Steven Strang, a author and literary scholar who based MIT’s Writing and Communication Middle in 1981 and directed it for 40 years, died with household at his facet on Dec. 29, 2024. He was 77.
His imaginative and prescient for the middle was bold. After an MIT working group recognized gaps between the scholars’ technical information and their means to speak it — notably as soon as in positions of management — Strang advocated a good broader method not often used at different universities. Moderately than student-tutors working with friends, Strang employed instructors with doctorates, material experience, and instructing expertise to assist practice all MIT group members for the present and future careers changing into more and more reliant on persuasion and the necessity to talk with diverse audiences.
“He made an indelible mark on the MIT group,” wrote present director Elena Kallestinova in a message to WCC workers quickly after Strang’s dying. “He was deeply revered as a pacesetter, educator, mentor, and colleague.”
Starting his skilled life as a journalist with the Bangor Day by day Information, Strang quickly shifted to academia, receiving a PhD in English from Brown College and over the many years publishing numerous items of fiction, poetry, and criticism, along with his pedagogical articles on writing and rhetoric.
However the Writing and Communication Middle is his legacy. At a retirement celebration, longtime MIT lecturer and colleague Thalia Rubio known as the WCC “Steve’s creation,” declaring that it went on to serve many 1000’s of scholars and others. One other colleague, Bob Irwin, described in a observe Strang’s dedication to creating the WCC “a spot that supplied each friendliness and the very best skilled requirements of recommendation and session on all communication duties and points. Steve himself was conscientious, a respectful director, and a heat and dependable mentor to me and others. I feel he was exemplary in his job.”
MIT acknowledged Strang’s main contributions with a Levitan Educating Award, an Infinite Mile Award, and an Excellence Award. In nomination letters and testimonials, college students and friends alike informed of a “tireless dedication,” that “they won’t have graduated, or been employed to the job they’ve at this time, or gained admittance to graduate college had it not been for the assistance of The Writing Middle.”
Strang can also be remembered for his work founding the MIT Writers Group, which he first supplied as a artistic writing workshop for Unbiased Actions Interval in 2002. In one more instance of Strang recognizing and assembly a group want, about 70 folks from throughout the Institute confirmed up that first 12 months.
Strang is survived by a big prolonged household, together with his spouse Ayni and her two kids, Elly and Marta, whom Strang adopted as his personal. Donations in his reminiscence might be made to The Rhode Island Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
