IN MEMORIAM KARL JOACHIM WEINTRAUB

Karl Joachim Weintraub, beloved history professor at The University of Chicago, died on Thursday, March 25, at age 79.

The University of Chicago lost one of its greatest members yesterday, a man who spent over two-thirds of his life as a student and teacher at Chicago. My good friend BRG has always said that, at Mr. Weintraub's passing, a whole era of the University's history will have ended as well. That "Weintraub" (as many of us who would never presume to call him "Jock" called him), along with Mrs. Weintraub, persisted in teaching "History of Western Civ" in the core when their their colleagues ended the course adds poignance to exactly what has passed with him.

The University's official announcement conveys the salient outline of the life, though of course few words could capture the essence of the man and the teacher (the two were the same).

Weintraub was my first interviewer for the Fundamentals program, and he spared me little room for the arrogance and imprecision of a first-year in The College. I'll never forget the musty office with its myriad piles of books and memories of pipe-smoke, and the professor hunched over his dimly-lit desk engrossed in a book. I hope there's never again in my life so great a disjunct between what I thought I knew entering his office and what I knew I did not as I left.

"Western Civ" was the delight and bane of generations of Chicago students. Though in many ways I too wonder whether "The West" is the best construct for teaching history, the course as Weintraub taught it was precisely what a Core civilization course should be. Not an indoctrination into the current methodologies and schools of historical analysis. Not a taking-on of huge chunks of data and dates. Rather, the course used the documents of the historical record as a means into the minds and hearts and bodies and spirits of those who have lived in very particular times and places of the past.

Weintraub's "Western Civ" was not about history, but about humanity. It was about understanding how the documents from which history is made were also the best places to practice that old maxim, championed and embodied by Weintraub himself - COLAMUS HUMANITATEM - let us cultivate all that makes human life worth living at all!

(And maybe we could remember Hugh Miller as well.)

In nearly 70 years, only 8 people have been awarded the University's top teaching honor, the Quantrell Award, twice. Karl J. Weintraub was one of them, and had one of the longest spans between his first and award and his second (1960 and 1986). That students - and a university - in such different times could honor his teaching is perhaps one of the best signs of how much he had to offer.

Mr. Leon Kass captures the man and his spirit very well, in words that show the best way to honor him in death - to hold alive the vision of liberal education for which he stood and lived: "For me and many of my contemporaries, Jock Weintraub has stood for decades as the shining exemplar of everything admirable about the University and the intellectual life: love of books, wide curiosity, immense learning, intellectual probity and courage, respect for each individual, dedication to the university, and, above all, magisterial devotion to his subject and his students. As long as Jock Weintraub was on our faculty, one could be sure that this was still The University of Chicago. We shall not see his likes again."

May future years show that, even after his passing, the University is still the one that Weintraub would recognize.

Keep Katy O'Brien Weintraub in your remembrance as she faces a new time in her life.