Wilfred Kaplan, 1915–2007

By Wendi Maloney

Longtime AAUP member Wilfred Kaplan died on December 26, 2007, at the age of ninety-two. An emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan, Kaplan joined the AAUP in 1946. He served as president of the University of Michigan AAUP chapter and president of the Michigan AAUP conference in the 1950s and 1960s and as a member of the national Council from 1972 to 1975. A supporter of AAUP collective bargaining, he also helped to bring local AAUP chapters to several universities in Michigan.

Kaplan maintained his close ties to the AAUP in retirement. In 2006, he included a $10,000 bequest in his will to support the Association’s capital campaign, and he allocated a percentage of the profits from a memoir about his life with his late wife to the AAUP.

Kaplan sought, most of all, to advance AAUP principles on his own campus. A February 1 obituary in the University of Michigan’s University Record Online honors Kaplan for having served as vice chair of the university’s Senate Advisory Committee on Academic Affairs; in 1986, he received the committee’s Distinguished Faculty Governance Award. In addition, Kaplan helped to establish the Academic Freedom Lecture Fund in 1990 to support an annual lecture in honor of three professors dismissed or suspended for political reasons during the McCarthy era. He remained on the fund’s board of directors until his death. In recent years, he also served as president of the University of Michigan Retirees Association.

Kaplan wrote several textbooks during his career, among them Advanced Calculus, initially published in 1952. The most recent edition of the text, published in 2003, continues to be used in colleges and universities worldwide, reports the University Record Online. Kaplan also wrote numerous research papers and supervised doctoral students.

In a January 15 letter to the editor of the Ann Arbor News, Walter Debler, an emeritus professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, wrote that Kaplan

worked tirelessly to improve the faculty—and, de facto, the university—by his work on many committees, work that spanned multiple decades. While he was a leader, he was never domineering, but always logical. Often, he would quietly remind his associates when they had strayed from their stated purpose or point out a legal or historical obstacle to what was being considered. He was always up to date and on the mark until he died, many years after he had retired.

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