Two prominent AAUP members remembered

Two longtime AAUP members died last winter. Paul Oberst, a law professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky, died February 27, and James Tobin, a Nobel laureate and professor of economics at Yale University, died March 11.

Oberst, who was 87, taught at the University of Kentucky College of Law for thirty-six years, retiring in 1982. He was dedicated to the principles of academic freedom and active in the AAUP on the local and national levels. Oberst joined the Association in 1946 and frequently held office in his local chapter. He was also a founder and longtime office holder in the Kentucky AAUP state conference. He was instrumental in getting UK faculty members a seat on the university's board of trustees, and himself served three terms as a trustee.

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On the national level, Oberst was a member of the Association's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, the AAUP Council, and several other standing committees. He chaired two major investigating committees, those responsible for investigations at Auburn University in 1957-58 and Ohio State University in 1972-73.

In addition to his work on academic freedom and university governance, Oberst was an active champion of civil rights. He participated in the court case that led to the UK law school's racial integration in 1949, and was a member of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights for twenty-two years and a principal author of Kentucky's landmark 1966 civil rights law. He was inducted into the Kentucky Civil Rights Hall of Fame in spring 2001. "He worked tirelessly for what was right, because it was right, not for personal glory or profit," says Jamie Oberst, his son.

Tobin, who died at age 84, taught at Yale from 1950 until his retirement in 1988, and was a renowned teacher and economist whose research shaped economic theory and policy. In the early 1960s, Tobin served on the President's Council of Economic Advisers, whose policy recommendations from that time are still highly influential. He received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1981. Tobin was also a gifted teacher who never let students lose sight of the fact that "the ultimate reason for studying theory was to make the world a better place," says William Brainard, a Yale colleague and a former student of Tobin.

Tobin joined the AAUP in 1958 and was a member of the Committee on Government Relations in the early 1990s. "Jim Tobin did not miss a meeting during his time on the committee, and his contributions to our deliberations and to the positions the AAUP adopted were most valuable," says Don Wagner, a professor at the State University of West Georgia, who chaired the committee at the time.