University Times

Nathan Hershey, right, received the University Senate Service Award in 2003. Hershey created the award in 1999 to recognize those who made outstanding contributions to the Senate. Presenting Hershey with the award was then-President James Cassing.

Nathan (Nat) Hershey, a longtime Graduate School of Public Health faculty member credited with founding the field of health law, died April 15, 2017, of complications from a fall in an Austin, Texas, hospital.

He was 86.

He had been ill with Alzheimer’s disease for several years but — typical of his legacy as a professor and a passionate leader of the University Senate, colleagues say — still fought for the right of people facing such illnesses to have more control over their lives.

“A person should be the master of his or her fate,” he told the University Times in 2014. “I feel like I’ve had a complete life by my standards.”

“He had a very strong sense of trying to have fairness and justice,” recalled another former Senate president, John Baker, an emeritus associate professor of oral biology in the School of Dental Medicine. Baker served under Hershey when Hershey formed several ad hoc committees to handle a variety of issues, during what Baker remembers as a contentious era.

“Hershey was effective at a time of particular political interest,” Baker said. Hershey was especially successful when it came to pushing for benefits for employees in same-sex relationships in the face of resistance from University administrators, Baker noted.

When the Pitt office charged with research oversight required new guidelines, Baker said, Hershey also pressed for involvement by the Senate. “Rather than just have the administration do it, he insisted on forming an ad hoc panel of faculty to contribute to the revision,” Baker said.

Hershey was also instrumental in the effort to accelerate the faculty grievance procedure and in creating a method for faculty to evaluate department chairs and deans, Baker recalled.

“He was effective as a faculty leader because he was very persistent in bringing [issues] up to the administration,” he said.

“He could be very blunt,” Baker added. “He didn’t beat around the bush. But once you got to know him he really was a nice person. He was a very friendly person,” opening each Senate session with a joke or story.

“He was a unique individual and I think the University is a lot better off for his involvement in the Senate.”

Hershey graduated from New York University in 1950 with a B.A. in history and earned his law degree from Harvard in 1953.

After a stint in the Army he spent several years with a New York law firm, then joined Pitt as an assistant research professor of health law in 1958. In 1968 he became director of the health law training program in public health, rising through the academic ranks to become professor of health law in 1971.

Hershey was an elected member of the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences.

His many publications include the books “Hospital Law Manual, Human Experimentation and the Law” (1976) and “Hospital-Physician Relationships: Case Studies and Commentaries on Medical Staff Problems” (1982).

Hershey served on many committees at his school, and as Senate vice president and president for three terms each. He also was involved in many of the Senate’s committees across two decades.

Dean Donald S. Burke memorialized Hershey in a note to the Pitt community as a “champion for justice and equity” who could also disarm a colleague with an invitation to play basketball.

“Nat would frequently stop in to give me advice about running the school, usually unbidden, but always on the mark,” Burke wrote. Alumni of the health and policy management program “almost to a person, fondly tell me about their memories of Nat as a beloved teacher, mentor and role model.”

He is survived by his daughter Suzanne.
—Marty Levine