UF dean Ralph Lowenstein, who predicted digital media nearly 50 years ago, dies at 90

University of Florida Dean Emeritus Ralph Lowenstein has always been a fighter. Perhaps that’s why he became such a respected leader of the Gainesville university’s College of Journalism and Communications.

“Truly a legend who leaves behind a huge legacy at UF,” said Steve Orlando, an assistant vice president for communications and an adjunct lecturer.

Lowenstein, who became the third dean of the communications college in 1976, died Monday at 90 following a massive stroke, according to UF.

“To say that a cornerstone of our college has crumbled would not adequately express the role Ralph played in bringing our college to where it is today. No one has had a greater impact on this program. His imprint from nearly two decades as dean continues to be felt to this day. He was truly a transformational leader and an extraordinary human being,” said UF’s current dean, Diane McFarlin, who graduated from UF the year that Lowenstein was named dean.

Born in Danville, Virginia, on March 8, 1930, Lowenstein’s first slap — metaphorically, speaking — came via telegram on the day he was born.

“My parents had had two boys two years apart, and I was supposed to be a girl, so they had a girl’s name all picked out — Rosa Louise. I was supposed to be named for my grandmother who had died the year before. I was probably one of the few babies who had a telegram, ‘Better luck next time’ — that started off life,” Lowenstein said, laughing, in an oral history interview he gave to the UF Board of Trustees in 1992.

Fighting in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence

“I always felt different. I guess that was the thing,” he said in the interview.

There weren’t many Americans who fought in the 1948 Israel War of Independence.

Lowenstein, then a skinny 18-year-old Jewish kid “bursting with purpose and pride,” according to a 1998 Miami Herald story, used his summer break from Columbia University to join Machal, an acronym for Mitnadvei Chutz L’Aretz, the Hebrew phrase meaning “Volunteers from Abroad.”

“There are so few Americans that served in the Israeli Army in 1948. ... There were probably at most — I am just guessing — 1,000 or 2,000. When I got there in July, there were only 200 Americans in the Israeli Army,” Lowenstein said.

When Lowenstein got there 72 summers ago, they slapped a German rifle with a swastika into his hands. There was no time to scrape off the loathsome symbol.

“We were fighting people who weren’t an awful lot better than we were,” Lowenstein told the Herald in 1998 on the 50th anniversary of the War of Independence. “They had better equipment, but they didn’t have the motivation.”

Said Bob Haiman, president emeritus of the Poynter Institute: “He was not exactly the hardened soldier the Israelis were looking for. But the outline of the wonderful leader he was to become already was becoming visible. And fairly soon, young Ralph was Colonel Lowenstein of the Israeli Army,” Haiman said.

After serving, Lowenstein returned to the States, earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Columbia University and his doctoral degree from the University of Missouri. He reported for, among others, United Press International, the El Paso Times and CBS Morning News.

Lowenstein was chairman of the news-editorial program at the University of Missouri before arriving at UF.

Accomplishments at UF

Lowenstein served as UF’s journalism college’s dean from 1976 to 1994.

Under his direction, the college opened Weimer Hall in 1980. Lowenstein was a pioneer in digital media, establishing the Interactive Media Lab in 1993, which created one of the first journalism-related websites in the world, McFarlin said.

In 1981, the College of Journalism inaugurated Gainesville cable press, the first 24-hour rotatext cable newspaper in the U.S., and became the first communications program in the U.S. to install and network 245 computers in all faculty offices, student labs and broadcast stations, according to McFarlin.

Also in 1981, the college launched National Public Radio station WUFT-FM and established the Joseph L. Brechner Center for Freedom of Information and the Knight Division for Scholarships, Career Services & Multicultural Affairs.

Under Lowenstein’s tenure, he helped increase the college’s endowment from $2 million to $12 million. He was so far ahead of the curve he was one of the first journalism educators to write about the electronic newspaper.

In Media, Messages and Men, which he co-authored in 1971 with John C. Merrill, Lowenstein predicted the “personal retrieval stage” of mass communication via centralized computers.

There is a commemorative piece inside UF’s Innovation News Center and it’s one of McFarlin’s favorite stories to tell about Lowenstein.

“It notes how Ralph, when speaking before a group of newspaper executives more than four decades ago, stunned them by pronouncing that print was dead. This was in the late 1970s and Ralph already envisioned the rise of electronic news. He was extraordinarily prescient and unfailingly direct, which made him a great leader and mentor. You could always count on him for sage counsel,” McFarlin said.

Alumni under Lowenstein’s leadership

Among those who have studied under Lowenstein’s tenure at UF: Pulitzer Prize winners David Finkel and Debbie Cenziper of The Washington Post and photojournalist Essdras Suarez, who won two Pulitzer Prizes as part of spot news coverage teams with the Boston Globe and the Denver Post.

Aminda Marqués González, executive editor, publisher and president of the Miami Herald and el Nuevo Herald, and the Herald’s Managing Editor Rick Hirsch, are also UF alums.

“Dean Lowenstein truly was a visionary, someone who recognized in the 1970s that unprecedented changes were in store for traditional media that would disrupt the news business in profound ways,” Hirsch said.

“And he had such a human touch. When my father died 13 years ago, I found a handwritten note in a basket on his nightstand from Dean Lowenstein. It was written after I had won an award: ‘I just wanted you to know how proud we are of your son. ...’ It was the first time I had seen it,” Hirsch said.

Also, Gale King, executive vice president of Nationwide Insurance; Mary Sellers, U.S. president of United Way Worldwide; Tony Award-winning producer Scott Sanders (Broadway’s “The Color Purple”); former “Saturday Night Live” cast member Darrell Hammond and best-selling crime fiction author Michael Connelly, who wrote “Blood Work,” the source novel for Clint Eastwood’s movie.

After retirement

Just before retiring, Lowenstein lamented that UF needed to improve its recruitment of top Black students, who, in 1993, made up just 5.7% of the school’s enrollment.

“African-Americans make up 18% of Alachua County’s population, and when all you can muster is 5%, then there’s a serious problem which somebody is not addressing,” Lowenstein told The Gainesville Sun at the time. “Something is wrong either with society or the university, and if society can’t correct it, then it’s up to the university to do something.”

Alas, according to UF’s Institutional Research site, the percentage of Black students is still only at 5.6%.

After retiring, Lowenstein stayed active with the Journalism School and the Gainesville community. Students and faculty still saw Lowenstein regularly strolling the halls of Weimer.

Survivors, services

Lowenstein’s survivors include his wife, Bronia, children Henry and Joan, and six grandchildren.

“He was a great storyteller,” Dean McFarlin said. “My favorite story is how he met Bronia on a blind double-date. He wasn’t paired with Bronia and, since it would have been rude to ask for her phone number, he went to her tiny New Mexico hometown afterward in the hope that he might run into her. As it turns out, she almost ran into him as she careened down the town’s main street. That led to a long and happy partnership.”

Services will be private due to the COVID pandemic.