Hayden White

Hayden V. White was University Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he served as Chair of the History of Consciousness Program, and Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. White had a profound influence on the practice and conceptualization of all the humanities disciplines. A historian in the tradition of literary criticism, he is most famous for his work Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973). He argued that historical writing mirrors literary writing in many ways, sharing the strong reliance on narrative for meaning, therefore ruling out the possibility for objective or truly scientific history. White has also argued, however, that history is most successful when it embraces this "narrativity," since it is what allows history to be meaningful. White also figured prominently in a landmark California Supreme Court case regarding covert intelligence gathering on college campuses by police officers in the Los Angeles Police Department (White v. Davis, 13 Cal.3d 757, 1975). In 1972, while a professor of history at UCLA and acting as sole plaintiff, White brought suit against Chief of Police Edward M. Davis, alleging the illegal expenditure of public funds in connection with covert intelligence gathering by police at UCLA. The covert activities included police officers registering as students, taking notes of discussions in classes, and making police reports on these discussions. The Supreme Court found for White in a unanimous decision. This case set the standard that determines the limits of legal police surveillance of political activity in California; police cannot engage in such surveillance in the absence of reasonable suspicion of a crime. White has received honorary doctorates from the University of Michigan and the University of Gdansk in Poland. White passed away on March 5, 2018.