[2] Shortly after obtaining a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1969,[3] he was appointed assistant professor of Greek and Latin in the Classics Department.
As Dean, he was a forceful advocate of coeducation, going so far as to hold a faculty vote without the knowledge of the university's president, William McGill.
[5] As a professor in Columbia's Classics Department, he produced a number of notable works of scholarship, including the book The Necessities of War: A Study of Thucydides' Pessimism, which won the university's Lionel Trilling Award.
His second wife, Susan Rieger, author of The Divorce Papers and The Heirs, is a former administrator at Yale and Columbia Universities.
His third wife, Katherine Dalsimer, is a Clinical Professor of Psychology at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, and an author.