World War II Veteran and former CIA officer Dr. Max Oppenheimer Jr. will be the speaker at the afternoon ceremony of the SUNY Fredonia 2007 Commencement, to be held Saturday, May 12 at 3 p.m. in Steele Hall. Dr. Oppenheimer is professor emeritus of the foreign languages
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department at SUNY Fredonia.
There are two commencement ceremonies at SUNY Fredonia, one at 10 a.m. and one at 3 p.m. The speaker for the 10 a.m. ceremony is Dr. David Mittlefehldt, an alumnus who is being honored with an honorary doctorate from the State University of New York. Read the news release on Dr. Mittlefehldt.
Dr. Oppenheimer was born in New York City in 1917 but lived with his family in Germany and France from 1922 until 1935, when he returned to the United States and enlisted in the U.S. Army. Dr. Oppenheimer worked for the Army’s Military Intelligence Service. He witnessed the major World War II events in France, Belgium and Germany, including the pre-Normandy invasion and the discovery of the first Nazi concentration camp at Nordhausen. He participated in five military campaigns, from Utah Beach to the later meeting with the Russians on the Elbe, and received the Bronze Star Medal, a military decoration that is awarded for bravery, acts of merit, or meritorious service. Dr. Oppenheimer recently wrote an autobiography, An Innocent Yank at Home Abroad: Footnotes to History, 1922-1945 (Sunflower University Press, 2000) which details his youth as an expatriate and his U.S. Army service during World War II.
Dr. Oppenheimer was recalled to active military duty in 1951 during the Korean conflict, serving seven years with the General Staff in the Pentagon. From 1956 to 1958, he served as an intelligence officer for the CIA.
A love of foreign language was born in Dr. Oppenheimer during his teenage years. At age 13 he moved with his family to Paris and quickly learned French and Latin, as well as the English he had forgotten. He graduated cum laude with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Paris in 1935. After that he moved back to the U.S. and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from New York University in 1941, a master’s degree from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1942, and a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in 1947. He is fluent in Russian, Spanish, German and French.
His teaching career began in 1947, when he served as an instructor in French, German and Spanish at San Diego State College (now university). From there, he taught romance languages at Washington University, and then Russian and German at Florida State University. In 1961, Dr. Oppenheimer joined the foreign languages faculty at the University of Iowa and under his leadership the Department of Russian within the College of Liberal Arts was established. He came to SUNY Fredonia in 1967 as a professor and eventually became chair of the department of languages, where he served until 1976.
Throughout his life as an interpreter, Dr. Oppenheimer has translated numerous texts, including a Russian book on hydraulics for the U.S. Office of Naval Research. His most recent book, Is That What It Means? (Sunflower University Press, 2004) is a compilation of 110 of his newspaper columns on language. He has contributed—and continues to submit—many scholarly articles to noted language journals such as Slavic and East European Journal, Journal of Human Relations, Modern Language Notes, South Atlantic Bulletin, and Language Problems and Language Planning.
Dr. Oppenheimer currently resides in Sun City, Arizona.
