Edwin Lewis: Former Ombuds at Iowa State
Edwin Lewis, who served as Staff Ombuds during a pilot program for the office in 2006-08, passed away earlier this week. Lewis was a longtime faculty member and administrator at Iowa State University. He was fellow of the American Psychological Association and certified mediator, and served on the boards of many non-profit organizations. A funeral service will be held this afternoon in Minneapolis. (Inside Iowa State.)
Dr. Lewis served on my master of science committee and, I should add, served me well.
ReplyDeleteWhen he was working on his Ph.D many years ago one of his advisors was Dr. Sidney Pressey. During my 15 years at Georgia Tech I attended a most memorable lecture by B.F. Skinner as part of Tech's centennial year celebration. Here was an 80 year old man of world renown introduced by Georgia Tech University president Joseph Pettit, highly respected engineer and university president. Both of them had terminal health problems (Pettit died in 86 and Skinner in 90). On the stage together during Pettit's introduction of Skinner it was memorable; two skinny sick but both regal old men standing up there. But further than this and a great great lesson for me was how Skinner during the latter part of his speech brought himself to complain about Sidney L. Pressey being credited as "father of the teaching machine". Skinner believed he should have that title not Pressey. Skinner, world renowned and respected for his work in psychology and learning could not stand it.... and showed to the world (at least to me anyway) how petty he could be. Dr. Lewis and I had little in common in that our interests in psychology were not much overlapping other than our discussions about Pressey and his teaching machine and that we liked each other. Pressey had been on Lewis's doctoral committee. Pressey, Skinner, Pettit, Lewis; all were for me great men and important to learn from!