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Sheldon Rothblatt
Sheldon Rothblatt (born December 14, 1934) is an historian, academic, and author. He has written extensively on the history of universities, especially in relation to society and culture. Other research interests include 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. He is professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley where he taught from 1963 until 1998. Rothblatt served as director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education at Berkeley from 1989 to 1996 and is currently a CSHE faculty associate.

Background
Rothblatt is the son of Moshe and Gitel Rothblatt who immigrated to the United States through Canada from Belarus in the early 20th century. He was born in Los Angeles, CA and grew up speaking Yiddish and English. He graduated from Oakland Technical High School and earned his BA and PhD in history from UC Berkeley. While an undergraduate at Berkeley, he took two years of ROTC military training after which he earned the rank of second lieutenant and was posted in Germany as part of the Counterintelligence Corps. He married Barbara Goor in 1956.

Career
Sheldon Rothblatt was educated at the University of California, Berkeley and King’s College, Cambridge University, where he was an Ehrman Student. He received his PhD from Berkeley in January 1965. He has taught courses in the comparative history of universities at numerous institutions including Stanford, New York, Columbia, Oslo, Vienna and Monash (Australia) universities From 1996 – 1999, he served as STINT Professor of University History at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. 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.

At Berkeley he served in many capacities. He was Chair of the Department of History, Assistant and Associate Dean for Student Services, Dean of the Division of Freshman and Sophomore Studies in the College of Letters and Science and Chair of the Committee on Committees of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate.

Professional board service 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 has served 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.

Rothblatt has received much recognition and many awards for his work. 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. Professional memberships and fellowships include Fellow of the Royal Historical Society of Britain, Permanent Fellow of the Society for Research in Higher Education (UK), Member of the National Academy of Education and Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In May 1996, he received the Berkeley Citation for “distinguished achievement and notable service to the University”. He holds an honorary degree from Gothenburg University in Sweden. He gave many invited, distinguished lectures such as the Sidney Warhaft Memorial Lecture at the University of Manitoba, Canada in 1989, the first annual Hans Rausing Lecture at Uppsala University in 2002, and the Bishop Waynfleet Lecturer at Magdalen College, Oxford University in 2004. Rothblatt has also been knighted by the King of Sweden as Knight Commander of the Royal Order of the Polar Star (founded 1748).

Ideas
Sheldon Rothblatt is the leading historian of England's universities from the eighteenth century to the present. His work is distinguished by multi-faceted analysis presented in graceful, allusive and evocative prose. These qualities are evident in his first book, The Revolution of the Dons, an examination of mid-nineteenth-century change in the nature of instruction at Cambridge through examination of: concepts of the university; the then prevailing psychology of adolescence; the demography and behavior of Cambridge's students; and dons' interaction with their students. The result is a rounded presentation of what it meant and still means to be a don. In The Modern University and its Discontents, Rothblatt enlarged his canvas so as to encompass: the university's institutional structure and the creation of new types of universities; the effect of an emphasis on science on the university and its faculty; and the student sub-culture at Oxford and Cambridge. Again, this history summons up the past while showing how it does and does not resemble the present.

Rothblatt's histories are also distinguished by their distinctive structure. They are a series of related essays, a structure most evident in Tradition and Change in Liberal Education, a meditation on the changing meaning of the term 'liberal education'. Rothblatt uses this structure to present what might be considered problems based in the social sciences from a humanist's perspective. This structure also enables him to avoid writing a deterministic history, and instead to explore the paradoxes of his subject.

Both the range of his scholarship and his respect for the nuances of his subject have made him a central figure in the study of education. He has edited books featuring contributions from social scientists that discuss education in Europe and the United States. . In 2002, after Magdalen College, Oxford became the center of a furor about admission to Oxbridge, Magdalen invited Rothblatt to lecture on university admissions, elite institutions, and the relation of both to the wider society. These lectures are the basis of Education's Abiding Moral Dilemma: Merit and Worth in the Cross-Atlantic Democracies, 1800-2006. As its title indicates, this book reflects on the tension between 'worth' (the eighteenth-century goal of higher education) and 'merit' (the more modern goal of higher education), and the relation of both to concepts of democracy in the selection and education of university students. Here Rothblatt again expands his analysis, this time to primary and secondary education, and to comparisons of education in England, Scotland, and the United States. The book makes explicit a quality animating all of Rothblatt's work -- his intense engagement as student, teacher, scholar, and sometime administrator with the moral and ethical challenges of higher education.