Brandeis Alumni, Family and Friends
Remembering Professor Barney Schwalberg
November 26, 2024
Professor Barney Schwalberg, professor emeritus of economics, passed away on Sunday, November 17, 2024, in Brunswick, Maine, at the age of 95. Professor Schwalberg was born in New York City on August 2, 1929. He began his Brandeis career in 1965 as an assistant professor and retired in 1999.
Professor Schwalberg attended the Bronx High School of Science, the College of the City of New York, and when his family moved to Philadelphia, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania and graduated from the Wharton School with a degree in “general studies,” with a focus on statistics.
After college, with the start of the Korean War, Professor Schwalberg enlisted in the Army and was enrolled in the Army Language School in Monterey, California, where he learned Russian and sang in a Russian chorus. He picked up the language easily (and began reading Russian language chess books and developed a lifelong devotion to the work of Pushkin and Chekhov). After completing language school, he was sent to Hawaii, where he was employed intercepting and translating Soviet cables.
After his Army tour of duty, Professor Schwalberg worked for a few years in the Census Bureau’s Foreign Manpower Research Office in Washington, DC, before enrolling in graduate school in economics at Harvard where he received his PhD in 1964. After a year teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he began his 33-year career at Brandeis where his intellectual focus was the economics of education and comparative economic systems. His best-known courses were large sections of ECON 2a, an introductory course, which became one of the university’s most popular courses, and which won Professor Schwalberg the University’s teaching prize several times. More than one student reported “majoring in Schwalberg” rather than “in ECON.”
He was for many years the Department’s Advising Head and, in 1987, served as Chair of a committee charged with developing guidelines for university investments (and disinvestments) at the time of campus protests about apartheid in South Africa. Both the students and the administration had confidence that Professor Schwalberg would bring a reasoned and principled approach to this task. He stayed in contact with a large number of former students over the years.
In addition to his activities at Brandeis, Professor Schwalberg had a longstanding appointment at the Harvard Russian Research Center (now the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies) where he continued his research on Soviet education systems and was a regular at weekly coffee hours and seminars with other Soviet scholars. (He maintained friendships with many Soviet emigrés.) This led to tour groups to Russia through alumni associations, the Smithsonian, and Elderhostel as “cultural enrichment,” giving lectures on Russian history, literature, and culture (and maybe some economics). Through these activities, which continued into the late 1990s, he was able to see Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kyiv, and Tallinn, and he never wanted to travel anywhere else.
In 2009, he and his wife Adelle moved to Brunswick, Maine, to be closer to family. After Adelle passed away, he continued to live in an independent living community where he was known to hold forth on a multitude of topics in the dining room. As his parkinsonism progressed, he eventually moved to assisted living and memory care where the staff cherished him for his kindness and wit. They note that he corrected their grammar until his last days.
Professor Schwalberg is survived by his daughter Renee, son-in-law John Anton, and granddaughters Claire and Leah Anton.