Believe it or not, Schubert doesn’t actually have a very large lead in the race for the title of the UW’s most-graduated graduate. Some twelve others have five distinct degrees, although two of the alums are dead and so unlikely to catch up.
It wasn’t always such a tight competition, though. Iva Mortimer ’20, MA’26, ’39, MS’40, PhD’47 was the first grad to cross the stage five times, and she held the record for nearly a quarter of a century.
Mortimer had good reason for seeking so much education, though it cost some thirty years of her life (making her, I guess, the UW’s most gradual graduate). She’d first come to the UW to study zoology, but had given up academia for love, marrying agronomy professor George Mortimer after she received her first master’s. After George died in 1934, she was left with a family to support, and as there were few zoological jobs for women in the 1930s, she turned to the more promising field of home economics. After completing three more degrees, she joined the faculty of what is today the UW School of Human Ecology, teaching food and nutrition until her retirement in 1965.
The Badger who finally came along to tie her record was Giancarlo Maiorino MA’68, MA’69, PhD’71, MA’71, PhD’73, and he did it in much less time. The key to his speedy collection of sheepskins, believe it or not, was simple.
“I pushed the system to the brink,” he explains.
Maiorino had taken his first steps toward higher education in his native Italy, though opportunities there were limited. His parents couldn’t afford to provide him with a classical education, and instead he received vocational training to become an accountant.
“The one thing I learned,” he says, “is that I could not be an accountant.”
He emigrated to America, ostensibly to study English at New York’s Long Island University, but while there he discovered a love of literature. He enrolled at UW-Madison because “it was the only western university anyone in New York had ever heard of,” he says, “and it was the first university to accept my application.”
Then things get a little dicey. In Madison, Maiorino knew that he wanted to study Italian, art history, and comparative literature, which would mean covering several different — if related — academic areas. Yet with limited finances, he also knew he didn’t have forever to spend in school, so he’d have to be clever as well as bright.
“I used my imagination and street smarts,” he says. Graduate students were allowed to take only three courses a semester, and needed special permission from their department chair and dean to take a fourth. “But registration wasn’t done with computers then,” he says, “and you were allowed to add or drop courses at will during the first week of each semester. So I just added more courses than I dropped. It worked.”
To ensure his workload didn’t overwhelm him, Maiorino again relied on street smarts. As most of his courses were related thematically, he coordinated topics for his papers, using them for multiple classes and combining them to form the heart of his theses and dissertations. By 1973, as he was finishing up his second doctorate, he realized he was accomplishing something unprecedented.
“I thought the university would be so proud of me,” he says. “Instead, I was treated like a criminal.”
When the grad school discovered Maiorino’s actions, a dean threatened to block his second doctorate. But as he’d amassed some 180 credits with the full support of his department, there was little anyone could do to stop him. He picked up his fifth degree and soon left to join the comparative lit department at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he became the Rudy Professor of comparative literature. He retired in 2008.
Within a couple of years of Maiorino’s departure, the number of mega-degreed graduates would shoot upward: Jaafar Al-Abdulla MS’57, ’64, MS’67, PhD’74, MS’75; Kathleen Lindas MS’64, MS’74, MS’75, PhD’77, MS’77;
Lynette Korenic ’77, MA’78, MFA’79, MA’81, MA’84;
Farhad Jafari ’77, MS’79, PhD’83, MA’86, PhD’89; Karen Michaelis ’72, ’74, MS’85, PhD’88, JD’89; and Teri-Christine Hall ’76, ’78, MS’82, MS’87, PhD’90 all tied Mortimer and Maiorino before Robert Schubert came along. And after Schubert, Joan Price ’84, MA’86, PhD’91, MA’92, MFA’93; William Schmitz ’85, MS’92, MS’93, PhD’97, MS’99; Terence Ow ’88, MS’90, MBA’92, MS’94, PhD’00; and Ryan Toonen ’99, ’02, MS’05, MA’07, PhD’07 also reached the five-degree plateau. But no one has broken Schubert’s mark, or even tied it.
Until, believe it or not, this August.