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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New World (1963) and The Nation Transformed: The Creation of an Industrial Society (1963), two anthologies of American historical documents, and The Soviet Union since Khrushchev (1965).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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