Henry Ashby Turner

Charles J. Stillé Professor of History 

Henry Turner, B.A Washington and Lee University, Ph.D. Princeton University, faculty member at Yale since 1958. Brilliant scholar of modern German history, you have turned a flinty eye on preconceived ideas, challenging orthodox views on fascism and Nazism with a search for truth that only patient scholarship and overwhelming evidence can reveal. In your early work you explored the theories of fascism, introducing your own concept of fascism as a mode of utopian anti-modernism. And in book after book—four major works since 1985 alone—you have explored the mysteries at the heart of modern Germany. Perhaps your most enduring achievement is your painstaking examination of the role of German big business in the rise of National Socialism—a work that aroused much controversy, and equally wide praise, for the rigorous use of documentary evidence you brought to your questioning of German business financing of Hitler’s movement. More recently, you have been invited to examine the archives of the General Motors Corporation concerning its business involvement with the Third Reich, and are at present completing that study. 

Such productivity and involvement in scholarly controversy might argue against engagement in University administrative affairs, but in your case, this decidedly has not been so. In the 1960s, you chaired the influential history in the 1960s, you chaired the influential history department committee that set the structure of the history major in Yale College, persuading the department that the best undergraduate training in historical study is a series of broad lecture courses, followed by rigorous junior seminars which culminates in the writing of a senior essay. Between l976 and 1979 you served as chair of the history department, organizing a council of chairs to bring issues of common academic concern before the university administration. In the l970s and l980s you were a leader of the Yale University chapter of the American Association of University Professors. And through all of this—at Yale, in the historical profession at large, and with your students—you have defended the seriousness of the historical vocation. Your graduate students recall that your sharp critical eye, and the high standards that you set, were only exceeded by the support and warm friendship that you extended to them. 

In addition, for ten years you served as Master of Davenport College, in which capacity you not only fostered the life of the students, but became a major voice calling for the physical renovation of Yale buildings in general, and the residential colleges in particular. In all these ways, and more, you have given your heart and soul to Yale, and as you retire from formal teaching your colleagues thank and salute you.