In 2012, Pat Kilpatrick celebrated the success of the challenge grant campaign she led for the Flora Stone Mather Center for Women. Photo by Mike Sands.

Patricia B. Kilpatrick (FSM ’49, GRS ’51), the first female vice president of Case Western Reserve University, died March 3 at age 88. An active participant in the major institutional and social changes that shaped the university during her 30-year career, she remained a devoted member of the campus community long after her retirement in 1992.

“Case Western Reserve has lost one of its most extraordinary leaders,” President Barbara R. Snyder said. “An exceptional educator, administrator and alumna advocate, Pat brought insight and energy to all that she did. Her impact on students and colleagues cannot be overstated, and she will be deeply missed.”

Kilpatrick’s association with the university began in 1947, when she enrolled as a transfer student at Flora Stone Mather College. She took a streetcar to campus each day from her East Cleveland home and became deeply involved in college life.

“We had our own student government,” she recalled in a 2006 art/sci interview. “We had our own clubs and associations, and the students ran them. Every club in Mather College had an account at National City Bank. So we learned how to manage organizations. We learned how to work in the world.”

After completing a bachelor’s degree in history, Kilpatrick went on to earn a graduate degree in physical education from Western Reserve University, and Mather hired her as a PE instructor in 1962. Within three years, she was promoted to assistant professor and chair. In addition to serving as a faculty member, she became an assistant dean in 1965.

When the era of student protests began, Kilpatrick often met with campus activists. In the aftermath of the Kent State tragedy in 1970, CWRU students occupied Thwing Hall for three weeks. Kilpatrick and other administrators took turns spending time at the building, and one of her shifts happened to fall on her birthday. “The kids had brought a big birthday cake,” she recalled in a 2009 interview with Eleanor Blackman of University Archives. “We weren’t really on two sides.”

In 1973, Kilpatrick was appointed associate dean for student affairs at Western Reserve College; three years later, she took on the additional role of student union director. In 1979, she was appointed secretary of the university, where she provided administrative support for the Faculty Senate, organized commencement exercises and oversaw University Archives and Squire Valleevue Farm. Finally, in 1987, she was named vice president and university marshal.

Sandra Russ, Distinguished University Professor and the Louis D. Beaumont University Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences, first got to know Kilpatrick in 1984, when Russ began a term as chair of the Faculty Senate. “I was very young, and I needed guidance,” she says. “Pat was wonderful; she would guide you without your really knowing she was guiding you. There were very few senior women when I came here, and she just took me under her wing. And she did that with many people.”

Kilpatrick’s devotion to the advancement of women took many forms. In 1971, she agreed to chair the President’s Advisory Committee on the Status of Women in the University; the committee’s report, issued two years later, criticized “attitudes and practices that discourage and deny equal participation by women students, staff, and faculty.“

This photo of Pat Kilpatrick was taken circa 1962, when she joined the faculty of Flora Stone Mather College. Photo courtesy of University Archives.

Kilpatrick tackled these issues both as an administrator and as a leader of the Flora Stone Mather Alumnae Association, whose members funded scholarships for female students and played a major role in the decades-long effort to create a women’s center at CWRU. Kilpatrick was a passionate advocate for what became the Flora Stone Mather Center for Women, and her support continued until the end of her life. From 2007 to 2012, she chaired a challenge grant campaign for the center that generated $2 million.

“Pat was a force—absolutely,” Russ says. “She was a great politician, in the best sense of the word. She knew people, she understood people, she liked people. She could organize wonderfully; she knew how to make things happen. She was also a lovely person. Even if she disagreed with what you were doing, it didn’t affect how she felt about you.”

Kilpatrick is survived by her daughter, Rev. Catherine “Kate” Louise Walsh, and son-in-law, Mike; a son, Rufus Hall Kilpatrick III, and daughter-in-law, Kellie; and grandchildren Jonathan LaVerne Walsh, Jessica Elizabeth Walsh and Isabel Kilpatrick. One son, Timothy Leland Kilpatrick, preceded her in death.

In 2015, Kilpatrick learned that Yale Paprin (WRC ‘76) had made a $25,000 leadership gift to establish an undergraduate scholarship fund in her name. When Kilpatrick mentioned the fund to another of her former students, Lynn Lieberman Ritvo (FSM ’67), Ritvo matched the gift with an additional $25,000. Both alumni spoke at this year’s Momentum ceremony, an event honoring university donors and friends, a few weeks after Kilpatrick’s death.

“She was, to me and by my lights, the indomitable force … always looking, always checking, always making sure her students were staying on task and on course and not getting in trouble.” Paprin recalled. When Kilpatrick learned about the scholarship fund, she wrote to tell him that she was “stunned but delighted.” And even though they hadn’t kept in touch since he graduated, she assured Paprin that she still remembered him from his student days: “I never could forget all the good conversations we had and how much you cared about the college.”

Ritvo described Kilpatrick as “a role model, a mentor and, above all, a friend.” They’d known each other for almost five decades. Ritvo, who lives in Atlanta, had made a point of returning to Cleveland annually to have lunch with Kilpatrick, who once hired her as a residential director for Mather College and who coached her throughout her subsequent career in education. Along with everything else, Ritvo said, Pat Kilpatrick was “a giver of wisdom.”

Since the Momentum event in March, many other donors have joined Yale Paprin and Lynn Ritvo to support the Patricia Baldwin Kilpatrick Memorial Scholarship Fund. If you would like to make a gift, please contact Vanessa Mavec at 216.368.0388.

This photo of Harvey Buchanan was taken circa 1963, around the time he was appointed head of CIT’s Division of Humanities and Social Studies. Photo courtesy of University Archives.

Harvey Buchanan, professor emeritus of humanities and art history and provost emeritus, died Feb. 19 at age 92.

Buchanan began his career in 1952 as an instructor at Case Institute of Technology, which he later remembered as “an enormously exciting place to teach.” Some of his CIT students were among the best he would ever have, and he enjoyed knowing that the humanities curriculum gave them “time to expand freely and not have to worry about their professional goals.”

By 1962, Buchanan was a full professor and head of CIT’s Division of Humanities and Social Studies. He became a key figure in discussions that led to the federation of CIT and Western Reserve University in 1967, and he served the new institution as associate dean, and then provost, for humanities and arts. One of his major achievements was his creation, with Cleveland Museum of Art Director Sherman Lee, of a joint graduate program in art history and museum studies, which will soon celebrate its 50th anniversary.

In 1980, after becoming department chair in art history, Buchanan was invited by philanthropist Peter Putnam to commission a sculpture from a regional artist for the Case Western Reserve University campus. Soon, Putnam and his mother, Mildred, created an endowment to support further acquisitions. Under Buchanan’s direction, the John and Mildred Putnam Sculpture Collection grew to almost 50 works. Although it is hard to imagine now, the campus was virtually devoid of public art before Buchanan took on this project, which he headed until 2014—long after he retired from the faculty.

Harvey Buchanan and his wife, Penny, often hosted dinners for faculty members and other friends at their home in Gates Mills. Photo summer 2006, courtesy of Richard Davis.

Buchanan’s former colleagues and students speak of his charm, dapper style of dress (he favored bow-ties) and inexhaustible good cheer. They recall lively dinners at the home in Gates Mills that he shared with his wife, arts educator Penny Buchanan. For his retirement party in 1988, Buchanan had a hot-air balloon set up in their backyard. At one point, he and Penny stepped into the basket with the balloonist and took off for a brief flight.

Jenifer Neils, the Elsie B. Smith Professor in the Liberal Arts, led a fund-raising effort that year to establish an annual lecture in Buchanan’s name. “I could depend on him for advice about anything—student issues, faculty issues, curriculum issues,” she says. “He was very supportive of my career and scholarship. He loved to see the department and faculty flourish.”

Long after they graduated, his students also paid tribute to him. Irwin Singer (CIT ’64), who took Buchanan’s art history course as a junior, recalls the pleasure of “wandering over to the Cleveland Museum of Art and having Harvey Buchanan walk us through the rooms with Monet’s Water Lilies and many other paintings and talk to us about them.” In his senior year, Singer and some of his friends persuaded Buchanan to offer a second course, this time on modern art.

In 2004, while organizing a 40th reunion for his fraternity brothers in Sigma Alpha Mu, Singer scheduled a gathering at the art museum and invited Buchanan to show up as a surprise guest. Joel Schwartz (CIT ’64, GRS ‘66) seized the occasion to say that Buchanan’s course had stuck in his mind more than any other undergraduate class: “It exposed me to something I can still take advantage of today.”

“I think all of us felt that way,” Singer says. “At a time in my life when I was looking for something new and interesting, and someone to teach me something more than what I was getting, Harvey was there.”