Harvey Goldberg came to The Ohio State University in 1950 as an instructor in the Department of History. He rose through the ranks to that of Professor and remained at OSU until the autumn of 1962, when he returned to teach at his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin. His years at Ohio State were marked by extraordinary achievements in both scholarship and teaching. He published widely in many journals ranging from The Nation to The International Review of Social History. His many books include a monumental biography of the greatest of modern French democratic socialists, The Life of Jean Jaures, which the New York Times referred to as "The definitive biography, as dense with life, character and events as a Balzac novel." The Center is named in for him because many of his students came came to us and asked to commemorate and celebrate the life of Harvey Goldberg. We formed the Center in his honor.
Near the end of his book on Jaures, Goldberg wrote, "He had the integrity to be partisan, the courage to be revolutionary, the humanism to be tolerant." His students recognized and honored those same traits in Goldberg himself as evidenced by his award as Professor of the Year by the Arts College Student Council in 1959 when he was just 36 years old. His classes were frequently standing room only; several of them, including one on the death of Louis XVI and another on the fall of the Bastille, were Ohio State public events, not to be missed even by students not then enrolled in his courses. He would walk into the lecture hall and announce, if you weren't enrolled in the class, to please go to the back of the auditorium so that those students taking the class for credit could have a seat to be able to take notes. It really was quite a phenomenon. Harvey taught in front of the lectern without the aid of notes. "I like to think" he said, "that the students and I melt to nothingness before the significance of the materials." He believed that a teacher must "undertake to convey a kind of courage. If he's any good, he must live a life that is true and not hypocritical. He can teach the same kind of courage by example." It is clear, through the reverence in which so many of his former Ohio State students still hold him, that Harvey's example was not, indeed, lost on them.