“THE SAGE OF TREE FROG LANE”
“The experience of losing everything and finding I was having a wonderful time opened me to experiences I otherwise would not have had. I would have protected myself from them if I had known.”
TRIVIA
Phil was born in 1927, son of successful global transport executive John E. Slater.
He jumped ship from the Merchant Marines after serving at the end of WWII.
To help pay for his Harvard tuition, Phil volunteered for a paid medical study, becoming an unwitting research subject in the CIA’s infamous 1960’s MK Ultra research program that tested if LSD could be weaponized.
He then became a professor at Harvard University, and later the head of the Sociology Department at Brandeis University.
Phil later left academia to found Greenhouse, a personal growth center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He produced 9 non-fiction books, 3 fictional novels, and 14 plays.
He loved tennis, film, Italy, and often described himself as “addicted to the ocean.”
He died of cancer in his home aged 86, surrounded by his family, who spread his ashes around the globe.
He is survived by his wife, 4 children, 5 grandchildren, and 2 great grandchildren.
OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY
Philip E. Slater (May 15, 1927 — June 20, 2013) was the author of the influential 1970 best-seller The Pursuit of Loneliness (Beacon 1970), as well as nine other books of sociology and social commentary. Slater believed fervently in democracy’s adaptive superiority, a theme that ran throughout all his work. In a prescient 1964 Harvard Business Review article called “Democracy is Inevitable,” he and co-author Warren Bennis predicted the fall of the Soviet bloc and the rise of democracy, arguing,
“Democracy… is the only system that can successfully cope with the changing demands of contemporary civilization.”
Phil expanded this concept in his last two books of non-fiction, A Dream Deferred (Beacon 1992) and The Chrysalis Effect (Sussex Academic Press 2008). The Chrysalis Effect argues that much of the partisan conflict we are currently experiencing is the result of a global cultural metamorphosis from an authoritarian “controller” culture to a decentralized “integrative” culture”—a change that affects every aspect of our lives and which has provoked fierce resistance from traditional power structures.
Slater received his Ph.D. from Harvard and taught sociology at Harvard, Brandeis, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. He was Professor and Chairperson of the Brandeis Sociology Department in 1971 when he left academia to found Greenhouse, a personal growth center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Morrie Schwartz and Jacqueline Doyle.
A lifelong feminist, he was chosen by Ms. Magazine as one of its “male heroes” in 1982. After moving to Santa Cruz, California, Philip transformed from critic to creator, becoming an actor, playwright and novelist. He acted in over 30 plays and films, wrote more than 25 plays and novels, and taught writing and play-writing at UC Santa Cruz and in private workshops. He returned to academia in his eighties, teaching in the doctoral program in Transformative Studies at the California Institute for Integral Studies.
Despite having cancer, he continued to act, write, teach, blog and walk by the ocean until shortly before his death. In keeping with his critique of the medical model, he died at home, in the company of friends and family.