A Festschrift for Eli
By: Wight Martindale
At 4:00 on a leafy-golden late October afternoon, a group of professors from Lehigh’s business college will gather for drinks and light refreshments to celebrate the career of Eli Schwartz, an economics professor at Lehigh from 1954 to 1991. The event (the final details of which are still being worked out) is called a festschrift, a word taken from two German words meaning “celebration or feast” and “writing.” Professor Schwartz, who is now 87, will be toasted and roasted by fellow professors, and he will receive a handsome book, the contents of which are essays in economics, written in his honor by respected economists on topics related to or of interest to Professor Schwartz.
One of the organizers of this event is Professor Robert Thornton, a statistics and labor economics expert who has taught at Lehigh for 38 years. The assembling of this material and planning the event is a labor of professional pride and affection. Other Lehigh old-timers, Harriet Parmet and Rich Aronson, have also been involved in the project. The festschrift expresses the highest traditions of academic excellence and fellowship, and I regret to say that such events these days are far too rare. But it will be a fine moment for Lehigh. I am sure President Gast will be there, for this is an event not to be missed.
None of you reading this will have ever heard of Professor Schwartz, but he is, by any standard, an intelligent and original eccentric. All of these aspects of his character will be explored in the book written in his honor and in the comments from his peers.
Lehigh is not over-heavy with scholars of Eli’s stature. Those contributing essays for this book written in his honor, titled Variations in Economic Analysis, will include Lehigh professors Aronson, Parmet (emeritus), Nicholas Balabkins (emeritus), and (of course) Robert Thornton. Other contributors, in addition to these friends of a lifetime, will include George Borts, former editor of the “American Economic Review” (a leading academic economic journal), John Hilley, an economic advisor to President Clinton, Murray Weidenbaum, former chairman of President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors, and Robert Solow and Harry Markowitz, both of whom won Nobel Prizes for their work in Economics. This is an awesome list of contributors and this in itself testifies to the professional standing of Professor Schwartz.
He was recognized from his earliest teaching days as a provocative, intellectually challenging professor, and during his years at Lehigh he not only taught advanced courses in economics and finance, but he also wrote or edited seven books and published over 50 articles.
The event is also a testimony to Professor Thornton and the tone of Lehigh’s Economics department. It is collegial – constructive rather than carping. Like the ubiquitous Richard Aronson, they are always seeking each other out for luncheon meetings, the meetings being of secondary interest to just hanging out together talking shop. The department seeks to do well by its students and the professors actually like to talk to students. When the Business School needed an interim dean, Tom Hyclak, an expert on labor economics, was selected. Professor Frank Gunter, now on leave, spent two years as a colonel in the U.S. Army serving in Iraq.
Professor Thornton himself is one of Lehigh’s wonderful little secrets. He is among a handful of Lehigh professors who can still translate Latin accurately, due to a Jesuit high school and comprehensive undergraduate course of study at Xavier University in Ohio. Added together, he studied Latin for eight years and Greek for six. He was a varsity baseball player (a pitcher) and he still plays handball regularly. He has taught some of those still working here, including Athletic Director Joe Sterrett. In the economics trade, professors often team up to publish a scholarly paper, and Thornton is eagerly sought out as a partner. He’s good, and everyone in the department knows it.
Thornton is also a talented and meticulous editor, and he has edited the Martindale Center’s annual journal for years. He holds himself to the highest of standards: the papers piled high in his cluttered office are presided over by the statues of his august literary predecessors – Homer, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, and the muses of the theater, among others.
Both Schwartz and Thornton love to tweak the super-serious with wry absurdities. Schwartz once submitted to prestigious academic journals an essay asserting that business cycles could be explained by the permissive or non-permissive toilet training of each generation. His rejection letters never acknowledged that the thesis was intentionally nonsensical.
Likewise, Thornton, ever since his boyhood, has been writing knowingly awful verse. He once won third prize in a bad verse contest for his “Ode on a Grecian Urinal.” Of course all this foolishness is possible – for both Schwartz and Thornton – because they know the difference between good and bad.
And that, in itself, is a tradition worth preserving.
