A Gift for Student Support in Psychology

A psychology professor who retired in 1977 after 29 years at UConn is giving $2 million to the department to endow scholarships and graduate fellowships in psychology.

Maurice L. Farber, now nearing 95 years old, has established a trust to help financially needy students in his former department. It will benefit undergraduates majoring in psychology and psychology graduate students.

Farber lives with a caretaker in an apartment in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. His wife, Ruth May Farber, has passed away. The couple had no children.

He is described by those close to him as a gentle, cultivated man, an avid reader and a good listener. He wanted to help today’s students, particularly in light of the growing costs of a college education, says a family friend.

At the time he started teaching at UConn in 1948, psychology had tripled in size from the 1930s, from three to about 10 faculty members. Many of its students were veterans attending UConn on the GI bill; often, they were married and had children.

They were “all business” about getting their degrees, recalls a former colleague of Farber’s, Sam Witryol, emeritus professor of psychology.

Psychology then was housed with mathematics and political science in a former Navy barracks building located where E.O. Smith High School in Storrs now stands.

Today, the department has more than 1,200 undergraduate majors and 150 grad students and it enrolls annually more than 8,000 undergraduates in its courses. It is housed in its own building named for Weston A. Bousfield, who headed the department when Farber came.

It now has 55 faculty members, including some of the most active researchers at the University.

The UConn Psychology Department recently was ranked fifth in the nation for attracting federal research funding for psychology, moving up from an earlier 10th place ranking.

Farber was a social and clinical psychologist – “an ideal mentor for students in both areas,” says Charles Lowe, professor and department head, who joined the faculty five years before Farber retired.

Farber’s first PhD student, Theodore Millon, was awarded the eighth PhD in psychology at UConn, in 1954 (the department has now graduated 822 PhDs).

Millon went on to create widely used personality tests and had a distinguished academic career at the University of Miami. Currently he is scientific director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Personology and Psychopathology.

Farber himself was mentored by social psychology pioneer Kurt Lewin at the University of Iowa. He wrote a well-received book, Theory of Suicide (1968), and he was also interested in the social psychology of political groups. He wrote many articles from a psychoanalytical viewpoint about national character and political behavior.

He was known as a very good teacher, says Lowe, who, like Farber, was trained as both a clinical and social psychologist.

“Maury and I would get into terrific discussions about Lewin and Freud. I learned so much just by talking with Maury Farber,” he says. “He significantly influenced my development as a researcher and teacher.”

Jerome Smith, who was a graduate student here in psychology in the 1950s, later returned to UConn as a faculty member and was department head when Farber retired. He summed up Farber’s achievements at a retirement reception in 1977:

“He has taught well, extended our knowledge, and been a warm friend and delight to his colleagues.”