Influential professor dies at age 82

Accomplished history professor and former dean of the UCLA College Eugen Weber died Thursday at the age of 82.

He was a member of the UCLA faculty since 1956, held a chair in modern European history and served as dean of the College from 1977 to 1982.

He died of pancreatic cancer at his home, said UCLA spokesman Stuart Wolpert.

Weber’s colleagues agreed he held an international reputation as a top historian and a local reputation as an outstanding person.

Weber was born in Bucharest, Romania, and moved to England as a teenager, where he attended Cambridge University. He enlisted during World War II as an officer in the British Army before he began teaching.

One of Weber’s prominent areas of study was 19th- and 20th-century French culture and politics.

He was one of the first non-Frenchmen to influence French academia, said Patricia O’Brien, executive dean of the UCLA College.

“Eugen Weber is one of the giants of modern French history,” she said. “He was one of the first American (historians) to be published in French. His work immediately had international recognition.”

O’Brien added that Weber’s work altered the French people’s perspective on their own country’s history.

He also brought a unique sense of ingenuity and human concern to his field, history professor Caroline Ford said.

“In terms of his work, he was a very creative and imaginative historian who identified important topics that people continue to address and think about,” Ford said.

Weber also hosted a series on PBS titled “The Western Tradition,” based on his lectures.

He wrote a significant number of published books, including the popular textbook “Modern History of Europe” and the American and French award-winning “Peasants Into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France, 1870″“1914.”

“Peasants Into Frenchmen” was incredibly influential, said Lauren Rebecca Hinkle Janes, a history graduate student who first met Weber at a conference honoring the anniversary of the book’s publication.

He was “incredibly humble and grateful” at the celebration, Janes said.

“I had known him by reputation for so long before meeting him … and he was incredibly kind to me as a lowly grad student,” she said.

Though Weber retired in the early 1990s, he continued to teach large lectures, history Professor Ronald Mellor said.

“He was just a tremendous teacher,” Mellor said.

His colleagues said Weber’s great accomplishments as a historian were equaled by his outstanding personality.

“I knew Eugen for 31 years, and he was always extremely funny, with a slightly cynical edge,” Mellor said.

Weber’s witty attitude was one of his defining characteristics, Ford said.

Weber lived life to the fullest and enjoyed food, art and entertaining, Mellor said.

“(He was) a true man of the world ““ not only the fact that he spoke a large number of languages, but he traveled widely … and he just enjoyed life enormously,” Mellor said, adding that Weber’s colleagues looked up to him as well.

“He was someone who was always sophisticated in almost everything; for those of us who were younger, he was just a tremendous model,” Mellor said.

He brought a strong sense of ambition to his work, especially to his position as dean, O’Brien said.

“He had a saying that “˜good is not good enough,'” she said. “He set very high standards for himself and for others. He really did make a major impact on this campus in a very formative era (by) challenging us to be excellent.”

Though he enforced high standards, he was also fair, said Gary Nash, a history professor and director of the National Center for History in the Schools.

Nash said when he came to UCLA in the 1960s as an assistant professor, Weber, then chairman of the history department, immediately appointed Nash to important department committees.

“I thought he’d probably confused me with a more senior person. … (He) said there were only first-class citizens in the history department, not first-class and second-class. Coming from the Ivy League where there were definitely two classes of citizens, it was quite a delightful change,” Nash said.

Weber is survived by his wife Jacqueline, to whom he was married for almost 57 years.

Weber will be missed by his friends and colleagues, but his legacy will be remembered, Mellor said.

“He just seemed to be able to do everything without breaking into a sweat. It was a marvelous model, although I have to say somewhat intimidating; but he was extremely polite,” Mellor said. “He was of the old school.”

He has left his mark permanently on the university, Nash said.

“He was greatly admired, and he was a great pillar of the department of history for half a century,” Nash said.

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