Dr. Konnilyn G. Feig

Dr. Konnilyn G. Feig of Corte Madera, California, 84, passed away after a short stay in the hospital on Sunday morning, March 21, 2021. She leaves behind thousands of books of every genre, copious research files and notes, heartbroken friends, family, colleagues, and dogs, a lifetime of students she fired with endless intellectual ambition and community service, and an extraordinary legacy. Words used by her friends and colleagues to describe this remarkable woman are “gifted professor and teacher of substance and compassion,” “student mentor,” “author,” “accomplished, consequential global scholar and ambassador,” “trailblazing educational and social justice leader,” and “force of nature.” Konnilyn Feig’s journey through life was filled with triumphs despite early challenges. Konnilyn grew up in a small ranching community in Montana surrounded by raw beauty where everyone was a cowboy or cowgirl, the town’s library’s most extensive holdings were collections of The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, and Zane Grey, and steeped in Lutheranism’s catechism and the struggle between good and evil. She heard no poetry, saw no art, and heard no symphonies – she discovered that world only after she left. The daughter of Mildred and Herbert Feig, she was the oldest of seven siblings from her parents’ first, and, following their divorce, second marriages. She grew up without advantages and began to work at an early age, taking pride in the work ethic she developed.

A thirst for education characterized her life. Every morning she awoke with the question “what can I learn today?” At the University of Montana, Dr. Feig earned a B.S. in Business and Finance and a B.A. and M.A. in History. Capping her educational journey was a Ph.D. in History and International Relations from the University of Washington. She later also earned a post-doctoral M.B.A. in International Business from Golden Gate University. Her pursuit of a higher education was all the more impressive because she worked while earning her degrees at a time when there were no financial aid opportunities. She enhanced her overall education when she became a Special Assistant to the U.S. Commissioner of Education and an OE Fellow at the United States Office of Education.

Her career in higher education was also impressive. Konnilyn Feig was a beloved instructor and Dean at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington and a Dean at the University of Washington. She then served as Associate Dean and Director of Special Programs for the University of Pittsburgh, following which she became the founding Dean of the newly-merged College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Maine at Portland-Gorham (now the University of Southern

Maine), where she also held the title of Professor of History. Konnilyn Feig moved to California to take the position of Vice President of San Francisco State University, the first woman to hold such a high office at the university. There she was also a Professor of History teaching an honors seminar on the Holocaust every semester, and became a full-time Business Professor in her last year.

When community colleges began to develop in large numbers across California and the nation, Konnilyn Feig found her niche in 1989 first as Dean of the Division of Business and Social Sciences at Foothill College in the Foothill-De Anza Community College District in Los Altos Hills, California. But after revitalizing Division enrollment, breathing new life into curriculum development, program planning, and shared governance, and moving the Division into the technology world through the mid-1990s, Dr. Feig decided to devote the rest of her career to her first love – teaching – as a fulltime tenured Professor of History until she retired from Foothill at the end 2015. Foothill College lauded her participation in founding and active devotion to their renowned Honors Program, her commitment to new, cutting edge creation and teaching of new courses, her inspiring work with students, and her extraordinary leadership and innovation in pushing the college into online education. Dr. Feig received the Foothill President’s outstanding faculty medal/award and was selected as the faculty commencement speaker in 2001.

Dr. Feig was also deeply committed to and fought against human abuse and for social justice. That journey began, quite by accident at age 22, when she read in horror Eugen Kogon’s Theory and Practice of Hell, his brutal, unflinching account of life and death inside Buchenwald. She stumbled across the Holocaust and decided to become an historian to acquire the tools and insight to understand man’s inhumanity to man.

This Gentile Montanan with a strong Lutheran background became one of the first people in the United States to interview Holocaust survivors for oral histories and authored The Many Faces of Judaism: Portraits of the Portland Jewish Community (Jewish Federation Project 1977), a major oral history of survivors project now held by the Portland, Maine Public Library. She regularly traveled to countries in Western and Eastern Europe and stood in all 19 official Nazi concentration camps in the 1960s and 1970s, recording her developing impressions and changing reactions to each country, each people; former Nazis added to her insights.

Dr. Feig became one of the first in the U.S. (in the1960s) to teach Holocaust courses in a public university and later, community college, a practice she continued every quarter until she retired. Twenty years of single-minded focus, research, and rigorous scholarship culminated in the publication of her important and illuminating book on the concentration camps, Hitler’s Death Camps: The Sanity of Madness (New York: Holmes and Meier 1981), which confronts the how, and the why, of the Holocaust and her search for its meaning. She was a sought-after speaker on the Holocaust in the U.S. and abroad, was a member of the Executive Board of the Holocaust Library and Research Center of San Francisco, and served on the Mayor’s Holocaust Memorial Committee of San Francisco.

Dr. Feig’s teaching specialized in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, Contemporary Eastern Europe, and Central Asia and the Caucasus, but she was fascinated by the other subject matter and disciplines she also taught: International Business, Political Science, the Ancient World, the Medieval World, and Western Civilization in the last two centuries. Ideas, concepts, concerns, puzzles, and mysteries flooded her arena – and she synthesized them into a coherent mosaic and razor-sharp thinking she brought to her students. Konnilyn received many honors by organizations and countries for her international work for and with Holocaust victims and survivors, and later, for cancer and other projects in Eastern European countries, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. She was actively involved in Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, and Kosovo during the latest war and aftermath, and with torture victims in Georgia, Romania, and Uzbekistan. She served as International Co-Chair of ARWAC – Aid to Refusnik Women and Children – a successful effort to get Prisoners of Conscience out of Old USSR. These too she wove into her classroom, engaging willing students to participate in these outside projects, and encouraging all students to identify and act on their own passions in community service.

Konnilyn Feig was also deeply involved in the women’s liberation movement, regularly providing speeches and assistance. Her involvement culminated in the late 1960s when she received a federal grant to conduct workshops at locations across the nation to explore the challenges faced by women in higher education, the first federallyfunded program of its kind. Dr. Feig was a trail-blazer in this movement.

Konnilyn Feig’s friends remember her as, in the words of one, “the most intelligent person I have ever known,” in the words of another, “someone who was driven to do everything in her power to right the injustices in the world,” and in the words of yet another, “the funniest person on the planet, who always makes us laugh at her own and our own short-comings.” Dr. Feig was truly one-of-a-kind, a person of uncanny intellect and empathy, a voracious reader, and the utmost integrity who loved her friends, family, and dogs, garden, sailing, mountains, and never stopped doing what she loved to do: teach, think, and act.

Konnilyn Feig is survived by her best friend Lisa Wilhelm (who shared her passions, travels, projects, house, and dogs, was her research assistant on her book, and is now the reluctant owner of all those books wondering what the hell she is going to do with them); her dearest and oldest friend, Dr. Constance Carroll; her beloved sister and life rock Monica (Terry) Swank; her much loved brothers Lorne (Marilyn) Glaim, Randal (Sherry) Feig, and Barry (Holly) Feig; a crowd of nieces, nephews, grand nieces, and grand nephews; and her wonderful and now bereft dogs Muffin and Cody. She was pre-deceased by her parents, her brother Greg Feig, and her sister Carol (Tom) Camps. An endowed scholarship is being established in Konnilyn’s name to benefit Foothill College Honors students. Gifts can be made in her honor by making a check payable to FHDA Foundation with her name in the memo, mailed to 12345 El Monte Road, Los Altos Hills, CA 94022 or by going to: https://secure.donationpay. org/fhda/ Please include Dr. Konnilyn Feig Scholarship in the online form.

The Foothill College Business and Social Sciences Division will be holding a remote gathering of her friends and colleagues to share stories and celebrate her life on a date TBD. Her family, close friends, and colleagues will gather for a private celebration of life on the patio of Konnilyn’s beloved bookstore Book Passage in Corte Madera in mid-July. We will have a tough act to follow: among her many talents, Konnilyn was a brilliant, heartfelt, and memorable eulogist able to perfectly capture the essence of the person.