Marvin L. Goldberger (1922-2014) became Caltech’s fifth president in 1978. Goldberger was a particle physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and later became deeply involved in arms control and defense analysis. His papers document mainly his nine years as Caltech’s president (1978-1987) but include some files from his predecessor at Caltech, Harold Brown (Caltech’s president, 1969-1976). The papers include personal and general correspondence, documents relating to the administration of Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), papers concerning professional societies, government and civic affairs, arms control, human rights, and a small amount of personal and biographical material.

Marvin Leonard “Murph” Goldberger was born on October 22, 1922, in Chicago, Illinois. He received his bachelor’s degree from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University) in 1943 and his PhD in physics from the University of Chicago in 1948, where he served on the physics faculty. In 1957 he was appointed Higgins Professor of Mathematical Physics at Princeton University, where he remained until 1978, serving as chairman of the physics department. He was named the Joseph Henry Professor of Physics in 1977. In 1978 he was appointed fifth president of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he served until 1987. During his tenure as Caltech’s president, Goldberger reformed undergraduate education, overseeing the revision of teaching standards, the revamping of curriculum, the renovation of undergraduate residence houses and the establishment of the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF) program. Other major accomplishments include the addition of three major new laboratories to the campus; the acquisition of a $70 million dollar grant for the construction of the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the $50 million dollar pledge for the Beckman Institute; and the establishment of new programs in educational computing, and computation and neural systems. Goldberger left Caltech in 1987 to assume the directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1991, he returned to California to become a professor of physics at UCLA; in 1993, he moved to UC San Diego, where he was a professor of physics and later dean of the university's Division of Natural Sciences. Goldberger was a particle physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. With theoretical physicist Sam Bard Treiman, he derived the so-called Goldberger-Treiman relation, which gives a quantitative connection between the strong and weak interaction properties of the proton and neutron. Goldberger was very active in international scientific affairs. From 1963 to 1969 he was chairman of the High Energy Physics Commission of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) and for several years a US representative to that organization. In May 1972 he headed the scientific delegation to the People’s Republic of China that arranged for the first visit to the US in December of 1972 of a group of Chinese scientists. He returned to China in July 1973 as head of a delegation of US scientists, and again in September 1978 with a delegation of Caltech trustees, administrators and faculty. Dr. Goldberger was also active for many years as a science advisor to government agencies on international security and arms control. He was one of the founders in 1959 of the JASON group, which advised the Department of Defense. From 1965 to 1969 he was a member of the President’s Science Advisory Council (PSAC). He received numerous awards and academic honors, including the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, the Presidential Award of the New York Academy of Sciences, the Leonard I. Beerman Peace and Justice Award, and honorary degrees from Carnegie Mellon, the University of Notre Dame, Hebrew Union College, the University of Judaism and Occidental College. Goldberger was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He served as cochairman of the National Research Council and was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation International Advisory Board. Marvin Goldberger died on November 26, 2014. He was predeceased by his wife, Mildred, in 2006. They were the parents of two sons, Joel and Sam Goldberger.

103 linear feet

Permission to publish must be obtained from Head of Archives & Special Collections.

After a mandated 25-year closure period, the collection is open for research with the exception of two closed files. Researchers must apply for access. https://docuserve.library.caltech.edu/aeon/