History Professor Sanford Gutman to Retire

05/20/2009 

Sanford Gutman of Ithaca, N.Y., who has served on the SUNY Cortland faculty for 37 years, will retire on Aug. 31. He has earned the designation of professor emeritus of history.

Gutman, who grew up in Detroit, Mich., focused on history as an undergraduate at Wayne State University and earned his master of arts and doctoral degrees at the University of Michigan, specializing in modern European history.

He joined SUNY Cortland's History Department in 1972 as an instructor after teaching for two years at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. Gutman was promoted to assistant professor in 1976, associate professor in 1982 and professor in 1988. He also has been a visiting professor of modern Jewish history at Cornell University, Ithaca College and Syracuse University.

For much of his first 15 years at Cortland, Gutman taught European and French history and helped prepare secondary social studies teachers in the History Department's Professional Semester. An invitation from his department chair in 1979 to teach a course in Modern Jewish History led to his growing interest in that subject and the decision to add to his teaching repertoire that course and related ones on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Holocaust. To that end, in 1986 Gutman attended the Yad Vashem Summer Institute on Teaching the Holocaust and in 1991 was an invited seminar participant in the University Teaching of Anti-Semitism at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Gutman chaired the History Department for close to 10 years during a period when both student majors and the number of faculty increased substantially. He has served on numerous College and department committees over the years. Active in Jewish Studies at the College, he coordinated that program's committee for more than 10 years and was faculty advisor to the Jewish Student Society, now Hillel, for 15 years. Since 1975, he has been the College's Jewish chaplain. In addition he has served as a graduate coordinator for the Master of Science in Education in Social Studies and the Master of Arts in History for several years, and was faculty advisor to the History Club and Phi Alpha Theta, the history honor society.

Gutman served as president of the New York State Association of European historians. He has received several SUNY Cortland travel and teaching improvement grants. A Faculty Research Fellowship from the Research Foundation of SUNY in 1983 helped Gutman to research Jewish identity in France at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. He participated in two National Endowment for the Humanities summer institutes, both at University of California-Berkeley, in 1982 and 1989.

Gutman's scholarship has taken him to France and Israel during summers and sabbaticals. Subjects on which he has explored, written published scholarship, and presented at conferences and invited lectures range from the French Restoration (1815-1830) to French Jewish history and the Holocaust in France. His deep interest in the interlocking subjects of anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and the Arab-Israeli conflict has led to many university and public lectures to audiences who were not always sympathetic to the messages. He has written more than 35 book reviews and manuscript reviews on Jewish and French history.

Gutman will continue to teach part-time at SUNY Cortland as part of the College's phased-in retirement plan. He plans to read, travel with his wife, Linda, a writer and artist, and to visit their children and grandchildren.