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IN LUMINE
TUO
HONORED: On October 17,
1999, Fritz Stern '46, University Professor Emeritus, was
awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, one of Germany's
most prestigious literary prizes. Stern's award was covered
nationally in Germany, and his acceptance address was published in
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The award is given annually
in conjunction with the Frankfurt Book Fair. A former University
provost, Stern is the author of several highly influential books on
German and European history, including Gold and Iron:
Bismark, Bleichroeder and the Building of the German
Empire (which won the Lionel Trilling Award), The Failure of
Illiberalism, Dreams and Delusions: The Drama of German
History, and, most recently, Einstein's German World.
(For an excerpt from Einstein's German World, see Columbia
Forum.)
ACHIEVERS: Four of the
seven New York Mayor's Awards for Excellence and Science and
Technology awarded this year went to Columbia faculty. Ronald
Breslow, professor of chemistry, won for research creating
cancer-inhibiting molecules. Joseph F. Traub, professor of
computer science, won for his study on computing financial
derivatives. Yuang Chang, associate professor of pathology
at P&S, was honored for discovering the cause for the most
common cancer in AIDS patients. George Wolberg, adjunct
professor of computer science, won for developing digital imagery
warping for television and film. The awards, which were announced
on March 7, recognize achievements in New York City; a panel of
scientists and engineers at the New York Academy of Sciences choose
the nominees.
EARTH AWARD:
Columbia Earthscape, a joint electronic publishing project
in the earth sciences of the University and Columbia University
Press, has been named the Best New Internet-Based Electronic
Product - Math/Science for 1999 by the Association of American
Publishers. After several months of preview models, Columbia
Earthscape (www.earthscape.org) was launched
on December 14, 1999, at the American Geophysical Union Conference
in San Francisco.
Designed for
scientists and laymen alike, Columbia Earthscape contains
current research, breaking news, policy debates, curriculum models
for Earth science teachers, and Earth Affairs, a quarterly
magazine. Currently, the site has over 70,000 pages of multi-media
web content, which is available through annual subscriptions.
Funding for the initiative came from the Provost's Office as well
as grants from the National Science Foundation's Digital Library 2
Program and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources
Coalition (SPARC).
Last year,
the University received the same award in the Social
Sciences/Humanities category for CIAO, Columbia International
Affairs Online (www.ciaonet.org).
IN
MEMORIAM
Columbia
University mourns the recent deaths of two distinguished
scholars:
Sigmund
Diamond, Giddings Professor of Sociology and professor emeritus
of history, on October 14, 1999, in Norwich, Conn. He was 79.
Diamond, who taught at Columbia for over 30 years, was a specialist
in American labor history and had played an important role in
revealing Federal Bureau of Investigation information gathering at
American colleges and universities.
Diamond was
born and grew up in Baltimore. He graduated from Johns Hopkins in
1940 and earned a doctorate in American history from Harvard in
1953. During the 1940s, he worked for the United Auto Workers
union, where he studied women who worked during the war and what
happened to them after the war ended. Diamond found that by early
1945, women who had been laid off were having difficulty returning
to work, partly as a result of prejudice. At the same time, he
promoted the idea in the union that women should receive equal pay
for equal work. Diamond had been a member of the American Communist
Party from 1941 to 1950, and he was denied a position as a
part-time lecturer at Harvard when he resisted pressure from
McGeorge Bundy, then a dean at the school, to divulge the names of
other party members.
He joined the
Columbia faculty in 1955, where he taught history and sociology. In
his first book, Reputation of the American Businessman
(1955), Diamond profiled American business icons such as John Jacob
Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller.
He edited Creation of Society in the New World (1963) and
The Nation Transformed: The Creation of an Industrial
Society (1963), two anthologies of American historical
documents, and The Soviet Union since Khrushchev
(1965).
During the
student unrest of the late 1960s, Diamond drafted moderate
proposals that were adopted in April 1968 by a meeting of the joint
faculties in an attempt to find a compromise between students and
the University administration. He founded and headed the history
department's social history program and was a consultant for an
American Jewish Committee oral history project on the Holocaust.
Diamond explored his Jewish roots with In Quest: Journal of an
Unquiet Pilgrimage (1980), keeping a journal when he spent a
year traveling in Western and Eastern Europe and Israel.
In
Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the
Intelligence Community, 1945-1955 (1992), Diamond exposed the
FBI's attempts to gather intelligence on American campuses. The
book asserted that the bureau had enlisted university
administrators and professors, planting them as agents to collect
information on co-workers suspected of disloyalty to the United
States.
Diamond, who
retired from teaching in 1986, is survived by his wife Shirley, two
children and four grandchildren. A memorial service was held in the
Faculty Room of Low Memorial Library on December 15,
1999.
Joseph A.
Rothschild '51, the Class of 1919 Professor of Political
Science, died in his Manhattan home on January 30, 2000. He was 68.
Rothschild, who spent his entire teaching career at Columbia, was
one of the nation's leading authorities on modern East Central
Europe.
A native of
Fulda, Germany, Rothschild immigrated to the United States in 1940.
After graduating with highest honors from the College and earning a
master's at Columbia, Rothschild used a Euretta J. Kellett
fellowship from Columbia to study at Oriol College at Oxford
University where he earned his doctorate in 1955. He joined the
Columbia faculty that year as an instructor, rising to become full
professor. In 1978, he was named the Class of 1919 Professor of
Political Science. Rothschild also served three separate terms as
chairman of the Department of Political Science.
Rothschild
was a renowned authority on Eastern Europe and a pioneer in the
study of ethnopolitics. He was the author of numerous articles and
many books, including The Communist Party of Bulgaria
(1959), Communist Eastern Europe (1964), Pilsudski's Coup
d'Etat (1966), and East Central Europe Between the Two World
Wars (1974). His Return to Diversity: A Political History of
East Central Europe since World War II, originally published in
1989, and revised in 1993, was updated by Professor Nancy Wingfield
for a reissue this year.
Rothschild
taught Contemporary Civilization for more than 30 years. In the
years before the Contemporary Civilization course relied on
paperbacks, he was co-editor of the two-volume Introduction to
Contemporary Civilization in the West, 3rd edition (1960) - the
famous "redbooks" - and of their two-volume companion anthology,
Chapters in Western Civilization, 3rd edition (1960). In the
early 1990s, he was still a staple of the course, known to begin
each weekly staff meeting with a joke, often of dubious quality but
always well told. Rothschild, who had chaired the course from 1968
to 1971, received the Award for Distinguished Service to the Core
Curriculum in 1997.
Rothschild's
other Columbia honors include the Mark Van Doren Award for Great
Teaching in 1991 and the Great Teacher Award from the Society of
Columbia Graduates in 1978. Among many outside honors, he could
count fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Foundation,
the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Samuel Guggenheim
Foundation.
Rothschild's
wife, Ruth Rothschild, predeceased him on January 1, 2000. They are
survived by a son and a daughter. A memorial service for Ruth and
Joseph Rothschild was held in St. Paul's Chapel on March 23,
2000.
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