Neufeld honored by professorship in ILR School

By Linda Myers

Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations has established a new professorship honoring the school's founders as well as one of the first professors and his wife, thanks to gifts and commitments from generous supporters that have appreciated over time and are valued at more than $2 million.

The Maurice and Hinda Neufeld Founders Professorship in Industrial and Labor Relations was approved by the Cornell Board of Trustees earlier this year and dedicated in November. William Kay, who graduated from the school in 1951, led the endowment drive. Between 1981 and 1989 he chaired the committee that attracted significant gifts from ILR alumni and friends. Recently he made his own commitment to the school through a charitable remainder trust -- a gift that is invested to generate income for donors during their lifetimes, then reverts to the university. The school also will benefit from a bequest from Professor Emeritus Maurice Neufeld and his wife, Hinda. All the funds are being pooled to endow the professorship in perpetuity.

ILR Dean Edward Lawler said: "This endowed chair honors Maurice and Hinda's truly extraordinary contributions to the school at its founding and beyond. Maurice was there at the very beginning. Along with Professor Jean McKelvey, he developed the first curriculum -- a curriculum that in fact passed the test of time. He and the school's other founders had the creative intellectual vision, the foresight and the energy and determination to bring this rather risky enterprise to fruition."

"It was fascinating to be part of the school's beginnings," Neufeld said. The United States was wracked with strikes at the time in the steel and automobile industries, and Neufeld and his colleagues thought it was important to offer students the kind of education that would help produce "a different kind of society. We were the first school that educated students from their freshman year on in industrial and labor relations."

Neufeld attended the experimental college at the University of Wisconsin, where he studied Athenian and American societies in depth and mastered Greek well enough to produce an English verse translation of Sophocles' Antigone that was published in Classics in Translation, Vol. I in 1952.

He received his doctorate in American history from the University of Wisconsin in 1935. Following graduation he was involved in the labor movement, then became director of rationing and assistant coordinator of war plans during World War II as well as a U.S. army executive officer involved with the allied military government in Italy. In 1945 he was invited by Cornell to join the faculty of the fledgling ILR School.

During his 35 years at the school, Neufeld taught courses on comparative labor movements and American radicalism of dissent and served as a mentor and role model to innumerable students.

"He was a man of the people," said former student Kay. "He made his subject -- labor history -- interesting, and he was always interested in everybody's opinions. It impressed me that whenever he was asked to participate in any activity at the school, he did."

Neufeld received the school's Excellence in Teaching Award in 1976. Retired from active teaching that same year, he continues to research and write about working class history. His book The Persistence of Ideas in the American Labor Movement is forthcoming. Other books that continue to influence are Poor Countries and Authoritarian Rule and A Representative Bibliography of American Labor History.