But Ignatiev says the dream he had in the '60s lives on.

His wife, Kate, is a labor lawyer. His one year-old son, John Henry, is named after "the steel driving man, the fellow that died with a hammer in his hand," Ignatiev says. (Rachel, Ignatiev's 14 year-old daughter by a previous marriage, does not live with him.)

And his academic work concerns the issues of class and society that first fascinated him 30 years ago.

His dissertation deals with them in microcosm by focusing on Irish Catholic immigrants to the United States before the Civil War, he says.

"The working title is 'How the Irish Became White," Ignatiev explains. "How they became accepted into the white social formation and assimilated its values. The Irish were the model for virtually all the immigrant groups that came after them."

But the most significant legacy of the years he spent rallying his co-workers is his outspoken approach to situations he considers to be unjust, says Ignatiev.

Which brings us back to the toaster.

Battered by weeks of criticism, Ignatiev seems eager to set the toaster issue behind him.

"It's quite possible to argue that I was hairsplitting," he says. "I'm open to that discussion. People don't have to agree with me. I'm not absolutely convinced that I was right in this matter."

But he adds with a spark of old passion, "I am convinced I had the right to raise it."

Ignatiev has been affiliated with Dunster house for six years. In 1986 he became a resident tutor. After three years as assistant senior tutor, he became a non-resident tutor when he married in 1990.

'Positive Presence'

While many tutors squirrel themselves away and appear only to grab goodies at Masters' Open Houses, Ignatiev has been an active force in Dunster, his defenders say.

"He's the only tutor whom everyone knows," says Dunster resident Jonathon E. Schrag '92. "Not because of the controversy, but because he's at meals every week engaging with students."

Although they met when Ignatiev brought disciplinary charges against Schrrg for playing softball in the Dunster House courtyard, the tutor has been a postive presence in his life, Schrag says. "He's challenged me intellectually in a lot of ways--to apply the things that I study to my life."