Michael B. Petrovich

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University of Wisconsin-Madison Faculty Document 810
11 September 1989

MEMORIAL RESOLUTION OF THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON

ON THE DEATH OF PROFESSOR MICHAEL B. PETROVICH

In the spring of 1988, Michael B. Petrovich's colleagues celebrated his retirement from the History Department's faculty, after 37 years of service. He intended in his new freedom to address a number of backlogged scholarly projects. Within weeks, he was suddenly confronted with the onslaught of cancer, which he faced with realism and courage, sustained by the confidence of his religious faith, the nurture of his church community, and, above all, by the support of his devoted wife, Dushanka, and family. Working virtually to the end, he died on March 28, 1989.

Michael Boro Petrovich was born in 1922 in Cleveland, Ohio, of Serbian and Croatian parentage. After completing undergraduate studies (and winning election to Phi Beta Kappa), he served for the last two years of World War II as an officer in the OSS, his postings including Yugoslavia in the post-War early-Tito era. While pursuing graduate study at Columbia (M.A. 1947, Ph.D. 1955) and study abroad, Michael was engaged as an instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison starting in the fall of 1950. He was made Assistant Professor in 1953; he rose to full professorship in 1960, and in 1982 was made Evjue-Bascom Professor of History. Along the way, he accumulated a daunting list of honors: the first Kiekhofer Memorial Teaching Award (1953), the E. Harris Harbison Award for Distinguished Teaching (1967), the Wisconsin Student Association Teaching Award (1969), an honorary degree, and a range of honors national and international. He was chosen to lead various organizations, or serve on councils, in his scholarly fields of Slavic, Russian, and Balkan studies. His prolific scholarly output totaled some 70 items over more than 40 years of publishing; he coauthored five textbooks (and was working on a high-school text when he died), and translated seven of the books of his old friend, the Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas. His pioneering history of modern Serbia alone made him one of the commanding figures in his field; at the time of his death he was working on another groundbreaking study of the place of Dalmatian Humanists in the Italian Renaissance. His role in organizing the Russian Area Studies Program was one of his many lasting contributions to the campus at large. Another was his service on innumerable faculty committees, notably on the University Committee, and as chairman of two early committees on the problems of minority enrollment and retention.

Michael Petrovich never saw scholarship as isolated learning but as knowledge to be shared, enthusiasm to be spread. As an expert seeking to propagate his specialty, he produced a large number of academic disciples, directing some thirty each of M.A. and Ph.D. dissertations; these students are now spread throughout the American academic world, extending indirectly his own direct imprint upon that world. But he also believed firmly in undergraduate teaching. In his dedication to this belief, he won both awards and a wide following for his classroom skill. He was also a pioneer of new techniques: he was the first faculty member on the campus to use the Multimedia Instructional Laboratory in developing his two-semester course on the History of Russia. His classroom lectures in this and other courses were recorded and regularly broadcast over the University's radio service, making him a familiar and respected ambassador of the University throughout the state, by far one of its best-known professors. Beyond formal teaching, he was tireless in carrying his messages to a still broader public: speaking to civic groups and a wide range of public service or adult education seminars. He contributed several superbly guided tours of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to Extension programs. In all formats, he made his subject attractive, even dramatic, without diminishing the substance and the intellectual quality of his presentations.
His faculty colleagues hard-pressed to keep track of Michael's scholarly and educational range, were rarely aware of the yet wider scope of his activities. Deeply devoted to Madison, he was well-known in a range of civic functions, especially in religious and ecumenical areas; and he was a devoted member of Madison's Downtown Rotary, of which he served as a well-remembered President, and of which he had been planning to write a history at the time of his death.

Born into the Serbian Orthodox Church, son of a priest and himself a choir director from youth, Michael was a devout adherent of the Orthodox faith, which rewarded his devotion in the serenity and confidence it gave him in facing his ordeal by cancer. Also a talented and largely self-trained amateur musician, Michael organized the choir of Madison's Greek Orthodox Church of the Dormition; he not only made it a musical group of remarkable quality for so small a parish, but he devoted decades of effort to making his own arrangements of liturgical melodies to create one of the most influential bodies of practical performing material in Greek church music in America today. Among his hobbies, he enjoyed mounting reproductions of Orthodox icons.

Modest yet confident in bearing, Michael Petrovich was an infinitely articulate person, brilliant, engaging, and insightful, whether in formal lecturing or in relaxed conversation. He wore his erudition gracefully, able to converse easily and unpatronizingly with anyone he met. Gentle, an individual of utter integrity, he was a gentleman in the classic meaning of the word, and a coherent, totally integrated person.

The measure of Michael Petrovich's impact is that he is deeply mourned and sorely missed in so many different sectors, by so many of the circles and individuals his rich life touched. In him, the University for Wisconsin has lost one of its faculty immortals, his colleagues have lost one of their noblest friends, his field has lost one of its leading scholars, and the world has lost one of the most remarkable of human beings. Our loss is only the more acute because he has left with us so very much of himself, in so many ways.

MEMORIAL COMMITTEE
John W. Barker, Chair
Leon D. Epstein
Domenico Sella
Alfred E. Senn
J. Thomas Shaw

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