Charles Muscatine

Charles Muscatine died of a lung infection in Oakland, California on 12 March 2010. His wife, Doris, died in 2006; they had two children.

In 1966, as head of the UC Berkeley Academic Senate-appointed Committee on Educational Policy, he presided over an influential report that called for increased diversity in educational programs available to students.

His contributions to medieval studies include Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning (University of California Press, 1957), The Book of Geoffrey Chaucer, The Old French Fabliaux, and Poetry and Crisis in the Age of Chaucer. He also published extensively on the issues facing third-level education, including Fixing College Education: A New Curriculum for the Twenty-First Century, completed shortly before his death.

Muscatine taught at Wesleyan University before being reinstated in 1952.

Muscatine and others who were dismissed challenged the action in court and ultimately won a landmark victory when the California Court of Appeal in April 1951 ordered the University of California to reinstate the fired academics. In its decision, the Court of Appeal wrote:

Muscatine was born in Brooklyn to Samuel and Bertha (Greenberg) Mushkatin, Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire (now Belarus). The family moved to Trenton, New Jersey, where his father managed a department store. Muscatine studied English at Yale and served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, participating in the D-day landing on Omaha Beach. After the war he returned to Yale where he became one of the first Jews to take a doctorate in the English department. He joined the English department at UC Berkeley in 1948.

Charles Muscatine (28 November 1920 – 12 March 2010) was an American academic specializing in medieval literature, particularly Chaucer. Following service in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he returned home to complete his studies and went on to become a tutor at UC Berkeley. He was fired from his position there for refusing to sign a McCarthyite oath. He challenged the termination in court and won reinstatement to his post at Berkeley in a landmark 1951 court decision.