GALBRAITH, John S. 1916-2003

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born November 10, 1916, in Glasgow, Scotland; died of complications from pneumonia June 10, 2003, in San Diego, CA. Educator, administrator, and author. Galbraith was a history professor and authority on nineteenth-century Britain who helped organize the University of California at San Diego into a model institution emulating Oxford University. He was a graduate of Ohio's Miami University, where he earned a B.S. in 1938, and of the University of Iowa, where he earned his master's degree and completed his Ph.D. in 1943. He then served in the U.S. Army Air Forces for three years as an historian before beginning his academic career. From 1947 to 1948 he was an assistant professor at Ohio University; he then began his long association with the University of California at Los Angeles, where he was a history professor from 1948 to 1964 and again from 1968 to 1984. The mid-1960s were spent at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), where he was vice chancellor and later chancellor. At UCSD he is credited with supervising the creation and construction of the Geisel Library, which opened in 1970 and gave the university's new humanities faculty an invaluable resource. It was Galbraith, too, who recruited professors to teach the university's new undergraduate courses, and it was his ideas that are largely responsible for organizing UCSD into a college system similar to that at Oxford University. Galbraith left UCSD for a fellowship at Cambridge University, where he indulged his passion for English history. When he returned to the United States, he picked up his professorship at UCLA, but he went back to UCSD in 1984, teaching there until his retirement in 1993. In addition to his teaching and administrative work, Galbraith was the author of six books, including the influential history texts The Hudson's Bay Company as an Imperial Factor (1957) and Reluctant Empire (1963).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2003, p. B14.

New York Times, June 14, 2003, p. A28.