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AAUP Loses Valued Leader
By Gwendolyn Bradley
C. William Heywood, a historian and former first vice president of the AAUP, died November 16 at age eighty-four following a seven-year struggle with Parkinson’s disease and resulting complications.
Heywood did his undergraduate work at Earlham College and received his PhD in American history at the University of Pennsylvania. After four years of teaching at the College of Wooster, he joined the faculty of Cornell College in 1952. He served as chair of the history department from 1968 to 1978 and again for the academic year 1981–82. He was dean of the college from 1983 to 1987. Heywood came out of retirement in 1994 to serve for several months as Cornell’s acting president.
Heywood’s career included long, devoted, and distinguished service to the AAUP. Elected to membership in 1950, he served as president of the Cornell AAUP chapter and of the Iowa AAUP conference, as a member of the AAUP’s governing Council, and as a longtime member of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, among other positions. From 1966 to 1968, Heywood was first vice president of the Association.
“All of us who were privileged to know Bill Heywood benefited from a special warmth that radiated from him,” says Jordan Kurland, the AAUP’s associate general secretary. Lawrence Poston of the University of Illinois at Chicago, himself a former AAUP first vice president and veteran Committee A member, represented the national AAUP at a Cornell College memorial service for Heywood on November 27. “Academe could use more like him,” says Poston, “placing concern for his students, his colleagues, the AAUP, and higher education generally over personal ambition; or, more accurately, seeing those concerns as his ultimate ambition.”
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