Irwin Lieb; USC Dean Brought Jewish Scientists From USSR

Irwin C. Lieb, the highly respected former dean and vice president of USC’s College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and a philosopher known internationally for his efforts in bringing seven distinguished Soviet Jewish scientists to the United States to teach, is dead.

A USC spokesman said Tuesday that Lieb was 66 when he died Saturday at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena of lung cancer.

In 1983 Lieb and a colleague, Michael Melnick, posed as tourists rather than risk using the mails and traveled to the Soviet Union to deliver invitations on behalf of USC to the seven refuseniks, who had been denied the right to conduct research, use libraries or publish papers after they applied for emigration. The seven scientists were chosen by the New York-based Committee of Concerned Scientists, which was supporting dissident Soviet Jewish scientists.

“We want to create the opportunity for them to resume research and teaching,” Lieb said in a 1983 interview with the Times’ Moscow bureau. . . . “To express our concern for academic freedom.”

Lieb, a prominent humanist who came to USC in 1981 from the University of Texas, helped persuade Soviet officials to let the scientists accept the teaching positions he and Melnick had arranged at various U.S. universities, including USC. It took several years for all seven to arrive in the United States. In a letter afterward to his sons, Lieb wrote of his furtive mission and of the coded names and addresses he and Melnick had devised in order to meet with the refuseniks in remote subway stations or at their dismal apartments.

Lieb was fired as dean and vice president of the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences--the university’s largest--in 1985 by then-President James H. Zumberge in a dispute that rocked the campus. Lieb, who had been credited with improving the quality of the faculty within his college, had refused to resign and Zumberge refused comment on the firing, but university insiders said the two men had--among other things--quarreled over a new budgeting system. For a time, many of Lieb’s faculty supporters threatened to strike. Lieb remained on the faculty as a professor of philosophy.

His writings include four books, “The Four Faces of Man,” “Experience, Existence and the Good,” “Our Uncertain Universities” and “Past, Present and Future: A Philosophical Study of Time.”

Survivors include his sons, Michael and Gordon, a sister, Rita, and two nieces.

Private memorial services will be held in Los Angeles and Austin, Tex.