Departures
Political science professor Rogers Smith, a prize-winning teacher and expert on civil rights and constitutional law, will leave Yale to join the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania next academic year.
Smith has taught courses including “Constitutional Law” and “Civil Rights and Civil Liberties,” popular classes that have packed some of the campus’ largest lecture halls.
After 21 years at Yale, Smith said he is leaving partly because of the career path of his wife, Mary Summers, who also will take a job at Penn. His departure comes in the midst of the Political Science Department’s rebuilding efforts.
Smith has garnered praise and awards for his written work on issues including American citizenship and the civil rights movement. One of his most recent books, “Civic Ideals,” won six awards and was a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in history.
Retirements
The following professors have expressed their intention to retire at the end of the 2000-2001 academic year:
Colin Atterbury, Internal Medicine
James Crowley, History
David B. Davis, History
Evans Downing, Pathology
Robert Gifford, Internal Medicine
Morton Glickman, Diagnostic Radiology
John Gordon, School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences
Joseph La Palombara, School of
Management
Jack Philip Lawson, Diagnostic Radiology
Letty Russell, Divinity School
Dorothy Sexton, School of Nursing
William Smith, School of Forestry and
Environmental Sciences
Gregory Tignor, Epidemiology and
Public Health
Richard Wood, Divinity School
In Memoriam
Two former Yale researchers who were instrumental in the development of a vaccine for polio died in January. Dr. Dorothy Horstmann, an epidemiologist and Yale’s first female professor of medicine, died Jan. 11 in New Haven at age 89. Her death came four days after that of Dr. Joseph Melnick, who worked at Yale with Horstmann in the 1940s and 1950s. He was 86.
Horstmann was the first woman at Yale to hold an endowed chair. Her key discoveries about the nature of the polio virus, the disease that crippled President Franklin D. Roosevelt and once infected 57,000 people a year, expedited the development of an effective vaccine. Horstmann was also known for her research in combating rubella and other infectious diseases.
Melnick, who grew up in New Haven, received his doctorate from Yale in 1939 and became a professor of epidemiology here in 1954. Melnick’s addition of magnesium chloride, a preservative, to the polio vaccine allowed it to be transported throughout the world without freezers.
Barry Saltzman, a Yale professor of geology and geophysics whose work led to the discovery of chaos theory, died Feb. 5 at the age of 69.
Over his long and distinguished scientific career, including 33 years as a professor at Yale, Saltzman made important contributions to mathematics and climatology.
As a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Saltzman laid the foundation for the discovery of chaos theory while studying thermal convection. Later in his career, Saltzman shifted gears and began studying ancient climates. He investigated how climatological factors such as atmospheric winds, ice sheets and ocean currents interact to create ice ages approximately every 100,000 years.
At Yale, Saltzman’s research also included studies of the causes and patterns of the jet stream, trade winds and winter storms.
Maynard Mack ’32 GRD ’36, a scholar of Shakespeare and Pope known as much for his caring manner as his renowned lectures and ability to bring literature to a wide audience, died March 18. He was 90 years old.
Known as an inspirational teacher and colleague, Mack left a legacy which included legendary lectures on Shakespeare, a reputation as a respected voice on educational issues, and the Directed Studies Program, which he helped found.
After beginning as an instructor in 1936, Mack became a full professor in 1948 and a Sterling professor in 1965. Widely respected as both a writer and editor, Mack published several works on Shakespeare, Alexander Pope and 18th-century writers. The Twickenham Edition of the poems of Alexander Pope, one of Mack’s chief accomplishments as an editor, became the standard edition of Pope’s work.
Among Mack’s greatest achievements was bringing literature to a wide audience, including many who would later become his colleagues. Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead ’68 GRD ’72 was one of his students.
Dorothee Metlitzki GRD ’58, one of Yale’s most talented and multifaceted professors of English, died April 14. She was 86 years old.
Metlitzki taught at Yale for 26 years before retiring in 1984. Early in her life, she was active in Israeli politics and played a role in the founding of Israel. Metlitzki later became a distinguished scholar of medieval English literature, Arabic literature and the works of Herman Melville. Her 1977 book, “The Matter of Araby in Medieval England,” is still considered a major work in comparative literature.
After Metlitzki made a foray into the Israeli political scene in the years just before the country was formed in 1948, she taught at the University of California, where she received tenure in 1965, becoming only the second female professor in the English Department to be promoted to full professor status.
In 1966 Metlitzki returned to Yale with her husband and never left. She received tenure at Yale in 1976, and was only the second woman to be tenured in the English Department.