Obituaries
Boston University Faculty Members Remembered
John Gagliardo
College of Arts and Sciences professor emeritus of history, 73, on August 2
A Fulbright Scholar who studied at the University of Marburg in Germany, Gagliardo specialized in modern German history.
Gagliardo earned a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Kansas, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Yale University.
Gagliardo joined the BU faculty in 1968. He published four well-regarded books and one translation on early modern European and German history. Over his three decades at BU, he received numerous honors for his commitment to education, and in 1984 he received Boston University’s highest teaching award, the Metcalf Cup and Prize for Excellence in Teaching.
“John was passionately dedicated to the craft of teaching,” says William Keylor, a CAS professor of history and international relations and a close colleague of Gagliardo’s. “As a master lecturer, an inspiring seminar leader, and a dedicated mentor and advisor to students, he was peerless.”
Students also remember Gagliardo as a spirited and inspiring professor and a tireless mentor, according to Jay Corrin (GRS’76), who earned a Ph.D. in history from Boston University and is chair of social sciences at the College of General Studies. “I have not known anyone in my thirty years of teaching at Boston University who gave more of his time and energy to students than John Gagliardo,” he wrote in the history department’s newsletter. “Many of these students have told me that their lives were forever transformed by knowing and working with him.”
“His demanding standards of scholarship in the areas of research, critical thinking, and writing set standards that I’ve worked diligently, though not always successfully, to meet,” Corrin wrote. “And to this day he remains for me the model of a classroom teacher.”
Gerald Gordon
College of Arts and Sciences professor of sociology and chair of the sociology department, on October 30
Almost as soon as he began teaching at Boston University in 1976, Gordon became the director of the Center for Applied Social Science. He later became director of the Center for Technology and Policy, and in 1996 he was appointed chair of the sociology department. His notable early books focused on medical sociology and medical technology, and he wrote several influential articles on evaluation research and innovation in industry and technology. He retired from Boston University in 2007.
Throughout his career, Gordon was an advisor to the health industry and the U.S. government. He was a consultant to the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassina-tion, the U.S. Public Health Service, the Kaiser Foundation Research Institute, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and the National Institutes of Health. He was also a member of the National Academy of Sciences committee on technology and health care and a faculty member at Tel Aviv University in Israel.
Gordon earned a Ph.D. from New York University in 1962. Before coming to Boston University, he taught at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business and at Cornell University’s department of sociology and industrial labor relations, where he was chair of the organizational behavior department.
Stuart A. Marshall
School of Education professor emeritus of education, 88, on September 7
Marshall, who taught at BU from 1959 to 1980, specialized in school administration and development. Yet in the classroom, he emphasized a personal approach to education.
“He was very open and pleasant with students,” says SED Professor Emeritus Gaylen Kelley (SED’54,’59). “He really worked with his students; a lot of it was getting them to talk, to learn conflict resolution, and to recognize who they are in terms of their own strengths and weaknesses.”
Marshall earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of New Hampshire and graduate degrees in education from Springfield College and Stanford University. He achieved the rank of captain in the U.S. Army and was a high school principal and later superintendent of schools in Middlebury, Vermont.
After studying at Stanford, Marshall returned to New England in 1959 to begin a twenty-one-year career at the School of Education. In addition to teaching, he was a traveling consultant, helping school districts develop long-range plans and determine when to build new schools.
Daniel S. Bernstein
School of Medicine professor of medicine and associate dean and an early advocate for fluoridation, 80, on July 25
Bernstein earned an A.B. in English from Haverford College and an M.D. from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
In 1955, a research fellowship from the biochemistry unit of the U.S. Public Health Service enabled Bernstein to study at University College Medical School in London and at Duke University’s School of Medicine.
Bernstein then became an associate professor of medicine at Harvard University, where he worked for fifteen years. In 1973, he joined the School of Medicine, where he remained for the rest of his academic career.
He was one of the first proponents of fluoridation. In 1983, Bernstein told the Boston Globe, “There is one basic, irrefutable fact, and that is all water, everywhere, contains fluoride. It is not an additive. Fluoridation is an adjustment of that level, and at one part per million, its dental health benefits are great and it is nontoxic.”
After retiring, he kept up a busy clinical practice through an outpatient group at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The patients who couldn’t pay he saw without charge, his son Andrew told the Globe. Further, “My father always said, ‘If I want to spend forty-five minutes with a patient, I don’t care what any health plan says, I’m not going to spend only fifteen minutes.”
James Melby
School of Medicine professor of medicine and physiology and head of the endocrinology section of the department of medicine, 79, on August 19
Before coming to Boston University in 1962, Melby earned a medical degree and completed preliminaries for a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Minnesota, where he met his wife. Following their marriage and his residency, Melby was an associate professor of medicine and biochemistry at the University of Arkansas for three years.
Throughout thirty years of teaching and conducting research at Boston University, Melby saw patients, starting at 7:30 a.m. One patient described him as “a combination of God and Santa Claus,” Melby’s wife, Mary, told the Boston Globe.
In 1993, Melby stepped down from his position as section head but stayed on as a professor of medicine and physiology and director of endocrine hypertension.
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