UChicago News

Philip Roth, award-winning author and UChicago alumnus, 1933-2018

Wed, 23 May 2018 15:19 -0500

Philip Roth, one of the iconic voices in American letters who credited his debut novella to a conversation he had while a University of Chicago graduate student, died May 22. He was 85 years old.

Over a career that spanned six decades, Roth, AM’55, received almost every major literary prize, including the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, PEN/Faulkner Award and National Book Critics Circle prize. Other honors included the National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal, as well as the Man Booker International Prize for his contributions to literature in English.

Roth received his master’s degree in English from UChicago in 1955 and taught in the College’s writing program from 1956-58.

In media interviews, Roth discussed the impact of his time at UChicago, where he took classes with former Dean of the Humanities Napier Wilt, became a protégé of Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, and studied alongside noted writer and editor Ted Solotaroff.

In a 1983 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Roth said of Chicago: “I’ve never felt as close to any other city I’ve lived in,” in part because of the young talent he met at the University—“the competition, the ambition, the stimulation, the talk.”

Also in that interview Roth said he owed his debut novella Goodbye, Columbus to Richard Stern, the late Helen A. Regenstein Professor Emeritus in English Language and Literature. Over hamburgers at a Hyde Park tavern in 1955, Roth told Stern of his middle-class upbringing in New Jersey. “Dick got a kick out of the stories. ‘Why don’t you write that down?’ he said. My head was so full of The Golden Bowl, I thought he was having me on. But when I went home, I did it.”

His talks with Stern, Roth said, “helped me to see that what was in front of my nose, though not as resounding as Conrad or as convoluted as James, qualified as fiction. That’s what I learned in Hyde Park, how to talk back to all those great books.”

Roth’s time at UChicago influenced his work in other ways as well. Nathan Zuckerman, the protagonist of several Roth novels, is a UChicago alumnus, while Roth described former Dean Wilt as his “greatest supporter.”

“I loved the University of Chicago,” he said in 2011 upon winning the Man Booker International Prize. “[It] was in a great city and had great faculty and it had very, very smart students.” Roth said Bellow’s writing had a deep influence on his work and experience of the city. “[Bellow’s novel] Augie March was my guide book, I read it like Fodor's guide to Chicago, y’know? Also it was so glamorous—it seemed to me, that I should be in this city that nourishes this guy.”

Roth’s debut collection, Goodbye, Columbus won the National Book Award in 1960. He is perhaps best known for his 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint, a comic novel that attracted both praise and controversy for its frank discussion of sexuality. His other novels include The Counterlife, for which he won the 1987 National Book Critics Circle prize for fiction; American Pastoral, for which he won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; and Operation Shylock, The Human Stain and Everyman for which he won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1994, 2001 and 2007, respectively.

David Rockefeller, University trustee and descendent of UChicago’s philanthropic founder, 1915-2017

Tue, 21 Mar 2017 12:07 -0500

David Rockefeller, PhD’40, a prominent philanthropist, banking executive and University trustee whose grandfather, John D. Rockefeller Sr., was the philanthropic founder of the University of Chicago, died on March 20. He was 101.

Rockefeller’s ties to the University spanned a lifetime, from touring Egypt and the Middle East as a teenager with distinguished University archaeologist James Henry Breasted to the endowment of a professorship in UChicago’s economics department, from which he received his doctorate. Rockefeller was associated with the University’s Board of Trustees for seven decades, providing a strong connection to the institution’s founding in 1890.

David Rockefeller was a leader in finance as chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank and was a prominent philanthropist, serving as chairman of such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, the Council on Foreign Relations and Rockefeller University. His global work included the founding the Trilateral Commission, a non-partisan group to foster closer cooperation between the North America, Europe and Asia, and providing leadership and support for the International House Association, including International House at the University of Chicago.

“David Rockefeller led a truly remarkable life, characterized by his keen intellect, an understanding of global issues and a deep appreciation of the responsibility that his family’s legacy had given him,” said President Robert J. Zimmer. “He was a generous supporter of the University and offered the benefit of his experience and good judgment. He will be remembered here for his prominent role in the University’s history.”

Rockefeller was born in New York City on June 12, 1915 to John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. He attended the Lincoln School in Harlem, which featured progressive teaching methods influenced by John Dewey. As a child and young man he knew his grandfather, the former leader of Standard Oil, who was one of the most influential corporate figures and philanthropists in American history, but whom David Rockefeller knew as a “benign, indulgent” patriarch who gave out dimes to children. “He was the least dour man I have ever known; he was constantly smiling, joking and telling shaggy dog stories,” David Rockefeller wrote in his 2003 book, Memoirs.

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David Rockefeller

Rockefeller remembered a youth filled with art and travel. In 1929, at age 14, Rockefeller and members of his family toured Egypt and the Middle East at the invitation of Breasted, whose work fascinated Rockefeller’s father. Such excursions “made us feel the excitement of the opportunities open to us and recognize the role the family was playing in so many areas. These experiences gave us an education that transcended formal learning,” Rockefeller wrote about the experience.

Rockefeller graduated from Harvard College in 1936, and after a year at the London School of Economics, arrived at UChicago to pursue a PhD. The school “boasted one of the premier economics faculties in the world…the fact that Grandfather had helped found the university played a distinctly secondary role in my choice,” he recalled. His thesis, “Unused Resources and Economic Waste,” was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1940.

“David was proud of his Chicago degree and spoke often of his admiration for the great economists he had encountered here,” said President Emeritus Hanna Holborn Gray. “He liked to reminisce about his boyhood trip with James Henry Breasted, which happened as the Oriental Institute and Chicago House in Luxor, Egypt became objects of the Rockefeller family’s philanthropy.”

While working on his dissertation, Rockefeller met Margaret “Peggy” McGrath. The couple were married for 55 years until McGrath’s death in 1996.

Service and leadership on a global stage

After completing his graduate work, Rockefeller began in government service, working for New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. During World War II, he served as an intelligence officer in North Africa and the south of France, achieving the rank of captain. With the return of peace, Rockefeller embarked on his career at Chase Manhattan and worked to continue his family’s tradition of philanthropy—what John D. Rockefeller Sr. called “the art of giving.” He was first elected as a trustee of the University of Chicago on May 8, 1947. He served as a trustee until 1963, became an honorary trustee until 1966, then was a life trustee until 2007 and was a trustee emeritus at the time of his death.

Rockefeller became chairman and chief executive of Chase, where he focused on global banking and developed important relationships with numerous world leaders. He was part of a generation of Rockefellers who held a prominent place in American civic life. His brother Nelson Rockefeller was governor of New York and later vice president of the United States, while his brother Winthrop Rockefeller served as governor of Arkansas.

David Rockefeller’s civic work included helping New York City through its financial crisis, serving as a key supporter of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and leading Rockefeller University as chairman of its board of trustees. His many years of service to educational, civic and cultural institutions earned Rockefeller honors, including the U.S. Legion of Merit, the French Legion of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Gray said that when Rockefeller retired from Chase, the bank’s board decided to honor him by endowing a chair in his honor, rather than through a direct gift — after all, “what could you give a Rockefeller?”

There was a competition between Harvard and the University of Chicago for the chair, which was to be in international economics. Chicago won, and Rockefeller came for the announcement and dinner that inaugurated the chair. “He always remained interested in following its progress and learning of its incumbents,” Gray said.

The chair is now held by Nobel laureate Lars Hansen, the David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor in Economics.

John W. Boyer, dean of the College and author of The University of Chicago: A History, said David Rockefeller valued what his family had begun at the University of Chicago, and he contributed to its later successes.

“David Rockefeller served with great distinction as an active trustee of the University, as a generous philanthropist in support of the University’s academic programs and as a wise adviser to several of our presidents,” Boyer said. “The gifts of his grandfather, John D. Rockefeller Sr., to the early University of Chicago were primarily responsible for the founding of one of the great new research universities in modern America, setting a model for those who would follow in advancing the well-being of American higher education and society. David Rockefeller shared with his grandfather and his father a deep conviction about the profound responsibilities that the great American universities bear in enhancing the intellectual creativity and cultural progress of American civic life.”

Rockefeller is survived by five of his children, David Rockefeller Jr., Abigail Rockefeller, Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, Peggy Dulany and Ellen Rockefeller Growald. He was preceded in death by his son Richard Rockefeller.

Barry F. Sullivan, alumnus and trustee emeritus, 1930-2016

Wed, 28 Sep 2016 16:00 -0500

Trustee Emeritus Barry F. Sullivan, MBA’57, a banking chief and former chair of the University of Chicago Board of Trustees, died Aug. 11 at the age of 85.

Sullivan, who was elected to the Board of Trustees in 1980, served as chair of the board from 1988 to 1992. In his professional life he was a prominent banking executive and civic leader. From 1957 to 1979, he worked at Chase Manhattan Bank, rising to the level of executive vice president. From 1980 to 1991, he served as chairman and CEO of First Chicago Corporation. He then served as the vice chairman of Sithe Energies, Inc.; director of Liati Group, LLC; and vice chairman and COO of KRoad Power. He also was a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

In 1992, Sullivan joined the public sector as deputy mayor for finance and economic development of New York City and later served as the COO of New York City’s board of education. He was president of the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce. He also served as a trustee of Columbia University, Georgetown University and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sullivan became a life trustee at UChicago in 1996 and a trustee emeritus in 2007. He served as vice chair of the board from 1985 to 1987 before being named chair of the board. In 1990 he received the University’s Distinguished Alumnus Award. In 2004, he was inducted into the Founder's Circle of the Harper Society and received an honorary doctor of laws degree. He was a former member of the Council on Chicago Booth and a former trustee of the University of Chicago Medical Center.

Sullivan grew up in the Bronx in New York City and played basketball at Georgetown University. After service in Korea in the U.S. Army from 1952 to 1954, he earned a BA from Columbia University in 1955 and an MBA from what is now the Booth School of Business in 1957.

Sullivan is survived by his five children: Barry Jr., MBA’86; Gerald, MBA’86; Mariellen, Scott and John, as well as 17 grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his spouse Audrey, who had served as a member of the Women’s Board.

In keeping with tradition, a memorial resolution in Sullivan's honor will be presented at the Board of Trustees meeting in November.

Wallace W. Booth, alumnus and trustee emeritus, 1922-2016

Tue, 19 Jul 2016 13:00 -0500

A prominent business executive and philanthropist, Trustee Emeritus Wallace (Wally) W. Booth, AB’48, MBA’48, died at home in Los Angeles last month at age 93.

Booth was the retired chairman of the board and CEO of Ducommun Inc., a Los Angeles-based company engaged in the production and servicing of aerospace-related components. Throughout his career, he held senior positions with Ford Motor Co., Rockwell International and United Brands, Inc.

Born in Nashville, Tenn., Booth was raised in Chicago. He served as an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II before earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business from UChicago in 1948. He was elected to the University Board of Trustees in 1982, becoming a life trustee in 1991 and trustee emeritus in 2007.

He served on the budget planning, development planning and investment committees and was a vice chair of the Council on the Graduate School of Business (Booth Council). In 1986 he endowed the Wallace W. Booth Professorship. (Wallace Booth is of no relation to David Booth, for whom Chicago Booth is named).

He served on the board of directors of several companies, including Litton Industries, Rohr, First Interstate Bank and Navistar International and was involved in a number of philanthropic organizations, including The Children’s Bureau, the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists Foundation and the League for Children. Booth also was a former president of the Southern California United Way.

Booth is survived by his wife, Rosemary; his children, Ann Booth Cox and John England Booth; three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. He was preceded in death by Donna Booth, to whom he was married for 50 years.

William H. McNeill, world historian and distinguished scholar, 1917-2016

Tue, 12 Jul 2016 14:00 -0500

Prof. William H. McNeill, a pioneer in the field of world history and author of the seminal work The Rise of the West, died July 8. He was 98.

McNeill, AB’38, AM’39, was a teacher and scholar for four decades at the University of Chicago. The Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in History, he was the author of more than 20 books, from the sweeping history of human disease Plagues and Peoples to a memoir of the University during the presidency of Robert Hutchins.

McNeill was awarded the Erasmus Prize in 1996 and National Humanities Medal by President Obama in 2010. The Rise of the West, which traces civilizations through 5,000 years of recorded history, received the National Book Award for history and biography in 1964.

In a 1987 interview at the time of his retirement, McNeill said it was important for historians not to be too narrow in their outlook. “History has to look at the whole world,” he said. “And that means you have to know how the rest of the world is, how it got to be the way it is.”

McNeill was critical in launching the field of world history at a time when the discipline was narrowly focused on the history of Europe and its past and present colonies. In his work, he emphasized the connections and exchanges between civilizations rather than placing them in a vacuum.

“Bill McNeill was a scholar of extraordinary boldness, range and high creativity,” said John W. Boyer, the Martin A. Ryerson Professor in History and dean of the College. “He was able to see patterns and relationships among highly complex and disparate historical phenomena on a global level in ways that enabled him to write magnificent and courageous books of large intellectual compass.”

Boyer said McNeill provided decisive leadership during his chairmanship of the Department of History in the 1960s, rebuilding it into a preeminent site for international historical research after the department had lost much of its luster in the 1940s and ‘50s.

An early interest in history

McNeill was born in Vancouver, British Columbia. His father, John McNeill, was a historian of Christianity whose efforts to tell the story of faith through the connections among denominations inspired his son.

McNeill arrived at the University of Chicago as a 10-year-old when his father was appointed to the University faculty. He graduated from the Laboratory Schools and received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UChicago before attending Cornell to pursue a PhD in history.

McNeill’s studies were interrupted by his service in World War II, which included an assignment as assistant military attaché in Cairo. The position led to his working with Greek and Yugoslav governments in exile, making him an eyewitness to the middle stages of the Greek civil war. He wrote his first book from that experience, The Greek Dilemma: War and Aftermath, published in 1947.

In Cairo he met his future wife, Elizabeth Darbishire, who worked for the Office of War Information. She became his proofreader, critic and collaborator. They had four children together.

After the war, he completed his PhD at Cornell, and in 1947, he joined the faculty at the University of Chicago.

While in graduate school, McNeill stumbled across Arnold Toynbee’s The Study of History, which was an attempt to chart the rise and fall of world civilizations. Although he later worked under Toynbee at Chatham House in London, McNeill broke with Toynbee in his own work, seeing an interconnectedness among societies that didn’t exist in Toynbee’s writings.

A love of teaching and UChicago

At the University of Chicago, McNeill devoted himself to teaching in addition to his research. “Teaching is the most wonderful way to learn things,” he said in an interview. “You have to get up before a class at 10 o’clock the next morning and have something to say.” In 1983, he received the University’s Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

McNeill helped design the History of Western Civilization Core sequence at the University in the late 1940s and played a major role in introducing the history of other world civilizations as key elements of the College’s curriculum in the 1950s and ‘60s. He had a deep love and respect for the University and its intellectual community, dedicating The Rise of the West to “the community of scholars constituting the University of Chicago.”

“My father loved the University of Chicago wholeheartedly, its traditions and its people. A good-natured argument was his favorite form of entertainment, and he felt his colleagues and students at the University provided that in full measure,” said his son John McNeill, a professor of history at Georgetown University.

After his retirement, McNeill and his wife moved to Connecticut, where he continued to write. He completed a biography of Toynbee in 1989 and wrote The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History with John McNeill, published in 2003. In 2005, he published The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian’s Memoir.

In an essay for the American Historical Association, McNeill explained the importance of studying history. “Ignorance of history—that is, absent or defective collective memory—does deprive us of the best available guide for public action, especially in encounters with outsiders, whether the outsiders are another nation, another civilization or some special group within national borders.”

McNeill is survived by his four children and 11 grandchildren.

Abner Mikva, public servant and Law School faculty member, 1926-2016

Tue, 05 Jul 2016 16:00 -0500

Abner Mikva, one of the few Americans to serve in senior positions in all three branches of the federal government, passed away on July 4. He was 90.

Mikva, JD’51, taught at the University of Chicago Law School and served as senior director of its Mandel Legal Aid Clinic after retiring from government service.

His roles in the federal government stretched from serving in Congress in the 1970s, to sitting on the U.S. Court of Appeals in the 1980s, to being appointed White House counsel by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. Then, while teaching at UChicago, Mikva befriended and mentored a young Law School lecturer named Barack Obama.

“Abner Mikva was the Law School graduate who clearly embodied public service,” said Law School Dean Thomas J. Miles, the Clifton R. Musser Professor of Law and Economics. “Through his work in government and his teaching at the Law School, he encouraged younger people to join him in his important and honorable work. It is no surprise that he mentored a future president.”

A native of Wisconsin, Mikva graduated from Washington University at St. Louis and served with the Army Air Corps in World War II. He graduated from the Law School in 1951 and clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sherman Minton.

It was while at the Law School that Mikva got an early taste of politics. On his way home one night, he stopped by the local ward office and said he’d like to volunteer for the Democratic campaigns for the upcoming election. The committeeman asked who sent him, to which Mikva replied “nobody.” The committeeman then told the young law student: “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.”

Mikva wasn’t deterred, however. In 1956, he won election to the Illinois House as a Democrat and in 1968 was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served eight years from two different congressional districts.

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter nominated Mikva to the federal appellate court for the District of Columbia Circuit. He served on the court for 16 years, including the last three as chief judge.

Mikva left the bench in 1994 at the request of President Bill Clinton, who appointed him White House counsel. He served two years in the senior role before moving back to Chicago to start the first of his many retirements.

It was then that Mikva began to teach at UChicago. He also was appointed senior director of its Mandel Legal Aid Clinic and led the clinic’s Appellate Advocacy Project.

“It was such a memorable experience having Judge Mikva for Legislative Process,” said Adam Bonin, JD’97, one of Mikva’s first students in the course and now an election law attorney in Philadelphia. “There’s no substitute for the real-world experience he had. The stories he told were amazing, and he was always so generous with his time.”

Mikva and his wife, Zoe, started the nonprofit Mikva Challenge, a civic leadership program for young people which encourages them to get involved in political issues and campaigns. In 2014, in honor of Mikva’s long career in public service, the Kanter Family Foundation established the Mikva Fellowship Program Fund at the Law School to support a one-year postgraduate public interest law fellowship.

“He was smart as a whip, generous of spirit, and dedicated to the public good,” said Geoffrey Stone, the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law. “Our nation needs more leaders like him.”

The University in the spring of 2014 awarded Mikva the Benton Medal for Distinguished Public Service, which recognizes distinguished public service in the field of education. Later that year, Obama bestowed upon his mentor the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Mikva called it the “greatest thing that ever happened to me.”

In addition to his wife Zoe, Mikva is survived by three daughters, Mary and Laurie Mikva, and Rachel Mikva Rosenberg; and seven grandchildren.

The burial will be a private family funeral. A public memorial will be planned for early August.

Jack W. Fuller, journalism leader and University Trustee, 1946-2016

Fri, 24 Jun 2016 12:11 -0500

Jack W. Fuller set a standard of integrity and accomplishment for a generation of Chicago journalists, rising from his first junior job at the Chicago Tribune at age 16 to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for the newspaper, and ultimately the leader of Tribune Co.’s publishing division.

Fuller, 69, who served on the University of Chicago Board of Trustees since 1994, died June 21 at his Chicago home, after a diagnosis of cancer several months ago.

“Jack had a distinguished career as a journalist, author and business executive,” said President Robert J. Zimmer. “He had a personal commitment to higher education, and his wide-ranging interests, balanced judgment and wisdom made him an invaluable presence on the University’s board. He was a wonderful colleague and friend whose loss will be felt deeply in the University community.”

“Jack was a respected voice on our board for 22 years,” said Joseph Neubauer, MBA’65, chairman of the University’s Board of Trustees. “He had an innate understanding of issues affecting Chicago, and his vision also encompassed our history and future in a national and international context. Those are among the many reasons why he will be greatly missed.”

A Chicago native, Fuller earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University in 1968 before serving in the U.S. Army as a Vietnam correspondent for Pacific Stars and Stripes. After leaving the army he received a law degree from Yale University in 1973.

For two years, Fuller worked as a general assignment reporter at the Tribune, then left to serve as special assistant to U.S. Attorney General Edward Levi, who had been president of the University of Chicago from 1968 to 1975. Fuller returned to the Tribune’s Washington bureau and became an editorial writer in 1978. He was named editorial page editor in 1981.

Fuller won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for a series of editorials on constitutional issues. He became a mentor for many writers and future leaders of the newspaper, including current editor and publisher Bruce Dold and former editor Ann Marie Lipinski, now the curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. In 1989, Fuller was promoted to vice president and editor of the Tribune. He held that role until 1997, when he became president of Tribune Publishing.

Five of Fuller’s books were published by the University of Chicago Press, including Restoring Justice (2013), an edited volume of speeches by Edward Levi that chronicled his work rebuilding a discredited Department of Justice after Watergate. He published eight novels and numerous short stories, and continued to write opinion pieces and other articles for the Tribune and other outlets. He also taught a course in creative writing at UChicago.

Fuller retired from the Tribune Co. in 2004. He was a director of the MacArthur Foundation and a member of the Special Committee on editorial standards at Dow Jones & Co. He was also a past president of the Inter American Press Association, which works to monitor and safeguard freedom of expression in the Western Hemisphere.

Fuller served on the University’s Board of Trustees from 1994 onward. He was Board Vice Chair from 2009 to 2012; chair of the Community and Civic Affairs, External Relations, and University Relations committees, and served on many other committees including the Executive Committee from 2005 to 2013. He was a life member of the Humanities Visiting Committee.

Fuller is survived by his wife, Debra Moskovits, PhD’85, and two children from a previous marriage, son Timothy and daughter Katherine Ryan. Plans for a memorial service are pending.

Charles M. Harper, MBA'50, longtime supporter of Chicago Booth, 1927-2016

Thu, 02 Jun 2016 10:00 -0500

Charles M. Harper, a University of Chicago Booth School of Business alumnus whose landmark gift in 2007 led to the renaming of the school’s main campus building in Hyde Park, died May 28 at his home in Omaha. He was 88.

Harper, who was known as Mike, earned his MBA in 1950. He rose to prominence in the 1970s when he rescued ConAgra from near bankruptcy and transformed the failing food producer into an industry powerhouse. After a 1985 heart attack forced him to change his eating habits, Harper pioneered the creation of ConAgra’s Healthy Choice brand—one of the first mainstream food lines aimed at healthful diets.

“Throughout his remarkable career, Mike was an extraordinary alumnus. Even in retirement, he remained a generous and engaged supporter of Chicago Booth,” said Sunil Kumar, Chicago Booth dean and the George Pratt Shultz Professor of Operations Management.

In recognition of his donation in 2007, at the time the largest gift in the business school’s history, the Hyde Park Center at 5807 S. Woodlawn Ave. was renamed the Charles M. Harper Center. He also sponsored the Charles M. Harper Road to CEO Series and served on the Council on Chicago Booth from 1992 to 1995. He was awarded Booth’s Distinguished Corporate Alumnus Award in 1991.

Harper was born on Sept. 27, 1927 in Lansing, Mich., and grew up in South Bend, Ind. He received a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from Purdue University and served in the U.S. Army. After earning his MBA, Harper began his career as an engineer for General Motors, followed by 20 years at Pillsbury, a unit of General Mills, where he was a group vice president.

During his nearly two decades at ConAgra—as executive vice president and chief operating officer in 1974 until his retirement as chairman and chief executive officer in 1992—ConAgra’s annual sales increased from $600 million to more than $20 billion. After a brief retirement, he served as chairman and chief executive of RJR Nabisco from 1993 to 1996.

Harper’s wife, Josie, preceded him in death. The Josie Harper Admissions Suite at Booth is named for her. Harper is survived by his daughters, Carolyn Harper, Elizabeth Murphy and Kathleen Wenngatz; son, Charles Jr.; 11 grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren.

Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, renowned scholar of India, 1930-2015

Mon, 28 Dec 2015 14:18 -0600

Editor’s note: A memorial service for Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph will be held Nov. 12 at 1:30 p.m. in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel

Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, the William Benton Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of Chicago, died Dec. 23 in Oakland, Calif., after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease. Rudolph, 85, was a past president of the American Political Science Association and the Association for Asian Studies, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Along with her husband and close collaborator Lloyd, Rudolph published numerous influential works that earned them the 2014 Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian honor. The Rudolph’s extraordinary teaching and scholarship helped make the University of Chicago a leading institution for the study of India.

Rudolph’s work with her husband relied on careful qualitative analysis that incorporated topics and methods from other fields, including literature and psychology. The range of the Rudolph’s work was unusually broad, encompassing not only Indian politics but also comparative politics as a general field, with special interest in the political economy and political sociology of South Asia, state formation, Max Weber, political psychology, methodology, and the politics of category and culture.

Her major books include The Modernity of Tradition, Transnational Religion and Fading States; Education and Politics in India; In Pursuit of Lakshmi: the Political Economy of the Indian State; and Essays on Rajputana.

Born Susanne Hoeber in 1930, she lived in Germany until 1939, when her family fled following her father’s imprisonment for anti-Nazi activities. The Hoebers settled in Philadelphia, where Susanne’s parents, Johannes and Elfriede, were active in public service and social justice causes. Rudolph received her BA from Sarah Lawrence in 1951 and her PhD from Harvard in 1955.

Shortly after her arrival at Harvard, Susanne met fellow graduate student Lloyd Rudolph. Their marriage in 1952 marked the beginning of a 60-year partnership distinguished by its scholarly excellence and its extraordinary respect and affection, both for each other and for their students.

Their collaboration was especially noteworthy at a time when women seldom became professors. Susanne’s student Kristen Monroe, PhD’74, remembers their marriage as a source of “inspiration and hope for many young women, not sure they could successfully combine career with family. The grace with which Susanne did this, and the support Lloyd provided as an equal but liberated male were critical at a time when women lacked role models.”

In 1956, the couple embarked on their first trip to India, driving from London to New Delhi in a Land Rover. Their journey is documented in the 2014 volume Destination India, which earned praise as a model of travel writing and intellectual commentary.

The Rudolphs spent much of their adult life doing field research in India, and their scholarly work changed the field. Their first book, The Modernity of Tradition, introduced political scientists to the idea that the politics of countries outside Europe could differ from the European model and still be “modern.” It argued that many so-called “traditional” institutions—such as caste—can perform what Westerners think of as “modern” functions. Recognized as a classic in the field, The Modernity of Tradition has remained in print throughout the half-century since its publication.

The Rudolphs would author many more books together, in work noted for its breadth as well as its scholarly depth and attention to detail. Many, like Explaining Indian Democracy (2015), are mainstream analyses of Indian politics; others, like Making U.S. Foreign Policy toward South Asia (2008) address U.S. policy toward India. Their work on Gandhi, such as Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays and Reversing the Gaze: Amaar Singh’s Diary: A Colonial Subject’s Narrative of Imperial India, revealed Susanne’s concern with political psychology. These works focused attention on identity and suggest how people’s perceptions of others shape their actions toward others.

A dedicated teacher and winner of the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, Rudolph taught a popular course on the political psychology of identity at UChicago. Several of the Rudolphs’ many distinguished students mention another course taught by Rudolph, “Subjection, Equality and Domination: A Study of the Asymmetrical Relationship,” as their favorite course, precisely because of its ability to reveal new insight into issues such as race, and ethnic and religious prejudice, while forcing students to see the world in a new light.

The Rudolphs were active in the “Perestroika” movement, a loose-knit grassroots effort in the early 2000s that sought to open political science to greater methodological pluralism. The Rudolphs received the 2009 Blade of Grass Award, given by the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Conference Group of the American Political Science Association, in honor of their contributions to interpretive studies of the political world.

As pre-eminent scholars of the world’s largest democracy, the Rudolphs lived in India every fourth year for nearly 50 years. Their three children were educated in Indian schools so they would grow up bilingual in Hindi and English. Much of this time was in Jaipur, with Rajasthan their home base for studying modern politics and examining India’s princely states both in the British colonial period and post-independence.

Rudolph is survived by her brothers, Thomas Hoeber of Berkeley, Calif., and Francis Hoeber of Philadelphia, Penn., her husband, Lloyd, and her three children: Jenny, who serves on the faculty at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School; Amelia, artistic director of Bandaloop, an Oakland, Calif.-based aerial dance company; and Matthew, a political scientist teaching at San Francisco State University. Susanne also delighted in and is survived by her three grandchildren: Gia (19), Maya (9), and Ry (4).

A memorial service will be scheduled at a later date.

Amy Kass, inspirational teacher who treasured a humanistic education, 1940–2015

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 12:50 -0500

During a teaching career that spanned 34 years at the University of Chicago, Amy Kass designed courses that addressed both the enduring questions of human existence and the urgent questions facing today’s young people by helping them see the relevance of classic texts to their everyday lives.

Among these was the “Ethics of Everyday Life: Courtship” course, which she co-created with her husband, Leon Kass, SB’58, MD’62. In the course she encouraged students to explore “inarticulate longings” and discover the purposes and virtues of courtship, love, sex and marriage through texts by such writers as Homer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, Allan Bloom and even Miss Manners.

Amy Apfel Kass, AB'62, senior lecturer emerita in humanities, died on Aug. 19 at her home in Washington, D.C., after a 10-year battle with ovarian cancer and a short battle with leukemia. She was 74.

“Amy Kass was a wonderfully generous and engaged teacher of the humanities, who profoundly influenced and enriched the lives of several generations of students in the College,” said John W. Boyer, dean of the College and the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of History. “Her contributions to the theory and practice of liberal education were manifold and outstanding. She left an extraordinary legacy of excellence and dedication to the highest educational ideals of the College.”

In an article published in the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens, AB'95, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, noted that Kass was one of the best teachers he ever had. “Mrs. Kass believed that at least one aim of a higher education is to provide students with a sextant of sorts, by which they might better discover what it is they should know about life, what they might hope for it and how they might go about getting it,” he wrote.

Born Amy Judith Apfel in 1940, Kass grew up in New York City and chose, against her parents' wishes, to attend the University of Chicago because the recruitment catalogue focused on ideas and contained no pictures. "But really what was distinctive about Chicago—it was a place where you didn’t have to apologize for being serious," she often said. She met her future husband on her first day on campus. Leon Kass, a student at what is now the Pritzker School of Medicine, happened to be on the Orientation Board, responsible for orienting new students. The two were married two years later, in 1961.

During a video interview in January 2014 with Bill Kristol, founder and editor of the Weekly Standard, Amy Kass spoke fondly of her experience at UChicago. “We spent the first three weeks discussing the Declaration of Independence,” she recalled. “And I was blown away. The conversations that it generated … really converted me to a way of thinking, a way of reading and a way of speaking,” she added.

After graduating from UChicago, Kass took a teaching job at a high school in Lincoln-Sudbury, Mass. She took time off in the summer of 1965, following the passage of the Voting Rights Act, to put her strong beliefs in civil rights into action. She and her husband traveled to Mississippi, where they spent a month mobilizing African Americans in rural Holmes County to register to vote, encouraging them to organize and defend their civil rights.

“Amy’s devotion to excellence in teaching was part of a larger moral vision that guided her throughout her life and shaped her character,” said Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, and the Herbert W. Vaughan fellow at the Witherspoon Institute. “At the core of that vision was a sense of the profound and equal dignity of the human person.”

Re-inventing the rituals of courtship

Kass joined the UChicago faculty in 1976 as a lecturer in the Humanities Collegiate Division. Her husband Leon also joined the faculty for what would be a long and distinguished tenure; he currently is the Addie Clark Harding Professor Emeritus of Social Thought and the College. Amy and Leon Kass co-founded the “Human Being and Citizen” Common Core course devoted to the questions, “what is an excellent human being and what is an excellent citizen?” Amy Kass also was a stalwart teacher and advisor in the Fundamentals: Issues and Texts undergraduate major.

“Amy was an inspirational teacher for students and staff, believing so vehemently as she did in the value of a humanistic education,” said David Bevington, the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus. “She was no less dear and wonderful as a human being and colleague.”

Nathan Tarcov, professor of social thought and political science, agreed. “Amy was a rare and beloved teacher who inspired her students not only to respect the great books she taught but to respect themselves and each other,” said Tarcov.

At UChicago, Kass and her husband learned from their observations and through conversations that many young people went along from one unsatisfactory relationship to the next, often becoming “jaded and embittered.”

“There was a lot of talk about the failure of marriage, the divorce culture, the problems of single parenthood,” said Leon Kass during an interview with the Weekly Standard’s Kristol. “But there was absolutely no discussion whatsoever about how you get married and how you go about finding and winning the right one with whom you could make a life. And there were no cultural norms, there were no teachings.”

The Kasses decided to address the problem, both in writing and teaching. In 2000, the efforts led to the creation of a course, “Ethics of Everyday Life: Courtship,” which was based on an anthology the couple edited, Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying. The book promotes what they called a higher kind of sex education designed to prepare hearts and minds for romance leading to lasting marriage.

Through the book, the Kasses sought to inspire young people to rediscover the blessings of marriage by reading classic and modern works on the subject, and re-inventing new forms of courting based on improved respect between men and women.

“Amy tried to help her students realize that what they longed for—intellectually, spiritually, even romantically—but too often felt they were denied by modern life, was only denied to them as long as they failed to really understand their longings,” wrote journalist Yuval Levin, who earned his PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at UChicago. “They could come to better understand them through the study of great works of literature.”

In 1980, after only four years of teaching in the College, Amy Kass won a Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. In 2010, Kass received the Norman Maclean Faculty Award, and the University subsequently created the Leon and Amy Kass Odyssey Scholarship Fund.

“Amy Kass was keenly interested in young people’s development as thoughtful human beings,” said Ralph Lerner, the Benjamin Franklin Professor Emeritus in Social Thought and the College, who co-taught several courses with Kass. “Her welcoming manner and easy smile never got the better of her intellectual rigor. Her success as a teacher may be measured by her many College students who strove to adopt for themselves the standard she held up before them: that when it comes to thinking, half-done is not well done.”

Kass retired in June 2010, and she discussed Herman Melville's Moby-Dick in her last class. When summarizing her UChicago career, she wrote that her lifelong mission was to teach people to “read great books slowly and critically, to refine their ideas, to enlarge their sympathies, and to aspire to a richer life beyond self-centered quests for gain, fame or power.”

Kass served on the National Council on the Humanities for the National Endowment for the Humanities, as a consultant to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Corporation for National and Community Service, and as a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

She authored numerous articles and edited anthologies on American autobiography, and on the idea and practice of philanthropy. In addition to Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar, she and her husband also produced the anthology, What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song. They also produced e-curricula on The Meaning of America and The American Calendar.

Amy Kass is survived by her husband of 54 years, Leon Kass; her daughters, Sarah Kass and Miriam R. Kass; son-in-law, Robert Hochman; her granddaughters, Polly, Hannah, Naomi and Abigail; and her siblings, Dr. Roberta J. Apfel, Dr. Franklin J. Apfel and David J. Apfel.

Donald Levine, sociologist and former dean of the College, 1931-2015

Thu, 09 Apr 2015 09:20 -0500

Whether he was teaching his students about sociology through martial arts or leading them to the Point during the University’s annual Kuvia celebration, Prof. Donald Levine believed in education without boundaries.

“[T]he intense communication that flourishes here occurs well beyond the classroom,” Levine told entering College students at Opening Convocation in 1982. In the years to come, he said, they would learn everywhere: “in the residence halls, at the supermarket, on the playing fields, inside the coffeehouses and on the streets of Hyde Park.”

Levine, the Peter B. Ritzma Professor Emeritus of Sociology, died on April 4 after a long illness. He was 83.

An adventurous and open-minded intellectual, Levine, AB’50, AM’57, PhD’57, made wide-ranging contributions to the field of sociology, alongside his lasting impact on the University as dean of the College from 1982-87.

John W. Boyer, current dean of the College, said Levine served “brilliantly” in that position.

“As an alumnus of the College and later as a prominent faculty leader, Don was a strong and passionate advocate for student rights and student welfare, and a firm believer in the power and efficacy of general education as a defining principle of the College’s educational programs,” Boyer said.

“I’m on very good terms with the dean”

As dean, Levine reaffirmed the importance of the College’s liberal arts education. “[E]ven from a practical point of view of occupational success in later life, the best thing you can do is acquire a wide range of intellectual abilities,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1982.

He used his deanship to draw attention to the non-academic aspects of College life as well. Levine worked to expand the academic advising program, strengthen the residential house system and encourage students to venture outside Hyde Park. He attracted national attention for his decision to change the school’s official song to replace “sons” and “men” with gender-inclusive terms like “children” and “us.”

With several colleagues, he created the College’s annual wintertime festival, Kuviasungnerk/Kangeiko, which began in 1983. The celebration was, in many ways, a reflection of Levine’s seemingly indefatigable good humor. “You can’t change the weather, but you can change your perception of it,” Levine said. “We wanted to blast away winter doldrums with some fun.”

Kuvia also honored Levine’s belief that education should cultivate both body and mind. A fourth-degree black belt in Aikido, Levine taught a College course that incorporated sociological theories of conflict resolution along with a weekly three-hour “lab” focused on the theory and practice of the Japanese martial art.

Levine, then dean of the College, knew the course seemed unconventional to some, but “I’m on very good terms with the dean of the College, you see,” he said.

Intellectual dialogue

In his own undergraduate days, Levine met the renowned philosopher Richard McKeon, whose work on pluralism shaped Levine’s open-minded approach to sociology and social theory.

Over his long career, Levine published several works that are now considered landmarks of sociology. His “masterpiece,” according to former student Charles Camic, was Visions of the Sociological Tradition, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1995.

In that book, Levine traced the intellectual genealogy of the social sciences and argued that different traditions of social thought could productively inform one another. “It’s a brilliant analysis of theories and intellectual traditions, but also a very thoughtful effort to bring them into intellectual dialogue with one another,” said Camic, PhD’79, now a professor of sociology at Northwestern University. “The beauty with which it’s argued and the depth of his knowledge about these different intellectual traditions are astounding.”

Levine was also influential in promoting the work of German sociologist Georg Simmel and translated several of Simmel’s works into English. “He brought Simmel to awareness in the U.S.,” said Douglas Mitchell, a longtime editor at the University of Chicago Press, who worked with Levine throughout his career.

As a young scholar, Levine spent several years doing fieldwork in Ethiopia, which resulted in his first book, Wax and Gold: Tradition and Innovation in Ethiopian Culture. In 2004, Andreas Eshete, the president of Addis Ababa University, called Wax and Gold “an Ethiopian classic.”

Levine remained interested in Ethiopia throughout his life and served as an advisor on Ethiopia to the U.S. Senate, Department of State and other federal agencies. In 1999, he published Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society, an interdisciplinary study of Ethiopian history.

Levine used his experiences as dean of the College to inform his 2006 book, Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America, in which he explored the history of undergraduate education at UChicago and proposed ways to keep liberal education relevant in the modern world. “That’s one I think people will keep coming back to, more and more,” said Levine’s former student Dan Silver, PhD’08, now a professor at the University of Toronto.

Ethiopia, martial arts, intellectual history, pedagogy—the breadth of Levine’s interest and his openness to new ideas set him apart, colleagues and students say. “He was a great believer in different approaches in the hope that each could be enriched by the others,” Camic said. “I think it also came out of a deeper moral belief in the importance of human dialogue across all lines.”

Levine brought that spirit to his work as a teacher. Rigorous but never doctrinaire, Levine encouraged students to follow their own interests wherever they led. “His goal as a teacher was to produce students from whom he could learn later,” Silver said.

At the end of his life, Levine was at work on a book on the role of dialogue in social theory, according to his longtime friend and UChicago PhD student Jonathan Baskin. Baskin was surprised that Levine was trying to finish another book during his illness, but quickly realized the project brought Levine joy in his last months. “For me, it was inspiring to see someone who really did what he loved to the end,” Baskin said.

An embodiment of the UChicago spirit

Levine’s colleagues and collaborators remember him for his generosity, thoughtfulness and positive outlook. Despite his many commitments, he was never too busy to read a former student’s work or send an email of praise. Mitchell remembers Levine making a surprise appearance at his most recent birthday party, flowers, card and balloons in hand—a memory that, for Mitchell, captures both Levine’s kindness and his game-for-anything sense of spontaneity.

“He lived in a way that expressed his commitment and love for ideas,” Baskin said. “He was one of the embodiments of the University of Chicago spirit for me. He expressed so many of its best qualities.”

Donald Levine is survived by his wife, Ruth Levine; his children, Rachel Levine, William Levine and Theodore Levine; and his grandchildren, Natanyel Bohm-Levine, Zoe Melnick and Ari Melnick.

A memorial service will be held on April 9, 1 p.m. at KAM Isaiah Israel Congregation, 1100 E. Hyde Park Blvd. Shiva will be at the Levine residence on April 9 and 11, from 6 to 8:30 p.m. with a minyan at 7 p.m. both nights. Memorial contributions may be made to the Nature Conservancy or the Jacob J. Weinstein Fund of KAM Isaiah Israel.

Robert M. Halperin, PhB’47, Trustee Emeritus, 1928-2014

Wed, 07 Jan 2015 13:00 -0600

Robert M. Halperin, PhB’47, lived in northern California, but the University of Chicago was never far from his mind.

As a committed University Trustee, he successfully led multiple alumni and development activities, helping raise millions of dollars to support the University’s research and scholarship. He had served as a Trustee Emeritus since 2007.

Halperin, former president of Raychem Corporation, a materials science firm, died on Oct. 26 in his Atherton, Calif. home after a long illness. He was 86.

An accomplished businessman, Halperin in 1957 joined Raychem, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based manufacturer of specialty wire, cable electrical insulation, plastic products and materials. He would serve as the company’s chief operating officer, president and vice chair before retiring in 1990.

In his obituary, the San Francisco Chronicle described Halperin as a “hard-charging” executive who put in long hours growing the business and expanding into scores of foreign markets. He was nicknamed “Bullet Bob,” for his “quick decision-making in recruiting talent, expanding the business and closing deals.” The Chronicle noted that Raychem’s materials were used in Boeing commercial jets, the Apollo spacecraft and the Alaskan pipeline.

Halperin applied his business prowess to managing UChicago’s development and investment initiatives. He was elected to the Board of Trustees in 1981, serving on the executive, development, financial planning, and investment committees. He was also a member of the Alumni Association Cabinet, and life member of the visiting committee of the Division of Physical Sciences.

During the late 1980s, he helped form the ARCH Development Corporation, which adapts University-developed technologies for corporate needs. From 1990 to 1996, he chaired UChicago’s College Fund, setting up the class agent volunteer structure, now the fund’s cornerstone.

Raised on the South Side of Chicago, Halperin had a deep connection with UChicago. His mother Edna, brother Warren, AB’51, and son Mark, AB’81, graduated from the University. He received his PhB from UChicago in 1947, a BSME from Cornell University in 1949 and an MBA from Harvard University in 1952.

Halperin is survived by his three children, Peggy, Philip and Mark, AB’81. Ruth Levison Halperin, who was Robert’s wife of 52 years, died in 2008. A public memorial service was held in November 2014 at Stanford University.

Mike Nichols, X’53, director and improv comedy pioneer, 1931-2014

Thu, 20 Nov 2014 14:25 -0600

Mike Nichols, X’53, a satirist whose caustic wit led him to Broadway and Hollywood success with films including The Graduate, died Nov. 19, according to news reports. He was 83.

Long before Nichols became one of the few people to win Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards, and even before he joined the famed Compass Players, he was a 17-year-old pre-med student at the University of Chicago who fell in love with the intellectual and bohemian atmosphere of Hyde Park in the 1950s.

For the first time in his young life, Nichols felt at home. “Everything was wide open, everybody was strange at the University of Chicago! It was paradise,” he told the New York Times in 1984. “I began to see there was a world that I could fit in.”

He dropped out of school in the middle of his second year, and began to mingle with a ragtag group of theater artists including Shelley Berman, Severn Darden, X’50, Andrew Duncan, Barbara Harris, David Shepherd and Paul Sills, AB’51, who had begun to experiment with improvisation. In one early workshop, Nichols participated in an entirely improvised adaption of Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain.

Among this group of eccentrics was Elaine May, who had hitchhiked across the country to study at the University of Chicago. She never bothered to formally enroll, but still managed to be a source of mischief in University classes—at one point, May sat in on a philosophy class and insisted that Socrates was drunk in Plato’s Symposium.

Sills introduced Nichols and May, telling May, “I want you to meet the only other person on the campus of the University of Chicago who is as hostile as you are.” The two shared a quick wit, dark sensibility and Jewish heritage that influenced much of their comedy. Their immediate creative spark grew into a decades-long friendship.

Nichols and May first collaborated as members of The Compass Players, the pioneering improvisation and sketch comedy group founded by Sills and Shepherd. The group, which later spawned Chicago’s Second City theater, performed at the Compass Tavern at 55th Street and University Avenue. The performers used an innovative hybrid of ad-libbed and scripted material, much of it focused on political and social issues of the day.

Through the Compass, Nichols and May improvised many of the scenes that would be included in their Broadway hit “An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May.” The recording of that production earned Nichols a Grammy.

The duo specialized in comedy that highlighted human foibles and satirized contemporary culture. In one famous sketch, a mother berated her rocket scientist son for not calling more. In another, a grieving Nichols learned that a funeral home’s $65 special did not include any “extras.” “What kind of extras?” Nichols asked. “Well, how about a casket?” May responded.

“People always thought we were making fun of other people when we were in fact making fun of ourselves,” Nichols told the Associated Press in 1997.

Despite the enormous success of “An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May,” the pair parted ways at the peak of their popularity. Nichols began directing in the 1960s with a production of Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, for which he won a Tony. He ventured into film with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and The Graduate. He later directed Heartburn, Primary Colors, and HBO’s landmark adaptation of Angels in America.

The range of subjects and tones Nichols tackled in his career never troubled him. “I never understand when people say, ‘Do you do comedy or tragedy?’ I don't think they're very much different,” he wrote in the Hollywood Reporter. “They both have to be true, and there isn't a great play in the world that doesn't have funny parts to it—as Salesman does, as King Lear does. The whole idea is to reflect life in some way, which means surely you have to have both.”

Gerald Ratner, PhB’35, JD’37, law partner, avid supporter of UChicago, 1913-2014

Mon, 23 Jun 2014 11:38 -0500

In 1931, the University of Chicago awarded Gerald Ratner a $300 annual scholarship to cover his undergraduate tuition. A high school valedictorian who commuted on a streetcar every day from the city’s Southwest Side, Ratner graduated with honors from the College in 1935, and from the Law School in 1937.

Ratner embarked on a successful legal career in Chicago and became a devoted and generous supporter of his alma mater. Saul Levmore, former dean of the Law School and the William B. Graham Professor of Law, put it, he was “one of the best ambassadors the University has sent forth.”

Gerald Ratner, a senior partner at the law firm of Gould & Ratner, died in his sleep on June 20. He was 100.

“We have lost a truly generous, beloved and devoted friend in Gerald Ratner,” said University of Chicago President Robert J. Zimmer. “We mourn his death while valuing our memories of his long and remarkable life. His various achievements as a philanthropist, attorney and athlete live on as his legacy.”

A former varsity baseball player and a longtime advocate for UChicago athletics, Ratner mentored student-athletes while emphasizing the value of physical activity for all students. In 1998 he made a generous gift toward what would become the Gerald Ratner Athletics Center. Opened in 2003, the center is used by thousands of students, faculty, staff and alumni each week.

“We need recreation to complement our academic challenges,” Ratner said in announcing his gift. “You are a better student if you have a release or diversion from academic pressures, and mine was athletics,” he added. “Chicago is not, like some colleges, a minor league training ground for professional athletes; it is a major league for future leaders. Life would have been a lot less fun without sports.”

In April 2006, Ratner funded a gallery in the Smart Museum of Art named for his late wife, Eunice Payton Ratner, and an endowed distinguished service professorship in the Law School, currently held by Prof. David A. Strauss, a constitutional scholar.

Ratner also established a student loan fund in 1961, at what is known today as the Chicago Booth School of Business, in memory of his brother, J.E. Ratner, a former UChicago faculty member and editor-in-chief of Better Homes & Gardens.

“I did these as my way of giving back to the University for what it gave to me. It was the springboard for my career,” Ratner said in an interview with the University of Chicago Chronicle in 2003. “I felt that any gift to this great University would, in turn, be magnified and multiplied a thousand times by what its outstanding graduates and faculty could do for the world.”

Ratner received the Law School’s Distinguished Law Alumni Award in 1999 and six years later was awarded the University of Chicago Medal. In 2009, he won the Alumni Service Medal.

Michael H. Schill, the Harry N. Wyatt Professor of Law, said the deans of UChicago’s Law School had a tradition of taking Ratner out for his birthday each year. “At these lunches he would regale us with stories about his time here in Hyde Park,” recalled Schill. “He loved every part of this university with every fiber of his being. Gerry Ratner was one-of-a-kind. We have lost a wonderful man whose memory will be cherished.”

A Chicago lawyer for more than 75 years

The son of a neighborhood grocer, Ratner was born on Dec. 17, 1913—the 10th anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first flight. He grew up in the city’s Brighton Park neighborhood, where his mother ran a small store that sold candy, ice cream, tobacco and other items while single-handedly raising him and two other siblings.

Ratner told Crain’s Chicago Business in December 2013 that his father had left home when he was 5, and the adverse family circumstances had made him a ‘tough little kid.” His mother’s hard-working style had a tremendous influence on him. He attended Marshall High School and earned a full scholarship from UChicago, where he excelled in his academic work.

“Everything at the University was stimulating,” he told The Chicago Maroon in May 2006. Ratner said he took electives in economics, political science and “a little of everything.” He obtained his PhB from the University and went on to study law. “The Law School taught me to think and analyze. Even if I wasn’t a lawyer, the education was valuable. There are many great universities, but none greater than the U of C.”

Ratner also was an outstanding student-athlete. He played baseball while enrolled in the College and intramural football at the Law School. Although he dreamed of entering the world of professional baseball, he chose the stability of a law career after graduation and practiced for several years before joining the U.S. Army during World War II. According to Crain’s Chicago Business, he served as a military policeman stationed in Africa, where he processed German and Italian prisoners of war.

He returned to Chicago, where he married his late wife, Eunice, in 1948. In 1949, Ratner co-founded the law firm of Gould & Ratner, which, according to Crain’s Chicago Business, counseled the Crown family on many headline deals over the past decades, including the 1959 merger of Material Service Corp. with defense contractor General Dynamics Corp., and the 1961 sale of the Empire State Building.

Ratner practiced law for more than 75 years and maintained a noon-to-midnight work schedule into his 90s.

“Gerry was an extraordinarily kind and generous man, with a sweet disposition and a subtle intellect,” said Geoffrey R. Stone, the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law and a friend of Ratner’s. “As an alum of both the College and the Law School, he was deeply devoted to the University and, above all else, to the well-being of its students.”

Ratner is survived by his nephew William Ratner of Los Angeles. A memorial service will be held at noon, Tuesday, July 1 at Drake & Son Funeral Home at 5303 N. Western Ave.

University Trustee Emeritus Steven G. Rothmeier, 1946-2014

Wed, 11 Jun 2014 11:05 -0500

Steven G. Rothmeier, MBA’72, was a risk-taker as a businessman, a decorated Vietnam-era veteran and a Trustee Emeritus at the University of Chicago. Rothmeier died on May 14 at age 67 in a Florida nursing home after a long illness.

Rothmeier was elected to the University’s Board of Trustees in 1987. He served on the audit, development, financial planning, investment, and trusteeship committees, and in 2007 he was made a Trustee Emeritus. He served as board chair of the ARCH Development Corporation, a UChicago entity that provides seed money for venture capital projects. He also was a life member of the Booth Council and a member of the Harper Society Founder’s Circle.

“Steve and I met the very first day of school at orientation for the graduate students in 1971,” recalled John Edwardson, MBA’72, a University of Chicago Trustee and the retired chairman and CEO of CDW. “He was freshly back from Vietnam, and we just hit it off and became good friends and stayed good friends. He was a vigorous, tough, but fun-loving guy. We enjoyed our time together at Booth.”

In the business world, Rothmeier was known as a no-nonsense executive who remade Northwest Airlines in the 1980s. He joined Northwest Airlines in 1973 as a corporate financial analyst and five years later, Rothmeier was promoted to vice president for finance, treasurer and CFO. At age 32, he was the youngest CFO in the history of the company and the youngest in the U.S. airline industry. A few years later, Rothmeier was named Northwest Airlines’ president and chief operating officer.

Rothmeier engineered the $884 million acquisition of Republic Airlines by Northwest in 1986—at that time, the largest-ever airline deal. In 1989, he successfully negotiated the sale of NWA, Inc., the parent company of Northwest Airlines, for $3.6 billion. He described himself as developing a reputation as a “risk-taker” during this merger, as he steered the company through difficult times in the late 1980s.

Edwardson worked with Rothmeier at NWA as CFO for a few years before moving on to become president of United Airlines and chairman and chief executive of CDW.

“I’d describe his management style as tough, but fair,” Edwardson said of Rothmeier. “He was very demanding, but the airline industry is a very demanding one that requires leaders to be tough and forceful in their jobs. He was never mean-spirited or vindictive. What most people didn’t know was that he had an absolutely wicked sense of humor.”

Following his time at NWA, Inc., Rothmeier became president of IAI Capital Group. In 1993, he founded and served as chairman and CEO of Great Northern Capital, his own merchant banking, consulting and investment-management company. He retired in 2012.

He also served as a director on the boards of more than a dozen New York Stock Exchange-traded corporations. In 2011, The Wall Street Journal named him one of America’s eight most effective corporate directors. Rothmeier also co-founded and directed the Lumen Christi Institute in Chicago. He was the past director of the American Council on Germany, a former trustee for the German Marshall Fund of the United States and former vice-chairman of the U.S.–China Business Council.

Rothmeier was born in Mankato, Minn., and raised in Faribault, Minn. In 1968, he received his BA in Business Administration from the University of Notre Dame, where he also played varsity football. After graduation, Rothmeier served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Army Commendation Medal and Bronze Star Medal. He then came to UChicago to earn his master’s degree.

He is survived by his mother, Alice; two brothers, Michael and Jay; three nephews and two nieces. A requiem mass was held in St. Paul on May 28.

Alumnus George Anastaplo, 88, taught for nearly six decades at Graham School

Fri, 07 Mar 2014 14:54 -0600

George Anastaplo, AB’48, JD’51, PhD’64, who sacrificed a promising legal career by defending his First Amendment rights before the McCarthy-era Illinois Bar and eventually the U.S. Supreme Court, died Feb. 14 after teaching nearly six decades in the University of Chicago Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies.

The son of Greek immigrants who operated a restaurant in Carterville, Ill., Anastaplo pursued his bachelor and law degrees from the University of Chicago after serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, navigating B-17 and B-29 bombers.

Anastaplo was denied admission to the Illinois Bar in 1950 after refusing on principle to answer whether he was a member of the Communist party—calling questions about political affiliation and religion irrelevant. The Committee on Character and Fitness, which routinely interviewed Bar applicants, also asked if Communist Party members should be allowed to practice law in Illinois.

“I should think so,” replied Anastaplo, who then went on in his characteristically polite yet pithy manner to defend the right of revolution, if justified, as established in the Declaration of Independence.

Anastaplo argued his own case before the Illinois and U.S. Supreme Court. He lost the federal case in 1961 by a 5-4 decision. Justice Hugo Black, comparing Anastaplo to Clarence Darrow and other brave lawyers, wrote a dissenting opinion famously asserting, “We must not be afraid to be free.”

With his unblemished record, Black wrote, “the very most that can fairly be said against Anastaplo’s position in this entire matter is that he took too much of the responsibility of preserving that freedom upon himself.”

As the case went through appeals, Anastaplo worked on his doctorate in the Committee on Social Thought at the University under the guidance of mentor Leo Strauss. In 1957, he joined the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults faculty and continued to teach through December 2013. He also taught at Dominican University (then Rosary College), and later at the Loyola University School of Law, frequently riding his bike from Hyde Park to Loyola until he was nearly 80. He also authored scores of books and hundreds of articles on topics ranging from political science to philosophy to religion to classic literature.

Anastaplo was the “heart and soul” of the Basic Program, said former chair Cynthia Rutz. “He inspired everyone around him—students and fellow faculty alike—to always continue learning and never be afraid to pose difficult questions,” she said. She noted that longtime Hyde Park alderman Leon Despres, PhB’27, JD’29, perfectly dubbed Anastaplo the “Socrates of Chicago” for his tireless role of good-natured gadfly, poking and prodding ideas, whether he was in a courtroom, classroom or elsewhere.

Anastaplo’s unwavering commitment to free thought earned him many admirers. In 2005, he was the inaugural recipient of the Graham School’s Excellence in Teaching Award, and received the school’s Distinguished Service Award in 2012. But the Bar interview wasn’t the only time his devotion to the ideal rendered him an outsider.

Keith Cleveland, AB’64, AM’69, JD’79, also a former chair of the Basic Program who taught with Anastaplo for 45 years, recalled that Anastaplo was kicked out of Russia in 1960, while driving through Europe on vacation with his family after defending a group of fellow tourists handing out American literature. He also was expelled from Greece in 1968, for asking some embarrassing questions of the right-wing military junta in power. Recalling these events and Anastaplo’s case against the Illinois Bar, political scientist C. Herman Pritchett wrote: “As W. C. Fields might have said, any man who is kicked out of Russia, Greece and the Illinois Bar can’t be all bad.”

Although Anastaplo never became a lawyer, his legal training served him well in academia, Cleveland said. “George brought his extraordinary cross-examination skills to the classroom,” he said, “not in a hostile manner, but to open up and explore ideas and pursue them in an interesting and intelligent way.”

Larry Arnhart, AM’73, PhD’77, a former student of Anastaplo’s who teaches political science at Northern Illinois University, said he tries to live up to his mentor’s patient intellectual prodding at the podium.

“Sometimes, you ask a provocative question and there’s silence,” Arnhart said. “George always said if students don’t respond, don’t just resume lecturing and let students get away with being so passive. Wait, and wait some more until someone shares their thoughts. Soon enough, students discover that a class organized around stimulating discussion is more interesting,” he said.

Michael Allocca, current chair of the Basic Program, said Anastaplo had a “hard-core” following of people who would sign up for every course he taught, and he was known for never having missed a session.

“During the last week of autumn semester in December, when he called to say he wouldn’t be well enough to make it in,” Allocca said, “he asked if we could set up a phone in the classroom so that he could lead the discussion from home via telephone.”

Miriam Redleaf, Anastaplo’s daughter and a professor of otolaryngology at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, said his family wasn’t surprised by his efforts to finish the semester despite prostate cancer that had spread to his bones.

“He was proud of teaching all the way till the end,” Redleaf said. “He never considered missing a class.”

Anastaplo is survived by his wife of more than 65 years, Sara Prince Anastaplo; his daughters, Helen Newlin, Miriam Redleaf and Theodora Anastaplo; his son, George Malcolm Davidson Anastaplo; and eight grandchildren. A memorial service will be held at Bond Chapel on the University of Chicago campus on Friday, June 6. More information about the memorial service will be published on this website when it becomes available.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to The George Anastaplo Basic Program Lecturer Fund, Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies, the University of Chicago, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL. 60637.

John W. Rogers Sr., JD'48, judge and member of Tuskegee Airmen, 1918-2014

Thu, 23 Jan 2014 13:19 -0600

A member of the legendary Tuskegee Airmen during World War II, John W. Rogers Sr. flew 120 successful combat missions across Europe, earning a reputation among his peers as “the best dive-bomber pilot in the business.” He and his comrades later won the Congressional Gold Medal for their valor.

In the 1940s, when few African Americans attended law schools due to racial discrimination, Rogers, JD'48, again was a trailblazer, graduating from the University of Chicago Law School and subsequently serving 21 years as a widely respected juvenile court judge in Illinois.

Rogers, a Hyde Park resident, died Tuesday, Jan. 21, at the University of Chicago Medical Center. He was 95. A memorial service will be held at 1 p.m. Friday at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, 5850 S. Woodlawn Ave. A funeral will follow at 2 p.m.

“The legacy of John Rogers Sr. is essential to the contributions that the entire Rogers family have made to the University of Chicago community,” said UChicago President Robert J. Zimmer. “John and his family members were pioneers in many facets of their lives, and they made it possible for others to build on their successes. John’s historic achievements and his devotion to service will serve as a lasting inspiration at the University and across the nation.”

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Lab’82, who knew Rogers since childhood, told the Chicago Tribune that he “lived his values more clearly than almost anyone I know.”

“He didn’t preach—he just embodied his values, which included treating everybody well, taking care of other people than himself and always being on time,” Duncan told the Tribune. “He was a real role model for so many people in the community who came before his court and dealt with tough issues.”

A native of Knoxville, Tenn., Rogers was born on Sept. 3, 1918 and moved in with his uncle in Chicago at the age of 12, after both of his parents passed away. From a young age, Rogers dreamed of flying planes and attended the Civilian Pilot Training Program on the South Side of Chicago. Upon obtaining his pilot license, he joined the U.S. Air Force, and in 1941, became part of the famed 99th Pursuit Squadron of the Tuskegee Airmen—the first squadron of African American pilots in the U.S. military.

In later years, Rogers recalled that he and his comrades had encountered discrimination during recruitment and training because whites did not take their black colleagues seriously as combat fighters.

“Even though they (whites) let us into the military, it does not mean we were fully accepted as equal,” Rogers said in a 2012 interview. “The Tuskegee Airmen were seen (by white servicemen) as an experimental group. They (whites) wanted to see if we were any good in combat before deploying more African Americans in the air.”

Rogers and his team members excelled. Mark Hanson, curator of the Chanute Air Museum in Rantoul, Ill., where the 99th was first activated, said in 2012 that Rogers was regarded as a pilot who “could put a 500-pound bomb through a building’s window.”

After the war, Rogers returned to Chicago and applied to the Law School. According to John Rogers Jr., a University Trustee who also chairs the board of directors of the Laboratory Schools, his father was not admitted on his first attempt, but he showed up at the school in his captain’s uniform and eventually “argued his way in.”

On the first day of class, Rogers Sr. met his future wife, the late Jewel C. Stradford Lafontant, who later became the first African American woman to graduate from the Law School. The couple married in 1946.

“[Rogers Sr.] always said that he learned to think at the Law School—that the Socratic method they used and the quality of the instruction and professors was world-class and made him a better thinker,” said Rogers Jr.

The couple’s education at the law school paid off. Lafontant became the first woman and the first African American to hold the post of U.S. Deputy Solicitor General. Rogers went into private practice after graduating in 1948. He started his own law firm and subsequently worked for Earl L. Neal & Associates. In 1977, Rogers was appointed a juvenile court judge in Illinois and served on the bench for 21 years.

A number of the youths who appeared before him later wrote him letters thanking him for giving them a second chance and one straightened out and formed a church, his wife told the Chicago Sun-Times.

“John Rogers Sr. was a pathbreaker. From his service as a Tuskegee Airman to his appointment as a distinguished judge, he was a leader,” said Michael Schill, dean of the Law School. “I am proud that John was a graduate of UChicago and would like to think that the education he got here helped prepare him for the great success he achieved in his long and important life.”

In 2007, Rogers Sr. was among the 300 Tuskegee Airmen to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, Congress’s highest civilian honor.

The Law School honored Rogers Sr. and his first wife in 2012 by naming its dean of admissions' office for Rogers Sr. and Stradford Lafontant, who died in 1997. The school held a celebration in honor of the family and to thank Rogers Jr. for a significant donation he made to name the office after his parents. A plaque featuring a photo and biographical information about Rogers Sr. and his first wife is on display in the Law School’s main classroom hallway.

Rogers met his second wife, Gwendolyn, AM’53, in 1968, and they were married in 2001. “He was a wonderful person, and we had a wonderful life together,” she told the Chicago Tribune.

For those who intend to send a gift of remembrance, the family is asking for them to be made to the University of Chicago Law School (contact Alison Coppelman, director of alumni relations and annual giving, 773-834-8652), the Chicago Urban League (Darrious Hilmon, vice president of development, 773-451-3500) or the Chicago “DODO” Office of the Tuskegee Airmen Inc. (www.taichicago.org/donors).

Paul J. Sally, Jr., influential mathematician and educator, 1933 – 2013

Thu, 02 Jan 2014 15:20 -0600

Update: A memorial service will be held for Prof. Paul J. Sally, Jr., at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, May 7, at Bond Chapel, 1025 E. 58th St.

Known for his contributions to the field of harmonic analysis and his passionate commitment to teaching, Prof. Paul J. Sally, Jr. built a legacy of love for mathematics at the University of Chicago for nearly 50 years.

Professor Sally died on Dec. 30, 2013. He was 80 years old.

Sally taught at the University since 1965 and served as chairman of the mathematics department from 1977 to 1980. He was resident at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., in 1967-68, 1971-72, 1981 and 1984. He produced notable research results on such topics as SL(2), supercuspidal representations and Fourier transforms. His many professional affiliations included service as chairman of the board of trustees of the American Mathematical Society.

“Paul had a fierce belief in mathematics and in people,” wrote Professor Shmuel Weinberger, chair of mathematics, in a note to faculty. “I will miss him deeply.”

Sally’s impact in the classroom was legendary. He produced 19 PhD students and was director of Undergraduate Studies in the Mathematics Department for decades. He pioneered outreach programs in mathematics for elementary and secondary teachers and students. From 1983 to 1987, Sally served as the first director of the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project, home of the nation's most widely used university-developed mathematics curriculum. In 1992, he founded Seminars for Elementary Specialists and Mathematics Educators (SESAME), a first-of-its-kind program for elementary school teachers from Chicago Public Schools.

'A force of nature'

Diane Herrmann, the co-director of Undergraduate Studies in Mathematics and a Senior Lecturer, described Sally as “a force of nature.” Herrmann worked with Sally as a teacher, mentor and then as a colleague for the past 30 years.

“He was passionately interested in mathematical education at all levels,” said Herrmann, who with Sally co-founded the Young Scholars Program, a groundbreaking enrichment program for mathematically talented seventh through 12th graders.

One student who benefitted from the Young Scholars Program starting in seventh grade was Maryanthe Malliaris, who is now an assistant professor in UChicago’s department of mathematics. She recalled the experience as “exhilarating” and “decisive for my future in mathematics.”

“He had an incredible psychological astuteness, and a forceful clarity,” Malliaris wrote in an email. “He devoted a great deal of his time to creating possibilities for others. He concerned himself with the field as a whole. He would be there on Saturdays, on evenings, in the summer. His door was always open. He would show by example what it is to be a great human being.”

David Vogan, AB, SM, ’74, another former student of Sally’s, went on to be a Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and president of the American Mathematical Society.

“What distinguished Paul Sally was not only his passion for mathematics, but also his love and care for everyone studying mathematics,” Vogan said. “He had an appreciation for all the different levels of mathematics. He was a remarkable individual who seemed to have an unlimited supply of energy.”

Sally’s motto for SESAME reflected one of his core beliefs: “To teach real mathematics, you better know some.” Aspiring teachers who took Sally’s courses such as Elements of Math Instruction, a graduate class in UChicago’s Urban Teacher Education Program, found that he expected them to understand concepts ranging from elementary-level to graduate-level math.

“He overcame tremendous obstacles to provide education and outreach at the University, in the city of Chicago and nationally” said Robert Fefferman, the Max Mason Distinguished Service Professor in Mathematics. “He lost both legs and lost his eyesight to childhood diabetes and it did not stop him at all.”

Type 1 diabetes affected Sally since he was a teenager, resulting in the loss of both legs and one eye; degeneration in the other eye meant that he was legally blind. Students affectionately nicknamed him the “Math Pirate” or “Professor Pirate” for the unmistakable black eye patch that he wore. Speaking with the University of Chicago Magazine in 2008, he said his true love had been the classroom since he walked into a class of high school seniors in 1954, at the age of 21.

“This is just where I belong. I just have this incredible desire to teach,” he told the magazine.

David Sally, one of Paul Sally’s three sons, said his legacy will be felt in ways large and small.

“The family is gratified to hear words of condolence from students, teachers and colleagues to let us know how much our father meant to the University, to Chicago, and to so many people around the world,” he said. “Dad died on December 30. That’s 12-30-2013, a numerical anagram! He would have appreciated that.”

Numerous honors include Quantrell

Sally was born in Boston on Jan. 29, 1933. He earned his B.S. and M.A. degrees from Boston College and his Ph.D. from Brandeis University. He was an instructor at Washington University before coming to the University of Chicago in 1965.

Sally won many honors and awards for his teaching and educational outreach, including the University’s Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1967. Part of the citation for the award reads: “His informal but infectiously enthusiastic classroom manner has shown his students the delights of a subject sometimes thought to be austere. Always rigorous but never pompous, he leads his classes through difficult problems by clear, careful steps.”

Other awards include the Boston College Alumni Award for Excellence in Education (1999); the American Mathematical Society Award for Distinguished Teaching (2002); and the University of Chicago Provost’s Teaching Award (2005). In addition to his leadership at the American Mathematical Society, Sally’s professional service included the U.S. Steering Committee for the Third International Mathematical and Science Study.

Sally is survived by his wife, Judith, and his three sons, David, Stephen, and Paul III, and their families.

Services will be held Saturday, Jan. 4 at St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Hyde Park. A wake will be held from 10 to 11 a.m., with a funeral mass at 11 a.m. A reception and luncheon will follow in the Tea Room on the second floor of Eckhart Hall on the UChicago campus.

Bernard Sahlins, AB’43, co-founder of Second City, 1922-2013

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 16:37 -0500

Comedy pioneer Bernard Sahlins, who co-founded Chicago’s famed Second City theater, died Sunday at age 90, according to news reports.

As a Second City producer, Sahlins, AB’43, pushed the boundaries of sketch comedy and helped make performers like Dan Akroyd, John Belushi, Bill Murray and Gilda Radner household names. He also continued to give guidance and inspiration to generations of UChicago students.

The Chicago native was a founding member of the Compass Players, a student-run theater at UChicago that is widely credited with inventing modern improvisational comedy. Sahlins and fellow alums Howard Alk and Paul Sills brought the techniques they pioneered with the Compass Players to The Second City, which they founded in 1959.

“Compass and Second City were really born on the top floor of the Reynolds Club,” Sahlins said in a 2009 interview.

From its earliest days, Second City earned the reputation for presenting high-minded and topical satire. Through improvisation, Second City’s writer-performers developed sketches that probed contemporary life and culture.

Their approach was directly influenced by the theater’s University of Chicago origins, Sahlins wrote in his 2001 memoir, Days and Nights at the Second City: “We were university people, imbued with respect for intellectualism and the great masterworks.”

Sahlins remained an active force at the theater for the next 25 years, directing and producing numerous Second City revues. He also co-created and produced “SCTV” in Canada.

As a director, Sahlins pushed his performers to play to the top of their intelligence while allowing them to develop their own voices and styles. “In this work the job of the director is to hold to standards of intelligent discourse and skilled acting, not to dictate attitudes and content,” he wrote.

He sold his interest in Second City in 1984, but remained devoted to the Chicago theater community. In his distinguished career as a playwright and director, Sahlins worked with institutions including Court Theatre, Steppenwolf and the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre.

Sahlins never forgot his University of Chicago roots. He returned to campus in 1986 to train the first generation of Off-Off Campus, the University’s improvisational theater troupe. “There’s a legacy of training that goes directly back to Bernie,” said Heidi Coleman, director of Theater and Performance Studies.

Sahlins received the University’s Professional Achievement Award in 1989. He also received Joseph Jefferson “Jeff” Awards for directing and professional achievements, among many other honors.

In 1999, when the Second City celebrated its 40th anniversary, Sahlins spoke at the festivities and reflected on the value of Second City’s work.

“The fact is, man is the only animal that laughs, and comedy’s major role is to evoke the laughter that celebrates our unity as mortal creatures,” he said. “[Laughter is] the realization of a desperate hope: the hope that we are enough like one another to sense one another and to be able to live together.”

He is survived by his wife, Jane Nicholl Sahlins, and his brother, Marshall Sahlins, the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Anthropology.

Roger Ebert, X’70, film critic and longtime Graham School lecturer, 1942-2013

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 16:58 -0500

Before Roger Ebert, X’70, became one of the world’s most influential film critics, he began doctoral studies in English at the University of Chicago in 1966. Although Ebert left his studies to pursue a remarkable career as a Pulitzer-winning journalist and commentator, he never fully left the University, serving for 37 years as a lecturer on film for the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies.

Ebert died of cancer on April 4 at age 70, prompting tributes and remembrances from around the world.

A lasting affection developed over the years between Ebert and the UChicago community. He began his service as a lecturer in 1968, shortly after becoming a film critic with the Chicago Sun-Times. Colleagues and students said he passionately introduced his classes to global cinematic styles, genres and directorial oeuvres. Starting in 1994, Ebert typically taught classes at the University’s Gleacher Center in downtown Chicago.

“In many ways, he was a public intellectual,” said Judy Hoffman, senior lecturer in Cinema and Media Studies and the Department of Visual Arts, who first met Ebert when she was a young filmmaker. “In his reviews, he led you through a continuum of film history. He really taught—it wasn’t just giving films a thumbs up or a thumbs down. He knew film history, and wrote his reviews with that in mind.”

A native of Urbana, Ill., and a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Ebert also maintained a lifelong connection there, including launching Roger Ebert’s International Film Festival in Champaign. Ebert gained widespread recognition through his work on television with fellow critic Gene Siskel, with shows including Sneak Previews and Siskel & Ebert At the Movies. His writing on film as well as cultural and political topics was broadly influential; in 1975, Ebert became the first person to receive a Pulitzer Prize for film criticism.

At UChicago, Ebert was particularly committed to discussions and conversations with students, encouraging them to develop their ideas and challenge his conclusions. He was known to test his critiques with students and respect the feedback he received. Often, class sessions were significantly extended beyond scheduled times in order to adequately treat topics and provide ample time for discussions with students.

A passion for independent film

In addition to his teaching, Ebert was a longtime admirer of the student-run Doc Films society, founded in 1932, a UChicago showcase for diverse and often rare films. In a 2008 post on his blog, Ebert praised Doc’s commitment to screening legendary directors’ films, which are often unavailable on DVD. “It says something about DVD producers, but even more about Doc Films.” Ebert also returned to campus for Doc Films events, including a discussion in 2000 at the Max Palevsky Cinema with filmmaker Woody Allen.

Ebert discussed the memories that the University of Chicago’s architecture evokes for him in a 2010 blog post featuring the campus photography of Justin Kern, AB’04, PhD’10. “I spent a year as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, and [Kern’s] photographs made my heart quicken,” Ebert wrote.

Remarkably, during Ebert’s tenure with the Graham School he never repeated a course—evidence of the breadth and depth of his knowledge and his devotion to continual learning. He was particularly interested in studying oeuvres of important film figures, including Ingmar Bergmann, Federico Fellini, Francois Truffaut, Luis Bunuel, Alfred Hitchcock, Werner Herzog, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder and John Huston.

On multiple occasions, Ebert also arranged to bring these figures to the classroom to discuss their works with students. A representative class he taught in 2003 was titled “Not the New Wave: Before and After the Revolution.” The University of Chicago Magazine reported in 2004 that Ebert’s class had “achieved cult status, with students returning year after year.”

The range of Ebert’s interests set him apart from other critics, according to Hoffman, a member of the board of directors at Kartemquin Films, which produced Hoop Dreams and numerous acclaimed documentaries. Ebert sought out and supported independent films that weren’t on the radar of other critics. “If it wasn’t for Roger championing Hoop Dreams, that film never would have gotten the national attention it did,” Hoffman said.

“Clearly, film was everything to him,” Hoffman added. “He wanted other people to share that love of cinema.”

“The Graham School and its students were fortunate to have Roger Ebert as a prized and highly respected instructor for 37 years,” said Graham School Dean Daniel Shannon. “He represented the highest values of the University and the Graham School, as someone with an extraordinary commitment to his area of expertise and a passion for sharing his knowledge with others.”

Robert Bork, jurist and scholar, 1927-2012

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 17:38 -0600

Robert Bork, AB’48, JD’53, a former judge, law professor and Solicitor General of the United States who was nominated to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, died on Dec. 19. He was 85.

Among legal scholars, Bork was known for his influential and serious scholarship in many areas, including antitrust law. Bork became known more widely to the public in 1987 when President Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court. The nomination failed amid controversy in the U.S. Senate, after which Bork returned to his work as an author and legal scholar.

Bork received his bachelor’s degree from the College at UChicago in 1948. He matriculated at the Law School in the fall of 1948, but took a leave of absence for service in the military, returning to finish his degree in 1953. He served as an editor on the Law Review and graduated Phi Beta Kappa and as a member of the Order of the Coif. Bork spent time at the Law School later in his career as a visiting faculty member and as a member of the Visiting Committee.

Bork began his legal career in private practice, then became a professor at Yale Law School. His seminal scholarship on the application of economics to antitrust law was critical to both the scholarly and judicial understanding of that area. Bork served as Solicitor General of the United States from 1973 to 1977, arguing several important cases before the Supreme Court. In 1982, President Reagan appointed him to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where he served until 1988. He was a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor at the Ave Maria School of Law.

“Judge Bork was a great legal scholar,” said Michael H. Schill, dean of the Law School and the Harry N. Wyatt Professor of Law. “His legacy to the world of law and economics and to antitrust law cannot be overstated, and we are proud that this legacy is deeply rooted in the education he got here at Chicago.”

Schill added, “On a personal note, I am proud to say that I was a student of Judge Bork’s at Yale, and remember him as an extraordinary teacher. Many of my colleagues counted him as a mentor and a friend, and he will be deeply missed by all of us.”

In June 2012, the University of Chicago honored Judge Bork with a Professional Achievement Award. Judge Frank Easterbrook of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, who is both a Senior Lecturer at the Law School and a former assistant to Bork in the Solicitor General's Office, was one of his nominators. “Bob took an intellectual approach to his duties as Solicitor General,” said Easterbrook in that nomination. "It was never enough for him that some case pointed in a direction, or that a client agency wanted to go there. He thought that the United States always should ask why and explain the answer with care.”

“Judge Bork had a distinguished career working in many areas,” said Randal C. Picker, the Paul H. and Theo Leffmann Professor of Commercial Law and longtime teacher of antitrust law at the Law School. “For me, of course, his book The Antitrust Paradox stands out. It accomplished exactly what scholars aspire to but rarely achieve: serious, careful work with substantial, real-world influence.”

Bork is survived by his wife Mary Ellen and their three children, Ellen, Robert and Charles.

Alumna Lynn Margulis dies at 73, following distinguished scientific career

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:08 -0600

National Science medalist Lynn Margulis, AB’57, Lab,'54, one of the most influential biologists of her day, died Nov. 24 at her home in Amherst, Mass., at the age of 73.

Margulis, who was a distinguished university professor in geophysical sciences at the University of Massachusetts, received the 1999 National Medal of Science from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. She was cited “for outstanding contributions to the understanding of the development, structure, and evolution of living things and for extraordinary abilities as a teacher and communicator of science to the public.”

Margulis was internationally known for her research on the evolution of eukaryotic cells — cells that have a nucleus. She also was a leading proponent of the idea that the merger of previously independent organisms is of great importance to evolutionary change.

She also worked to support the Gaia Theory, the idea that Earth’s temperature and chemical composition are actively regulated as a consequence of the metabolism, growth, death and evolution of interacting organisms.

Margulis graduated from the College at age 17 with a degree in liberal arts and went on to earn her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. Her first husband was Carl Sagan, AB'54, SM'55, SM'56, PhD'60, whom Margulis met while she was a student in the College. Her survivors include three sons, Dorion and Jeremy Sagan and Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma; a daughter, Jennifer Margulis; and nine grandchildren.

Morris Philipson, former director of University of Chicago Press, 1926-2011

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 15:26 -0500

Morris Philipson, director emeritus of the University of Chicago Press and a leading figure in academic book publishing, died Thursday, Nov. 3. Philipson, 85, was a resident of Chicago.

He was a lion in the publishing world and served as director of the Press from 1967 to 2000. During his tenure — the longest of any director in the Press’s 119-year history — he raised the bar in academic publishing to unprecedented heights, promoting the intellectual revolutions in culture, scholarship and the arts that characterized the period.

His judgment and taste earned him a reputation for making bold choices that resulted in pioneering works that defined their fields.This vision was exemplified by such monumental projects as The Works of Giuseppe Verdi, The Lisle Letters and Yves Bonnefoy’s Mythologies.

Other outstanding publications included John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, a 1980 American Book Award winner that broke new ground in gender studies; several editions of the Chicago Manual of Style, the definitive reference for any writer; and Norman Maclean’s best-selling A River Runs Through It. Philipson was also an innovator in paperback publishing, expanding the Press’s commitment to reissuing classic works by provocative writers including André Malraux, Isak Dinesen, Anthony Powell and Paul Scott.

Philipson took great pride in establishing the Press as one of America’s leading publishers of translations, forging fruitful partnerships with French and German publishers in particular. Philipson and his editors introduced to an American audience works by Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Thomas Bernhard, among others. A translation of essays and letters by the German publisher Kurt Wolff, who as an émigré founded Pantheon Books, was for Philipson “an occasion to make conscious the fact that the character of a press is determined by the publisher making selections on the basis of his conceptions of art and serious thought,” he told Publishers Weekly in 1991.

In recognition of his extraordinary contributions, the French government in 1984 awarded Philipson the Commandeur de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for his service to French letters, and in 1982 he became the first director of a scholarly press to win PEN American Center’s Publisher Citation. Shortly before retiring in 2000 Philipson also received the Association of American Publishers’ Curtis Benjamin Award for Creative Publishing.

Philipson was born in New Haven, Conn., and received his AB (1949) and AM (1952) from the University of Chicago. Abroad, he pursued studies at the Sorbonne and as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Munich. He received a PhD in philosophy from Columbia University where, under the mentorship of Jacques Barzun, he concentrated on aesthetics. As an advocate for the pursuit of “the best that has been said and thought in the world,” he inspired the next generation by teaching courses in philosophy, cultural history and literature at the Julliard School of Music, Hunter College and the University of Chicago. Before returning to his alma mater to assume the directorship, he established his distinctive editorial style at Random House, Alfred A. Knopf and Basic Books during the golden age of New York publishing.

His passion for publishing was reflected not only in recognizing the potential in other authors, but in realizing his own literary aspirations. He was the author of five acclaimed novels — Bourgeois Anonymous (Vanguard, 1965), The Wallpaper Fox (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1976), A Man in Charge (Simon & Schuster, 1979), Secret Understandings (Simon & Schuster, 1983) and Somebody Else’s Life (Harper & Row, 1987) — as well as short stories and works of nonfiction.

Novelist Cynthia Ozick praised his work as comprising “lucid and engaging prose, incisive social insight, high wit, ironic brilliance, narrative urgency, the puzzlement and poetry of human life.”

Philipson and his late wife, Susan, shared their love of books and ideas by making their home a salon, where they entertained a diverse spectrum of writers, thinkers and artists, including such luminaries as Hugh Trevor-Roper, Jack Fuller, Wendy Doniger and Bill Russo.

He is survived by his children Nicholas, Jenny and Alex, and a granddaughter, Rachel.

Herman L. Sinaiko, longtime College professor and Plato scholar, 1929-2011

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 14:06 -0500

Update: A memorial service for Herman L. Sinaiko will take place Friday, Nov. 18 at 4 p.m. in Bond Chapel. Seating will begin at 3:30. Those who cannot attend the service may view it on cTV or at the UChicago Live page on Facebook.

Herman L. Sinaiko, a beloved teacher in the College and a scholar of Plato, died Sunday, Oct. 2 in Hyde Park after battling lung cancer. He was 82.

Sinaiko, who taught in the College for 57 years and served as dean of students in the College from 1982 to 1986, was known to generations of undergraduates as a thoughtful, rigorous and devoted teacher. He was also a passionate advocate for UChicago students, both inside and outside of the classroom.

“Herman Sinaiko was an enormously brilliant teacher who enriched and transformed the lives of the thousands of undergraduates whom he taught at Chicago,” said John W. Boyer, dean of the College. “He leaves a powerful legacy of service to the University and the College.”

Sinaiko’s deep ties to the University were established during his years as an undergraduate living in Burton-Judson Courts. A proud “Hutchins baby,” Sinaiko entered the College in 1945 at the age of 16 and received his bachelor’s degree in 1947.

He began teaching in the College in 1954, and in 1961, he received his PhD from the Department of Philosophy and the Committee on Social Thought. His dissertation was the basis for his first book, Love, Knowledge and Discourse in Plato: Dialogue and Dialectic in the Phaedrus, Republic and Parmenides (1965).

Deep commitment to undergraduates

Although his scholarly work on Plato was widely respected, it was through his work with students that Sinaiko made his greatest mark.

Throughout his career, Sinaiko, Professor in the Humanities, remained devoted to teaching in the College, particularly in the Core. His enthusiasm in the classroom earned him the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Undergraduate Teaching in 1963, the Amoco Award in 1994 and the Norman Maclean Faculty Award in 2003.

In recent years, Sinaiko’s passion for exposing undergraduates to the liberal arts led him to develop the University of Chicago Great Books Institute, an effort aimed at enriching education in community colleges, particularly for minority and first-generation students. Sinaiko hoped that giving students access to the materials and pedagogical methods used in the Core would provide them with the tools to succeed at a four-year institution.

Sinaiko’s friend and colleague James Redfield remembered him as “a College person, and there aren’t so many of those. His real home was the College, and his real work was undergraduate teaching,” said Redfield, the Edward Olson Distinguished Service Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought and the College.

Sinaiko, who taught “Greek Thought & Literature“ and “Human Being & Citizen,” among other courses, tried not to advocate a particular school of literary interpretation in the classroom. “[I]n the Core, I want students to develop such skills as tact, subtlety and sophistication, so that if a student chooses to be a Marxist at least she or he will be a smart Marxist,” Sinaiko told the University of Chicago Chronicle in 1994.

Sinaiko’s love of working with students was obvious, according to his colleagues. “There was a real joy in Herman when it came to sitting in a room with kids and trying to figure important things out,” said Ted O’Neill, lecturer in the Humanities Collegiate Division, who co-taught “Human Being & Citizen” with Sinaiko.

Sinaiko’s concern for his students went beyond the classroom. “He cared very much about the whole student—not just the student as a little intellect, but the person that contains the intellect,” said Susan Art, dean of students in the College.

A champion of students and the arts

Sinaiko championed numerous student causes in his years at UChicago. As dean of students, he worked to improve mental health care for students. Over the years, he also supported efforts to improve residential life facilities and was a strong supporter of student endeavors in the arts.

He was particularly instrumental in expanding University Theater. Early in his tenure as dean, with student involvement in theater flagging, Sinaiko helped to establish a student-run University Theater Committee. Thanks to leadership from Sinaiko, Francis X. Kinahan, Steve Schoer and others, participation in UT soared.

Bill Michel served as director of UT while Sinaiko was the organization’s faculty director. “He would often call me because a group of students had come to him with an idea,” remembered Michel, now the executive director of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts.

“No matter how off the wall, he would want to help make it happen. From the students who created Fire Escape Films while sitting on the fire escape outside his office in Gates-Blake, to the hundreds of students who enjoyed countless UT picnics in his backyard (I always wondered if it was a coincidence that the sets of David Auburn’s Proof looked like Herman’s house), it’s fair to say that Herman was one of the great supporters of student arts at the University.”

Sinaiko’s efforts on behalf of students gained him an enthusiastic following that even caught the attention of Esquire magazine. The September 1966 issue named him among the nation’s “super-profs,” and included a cartoon of a cape-adorned Sinaiko.

It wasn’t the only exuberant tribute Sinaiko would receive. In 2005, several students in his Greek Thought & Literature course started a Facebook group called “Herman Sinaiko is a Rock Star” and made T-shirts bearing the slogan. Sinaiko later modeled his shirt for the University of Chicago Magazine.

Anne Heminger, AB’08, was one of the members of the Facebook group, and is also a third-generation Sinaiko student (both her mother and step-grandmother studied with him). She was amazed that someone so distinguished still wanted to teach undergraduates. “I think that sums up his educational philosophy quite well—he always believed his undergraduates were as capable as anyone else at grasping the complexities of the texts we studied,” she said. “It was an amazing class to be a part of.”

Sinaiko’s son Jesse remembers how ardently students admired his father. “I’d wander over to his office after school. There were always students lined up outside his office door to talk to him. He was really proud of the fact he was considered a great teacher, and he was.”

Teaching impacts thousands

Colleagues and friends remember Sinaiko for his compassion, intellectualism—and his trademark turtlenecks, a style he adopted in the mid-1960s to avoid wearing ties.

“When he was dean of students, he was assailed by one of the conservative magazines of the time for wearing turtlenecks. As far as they were concerned, this was both hilarious and a terrible breach of decorum,” recalled O’Neill. “He suffered for his turtlenecks.”

That good-natured irreverence was typical of Sinaiko, according to his friends and colleagues. “He was witty, but always in a benevolent way,” said Art.

“He was fun to be around, and he was a good listener,” agreed Redfield. “He was somebody who was always there when you needed him.”

Sinaiko’s lasting impact is clear, said O’Neill. “There are thousands of students who were changed by Herman’s teaching. That’s a legacy that will continue in people’s lives.”

“He was completely devoted to teaching, to the College, to the Core, to everything we stand for here,” said Art.

Sinaiko is survived by his wife Susan Fisher and their children Benjamin and Jane; three children from his first marriage, Jesse, Eve and David; and four grandchildren, Eli, Maia, Asher and Zachary.

A fund to support undergraduate research has been established in Sinaiko’s honor. Donations to the Herman Sinaiko Research Fellowship Fund may be sent to the Office of the College Dean at 1116 E. 59th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

University community mourns loss of Mandeep Bedi, AB’10

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 16:54 -0500

UPDATE: A campus remembrance of Mandeep Bedi’s life will be held Thursday, Sept. 1. Members of the campus community are welcome to attend.

It is customary in the Sikh tradition to wear white at the time of mourning. Elizabeth Bedi, Mandeep’s widow, invites guests to follow this tradition, if they choose, and to consider wearing white, light or bright colors.

The schedule for Thursday is as follows:

11 a.m. - 1:45 p.m. – A gathering in Bartlett Quad to prepare a graffiti wall; Mandeep Bedi’s senior thesis was on American graffiti.

2 p.m. - 4:45 p.m. – A campus remembrance service at Rockefeller Chapel, followed by a reception in Ida Noyes Hall.

The University of Chicago community responded with profound sadness to the tragic death on Aug. 25 of Mandeep Bedi, AB’10.

Bedi, 23, who received an undergraduate degree in anthropology, continued to work on campus as a sales intern for the IT Services Solution Center at the University of Chicago. His wife, Elizabeth Bedi, is a fourth-year anthropology student in the undergraduate College. She was injured in a traffic incident that took place Friday, Aug. 19, and resulted in the death of Mandeep Bedi.

“This is an incredibly painful loss for our community,” said Kimberly Goff-Crews, Vice President for Campus Life and Dean of Students in the University. “Mandeep has been a bright presence on campus, concerned for his fellow students, intellectually engaged, and committed to helping his colleagues. We will all honor his memory.

“On behalf of Dean John Boyer and the University community, I extend our heartfelt condolences to the family of Mandeep Bedi,” Goff-Crews said. “We are especially concerned for our student, Elizabeth Bedi, and we are offering any guidance and assistance she might need in this terribly difficult time.”

Many of Mandeep Bedi’s colleagues and friends recalled his eagerness to serve others and create a welcoming atmosphere. In 2009, he taught two courses to Chicago high school students – one on the politics of soccer and another on contemporary freedom of speech. Bedi’s volunteer effort was organized by Splash! Chicago, a student-run organization that gives UChicago students a chance to design and teach short classes every fall.

“He made everyone feel at home,” said Kevin Brooks, sales manager of the IT Services Solution Center, who oversaw Bedi’s work there. Brooks said that when Bedi started work at the computing sales and service center, he would offer patrons coffee when they entered.

“He was just an engaging personality,” Brooks said. Bedi started working at the Solution Center in 2009, and continued his work after graduation as he considered pursuing graduate studies, Brooks said.

Bedi’s previous campus job was as a Residential Computing Assistant, where he helped students and staff in residence halls with their computing problems. Richard J. Mason, director of operations and communications for Housing and Dining Services, said Bedi was “a very sensitive and compassionate person.”

An avid fan of the English soccer team Arsenal, Bedi had an academic interest in the anthropology of urban graffiti, Brooks said.

“We wanted to keep him in our office as long as we could, because he made an incredible impact here,” Brooks said.