JON VAN TIL

I'm Jon Van Til, Professor Emeritus of Urban Studies and Community Planning at Rutgers University, Camden.   I've been privileged not only with long life--I was born in 1939 in Ohio--but I also served a long and satisfying career as an applied sociologist. I did a number of things and I wrote a number of things and many of these activities led to writings which can be accessed on this site. 

To put it briefly, I sought to build a career around a set of values: Democratic participation, citizenship, social justice, social  equality, elimination of poverty, reduction of social inequality, diversity, equity, inclusion, racial and ethnic justice and equality, gender respect, and equality, political liberalism,  civic action, voluntary  organization, anti-fascism, social and economic innovation, environmental justice, and sustainability.  Each of these values was directly contradicted and openly   threatened by the fascist movement that engulfed the world of my birth in 1939 and rose to control American society and government in the age of Trump, as my time on this beleaguered planet came to its close.

In the intervening years of my lifetime, a variety of hopeful forces, pretty much the entire list of values in the preceding paragraph, seemed to be on the rise, or as my friend and colleague Bob Putnam put it,  in positive upswing.  I, along with many millions of others around the world, joined in optimistic and active participation along lines that may be considered as social democratic. But such values are not permanent, and the struggle to achieve them remains to be recovered, advanced, and secured.

An electronic encyclopedia summarizes my career as follows:

Jon Van Til is an American sociologist and professor emeritus of urban studies and community planning at Rutgers University, Camden, recognized for pioneering research on nonprofit organizations, voluntary action, and the third sector.[1][2]

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Swarthmore College with high honors in political science and holder of a doctorate in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, Van Til joined Rutgers in 1974 as chair of the urban studies department, co-founding its graduate public policy program and directing its citizenship and service education initiative from 1988 to 2000.[1] He edited the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (formerly Journal of Voluntary Action Research) from 1978 to 1992, served twice as president of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, and held the founding board chair of the Center for Nonprofit Corporations in Trenton.[1] Van Til's publications, including Growing Civil Society (2000, 2008), Breaching Derry's Walls (2008) on Northern Ireland's peace process, and Mapping the Third Sector (1988), address urban policy, philanthropy, citizen participation, and social economy dynamics.[1] His contributions extend to consulting for entities like the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and national service programs, Fulbright professorships at the University of Ulster, and awards such as Rutgers Camden's Creative Teacher of the Year in 1991 and the Association's Career Award for Distinguished Research and Service in 1994.[1]

Between 1966 and 2024 I served in a variety of academic and administrative positions at Purdue University, Swarthmore College, the Pennsylvania law and justice Institute,  and Rutgers University at Camden. Over the last 25 years. I was five times named a Fulbright scholar or specialist, twice for terms in Northern Ireland, twice in Hungary, and once in Turkey.  My academic work is covered by articles in the major electronic encyclopedic sources Wikipedia and Grokipedia (https://grokipedia.com/page/jon_van_til).  

 From the year 2014 to the time of the present writing in 2026 I resided in Budapest with my wife, Prof. Agnes Kover-Van Til of ELTE University.  There I continued to explore the long-time Van Til family interest in the Danube region.  In 1938, my father William Van Til’s  book The Danube Flows Through Fascism was published by Scribner’s. Part travelogue and part political commentary, this lively book describes a 900-mile foldboat trip down the Danube taken by the author and his new bride in the summer of 1937.  During this odyssey, my intrepid parents paddled through Hitler’s Germany, pre-Anschluss Austria, and Hungary on the brink, eventually reaching the Iron Gates in what was then Yugoslavia. (Cf. William Van Til, The Danube Flows Through  Fascism.  New York: Scribner’s, 1938.)  The four chapters dealing with the trip through Hungary have been translated into Hungarian and published in the journal Esely in 2012. 

The family interest in the Danube region has been maintained by my two talented children,  Ross  (born in Philadelphia in 1977), a meteorologist with the national weather service, and Claire (born in Boulder in 1979), a  lawyer and public administrator with the city of Philadelphia.My two children, along with my grandson, Wes (born 2012 to Melissa Lane, wife of Ross) have joined Agnes and me in vacations to  Hungary and Croatia on an annual basis for several years.

​ My  father’s book has long been out of print, and I spent a good bit of  a recent Spring talking it out as an audiobook, and am delighted to present it here without charge.  If you'd like to listen to my reading, it's on an electronic address that can be reached by a few productive clicks. Click on the following link to hear the audiobook: https://www.mediafire.com/folder/v2w1iv75zuzc/DanubeFlowsAudiobook_2parts

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FASCISM THREATENS, BOTH  HERE AND THERE

Before I started living in Hungary most of the time, my American home was near Terre Haute, Indiana, in a lovely lakeside home my parents bought some 50 years ago when my progressive educator father was appointed Coffman distinguished professor of education at Indiana State University.  Dad died in 2007 at age 96, and it was a delight to live close to my mother as she made it past the century mark

Much of Indiana resembles Hungary in terms of territory, population, economic base, urbanism/rurality and political culture.  About 10 million people in a geographical oblong, lots of pigs and corn, one big city at the center, and a propensity to elect as maximal leader folks like Mike Pence and Viktor Orban.  I never found a handle to write about Indiana, but in Hungary I did try a few articles for the Huffington Post and greatly enjoyed working with a number of colleagues on a book about Hungarian oppositional forces.  These writings can be found in my section of the very useful researchgate.net web resource.

Emerging from the template of Chapter 11 (Listen, Mr. Hitler) of Dad's volume, I wrote an essay originally drafted in 2014, titled “Listen, Mr. Orban.”  It is a real delight to spend the years granted me past 2026 living in a much more democratic land then Hungary was before, now that Peter Magyar has been elected Prime Minister.

The study of voluntary action and civil society, and the encouragement of productive forms of the same, comprised most of my professional life and works. Over the past 50 years, much of that work has been centered in the network and publications of ARNOVA, the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action. 

 Many of my published books and papers may be found on the basic website that accumulate links to such work, such as academia.edu–click (https://rutgers.academia.edu/JVanTil ) or  www.researchgate.net