Journal and Courier

Devoted professor, dean dies

Robert Ringel

Although Robert Ringel accumulated many honors throughout his distinguished career at Purdue University, friends say they scarcely begin to describe his contributions.

"I know all the titles and all the rest of it," said Margaret Rowe, a friend and colleague. "But there is a lot of human activity behind those titles."

Ringel died Friday at 69. In his nearly 40 years at Purdue, he served at various times as a professor, a dean and other administrative posts.

Former Purdue president Steven Beering, the current president emeritus, saw Ringel almost every day from 1990 to 2001 when Ringel was the executive vice president for academic affairs.

One tangible result of his colleague's presence is the quality of faculty and staff that abides there, Beering said. Ringel made coming to Purdue attractive to many talented researchers and teachers, he said.

"He was an articulate spokesman, and he demonstrated excellence in his own work," he said. "He was an exemplar of quality, of what we did as an institution, and of personal charm."

Beering said Ringel was also distinguished as a teacher -- a calling he returned to in his last four years at the university -- and as a professor in the fields of audiology and speech sciences. His final research work was to help develop an artificial larynx that has shown some early success in animals, Beering said.

Ringel, a descendant of Polish Jews who immigrated to the United States around the turn of the century, was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1937 into a working-class family. He could claim among his relations comedian George Burns, whose sister was married to Ringel's grandfather.

Less happily, most of his family who stayed in Europe later died at the hands of the Nazis.

Rowe, an English professor at Purdue, served under Ringel when he was the dean of the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education from 1973 to 1986. She credits him for having brought esteem to that school in the 1970s, even at a time when low enrollments were prodding administrators to consider withholding money for the liberal arts.

"I tell you, what he did is make the school much better and put us on the map at Purdue," she said. "And that's no small deal. He had real academic values, and he was a tough customer."

Ringel's devotion to the arts was evident also in his advocacy for the creation of permanent galleries at the university, which it lacked in the first century of its existence.

At the ceremony for the gallery that bears his name in the Purdue Memorial Union, he said, "I came to appreciate the importance of the arts in humanizing a world that can become overly technical and insensitive."

Service information

Funeral services for Robert L. Ringel will take place at 10:30 a.m. today at Soller-Baker Lafayette Chapel, 400 Twyckenham Blvd.

Friends will be received from 2 to 4 p.m. at his family residence, 208 Rosebank Lane, West Lafayette.

Ringel obituary

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