Sad News: Professor Emeritus Ricardo Morant
Aug. 23, 2019
Dear Colleagues,
I write to share the sad news of the passing of Ricardo Bernardino Morant, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Volen National Center for Complex Systems, on August 21, 2019 at the age of 93. His beloved wife, Paquita, predeceased him. He is survived by his four children Ramon, Francisca, Dolores, and Ricardo, and his most adored grandchildren.
Ricardo was born in New Britain, Connecticut. He received his BA from Harvard University in 1948 while also serving in the US Naval Reserves from 1946-1948. He went on to receive an MA and PhD in experimental psychology from Clark University in 1950 and 1952 respectively. He joined Brandeis after completing his doctorate in 1952, he was granted tenure in 1960, and he held the Minnie and Harold L. Fierman Chair in Psychology from 1968 until his retirement in 2005. Brandeis President Abram Sachar in his book A Host At Last said in his summary of the successful establishment of the department of psychology at Brandeis that, “Much of the credit for creating a climate of amicable dissidence belongs to the two men who had the most to do with developing the program and who, between them, chaired it for twenty years, Abraham Maslow and Ricardo Morant.”
The following is from his close colleague and friend Professor Jim Lackner, the Meshulam and Judith Riklis Professor of Physiology.
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Ricardo Morant was a foundational figure in the emergence of Brandeis University as a premier research institution. He joined Brandeis after receiving his doctorate in experimental psychology from Clark University in 1952. Brandeis had been founded in 1948. Abraham Maslow, the originator of humanistic psychology, had joined the faculty in 1951. He and Morant became friends and collaborators, and they worked together to build the Department of Psychology at the still young university. They soon recruited Richard Held and Ulric Neisser and several clinical and gestalt psychologists. In so doing, they established Brandeis University as a leading world center for humanistic psychology, gestalt psychology, and the empirical study of cognition, movement adaptation, and perception.
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Ricardo Morant, known to his colleagues as Ric, performed with his students remarkably wide-ranging and pioneering studies in many fields of psychology, including the development of object perception in infants, auditory and visual localization, and visual motion illusions. His work on alterations in auditory localization during exposure to angular acceleration was highly relevant to aviation medicine and to the understanding of the biological basis of illusory changes in sensory localization that occur in aerospace conditions. These classic studies still influence current work on the auditory illusions experienced in high performance aircraft during high-g maneuvers. His studies with his graduate students on color vision and the role of head orientation in the generation of the long-lasting McCullough effect are elegant. He was one of the first scientists to demonstrate multisensory influences on the perception of the vertical, which arose from his interest in how humans adapt to rotated visual fields. His broad interests in art and aesthetics led to a classic paper with Abe Maslow on “Art judgment and the judgment of others.”
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Ricardo Morant was greatly admired and respected for his role as a gifted teacher and mentor to young students. He earned their gratitude, and he was devoted to helping them succeed. He influenced generations of Brandeis students, many of whom went on to careers in psychology and made important contributions to work on auditory and visual perception, self-perception, and adaptation to unusual sensory conditions. Many of these “Morant offspring” are still active, and their students have also become major contributors to the understanding of human behavior and performance. Thus his influence has lived on generationally.
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The seminar classes that Morant led were renowned for the way in which he taught students to think about research, to ask challenging questions about the unknown, and to analyze what was known. Ricardo Morant was able, with his keen analytic skills, to show students how to break down a problem into understandable, tractable components, and how best to evaluate them experimentally. His seminars were instrumental in having many students decide to pursue academic research careers.
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For many years, Morant was the Chairman of the Brandeis Department of Psychology. He assembled a faculty with expertize spanning fields from humanistic, clinical, developmental, social, and experimental psychology to neuropsychology, always recruiting outstanding faculty members. He was a kind and supportive Chairman, encouraging and bringing out the best in his faculty through his mentoring and advice. He was a man of great intellectual depth, and his range of knowledge was matched only by his modesty. He was a voice of rationality in the sometimes tumultuous times at Brandeis in the 1960s and 1970s. He always strove to bring out the best in people.
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His lectures in introductory experimental psychology, a large class taken by all psychology majors, were renowned for their substance and clarity. He profoundly respected his students and believed that all of them were capable of doing outstanding things if they put their heads and hearts into them. This was a guiding theme of the last lecture that he gave on the day of his retirement after 60 years of teaching at Brandeis. He gave the students advice about the complexity of the challenges that they faced in a rapidly changing and complicating world, and how to cope with adversity and to bring balance and perspective to their lives.
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Ricardo Morant was a man of consummate integrity and goodwill. He always looked for the best in his colleagues and students. He loved research and never lost his joy in thinking about experiments and analyzing problems. He was always thinking about how to achieve new insights. His beloved wife, Paquita, predeceased him and gave him a lasting sorrow that never faded. But, his grace and enthusiasm and encouragement of others never waned. He was one of the great pioneers of academia, who helped to lay the basis for the great university that Brandeis has become. Ricardo Morant embodied grace, culture, and a critical insightful mind, qualities that are precious in any time and in any situation. He was, and still is in our memories, a man for all to emulate.
Please join me in extending our deepest sympathies to Ricardo Morant’s family, many friends and colleagues.
Sincerely,
Lisa M. Lynch, Provost