Prof. Duncan MacIntyre, former Sun director, dies at 92

Prof. Duncan M. MacIntyre, industrial and labor relations, who chaired the Sun senior board for several years during the 1960s and 1970s, died July 24, 2007, in Ithaca at the age of 92. 

Prof. MacIntyre was admired by numerous Sun alumni, some of whom also had the benefit of taking his courses in the ILR school. He made the driest material – his required course was on Economic Security – compelling and he was renowned for knowing everything about each student in his class the first day of the term. Several alums in the class of ’67, including G. Edward DeSeve and myself, had the pleasure of lunching with Prof. MacIntyre and his wife Margaret at Lakeview, where they resided, during our reunion this past June. His walking was bad, his eyesight almost gone, and in general, he was frail, but his mind was totally sharp.

Bob Huret ’65, one-time Sun sports prognosticator, endowed teaching awards in Prof. MacIntyre’s honor at ILR in 1998. Prof. MacIntyre always was his own man at Cornell – after all, he had been an undergrad at Colgate – and did not cut his cloth to suit the day’s fashion and was not to everyone’s taste, including some Sun staffers and others – the late Prof. Raymond Bowers, physics, with whom he served on the Kahn-Bowers Commission on the Quality of Undergraduate Instruction, once called him a “prickly pear.”  But he well understood the role of the senior board – to advise but not to control – and was always a fine source of advice for editors and managers during his time on the Sun board.

-- Richard B. Hoffman '67