Walter Berns

Professor Berns was born on May 3, 1919, in Chicago. He attended Reed College in Portland, Ore., and the London School of Economics and received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Iowa. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he worked as a waiter in Taos, N.M., where he befriended Frieda Lawrence, the widow of D. H. Lawrence. Taking her advice, he pursued an academic rather than a literary career. In 1951, he married Irene Lyons, who survives him, along with his daughters, Elizabeth Fradkin and Emily Heyser; a son Christopher; and six grandchildren. He earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago and taught at Louisiana State University and Yale before going to Cornell in 1959. He left 10 years later, after the faculty, “having jettisoned every vestige of academic freedom,” Professor Berns said, reversed itself and granted amnesty to black students who had seized the student union building. Some denounced dissenting professors as racists and threatened them with violence. He taught at University of Toronto until 1979, then moved to Washington to teach at Georgetown and conduct research for the American Enterprise Institute. In 2005, he received the National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush.