NEW GIFT MATCH! Anonymous Donor Will Match All Gifts Made to the Oberman Library/Chair before December 31, 2009, to an aggregate maximum of $300,000. ☼ Make a Matched Gift Now

GOAL: $2 MILLION

Your contribution will preserve the incomparable and valuable Oberman Research Library for the state of Arizona and simultaneously create an endowment for a professorial Chair in Late Medieval and Reformation History.

(as of April, 2008)

The late Heiko Augustinus Oberman was an acclaimed scholar, an educator with few equals, and a man of vision, dedication, and conviction. His trail-blazing work in the later Middle Ages and Reformation made him, a German colleague wrote, "not only the eminent historian of all Protestant denominations, but also of Catholicism" (Hans-Jürgen Goertz, Professor, University of Hamburg, in Mennonitische Geschichtsblätter , 58, 2001). Chance brought him to The University of Arizona and resulted in the creation of a famed center for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies. The standing of this center at the time of Oberman's untimely death and his conditional testament of his peerless research library to the Division demand the establishment of a chair linking his name and reputation to our fine public teaching-and-research university in perpetuity. At the time of his passing it was Oberman's fervent wish that the outstanding center that he had created should continue, not as a monument to him, but to edify and inspire future generations of students in this field.

With limitless creativity and what appeared to be inexhaustible energy, Oberman fully engaged every aspect of the life of a university professor; he extended and amplified this role beyond its customary perimeters. The announcement in January 2001 of his terminal cancer reverberated across continents. It brought an outpouring of personal letters and phone calls, each bearing witness to Oberman's contributions to and influence on individual lives. Amply represented in this outpouring were former students, friends, and colleagues.

For Heiko Oberman, step-by-step intellectual progress was valueless if not integrated with the development of the whole person. Of his responsibility to convey this to students he was keenly aware. It translated into a dedication to his students, for whom he spared no effort. He urged young undergraduates to visit him during his liberal office hours. For graduate students, the teachers of the future, his door was open day and night, and Oberman was ever eager to share the excitement of their discoveries. In keeping with this enthusiasm, barely two weeks before his death, he presided over the doctoral defenses of two students, the last falling on Wednesday, April 18, four days before his death in the early morning of April 22.

A history of scholarship

After earning his doctorate cum laude in historical theology in 1957 from the University of Utrecht, Oberman accepted a call to the Harvard Divinity School. There he soared effortlessly through the ranks to a professorship of Church History in 1963 and to a named chair, the Winn Professorship of Ecclesiastical History, a year later. In 1966 he accepted a chair in Church History in the Protestant Theological Faculty at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and assumed the directorship of the Institute for Late Middle Ages and Reformation. During his eighteen years there he engaged in groundbreaking research. His and the Institute's reputation attracted scholars in Reformation studies from many countries.

At the pinnacle of his career, his wife's crippling arthritis persuaded him to search for a warmer, drier climate. It was this consideration that prompted him to accept a professorship in History at The University of Arizona in 1984, where he remained until his death. It was here, in the unlikely setting of what he termed "the sun belt," that he founded the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies. He brought his fame with him and made the desert bloom.

Creating world citizens

Perhaps more than at Harvard or at Tübingen, it was at a public university that Oberman had the opportunity to implement and exercise his social mission of education. Born and raised in a country the size of the Netherlands, he communicated to his students from the seemingly boundless America that: "One cannot be parochial in a country so small that speeding sends you into another country, with its own language, customs, and 'certainties' about how things are. You learn early that there are ways other than yours of seeing, other ways of doing everything...." As a teacher, he saw it as his mission to be "a counterweight to media," helping students to distinguish between news and editorial, information and manipulation. He spared no effort to make them "world citizens ... to show them how to travel, how to encounter life experiences." He sought to enable them to think critically. A former graduate student has quoted him as follows: "Students know the batting average of Boggs—and everyone should know the best batter of the Red Sox—but they don't know the Second and First World Wars, or Napoleon. If that [historical awareness] is not present, a democracy cannot function, for it assumes that there is a level of knowledge—assumes that a debate can be understood—otherwise demagogues have free range."

These were the ideals that he was determined to inculcate in his graduate students, those who were to become his colleagues and the teachers of future generations. The graduate program Oberman developed at The University of Arizona in the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies encompasses both late medieval and early modern history, bringing the study of social, political, religious, economic, and cultural developments into fruitful interplay. This bridging of intellectual and social history promotes perspectives that innovatively transcend the traditional dividing line of the year 1500 between the Middle Ages and modernity. In addition, Division courses deliberately take note of Europe's effort to shape the extra-European world, including the Americas, in the process of building colonial systems.

Doctor-Father to Today's Professors of History

At Harvard and at Tübingen, Heiko Oberman trained doctoral students, all of whom have risen to academic positions that enriched the field of early modern history. In the third phase of his career, in Arizona, he trained a new generation of scholars and created a center that is so highly regarded that 100% of its students have won Fulbright and other major international fellowships , and have begun to leave their scholarly imprint upon the field. All graduates have secured academic positions in an extremely competitive market.

Outreach

Because of Oberman's and the Division's extensive network and renown, in the course of the last decade some fifty of Europe's and North America's leading scholars have come to our campus and placed themselves at the disposal of our graduate students and University of Arizona faculty. As a result, the students have received opportunities to publish, to gain additional fellowships, and to secure short-term, field-related employment overseas. All such activities have garnered additional recognition and visibility for the program, the University, and the local community.

Oberman recognized the importance of building bridges connecting the university to the local community.  It was in this spirit that in 1985 he launched the Annual Lecture for Town and Gown . The series has brought to the campus of the University of Arizona luminaries such as Joseph Macek (onetime personal adviser to former Czech president Alexander Dubcek), Hans Küng (Tübingen), Jürgen Moltmann (Tübingen), Krister Stendahl (Harvard Divinity School), David Tracy (Chicago), Martin Marty (Chicago), Yosef Yerushalmi (Columbia), Leon Bass (1992 winner of  "Holocaust Humanitarian Award"), Jaroslav Pelikan (Yale), Robert Wistrich (Hebrew University), John P. Frank (Consitutional lawyer), Patrick Collinson (University of Cambridge), Elaine Pagels (Princeton), William Chester Jordan (Princeton), James D. Tracy (University of Minnesota), Caroline Walker Bynum (Princeton), Natalie Zemon Davis (Princeton), and David Cressy (Ohio State University). These lectures have been avidly attended and it was Oberman's hope that they would stimulate the creative capacities of a broad public.

In keeping with this philosophy, during the winter months Oberman offered a Sunday evening colloquium in his home that attracted community leaders. The subjects ranged far afield of the Late Middle Ages and Reformation and included among many others Adolf Hitler, whose effects Oberman had witnessed as a child, Anti-Semitism, European Witchcraft, Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and Machiavelli.

The same impulse toward exchange with the world outside the university may be seen in his organization of the Annual Summer Lecture Series . This series has provided advanced doctoral students an opportunity to formulate their ideas on a wide range of topics and present them to a lay audience. Among the topics have been mystics and prophets in the Later Middle Ages, heretics, and humanists.

Recognition

Heiko Oberman was an internationally acclaimed scholar, winner of the prestigious Dr. A. H. Heineken Prize for History —the highest award for the historical discipline. Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and Correspondent of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1991 he was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society, America's oldest learned society, begun in 1743 in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin. He received many distinguished fellowships and awards including honorary degrees from Harvard University, the University of St. Louis, the University of Aberdeen (Scotland), and Valparaiso University (Indiana). Coincident with the diagnosis of his terminal illness, it was announced that a distinction for extraordinary representation of Dutch scholarship and culture would be conferred on Heiko Oberman by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands in April 2002.

In his will Heiko A. Oberman provided that his personal research library would pass to the university upon the successful endowment of a Chair in Late Medieval and Reformation History. This library is the largest such collection left in private hands in North America and will greatly enhance The University of Arizona Libraries' holdings in this field.

Your contribution toward this endowment will ensure that The University of Arizona connection to this famous scholar will endure. It will secure for The University of Arizona Libraries one of the largest collections in its field of early modern and modern books. It will make certain that the UA Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies not only honors the memory of its world-famous founder but transmits to the twenty-first century its exemplary academic leadership and its embodiment of the highest standards of instruction and national and international learning.