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AROUND THE QUADS

IN MEMORIAM

Richard Bersohn, Higgins Professor of Natural Science since 1986 and a Columbia chemistry professor for 44 years, died on November 18. He was 78.

A renowned physical chemist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, Bersohn’s research focused on the photochemistry of molecules and the reaction of photochemically produced free radicals. Among his achievements was the first demonstration that photodissociating molecules produce fragments with a characteristic spatial pattern that reveals the molecular motions during dissociation. Bersohn also did pioneering research in biophysics and in molecular reaction kinetics. Although a gifted theoretical chemist, he became an experimentalist soon after coming to Columbia in 1959. Bersohn taught at Cornell for eight years before joining Columbia.

Born in New York City on May 13, 1925, Bersohn grew up on the Upper West Side, just blocks away from the American Museum of Natural History and its planetarium. There, his passion for science developed. By 1943, he had received a B.S. in chemistry from MIT and entered the Army for two years, where he worked on the Manhattan Project. He received an M.A. (1947) in physics and Ph.D. (1949) from Harvard under the supervision of the Nobel Laureate J. van Vleck, a theoretical physicist.

Bersohn is survived by his wife, Nehama ’70 GSAS, ’76 GSAS; children, Malcolm Mark, David ’77L, Rina ’98 and Leora; grandchildren, Daniel ’05 and Rebecca; daughter-in-law, Shelley Shapiro; son-in-law, Adam Spiewak ’99, ’02L; twin brother, Malcolm ’60 GSAS; sister, Barbara Elkin; and sisters-in-law JoAnn Bersohn, Miriam Rezler and Sara Rezler.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun, who retired as the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities in 1992, died at her Manhattan home on October 9. She was 77. A University literary scholar whose extensive writings included pioneering books and essays in the feminist canon, Heilbrun also wrote mystery novels, featuring heroine Kate Fansler, under the pseudonym Amanda Cross.

Heilbrun, an only child, was born on January 13, 1926, in East Orange, N.J. The family moved to Manhattan when Heilbrun was 6, and she graduated from private schools in New York. She earned a B.A. in English from Wellesley College in 1947 and an M.A. (1951) and Ph.D. (1959) from Columbia.

Aside from stints as an instructor at Brooklyn College in 1959–60 and as a visiting lecturer or professor at Yale, Princeton, Swarthmore and other colleges, Heilbrun spent her entire academic career at Columbia, joining the faculty in 1960 as an instructor of English and comparative literature. In 1986, she became a founder of and the first director of the University’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She was its director until 1989. Heilbrun also served as editor of Columbia University Press’ Gender and Culture Series. Throughout her academic career, and afterward, Heilbrun wrote books and contributed articles to professional journals, newspapers and magazines. She wrote numerous book reviews and essays for “Hers,” a former column in The New York Times. Heilbrun’s academic specialty was modern British literature, roughly 1890–1950, an era that included Yeats, Conrad and Eliot, with a focus on the Bloomsbury group, made up of Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster and other writers. Heilbrun was founding president of the Virginia Woolf Society.

Heilbrun received honorary degrees from Penn (1984) and Bucknell (1985), and was a Guggenheim Fellow (1965–66), AAUW Honorary Fellow (1970–71), Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellow (1976–77), Radcliffe Institute Fellow (1976–77) and NEH Senior Research Fellow (1983–84).

She is survived by her husband, James, whom she married in 1945; children, Margaret, Emily and Robert; and two grandchildren. Memorial contributions may be sent to the Kate Fansler Foundation, 151 Central Park West, New York, NY 10023.

Richard E. Neustadt, a former professor of government at Columbia as well as a prominent White House adviser, historian and authority on presidential power, died on October 31 at his English country home in the village of Furneux Pelham, Hertfordshire. He was 84.

Neustadt was born on June 26, 1919, in Philadelphia and grew up in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., earning a bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley and a master’s and Ph.D. (1951) from Harvard.

Neustadt began his career in 1942 as an economist in the Office of Price Administration, before enrolling in the Navy, where he was a supply officer in the Aleutian Islands. He later joined the Bureau of Budget, where he stayed for four years while completing his Ph.D. In 1950, he joined Harry S. Truman’s team as a policy and administrative adviser. After Dwight D. Eisenhower became president in January 1953, Neustadt returned to academe. Following a year at Cornell as professor of public administration, he came to Columbia in 1954 as professor of government, where he quickly attracted a devoted following for his classes, with students often sitting on the floor to hear his lectures.

Neustadt left Columbia in 1965 to join Harvard as an associate professor of government and associate dean of the Graduate School of Public Administration. He became a founding father of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, helping mold the school’s curriculum and direction. He taught there for more than two decades and became professor emeritus in 1989. A consultant to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, as well, Neustadt was an adviser to several federal agencies and legislative panels in the 1960s, and advised Michael Dukakis during the 1988 presidential campaign.

Neustadt’s most influential work on the presidency was published in 1960 under the title Presidential Power, and periodically revised over the years until it was published in 1990 as Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership From Roosevelt to Reagan. He said his intent was to explore “the classic problem of the man on the top,” that of “how to be on top in fact as well as in name.” Neustadt also authored several other books and held numerous academic posts and honors, including a year at Nuffield College, Oxford (1961–62); Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the Woodrow Wilson Award from the American Political Science Association and, last year, the inaugural prize for portrayal of the presidency from the Smithsonian Institution.

Neustadt married his first wife, Bertha Cummings, who died in 1984, in 1945, and they had a son and a daughter. He had a home on Cape Cod but lived in England most of the year with his second wife, Shirley Williams, the leader of the Liberal Democrats in the British House of Lords.

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