REMEMBRANCE / Gavan Duffy was a scholar with a sense of humor
Posted on September 25, 2025 by Thorne Dreyer
By Henry Mecredy / The Rag Blog / September 25, 2025
Gavan Duffy was born December 8, 1949, in Massachusetts. He passed away in Syracuse, New York, on September 6, 2025. He graduated from the University of Houston and taught political science at the University of Texas at Austin. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Gavan studied political science and artificial intelligence, earning a Ph.D. in 1987. He joined the faculty of Syracuse University in 1989, specializing in the field of conflict and collaboration. His wife, scholar and educator in the field of international studies, was L.H.M. “Lily” Ling who passed away October 1, 2018.
Gavan was an anti-war activist and a contributor to both The Rag and Space City! He is remembered by his many friends in Austin, Houston, and Syracuse for his sense of humor and love of music. Gavan’s musical talent is highlighted on a Youtube video. Gavan sings “Spinning Blue Ball,” a song he wrote.
When I met Gavan in 1970, he was new to Austin and was still splitting his time between Houston (where I think he helped create the newspaper Space City! with Thorne Dreyer and others) and Austin. He could often be found around the University of Texas campus though at the time, I believe, he was not a student. Then as well as later he knew many, many people. He was an inveterate name-dropper!
Gavan was on-air at KPFT, Houston’s Pacifica FM station, for a while.
During my acquaintance with Gavan, his time was roughly divided into his Austin-Houston period and his Syracuse period. He said without any rancor at one point that his move to Syracuse was in pursuit much more of his spouse Lily’s academic career than of his own. I do know that if he had moved to Syracuse alone he would have starved to death, as she was an accomplished and enthusiastic cook, and he was neither.
In Austin in the Seventies, we smoked Benson & Hedges Menthol cigarettes. We quoted Bob Dylan to one another. Late at night with the munchies we would eat waffles at 19th and Lavaca at a Dobbs House. He liked his soft and I liked crispy.
When the old YMCA building was still standing (at 22d and Guadalupe in Austin) we sort of practiced there to make a band at one time, along with Paul Spencer and some others. From my association in particular with Gavan and Paul I was dragged out of my faith in the Democratic Party and the liberal understanding of the Vietnam war, and into radicalism.
At one period we hung out together where I lived briefly, at a large boarding-house kind of place in the West Campus area (2202 Nueces, no longer standing) sometimes called the Yellow Bordello for some reason. Bob Bower, anti-war GI, lived there for a while and assorted other hippies and druggies were seen there. None of the people drifting in and out were strait-laced and all of them were open to drug experimentation. Gavan and I would often play guitar while Bill Meacham played harmonica; we would smoke grass to improve the sound of the music. Along with many others in the Austin West Campus community Gavan worked on The Rag, Austin’s alternative, culturally and politically radical newspaper.
Once at the Yellow Bordello under the influence of cannabis and alcohol Gavan and I were sitting on the couch, both of us singing loud while I banged furiously on my old Martin guitar. All at once Gavan started singing even louder, roaring even, inspiring me to strum my guitar even more heartily, until I realized something was wrong. Keeping time by slamming his hand down on the couch arm, Gavan had hit a sewing needle left in the fabric, jamming it into his hand big-end first. He seemed upset when I could not stop laughing.
Gavan went to the Republican National Convention in Miami in 1972, somehow passing himself off as a journalist. When he returned he laughed to me that even some of the hippie-rad journalists there expressed shock at his sloppy and food-stained attire! I guess he was making a statement.
When I had young sons, they would have a great time during Uncle Gavan’s visits. He would accuse them of “crying to get your way,” and would give them “electric spankings,” in which he would rapidly slap their glutes with both hands to general laughter.
A period of time passed during which Gavan obtained some credentials, mostly at the University of Houston, UT and MIT, that enabled him to teach Government at the University, which he did for several years until he moved to Syracuse University. He moved there with his delightful and ebullient wife Lily HM Ling (1955-2018), also an academic (at Syracuse and the New School). Before he met Lily Gavan ate only junk food.
They moved into a huge frame house a short walk east of the SU campus, some of whose rooms I never saw in spite of many visits there. Lily, from a Chinese family, would laugh wildly when Gavan would accuse her of speaking “Linglish” or attempt to imitate, actually parody, her walk.
By great good fortune, I traveled often to Syracuse for work, usually staying with Lily and Gavan, sometimes joined by our friend Carolina Jan Tulloss. They both made many friends in Syracuse.
In one of my visits, Gavan beat Lily and me at Scrabble, expending all seven of his tiles in one play and breaking into a shameless celebration, cackling and crowing like a demented grackle, and describing the suspense of waiting for the right letters.
He played guitar frequently with several Syracuse friends, including a gig or two at a coffee shop.
He loved baseball and watched it frequently on TV. Once, while he was still at MIT, I was visiting in Boston on a work trip and we watched the Astros in the National League Championship against the Phillies. As the last of the five games was nearing its end with the Astros ahead by one run, a Houston friend of Gavan’s called, giddy about the Astros going to the World Series, thereby putting the gris-gris on the team. Slamming down the phone, as we used to do, Gavan almost upchucked with rage and fear, and sure enough the Astros lost. Superstition… that’s what an advanced degree from MIT will do for you.
At some point in his Syracuse days, maybe after he retired from teaching, Gavan became obsessed with gambling and would spend endless hours at a nearby Oneida Indian Nation casino. I know they were endless hours because I went there with him once on the theory that he would play a few hands of poker and then we would leave. I became familiar with every gaming venue and garish advertisement, wandering around in that vast casino, before he cashed out. So regular were his visits, and I guess so much money did he lose, that he and Lily were awarded a free weekend in a nice suite at least once. Possibly this was his way of boosting the finances of indigenous Americans.
As for Gavan’s scholarly work, I am surely one of the least qualified to comment on it other than to say that in thousands of conversations with him I learned far more facts and was stimulated by a far larger number of insights into America than he was. I was always proud if I could insert relevant opinions about, say, George Ball or Daniel Ellsberg into our chats. Otherwise he was far over my head. A thing I always admired was his inability to be awed by people of intellectual accomplishment, and his knack for summarizing and contextualizing their arguments.
Gavan didn’t go in for hugs, but this sometimes-dignified professor enjoyed devising goofy handshakes, of which his favorite was to start with the conventional hand grasp, then leaving thumbs interlocked, rotating the fingers free so as to wave to your esteemed acquaintance from 18 inches away.
Though naturally funny and friendly, even smart-alecky, he affected a certain reserve and was always careful to avoid effusion in his greetings, even of old friends after long separations. Once, having not seen him and Lily for a couple of years, I was eastbound on I-90 toward Syracuse and had sent along an ETA to him. I had with me in the car a tracking device, so Gavan was watching in real-time my travels into town and to the house on his phone. Their house had a big front porch several steps up, overlooking the driveway. As I pulled in I saw Gavan on the porch. I lowered the driver’s window and donned my finest Texas grin, prepared to shout out a happy greeting. He beat me to it: His first words were, “You took the wrong exit.”