In the previous post we learned that the Harvard David A. Wells Prize winner for 1925-26, Mandell Morton Bober, was Jewish and this fact was considered relevant information in the Harvard economics department’s placement of graduates in university positions. This post provides some more biographical and career detail about Professor Bober who had a long and distinguished career as an economics professor at Lawrence University, Wisconsin.
Fun Facts: Bober taught undergraduate economics to Shinto Tsuru (who was to go on to Harvard graduate economics) and he was for a brief time a colleague of Harry Dexter White.
Bober’s papers are kept at the Lawrence University archives.
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Bober: Life and career highlights
Born: November 15, 1891 in Kovel, Volhynia then Russia (now Ukraine).
Immigration: September 22, 1911 in New York.
B.S. (Mathematics): 1918 from the University of Montana.
A.M. (Economics): 1920 from Harvard University.
Teaching Assistant: 1923-24 in European Industry and Commerce since 1750 and Economic History of the United States (both taught by Assistant Professor Usher), Harvard University.
Teaching Assistant: 1923-27 in Economics A, Harvard University.
Ph.D.: 1925 in Economics from Harvard University.
Thesis: “Karl Marx’s interpretation of history.” Awarded the David A. Wells Prize for 1925-26. Published in 1927 by Harvard University Press (370 pages). Major revision published in 1948 (445 pages), reviewed by Paul M. Sweezy in Journal of Political Economy (June 1949), pp. 255-56.
Instructor (Economics): 1925, Boston University.
Longest University Appointment: 1927-1961 professorship of economics at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.
Visiting professorship: Second semester of 1938-39 at the University of Buffalo for position left by Fritz Machlup (see AER March 1939, Notes, p. 224).
Government work: 1942 at the Office of Price Administration in Washington, D.C.
Textbook: 1955. Intermediate Price and Income Theory. (New York: W. W. Norton).
Honorary LL.D.: 1956 from Grinnell College.
Died: November 1966.
Sources: From a variety of items found in a search at the geneological site ancestry.com; Annual reports of the President of Harvard College.
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Lawrence College Yearbook (The Ariel) mentions
1943 Yearbook: “M.M. Bober returned this summer to America’s dairyland after a year and a half in Washington, D.C. with the O.P.A…was awarded the David A. Wells prize several years ago for his book on Karl Marx…is chiefly interested in “teaching, teaching and teaching.” p. 15.
1944 Yearbook: M.M. Bober–“in eight years the new deal has graduated from the w.p.a. to the w.p.b.”
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Bober remembered as undergraduate professor of Shigeto Tsuru
When released from prison in the spring of 1931, I found myself expelled from the Higher School; and thus I followed my father’s suggestion to study abroad. My choice was to go to Germany inasmuch as my first foreign language was German. It happened, however, that in 1931 the Marxism-orientated Social Democratic Party was quite strong in Germany, and my father agreed to finance my study abroad only on the condition that I go to the United States. I agreed to this and chose for matriculation a small college in the State of Wisconsin – Lawrence College in Appleton – with a clandestine intention of crossing the Atlantic in due course.
Lawrence College then had another attraction to me, that is the two Harvard-trained economists in residence: Harry Dexter White, who later was instrumental in drafting an alternative plan to that of Keynes in Bretton Woods, and M.M. Bober, a rare specimen of a scholar on Marx in America at the time.
“Shigeto Tsuru” in A Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists (2nded.), Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer (eds.) (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2000). p. 680.
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Bober remembered as reported on the Lawrence Economics Blog
Dec 7, 2012
Professor Galambos points us to The Chaney Tapes — a chronicle of legendary Professor William A. Chaney’s life and times here at Lawrence. Of particular interest to this blog is the very high profile of Lawrence economists. Here’s a taste of Professor M.M. Bober:
Some of Professor Chaney’s fondest memories are of his faculty colleagues in the 1950s and 1960s. M. M. Bober, professor of economics, is a particular favorite. His witticisms provide Chaney, himself the master of anecdotal enlightenment, with endless tales.
When discussing an art history professor’s latest attempts at painting, Professor Bober is reported to have said, “Hanging is too good for them”…
Bober’s sharp commentaries even warranted national attention when Time magazine published some of his more notable lines in a review of the retirement of several of academia’s greats in 1957: “If God were half as good to us as we are to Him, we’d be living in paradise,” “Businessmen have as much competition as they cannot get rid of,” and “When you leave this room I want you to feel that you have learned something. Don’t go out and just develop a personality.”
Source: Economics blog of Lawrence University.
Image Source: Lawrence College, “Ariel, 1934” (1934), p. 23. Lawrence Yearbooks. 4.
