Ray Ginger - Later Career

Later Career

The doors opened again in 1960, when Brandeis University was sufficiently impressed with his abilities and achievements to offer him an assistant professorship in the history department. He stayed at Brandeis for six years, becoming a tenured full professor, chairing the Committee on American Civilization, writing several more books, coaching the tennis team, and evolving rare pedagogical gifts. His lectures were legendary, less for their adept showmanship than for Ginger's uncanny ability to entice even the greenest and most awkward undergraduate to join him on a mutually thrilling journey of intellectual exploration. This remarkable talent received tangible acknowledgment many years after his death, when a former student (William Friedman, Brandeis '65), raised $2.5 million to endow the Ray Ginger Professorship of History at the university.

After leaving Brandeis in 1966, Ginger taught briefly at Stanford University and moved on to tenured positions at Wayne State University in Detroit and the University of Calgary, in Alberta, Canada. He died in Boston in 1975, of complications from acute alcoholism, survived by his third wife and two sons from his first marriage. Most of his papers were subsequently presented to the Labor History Archives at Wayne State University, where they are available for scholarly consultation.