|
|
DEATHS
Dr. Ginsberg, Sociology to Educational Leadership
Dr. Ralph B. Ginsberg, professor of education and chair of the educational
leadership division in the Graduate School of Education, died Saturday,
July 31, of injuries sustained in an automobile accident in Bristol, England,
where he was vacationing with his wife, Lois, who is the associate director
of the Dynamics of Organization program at Penn. He was 62 years old.
Dr. Ginsberg was a distinguished scholar whose career at the University
spanned 36 years and encompassed a wide range of disciplines beginning with
sociology, where his qualitative studies in applied probability were considered
invaluable to studies of migration, housing rehabilitation and community
development, insurance decisions, and labor market processes.
Trained as a humanist from his early days, Ralph Ginsberg earned his
bachelor's degree summa cum laude in English Literature from Brown in 1958,
then studied philosophy as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Princeton, and moved
to sociology for his Ph.D. at Columbia.
He joined Penn as a lecturer in sociology in 1963, and was named assistant
professor of sociology on receiving his Ph.D. in 1966. In 1972 he became
associate professor of sociology and public policy analysis, with regional
science added to his title in 1979. A year after that he became full professor
of regional science, sociology and public policy. Dr. Ginsberg also held
visiting faculty appointments at Princeton, Erasmus University in Rotterdam
and Umea University in Sweden.
Dr. Ginsberg's interests were not bounded by a field or discipline, colleagues
recall. "Ralph had a sociological imagination-he asked creative questions
about everything," said Dr. Laura Miller, a former student and colleague
of Dr. Ginsberg. In the late 1980's, his studies led him to investigate
theoretical questions about the learning process and, through a colleague
at Johns Hopkins, he became involved in research of study abroad programs.
These studies eventually led Dr. Ginsberg to a secondary appointment as
professor at the Graduate School of Education in 1995, and to appointment
as professor of education the following year.
At GSE, Dr. Ginsberg studied and taught the interconnections between
technology, learning, organizational structure and educational reform. His
timely and creative research in technology and learning issues were crucial
to the school's teacher preparation program, colleagues note, and they led
to his invitation to be guest editor for the most recent version of IEEE's
Technology and Society Magazine. His other major projects included
foreign language learning in computer-supported environments and study abroad
programs, film analysis and the interpretation of video data, statistical
graphics and data analysis, and computer support for reflective conversations
on the practice of teaching.
"Ralph was an excellent University citizen," said Vinnie Curren,
general manager of WXPN, who knew Dr. Ginsberg as both a WXPN board member
and as a mentor for Mr. Curren's studies in Organizational Dynamics. "He
was a very dedicated advisor. He spent a lot of time with his students and
knew how to talk to them." Dr. Ginsberg enjoyed teaching in the cross-disciplinary
Organizational Dynamics program, Mrs. Ginsberg said, because he "valued
the experience of learning from his students, who had interests and exepertise
in many different fields."
Dr. Ginsberg was editor of the Journal of Mathematical Sociology,
served on the editorial boards of several international journals, and was
deputy director of the National Foreign Language Center in Washington, D.C.
At various times Dr. Ginsberg served as Secretary of the Faculty Senate
and as a member of the Senate Executive Committee; chaired the graduate
group in public policy analysis and the FAS educational policy committee;
and held secondary appointments in the Wharton School (1975-93), School
of Public and Urban Policy (1970-82), and the South Asia Regional Studies
(1987-99). He was also a research associate with the Population Studies
Center and a fellow of the Annenberg Public Policy Center.
Dr. Ginsberg is survived by his wife, Lois; two daughters Marjorie and
Alice--the latter a Ph.D. candidate at GSE--a son, Geoffrey; and three grandchildren.
A memorial service is being arranged (215-898-9792 for information).
Dr. Hildebrand, Statistics and Service
on Wry
|
Dr. David Hildebrand, above, thought the Bird on the Bench deserved attention
too. |
Dr. David K. Hildebrand, a distinguished professor of statistics who
chaired the Faculty Senate in 1992-93 and twice served as moderator of the
University Council, died on July 13 after a long struggle with cancer.
He was 59 years old, and had spent 34 of those years on the Penn faculty.
A 1962 Carleton College alumnus who took his M.S. and Ph.D. from Carnegie
Mellon University, Dr. Hildebrand joined the Wharton School as a lecturer
in 1965 and was named assistant professor the following year. He was promoted
to associate professor in 1970--the year he also also served as visiting
professor at Carnegie Mellon--and he became full professor at Wharton in
1977. He chaired the Department of Statistics from 1985 to 1990, and during
two years of that time he took his first University-wide role in governance
as moderator of the University Council--a role then being reintroduced to
the structure under conditions of controversy. His humor and collegiality
were credited with making the position workable, and he was to hold it again
in 1997 at Council's request.
As a teacher and scholar of statistics he made contributions on many
levels. On the research front he published (with James D. Laing and Howard
L. Rosenthal) respected technical studies on models and methods for the
analysis of categorical data, and on applied probability. At the same time
provided some of the basic texts that made statistics come alive for students
aiming toward other careers. His 1983 book with Lyman Ott, Statistical Thinking
for Managers, is now in its fourth edition and has spun off an MBA-level
Basic Statistical Ideas for Managers. He also produced, in 1986,
Statistical Thinking for Behavioral Scientists.
In discussions on University educational standards during the 1970s
he argued the need for "universal numeracy" equal to the need
for "universal literacy" in today's world. In return, he introduced
into his own final exams, if not quite poetry, some rhyme that he reasoned
would ease tensions for his students:
Oh sing of the glory of stat;
Of sigma, x-bar, and y-hat!
The joy and elation
Of squared correlation--
Does anyone here believe that!
Or, for behavioral scientists:
The rats had been carefully matched,
But cages weren't carefully latched.
Without any waiting,
'Twas randomized mating,
With nary a rat unattached.
With memorable brevity he once sent an administrative decision back to
the drawing boards by publishing (Almanac May 27, 1986):
To Ye Editor
I see that the stores at 34th and Walnut
are to be called The Shoppes at Penn Square.
I assume that among the shoppes will be a
floriste, a computer shackcke (Ecce DECce?)
and a drugge storre.
Ah, pretension.
After his diagnosis last year Dr. Hildebrand continued to teach into
the fall semester, giving courses for three of the 12 cohorts of the MBA
program--and despite his illness did so at a level which won him an award
from one of the cohorts for "best teaching in the core curriculum."
Dr. Hildebrand is survived by his wife, Patricia Gach Hildebrand, who
is the Database Administrator of Social Science Computing in the School
of Arts and Sciences, and their sons, Martin V. and Jeffrey D. Hildebrand.
Remembering his youth and college days in Minnesota, Dr. Hildebrand used
to tell his family that his dream was to create for his alma mater a fund
for the removal of snow and ice, giving new meaning to the term "slush
fund." His college has agreed, and checks for the 1962 David Hildebrand
Memorial Fund may be sent to Carleton College, Attn: Elissa Ecklund Chaffee,
One North College Street, Northfield, MN 55057.
A Penn memorial service is being planned for Friday, October 1, at 2
p.m., with the location to be announced. (After presstime, Logan Hall
room 17 was announced as the location for the service--Ed).
Betty Jacob, Political Values
Betty Muther Jacob, who was known in her years at Penn for contributions
to multinational studies of comparative political values, died in Honolulu
on August 17 at the age of 89.
Joining the University in 1945 when her husband, Dr. Philip Jacob, was
named to the faculty here, Mrs. Jacob held a variety of staff posts at Penn--one
of them as administrator of International Studies of Values in Politics,
which the Jacobs established in 1960 as the first large-scale comparative
political science research program involving communist countries.
She joined her husband in 1970 at the University of Hawaii as Research
Associate of the Social Science Research Institute where she became the
coordinator of the International Automation and Industrial Workers project.
She continued her involvement in international research and with the University
of Pennsylvania in collaboration with Professor Henry Teune in the Democracy
and Local Governance project, spanning 30 countries.
Betty Jacob was active in the American Friends Service Committee and
other international agencies. She also served as special assistant to the
executive directors of UNRRA, 1945-46, and UNICEF, 1947-54.
She is survived by her children Sally, Kirk, and Stephen. Remembrances
may be sent to the Matsunaga Peace Institute at the University of Hawaii,
where a memorial service was held for Mrs. Jacob shortly after her death.
Dr. Barbara Kopytoff, Ethnohistory
Dr. Barbara Klamon Kopytoff, a lawyer and anthropologist who was a lecturer
and research associate in ethnohistory at Penn in 1979-81, died on August
20 at the age of 61.
A Swarthmore alumna, Barbara Kopytoff worked with children at the Eastern
Psychiatric Institute before taking her Ph.D. in anthropology at Penn, awarded
in 1964. She then became known for her work on the Maroon population of
Jamaica, teaching at Temple, Johns Hopkins, and Lehigh as well as at Penn
during the fifteen years she devoted to those studies. With grants from
the NIMH, NSF and NEH, she did fieldwork in Accompong town and archival
work in Kingston and in England as she traced the ethnohistory of the escaped
slaves who formed a distinct culture in the Jamaican interior.
In the late 1970s her interests turned to law, and she studied at McGill
University and at Temple, where she took her J.D. magna cum laude in
1987. For the next two years she did research with the late A. Leon Higginbotham,
publishing with him on legal issues relating to race, slavery and surrogate
motherhood. In 1990-92 she was an associate with the Philadelphia firm of
Schnader, Harrison, Segal and Lewis, but throughout her career in law she
"found her greatest satisfaction in clerking for federal judges,"
according to her husband of 31 years, Dr. Igor Kopytoff, professor of anthropology.
She served as law clerk to Judge Higginbotham and to Judge A.J. Scirica
when they were on the U.S. Court of Appeals, and to U.S. District Court
Judges William H. Yoh, Anita B. Brody, and John R. Provoda, for whom she
was clerking at the time of her death.
A memorial service was held on September 2 at the University Museum for
Dr. Kopytoff, who is survived by her husband; their daughter Larissa, who
is now a Penn undergraduate; and three brothers.
Loss in Burnley Family
I thought those in the University community would want to know that Rashad
Burnley, the twenty-year-old son of the Rev. Larry Burnley, has died tragically
in Toronto, Canada. Rashad, who was a student at Wooster College in Shaker
Heights, Ohio, was with a tour company attending a Carabana music festival
in the Canadian city when he disappeared. His body was recovered ten days
later. Memorial Services were held August 23.
Rev. Burnley was formerly the Associate Minister at the Christian Association
(1991-1993) and Director of Greenfield Intercultural Center (1993-1996).
Condolences may be sent to Rev. Burnley's address at 22 Vaughn Ave. New
Rochelle, NY 10801.
--Rev. Beverly Dale, Director, The Christian Association |
Almanac, Vol. 46, No. 2, September 7, 1999
FRONT
PAGE | CONTENTS
| JOB-OPS
| CRIMESTATS
| NEW Alcohol
and Drug Policy | FY
2000 Recognized Holidays | TALK
ABOUT TEACHING | BETWEEN
ISSUES | SEPTEMBER at PENN
|
|
|