David Kurtzman
David Harold Kurtzman was the fourteenth Chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh, and the last Superintendent of Public Instruction and first Secretary of Education of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Kurtzman became the University of Pittsburgh's Vice Chancellor for Finance in July of 1965, "at the height of a financial crisis at the University."
He was appointed Acting Chancellor after Stanton Crawford's sudden death of a heart attack seven months later, on January 26, 1966. Kurtzman's administration negotiated the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's bailout of Pitt's fiscal woes, through which the university became a state-related institution on August 23, 1966.
According to his obituary ten years later, after the bailout, as the university continued its search for a permanent chancellor, "trustees were heard to say 'If Dave Kurtzman were 10 years younger, we might not be looking.' Then 63, Dr. Kurtzman was two years short of the mandatory retirement age." On January 13, 1967, the Board of Trustees announced its selection of Wesley Posvar as its new Chancellor, effective June 1, and promoted Kurtzman to the full rank of Chancellor until then, and Chancellor Emeritus afterward.
A ballroom in the university's William Pitt Union is named in his honor.
Kurtzman was born near Odessa, Ukraine, in then-czarist Russia, and survived pogroms as a boy, eventually immigrating to the United States in 1921. Although he did not start high school until age 19, he finished in under two years, then earned an undergraduate degree in accounting from Temple University and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He worked for many years at the Pennsylvania Economy League. There he served as a key aide to David L. Lawrence, mayor of Pittsburgh, and Richard King Mellon, financier, in their effort to build the city's first renaissance after World War II. Kurtzman joined the newly elected Governor Lawrence in 1959 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania as his secretary of administration.
After his time at Pitt, Kurtzman returned to Harrisburg in 1967 as State Superintendent of Public Instruction under Governors Raymond P. Shafer and Milton Shapp; in this role he became the named respondent in the landmark US Supreme Court decision Lemon v. Kurtzman.
