Carl E. Schorske (1915–2015)

Abstract

at Berkeley. Schorske's years at Berkeley coincided with the student-cultural upheavals that typified the experience of that campus during a longer era of distress. These years brought to an apprehensive end the optimism and complacency of the so-called Golden Age of American higher education after 1945. Schorske was deeply involved with the struggles for free speech at Berkeley, protesting restrictive university policies and seeking to accommodate student rights. He later recalled that his ardent commitment to free speech reflected larger concerns about the fundamental values that a university should espouse in the face of political authority or social orthodoxies: "It was a continuous problem, and one of the things that it led me to was really thinking through the relation between the life of the university-what it is as an institution-and public life." 2 But, by the late 1960s, he found the campus turmoil at Berkeley increasingly distracting from his life as a scholar. He would later describe his feelings of being "eaten up" by the crisis, observing that "the psychic cost for one not temperamentally suited to conflict was very high." 3 In 1969 Schorske accepted an offer from Princeton University, where he remained for the rest of his career, achieving the honor of the Dayton-Stockton Chair in History. In the autobiographical reflections on his career that he presented in his lecture, "A Life of Learning," given at the American Council of Learned Societies in April 1987, Schorske described his intellectual odyssey as a young scholar in the throes of a world cracked open by political and moral contingencies, when "the coming of the Cold War-and with it, 1 For the general context, among a very large literature on the scholars who belonged to what has been called the