Nearly 20 years ago, the Harvard Extension School, in collaboration with the Harvard Extension Alumni Association (HEAA), began the annual tradition of honoring a faculty member who had completed 25 years of teaching at the Extension School. This year, for the first time, two veteran faculty members--Erich Goldhagen, a Fellow of the Kathryn W. and Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard, and Nicolae Iliescu, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Emeritus, Harvard University--reached this milestone. Like their predecessors, they will be honored at the HEAA Banquet in June and will receive a Harvard rocking chair to commemorate their quarter-century of dedicated teaching.

The Lamplighter profiles Erich Goldhagen below and will profile Nicolae Iliescu in the spring issue.

Erich Goldhagen, a Holocaust survivor, is officially retired from University teaching but, at the Extension School, continues to offer versions of the courses he taught as a Lecturer in Jewish Studies at the Harvard Divinity School and as an instructor in the Harvard College undergraduate Core Program. He reflects on his participation in Harvard's academic community as follows:

"I very much enjoy my Extension School audiences. Their heterogeneity enables me to cover my subject in depth and in an analytical fashion. In this fall's course, SSCI E-175 The Holocaust and the Phenomenon of Genocide, I explore such topics as the social psychology of the Nazi movement and the motivation of those who kill--what makes them tick--and, of course, the lessons humanity must learn from the Holocaust and other examples of genocide worldwide."

In alternate years, Goldhagen teaches Modern Political and Social Ideologies, a course which draws on his training as a political scientist. (He received an MA in that discipline from McGill University.) Comparing and contrasting modern ideological systems that have shaped and continue to shape our modern world (Marxist and non-Marxist socialism, capitalism, Bolshevism, irrationalism, Fascism, and negritude and black nationalism), the subject matter reflects Goldhagen's research at the Davis Center and a course he offered earlier at the Harvard Divinity School, Religion Under Communist Rule.

Political science as an academic discipline is a continuing theme in the Goldhagen family. Goldhagen's son, Daniel, Associate Professor of Government and of Social Studies at Harvard and author of the internationally best-selling book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, offers courses in German politics and social theory to University undergraduates. For a few years, the Goldhagens were unique father-son colleagues serving concurrently on the faculty at the University. "My son is so famous that I think my course enrollment at the Extension School doubled this year because some students thought he was really teaching the course," Goldhagen chuckles. "But my devout wish is that when I find I need to retire from Extension School teaching, my son, Danny, will take over my courses here."

In the meantime, however, Erich Goldhagen, to whom his son's book is affectionately dedicated, continues to explore with his Extension School students the whys and the wherefores of genocidal events which remain a shameful blot on mankind's record, and to examine the political systems men and women have fashioned for themselves in our time.