Harley L. Browning passed away at his home in Boulder, Colorado on June 21, 2021, at the age of 94. Surviving him are his wife Waltraut Feindt Browning (Waldi), two sons Erik and Tulio, five grandchildren, and his twin brother Clyde.
Harley was born in Akron, Ohio on April 28, 1927. After receiving his BA degree from Kent State in 1949, he began his graduate training at the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1950s, earning his Ph.D. degree under Kingsley Davis in 1962. His dissertation, “Urbanization in Mexico,” laid the foundation for a long-term research agenda about migration and urban development in Latin America. At Berkeley, Harley met his future wife Waldi, who also became a lifelong friend to many dozens of colleagues and graduate students and their spouses.
In 1960 colleagues Jack Gibbs and Leonard Broom founded the Population Research Center (PRC) as a unit within the sociology department at the University of Texas at Austin (UT). After joining the sociology faculty in 1962, Harley became director from the mid-1960s to 1977. Over 30+ UT years until his retirement in 1993, Harley forged institutional and training legacies through his leadership of the PRC, through his skillful recruitment and training of several generations of Latin American demographers, and through his role recruiting and mentoring assistant professors.
In 1970 the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) announced the start of its Population Centers grants program. With financial support from the UT administration, Harley and a team of young demography faculty traveled to the NICHD headquarters in Bethesda to discuss the Centers concept. Under Harley’s direction, the UT Population Research Center was the first social science population center to be awarded core support funding from NICHD. Other universities soon followed. The Texas PRC remains today as one of the leading centers for demographic research in the world.
During his tenure at UT, Harley inspired a generation of Latin American demographers through his research on internal migration, urbanization, and the structural transformation of employment. In the late 1960s, with his two students Jorge Balan and Elizabeth Jelin, and with the assistance of Waldi Browning, Harley pioneered a life history approach to internal migration. Their groundbreaking monograph, Men in a Developing Society (University of Texas Press, 1973) is still recognized today as a classic in the migration literature. It set the direction for a considerable body of work on internal and international migration by contextualizing migration decision‐making against social and family circumstances.
Equally insightful, if less well known, were Harley’s ideas about the social significance of generational length and its implications for the life course. He was among the first demographers to document how changes in life expectancy could influence both the timing and sequencing of major life events, such as completion of education, first marriage, and first birth, that define the transition to adulthood.
During the latter years of his career, Harley was in the vanguard in recognizing the broad social implications of the structural transformation of employment by signaling the importance of understanding economic development through the size and composition of tertiary employment. With his student Joachim Singelmann, Harley developed a new industry classification scheme that considered the differentiation of services and identified their functions and differential growth rates in the course of development.
Through decades of working with students, colleagues, and a broad network of collaborators, Harley was a central figure building the field of Latin American demography. His students hailed from Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, Peru, and the United States. Today many of the best-known demographers of Latin America were either Harley's students or his collaborators, and most were affiliates of, or visitors to, the Population Research Center.
Harley was the quintessential mentor. In the 1970s the active faculty of the Texas PRC consisted of Harley and a handful of young assistant professors. Harley mentored junior faculty before the practice was formally instituted. He regularly met with junior faculty, routinely provided probing comments on manuscripts, reviewed course syllabi, and even attended undergraduate classes to offer objective feedback on teaching. That so many young faculty members’ careers flourished is a tribute to his dedicated mentorship.
For graduate students Harley humanized the arduous training process with home-cooked dinners at “the Waldheim” (the Browning’s beautiful home on Pecos St.) prior to extended discussions of manuscripts, theses or dissertation chapters. He never missed a deadline for a letter of recommendation and generously shared books from his personal library. A true renaissance man, Harley also shared with his students and friends his cultural interests beyond demography and sociology, especially music (and jazz in particular), Andean art, and literature on a wide range of topics. Frequently one would leave his office or home with a stack of books that he had just read.
Harley’s students and colleagues will forever honor him for his superb mentorship that was customized to those of us fortunate to have benefitted from his professional guidance and friendship. Harley Browning redefined academic selflessness and humility; he cultivated trust, admiration and gratitude among his students and colleagues. Collectively and individually, we stand in his debt, and mourn his passing.
Marta Tienda, Maurice P. During ’22 Professor Emerita in Demographic Studies, Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton University
Dudley L. Poston, Jr., Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Texas A&M University
Joachim Singelmann, Emeritus Professor of Demography, University of Texas, San Antonio