Samuel Schuman

Author, scholar, and former English professor Samuel Schuman died Nov. 11, 2014, in Asheville, North Carolina. He was 72.

Schuman was born in Chicago and grew up in Glencoe, Illinois. He graduated from Grinnell College with a B.A. in English literature in 1962. He earned his M.A. in English literature from San Francisco State University and his Ph.D. in English literature from Northwestern University.

He taught in the English department at Cornell College from 1969 to 1977. While at Cornell he taught courses in Jacobean drama and staged two Shakespeare plays. During those years he was awarded a grant by the Ford Foundation and spent time in England where he discovered his second scholarly speciality, the work of Vladimir Nabokov. He was active with the college’s honors program, and when he left Cornell in 1977, it was to become director of the honors program at the University of Maine.

Schuman served in numerous administrative roles at Guilford College, the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and the University of Minnesota Morris, where he retired as chancellor in 2006.

In addition to his teaching, Schuman wrote hundreds of scholarly articles and seven books, including “Seeing the Light: Religious Colleges in Twenty-First Century America,” which was published in 2010 and highlighted Cornell. He was a dedicated advocate of physical fitness as well. He ran a 2:59 marathon in 1978, which qualified him to run in the 1979 Boston Marathon, and he wrote a regular column for Runner’s World. The UNC Asheville fitness center was named for him in 2013.

He is survived by his wife, Nancy Schuman, a son, a daughter, three grandchildren, two brothers, and a sister.