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I expect that Paul would be both touched and amused by the homage Tim Burke paid to him, yesterday, @ Easily Distracted:

Paul Grobstein embodied what I once thought all professors were like: contemplative, perpetually playfully delighted by ideas, generously engaged by anything crossing their path, unworldly, a touch eccentric, impractical, absent-minded, vaguely grumpy in affect…. Paul was one of the few to take on the role of the generalist, integrative, and speculative thinker who I think was once at the heart of the idea of the liberal arts….one of the last of his kind in the academic ecosystem. As in nature, emptying out such an ecological niche can sometimes damage the entire web of life in unexpected ways.

Paul would be touched, of course, to be recognized, so generously, for who he was and what he did. But I expect he'd be bemused, too, by Tim's nostalgia for what is no more. For I think the story Paul's been telling for the past few decades is neither nostalgic or tragic, but pragmatic--or even joyful: it's a tale about endless ongoingness. And thanks to him, there's lots of niche displacement on-going these days!

(While I'm recording homages, see also the nice one that just appeared in the Journal of Research Practice, an international, interdiscipinary journal that Paul helped support--via the Center for Science in Society--and which published several of his essays.)