photo by Sally McCay
REMEMBERING STEVE RUBENSTEIN
As many of you know, the University of Vermont community suffered a tremendous loss in June with the death of Stephen Rubenstein ’61. It was my honor to join his family and friends for a memorial service in New Jersey and to share my thoughts on his life and his profound influence on the University of Vermont.
Steve Rubenstein arrived at the University of the Green Mountains at age eighteen, and though his student days represented only a very small portion of his life, Steve’s relationship with the University he loved spanned more than half a century. It was especially over the course of the last two decades that Steve brought to UVM a transformative vision that has decisively shaped the character and identity of the institution. Steve brought to us a compelling, urgently posed, and oft-renewed formulation of the profound ethical obligation to stewardship of the planet Earth that we at the University have as teachers and as scientists and scholars.
The extraordinary generosity that Steve, his wife Beverly, and their family bestowed upon the University enabled UVM to establish the Rubenstein Ecosystem Science Laboratory on the Lake Champlain waterfront in 1999. A few years later, through the largest individual gift in the history of the University, Steve, Beverly, and the Rubenstein family committed to the provision of vital, permanent resources for the school of environment and natural resources that now bears the Rubenstein name, investing through our institution in the preservation of the planet and compelling us by dint of a vision and passion for the Earth that would not be denied to embrace the aspiration to which we are committed of being the nation’s premier environmental university.
Steve Rubenstein was a stand-up guy. He stood up for what he thought was right. In his sense of urgency about the battle to preserve the environment he was a leader, moving far ahead of the crowd and drawing others to follow behind him in his powerful wake. His sense of uprightness arose out of the fullness of his humanity—when Steve talked tough, what underlay the hard exterior was a core of sweetness, passion, and love.
There is a moment I will always remember when I think of Steve Rubenstein. The occasion was UVM’s historic 200th commencement, a ceremony held on the Green for the first time in decades. The University conferred an honorary doctorate on Steve that day. When I called him up to receive his honorary degree, all of the Rubenstein School graduates stood up spontaneously in their regalia to cheer this great benefactor who was about to become Dr. Stephen Rubenstein, Doctor of Laws, honoris causa. The tears in Steve’s eyes at that moment represented—or so I thought, standing beside him—a mixture of joy, of gratitude, and of true humility in seeing the students and the entire community—thousands of people arrayed across the Green, cheering for Steve Rubenstein—united in the recognition of the magnitude of his unparalleled contribution to the University he had first set foot on nearly half a century before.
At the University of Vermont, we will always remember the generosity of the Rubenstein family and, even more, the passionate Rubenstein vision that has shaped the destiny and redirected the course of one of our country’s oldest institutions of higher learning.—Daniel Mark Fogel
