Julana, his former wife, Grace Carroll, ’71, MA ’75, PhD ’75, and five grandchildren.
Explorer of the Mind
Robert B. Zajonc, a Holocaust survivor, devoted his life to better understanding human cognition.
Zajonc (ZYE-unts, rhymes with “science”), professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford, identified many mental processes that influence human behavior and helped revolutionize social psychology. He died December 3 in Palo Alto from complications of pancreatic cancer. He was 85.
Born in Lodz, Poland, Zajonc fled with his family to Warsaw in 1939 after the Nazi invasion. While he was staying with relatives, a bomb killed both his parents and broke Zajonc’s legs. Nazi soldiers sent Zajonc to a labor camp, but he escaped—twice. In 1944, at 21, he reached England and worked as a translator for the U.S. Army until the end of the war.
Zajonc immigrated to the United States in 1948 and earned his PhD in psychology from the University of Michigan. He stayed in Ann Arbor, where he was a professor of psychology and directed the Research Center for Group Dynamics and the Institute for Social Research. He came to Stanford in 1994.
When the study of human behavior was nearly solely concerned with people’s environment, Zajonc looked to the mind—specifically the interplay between cognition and emotion. He pioneered the “mere exposure effect,” the phenomenon that people prefer images they see over and over. He also discovered that people who perform tasks well perform them even better in front of an audience and that facial expressions affect emotions, not just vice versa. He received the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution from the American Psychological Association in 1978. At Stanford he urged interdisciplinary research on massacres and analyzed responses to the 9/11 attacks.
Zajonc is survived by his wife, Hazel Rose Markus, the Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford; their daughter, Krysia, ’07; three sons from a previous marriage, Peter, Michael and Joseph; and four grandchildren.
War Hero
In January 1945, a battalion of U.S. Army Rangers faced the mission of their lives: free more than 500 American and Allied prisoners from a Japanese POW camp in the Philippines. A 25-year-old officer led the raid. Every POW was rescued.
Robert Prince, ’41, died January 1 in Washington State. He was 89. Prince was hand picked for the rescue mission (see 2001 story). Time was of the essence: the Japanese War Ministry had issued a “kill all” policy. Prince and his battalion set their plan in motion, crawling toward the camp for 60 hours before surprising the guards with gunfire. Many POWs, survivors of the Bataan Death March dressed in rags, thought the raid was a trick and had to be forced out; the sick and wounded were carried.
Prince returned from the war a hero. He received the Distinguished Service Cross and toured the country on a war bond campaign. He settled down to market apples in Washington and raise two sons with his wife, Barbara. He was sworn into the U.S. Ranger Hall of Fame in 1999.
Prince’s story was retold in two books and inspired the 2005 movie The Great Raid, where James Franco played Prince. But Prince refused to be called a hero. In an interview with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Prince said, “People everywhere thank me. I think the thanks should go the other way. . . . Nothing for me can ever compare with the satisfaction I got from freeing those men.”
Prince’s wife and a son, Stephen Robert, predeceased him. He is survived by his son Jim; two grandchildren; and one brother.
