Vale Emeritus Professor Ron Taft AM
Vale Emeritus Professor Ron Taft AM
3 June 1920 – 21 October 2023
Tribute
Emeritus Professor Ron Taft AM in 2005. Photographer: Melissa Di Ciero. Image courtesy of Monash University Archives.
Emeritus Professor Ron Taft, who has died aged 103, was regarded as one of the most intelligent and productive psychologists in Australia.
Dubbed “the professor” from childhood due to his insatiable curiosity and “need to know”, he formalised his thirst for knowledge with a distinguished career in academia.
The main thrust of his scholarship was social psychology and personality, and he earned an international reputation for distinguished research on this subject, as well as ethnicity, immigration and social and cultural psychology. His pioneering, long-standing research on the psychological effects of immigration and settlement – a subject close to his own heart – examined how the experience of migration shaped and changed people and was not common anywhere else in the world at the time.
His inquiring mind also led to the study of Jewish ethnic identity, creativity and psychedelic experiences. His peers described him as ‘one of the best social psychologists in Australia,’ observing that they had ‘heard his contributions discussed from Oslo to Jerusalem.’
Professor Taft came to Monash in 1968 as Professor of Social Psychology, and served as the Fred Schonell Chair of Education. He was confident his new role would give him the opportunity to interact with colleagues from other disciplines such as sociology, history and philosophy and he immersed himself in faculty and University-wide committees, where he proved to be highly effective.
During his tenure, the faculty developed and offered courses in both educational and social psychology, providing advanced programs to those who wished to work as registered psychologists of the Australian Psychological Society. It became the first education faculty in Australia to offer PhDs, which resulted in not only a high number of professors emerging from its doors but also provided avenues to give mature students greater opportunities.
At Monash, Ron continued to pursue his wide range of research interests. He studied the educational careers of the children of immigrants and, to the surprise of many, consistently found that they stayed at school longer than the equivalent offspring of non-immigrants.
In 1976 he acted as Dean of the Faculty of Education and developed a new and very successful degree; the Diploma in Educational Psychology.
Ronald Taft was born on 3 June 1920, on the kitchen table at 10 Margaret Street, in the Melbourne suburb of Canterbury, the youngest child of Ukrainian migrants Grisha Tafipolsky, owner of the landmark fountain pen shop, Tafts, and Olya née Mushatsky. Educated at Scotch College, he enrolled at the University of Melbourne to study teaching “because I loved instructing people” and law “because I liked arguing”, but he soon abandoned the latter, finding it too focussed on the strict application of rules rather than justice. He graduated BA in 1939 and, captivated by the empirical approach of psychology, moved to the US where he completed an MA in Social and Clinical Psychology at Columbia University, New York, in 1941.
Afterwards he returned to Australia, working at the Australian Council for Education Research (ACER) to develop psychological tests for military and industrial personnel. He became the first qualified industrial psychologist to practise as a consultant in Victoria, employed by the Institute of Management in Melbourne. In 1943, Ron married Ellen Braumann, whom he had met at a Jewish youth group. Three years later the couple moved to the US with baby Barbara in tow, where Ron undertook graduate studies in psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. His PhD on the ability to judge personality was awarded in 1950. The family returned to Australia (with a new addition, David), after Ron was appointed senior lecturer at the University of Western Australia, and promoted to reader in 1957. There he began his research on the psychology of immigration and ethnic identity; an interest he would pursue for more than 30 years. In his book From Stranger to Citizen (1965), Ron synthesised the research he did from 1952 to 1965 on the incorporation of post-war immigrants into the life of the Australian nation, a work quickly recognised as a major contribution to the field. Whilst in Perth, the couple’s third child Marcus was born.
Ron was widely seen as a humble, warm, and responsive human being, with the gift of apparently thriving in the face of all the myriad challenges upon which he set his heart and mind. Beyond Monash, he was a foundation member and chair (1962-63), of the Australian Branch of the British Psychological Society, and foundation chair of the National Committee for Psychology in the Australian Academy of Science.
Professor Taft was awarded the Royal Society of Victoria’s prestigious Silver Medal for excellence in scientific research in 1975 and in 2014 he was named a Jubilee Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. In 2017, at the age of 97, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM).
Ron retired from Monash in 1981 on health grounds, upon which he was appointed Emeritus Professor. Ambitious and proactive, his determination to generate and disseminate knowledge did not fade in later years, nor his old habits of “mulling over the elegant mysteries of human behaviour”. He served as President of the International Association for Cross Cultural Psychology (1984-1986) and as an executive member of the International Union of Psychological Science and the International Association of Applied Psychology. After Ellen died in 2005, and with much encouragement from his children, he became absorbed in writing his memoir, My World (2015).
Ron was tireless in his endeavours but remained unpretentious, aspiring to add meaning if he could to the lives of all whose paths he crossed. He felt proud of his career as a scholar but remained thankful and convinced that “he had been incredibly lucky throughout his life.”