Former committee chair remembered

Academe, Nov/Dec 2002

Robert Dorfman, a noted political economist and a former chair of the Association's Committee on the Economic Status of the Profession, died June 24 at age 85. Dorfman served as chair of the committee, then known as Committee Z, from 1974 to 1977. He was professor emeritus at Harvard University, where he taught for thirty-two years before his retirement in 1987.

"Like everything else he did, his work with the AAUP was first rate," says Peter Steiner of the University of Michigan, a past president of the AAUP and himself a former chair of the economic status committee, adding that Dorfman "was devoted to civil liberties and to the people in the profession who weren't so fortunate as to be at Harvard."