Sheldon Rothblatt

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Sheldon Rothblatt served as director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education from 1989 to 1996 and is currently a CSHE faculty associate. He is a renowned scholar of British and European history, and his research centers on the history of universities in relation to society and culture, the history of campus planning and architecture, urban culture, intellectuals, scientists and professions and the history of liberal learning in the US, Britain and Continental Europe. At Berkeley he served as Chair of the Department of History, as well as Assistant and Associate Dean for Student Services and Dean of the Division of Freshman and Sophomore Studies in the College of Letters and Science and also as Chair of the Committee on Committees of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate.

Sheldon Rothblatt was educated at the University of California, Berkeley and King’s College, Cambridge University, where he was the Ehrman Student. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1956, served in the U.S. Army, and received his PhD from Berkeley in January 1965. He taught Modern British and European history at Berkeley from 1963 until retirement. He is now Professor Emeritus. He has taught courses in the comparative history of universities at Stanford, New York, Columbia, Oslo, Vienna and Monash (Australia) universities and served as STINT Professor of University History at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm from 1996-1999. He also taught undergraduate courses at Samford University in Birmingham, AL. He continues to teach European and American intellectual and cultural history at the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning on the campus of the University of San Francisco.

Professional board service past or present includes the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the American Academy for Liberal Education and the Consortium of Higher Education Researchers (secretariat in the Netherlands). He is an International Councilor, Council of Trustees, Instituto Cultural Judaico Marc Chagall, Porto Alegre, Brazil. He is or has been on the editorial boards of Minerva, Victorian Studies, the International Journal of the History of Sport, History of Universities, History of Education, History of Education Quarterly and Higher Education. From 1992 through 2001 he was a columnist for The Times Higher Education Supplement.

He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Social Sciences Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Davis Center at Princeton University, Nuffield College, Oxford University, the Japan Society for the Advancement of Science, and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. He has also been a Scholar in Residence at the Rockefeller Foundation, Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Italy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society of Britain, a Permanent Fellow of the Society for Research in Higher Education (UK), a Member of the National Academy of Education and a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He received the Berkeley Citation for “distinguished achievement and notable service to the University” in May 1996. He holds an honorary degree from Gothenburg University in Sweden. in 1989 he gave the Sidney Warhaft  Memorial Lecture at the University of Manitoba, Canada. In 2002 he gave the first annual Hans Rausing Lecture at Uppsala University, and in May 2004 he was the Bishop Waynfleet Lecturer at Magdalen College, Oxford University.

Selected Publications

Education’s Abiding Moral Dilemma: Merit and Worth in the Cross-Atlantic Democracies, 1800-2006. Oxford: Oxford Studies in Comparative Education, Symposium Books, 351 pages. 2007.

The Modern University and Its Discontents: The Fate of Newman's Legacies in Britain and America. Sheldon Rothblatt. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 475 pages. 1997.

The European and American University Since 1800: Historical and Sociological Essays. Sheldon Rothblatt and Bjorn Wittrock, eds. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 382 pages. 1993.

"The Limbs of Osiris: Liberal Education in the English-speaking World." Sheldon Rothblatt. in The European and American University Since 1800: Historical and Sociological Essays. Sheldon Rothblatt and Bjorn Wittrock, eds. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. 1993.

"Government Policies and Higher Education: A Comparison of Britain and the United States, 1630-1860." Sheldon Rothblatt and Martin Trow. in Social Research and Social Reform. C. Crouch and A. Heath, eds. Oxford University Press, 1992.

The OECD, the Master Plan and the California Dream: A Berkeley Conversation. Sheldon Rothblatt, ed. Berkeley: Center For Studies in Higher Education. 1992

"'A Long Apocrypha of Inquiries': The Humanities and Humanity." Sheldon Rothblatt. Mosaic, 1990.

"The Idea of the Idea of a University and Its Antithesis." Sheldon Rothblatt. In Conversazione. Bundoora: La Trobe University, 1989.

The Revolution of the Dons, Cambridge and Society in Victorian England. Sheldon Rothblatt. London: Faber and Faber, 1968. (reissued with new introduction by Cambridge University Press in 1981).

Tradition and change in English liberal education : an essay in history and culture. Sheldon Rothblatt. London : Faber and Faber, 1976.

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