RENOWNED LINGUIST WAS AMONG UCSD FOUNDING FACULTY IN 1963

Leonard Newmark, a renowned linguist who helped UC San Diego evolve into one of the nation’s top schools as part of the university’s first wave of faculty members, died in La Jolla at the age of 93.

He had struggled for years with dementia and Parkinson’s disease. But he succumbed to COVID-19 on May 2, according to his son, Mark.

Newmark was scooped up in the great talent hunt that UCSD founder Roger Revelle orchestrated in the late 1950s and ’60s to give the La Jolla campus a chance of eventually distinguishing itself internationally.

Revelle had already recruited Nobel Prize-winning physicist Harold Urey, as well as Maria Goeppert Mayer, who would win the Nobel in the same field.

He had a heavy focus on the hard sciences, which made some prospective faculty in the social sciences and humanities reluctant to decamp to La Jolla.

But in 1963, Newmark jumped at the chance to leave his position at Indiana University and head west. In his personal writings, he described how awestruck he was during a moment in his recruitment in which he mingled with UCSD’s early luminaries.

“So when I had lunch with Harold Urey, Jim Arnold, and Maria Mayer on the grass at (Scripps Institution of Oceanography) — with whales spouting just offshore — (and) had walked along the Scripps Beach with Stanley Mills, and been driven to Tijuana by Chancellor Herbert York, after a late-evening dinner .... I must have been cocky enough to hide my midwestern hick’s awe at the exotic setting and the august figures I had just met and to convince them that I had what David Bonner called the ‘piss and vinegar’ that this ambitious faculty wanted for its new recruits.”

Newmark founded the linguistics department, a program that is today ranked among the 35 best in the country by U.S. News and World Report. He hired the department’s original faculty and helped recruit notable figures in other fields, including Mel Spiro, the founding chair of the anthropology department, and George Mandler, founding chair of the psychology department.

He also served on the committee that developed UCSD’s undergraduate curriculum and helped convince the university that the initial design for its central library was “pedestrian.” The design was scrapped, leading architects to come up with the now iconic Geisel Library.

Newmark was born on April 8, 1929, in Attica, Ind., a farming town northwest of Indianapolis. His parents, Max Jacob and Sophie (Glusker) Newmark, ran a general store.

The young Newmark became a voracious reader in areas ranging from philosophy to economics to literature. He had a special love for Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The

Canterbury Tales.”

“Even in his 80s, he could recite from memory much of the prologue to ‘The Canterbury Tales’ and extensive portions of ‘Beowulf,’” Mark Newmark said.

“He marked birthdays, anniversaries and traumas by writing poems.”

The older Newmark enrolled at the University of Chicago at the age of 15 and graduated three years later, partly because he was able to pass exams for some courses without ever attending class — something the university allowed.

He went on to earn a master’s degree and a doctorate at Indiana University, where he met his wife, Ruth, during a game of ping-pong. He later joined the faculty of Ohio State, where he remained until returning to Indiana as an associate professor.

When he arrived in La Jolla, Revelle stepped in and made sure that Newmark, who was Jewish, could buy a home. Parts of La Jolla barred Jews from home ownership at the time.

“One of the distinctive mannerisms of my father was his tireless asking of questions,” Mark Newmark said. “A question would be followed by a question, which would be followed by another question.

“Knowledge, he would often say, emerges from the process of asking questions.”

Newmark is survived by Ruth, children Mark and Katya Newmark, son-in-law Matthew Costello and grandchildren Danya Costello and Justin Costello.