Rupp Returns: Former President Comes Back to University to Teach Religion

The nameplate outside the small office on Claremont Avenue says simply: George Rupp, Dept. of Religion; Institute for Religion, Culture & Public Life.

President of the University from 1993 to 2002, Rupp has returned to campus as a professor to teach two seminars for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students: Religion and International Development the fall semester and Religion and Modern Western Individualism in the spring. “International relief and development consumed me 80 hours a week for 11 years,” Rupp says. “It is what I was sure I would be most engaged in teaching.”

After leaving Columbia, Rupp was president of the International Rescue Committee, a nonprofit humanitarian relief and development organization, until last year. He then spent a year working on a book, Beyond Individualism: the Challenge of Inclusive Communities, which will be published by Columbia University Press in 2015.

He is now one of three Columbia presidents who are still in the classroom. Current President Lee C. Bollinger, a First Amendment scholar, has continued to teach a course in freedom of speech and the press every fall. Michael Sovern, who preceded Rupp as president from 1980-1993, usually teaches Legal Methods at the Law School, although he is not teaching this year.

Rupp, 72, was rarely on campus after stepping down as president. But as he was deciding what to do next after finishing his book, he met with Mark Taylor and Wayne Proudfoot, professors of religion here that he has known since they were all graduate students at Harvard. They persuaded him to return to teaching.

“George Rupp had a distinguished academic career in the study of religion,” says Taylor, the Religion Department chair. “It is only appropriate that he end his career where he began—in the Religion Department, sharing his experience and wisdom with undergraduate and graduate students.”

Rupp has an A.B. degree from Princeton, a bachelor’s in divinity from Yale Divinity School and a Ph.D. in religion from Harvard. Before coming to Columbia he was a professor and dean of the Harvard Divinity School, and then president of Rice University. His five published books include Globalization Challenged: Conviction, Conflict, Community and Beyond Existentialism and Zen: Religion in a Pluralistic World.

His classes are limited to 20 students to encourage discussion. The group this fall draws from the Mailman School of Public Health, the School of International and Public Affairs, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Social Work, the College, the School of General Studies, Teachers College and Barnard. They bring different perspectives to the study of international development, Rupp says. “I find it very stimulating.”

The course covers theories of international development and how religious groups—including local religious communities—view development. One assignment is to choose a developing nation and report on the work of three different relief and development organizations there, or to choose an organization and become an expert on its work in three countries. “Religion is the motivation for many of the people involved in international development,” Rupp says.

His spring seminar on Western individualism will be “a critical appreciation or an appreciative criticism,” he says. “Individualism as it has developed has steered us into a dead end that I think is problematic. We need to rethink it in a way that reaffirms the value of community.”

After several decades in academia, Rupp says he wanted to do something different and the job at the International Rescue Committee (IRC) seemed “a perfect fit.” He had a longstanding interest in international development, stemming in part from a year spent studying Buddhism in Sri Lanka in 1969-70 and visits to a daughter while she was living in Africa. He also has been involved with social activism since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Rupp is an ordained Presbyterian minister, although he has never been a pastor.

IRC, founded in 1933 at the suggestion of Albert Einstein to help resettle refugees from Nazi Germany, now works with refugees all over the world. It tripled in size while Rupp was president, to 12,000 employees and a budget of nearly $500 million. He visited IRC projects in 25 countries. “It was extremely satisfying to know that every day there were tens of thousands of people who were better off for what we were doing,” he says.

Rupp’s two adult daughters are both anthropologists, one specializing in Africa and the other in Asia. Two of his grandchildren have taken Saturday Chinese classes at Columbia.

“Columbia is a community. I feel warmly embraced,” he says. “Just going through the gates, the security guards say, ‘Hello President Rupp, we haven’t seen you for a while.’”

– By Georgette Jasen