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MEDIA CONTACT: Kristine M. McGrath
561/297-1168 or kmcgrath@fau.edu
Dr. Stanford M. Lyman Renowned FAU Scholar Dies At 69
BOCA RATON, FL (March 13, 2003) -- Stanford M. Lyman, a scholars' scholar, prolific author, and recognized authority on ethnic minorities and race relations, died Sunday, March 9 at the age of 69. Since 1985, Dr. Lyman held the Dr. Robert R. Morrow Eminent Scholar Chair in Social Science at Florida Atlantic University, first in the College of Social Science and, later, in the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters.
Dr. Lyman's interests ranged across disciplinary lines. He was recognized worldwide as a preeminent sociologist, anthropologist, historian, political scientist and psychologist. Even he found it difficult to categorize himself. He recalled once asking a colleague, "What am I?"
As a boy, Stanford Lyman was stunned by the power of the ethnic hatred and discrimination that ravaged his Jewish relatives in Europe and interned Japanese friends during World War II. From that beginning, through his studies, he became a leading figure in human rights activities, community and national service, and scholarship that advanced intercultural and inter-racial understanding.
Dr. Lyman is credited with inaugurating Asian-American studies in the United States as a result of a course on "The Oriental in America," which he began teaching in 1957 at the University of California at Berkeley, where he had earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees.
Before coming to FAU, Dr. Lyman was a professor at New School for Social Research in New York. He also taught at the University of California at San Diego, Davis and Berkeley, the University of Nevada and Sonoma State College. He was the author of more than two dozen scholarly books and well over 100 journal articles, educational reports, and book chapters. He received four Distinguished Book Awards and two Honorable Mentions from the Mid-South Sociological Association, the George Herbert Mead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, and recognition awards from the Chinese Historical Society of the United States, the Chinese Historical Society of southern California, the Japanese American Citizens League, and the American Association for Ethnic Studies. He was one of the founders of the section on Asian/Asian American Sociology of the American Sociological Association, and he served as President of the Mid-South Sociological Association.
In addition to teaching college students and presenting his ideas in FAU's popular Lifelong Learning Society courses, Dr. Lyman lectured throughout the country and abroad. As a Fulbright Fellow, he taught in Japan and spoke at a two-week conference and lecture tour in Yugoslavia. In 1986, before the student uprising in China, he spent five weeks lecturing at one of the country's leading universities, the Beijing Foreign Studies University in the capital of Beijing. In 1988, he visited three West African nations, presenting a joint lecture with the United States ambassador to Nigeria, Dr. Princeton Lyman, his younger brother
At the time of his death, he had two books close to completion and several more underway. In December of 2002, he was the proud dissertation advisor of the first graduate of the "Public Intellectuals Program" of the Ph.D. in Comparative Studies in the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters.
On Sunday, April 6, the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters will be producing a reading of "The Palm of Death," a play recently written by Dr. Lyman. A Sherlock Holmes mystery based on actual events, the play explores themes in sociological theory and analysis. The reading will be at 7 p.m. in the Lifelong Learning Society auditorium on FAU's Boca Raton campus.
He is survived by his siblings and their spouses, Harvard Lyman, Mary Bernero, Princeton Lyman, Helen Lyman, Elliot Lyman, Sylvia Lyman, Marlene Rothblatt, Harlan Rothblatt, as well as his nieces and nephews.
Dr. Lyman's hope was to be remembered for expanding understanding of the many cultures that make up a complex society, "the tragedies, the comedies of them living uneasily with each other."
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