Professorships
Named professorships are awarded to tenured faculty who have made a distinguished and enduring contribution to their research area. Named professorships are permanent awards established through contributions to the School of Law through the Indiana University Foundation.
The Ralph F. Fuchs Professorship
Ralph Fuchs was born in 1899 in Saint Louis. He earned his undergraduate degree and his JD from Washington University, then earned a doctorate in economics from what was to become the Brookings Institute and a graduate degree in law from Yale. He practiced law privately for one year, then joined the faculty at his alma mater, Washington University. During the Second World War, he worked for the government, first as administrative head of the Civil Service Commission's legal division, then in the solicitor general's office. In 1946, he became a professor of law at Indiana University, and was eventually awarded the title of University Professor, in honor of his scholarship, his teaching, and his public service.
Fuchs's scholarly interests were wide-ranging; but much of his writing dealt with administrative law. He was in many ways a pioneer in this emerging field. Before he came to IU, he had been an important contributor in drafting one of the most important pieces of federal legislation affecting administrative law, the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946.
The most striking thing about descriptions of Ralph Fuchs from people who knew him at all stages of his career is how consistently they return to the same theme: his extraordinary personal integrity. He was a man whose political views were deeply felt (and often quite unpopular views they were), whose students knew of his beliefs, because he lived his beliefs fearlessly, but who never took advantage of his role in the classroom to foist them off on those students. His service to the causes he believed in was unstinting. He was very active in the NAACP, and was appointed to its committee on legal redress in 1949. He also served as faculty advisor to the university chapter of the NAACP. When academic freedom was under threat because of the forces of McCarthyism, he worked with the American Association of University Professors, both at the campus level and as their national president from 1955 to 1957, to resist this threat and to create a culture of truly meaningful academic freedom. A member of the American Civil Liberties Union since the 1930s, he helped to found the Indiana chapter and was the first chairman of the executive board of the ICLU. Through it all, he was unfailingly courteous, and generous in the support and guidance he offered younger colleagues and students, well beyond his retirement in 1970 up until his death in 1985.