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Academic or radical, Schwartz always thinks for himself
Sunday, February 21, 1999 By Byron Spice, Science Editor, Post-Gazette
Jeffrey Schwartz is the type of professor who favors coats and ties around the office. His gray hair and beard are always neatly trimmed. His Forbes Quadrangle office is cramped and cluttered, but the books that line the walls are well-ordered.
A tweedy professor? More like a bomb-throwing radical, the way some people tell it.
During his 25-year career at the University of Pittsburgh, the anthropologist has sometimes bucked prevailing wisdom within his field, such as his contention that orangutans, not chimpanzees and gorillas, are closest to humans on the primate family tree.
In other cases, he has eagerly waded into long-running debates, such as whether Neanderthals were a direct ancestor of modern humans (Schwartz argues they were a separate species).
But he always thinks for himself. "He looks at everything with fresh eyes," says Ian Tattersall, the chairman of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History who is working with Schwartz to redescribe the entire human fossil record. "He's not bound by doctrine."
Colleagues may disagree on whether Schwartz is an insightful genius or a loose cannon, but not on his skills as a physical anthropologist. When it comes to bones, teeth or fossils, he has a discerning eye for the telling detail.
"He's taught me a lot of morphology," says Judith Masters, a geneticist in Pietermartizburg, South Africa. Police call upon his skills, most recently to help identify 20-year-old David Lee Carroll after his skull and jaw were found late last year in a wooded section of the Hill District.
Born in Virginia but raised in New Jersey, Schwartz is the son of a pediatrician who also was a researcher of kidney diseases. His mother, trained as a nurse, was an artist who was drawn to media on the cutting edge. "My mother is one of the grandparents of computer art," he says.
Schwartz had planned to become a psychiatrist when he entered Columbia University in 1969. He majored in pre-med and anthropology "because that's what people did in the '60s."
But as his anthropology studies involved him in archaeological digs around the world, one interest led to another, and he opted to abandon the treatment of mental disorders for the study of fossils and evolution, particularly of primates. In 1974, he joined the Pitt anthropology faculty. His wife, Lynn Emanuel, is an award-winning poet and director of the Pitt English Department's creative writing program.
"He's always been quite a radical," Masters says. "So many people feel like they have to conform. ... But science has got to be about courage, not conformism."
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