Daniel Detzner, former U professor focused on advancing marginalized communities, dies at 80

Daniel Detzner, an emeritus University of Minnesota social sciences professor who taught family studies and championed marginalized communities as a longtime teacher and administrator at the U, died Sept. 1 of heart failure at his home in Orinda, Calif. He was 80.

“He bounced from one department to another, mentoring, teaching and creating programs for and with people of color, first-generation students, immigrants, the elderly and incarcerated people,” said Detzner’s wife, journalist Carol Pogash. “His diverse academic life was bound by the pursuit of justice.”

Detzner came to Minnesota to work at the U on his doctorate, which he received in 1977. He was hired by the U’s General College, a program that allowed underprepared students to enter the university, and taught courses in the social sciences.

While conducting research on gerontology, Detzner developed one of the first aging studies programs for health and social services providers at General College. He helped design Insight Inc., an undergraduate degree program for inmates at Stillwater prison; U.S. Chief Justice Warren Burger handed out diplomas to program graduates in 1982.

Detzner directed the U’s Refugee Study Center from 1994 to 1998, conducting research on immigrant communities. Using life histories, he wrote about elderly refugees adjusting to American life in his 1994 book, “Elder Voices: Southeast Asian Families in the United States,” and he helped develop a program to address divisions between immigrant parents and their Americanized children.

As associate dean of General College, Detzner helped lead the fight to save the school after U administrators decided in 2005 to close it. Pogash said he considered the school’s closing a betrayal of students by the state’s flagship public university.

Born in Hammond, Ind., Detzner grew up in Calumet City, Ill., and Munster, Ind. He paid for schooling at the University of Notre Dame with summer jobs working for a railroad, pipe company and steel mill, and earned money as an elevator operator at the U.S. Capitol while getting his master’s degree at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

“He changed what he did [at the U], but the common ingredient was working with students who were less privileged,” Skovholt said. “He had to find a need and fill it.”

Detzner paid special attention to younger colleagues from minority groups. He lobbied the U’s vice provost in 2006 to hire three graduate students of color who were finishing their doctorates. One of them was Rashné Jehangir, assistant dean of equal opportunity programs in the College of Education and Human Development.

“He had the capacity to see things in people they didn’t see in themselves,” Jehangir said. “I would not be in my roles if I hadn’t met Dan.”

Detzner mentored Zha Blong Xiong, a refugee whom he helped navigate graduate school and who eventually became the first tenured Hmong professor at the U.

Detzner, Xiong said, “took me in like a father figure. ... He was my hero, my idol.”

Detzner married Toni Middleton, with whom he raised two daughters: Clare Squire of El Granada, Calif.; and Althea Middleton-Detzner of San Francisco. Their dad, they said, “saw the world as our classroom and wanted us to have a front-row seat to the political and cultural moments of our time.”

He took them to witness Walter Mondale’s 1984 announcement of Geraldine Ferraro as the first woman to run for vice president on a major party ticket, and they waved at Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev when he visited Minnesota in 1990. He taught them to look for early signs of spring in midwinter and included them in projects at his cabin near Spooner, Wis.

“He was quick to laugh at the absurdity of life and always had a little twinkle in his eye,” they said.

After Detzner and Middleton divorced, he married Pogash in 2014; the two had first met over coffee years before in graduate school at Georgetown.

Besides his wife and daughters, Detzner is survived by his stepchildren, John Wood, La Selva Beach, Calif.; Jake Wood, Reno, Nev.; and Rachel Wood, Kensington, Calif.; brothers Roger of Lafayette, Ind., and Ken of Tallahassee, Fla.; a sister, Cindy Stachelski of Moneta, Va.; and eight grandchildren. A celebration of life was held at the Detzner home in Orinda on Sept. 27.