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Passings

05/22/03
Former Keck School Dean Gordon B. Goodhart dies at 89.
Goodhart was medical dean at USC from 1953 to 1956.

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Gordon B. Goodhart, who served as dean of the Keck School of Medicine of USC in the mid-1950s, has died. He was 89.

Goodhart, a 1935 graduate of Occidental College and a 1943 graduate of the Stanford University School of Medicine, was medical dean at USC from 1953 to 1956.

During his tenure, the school launched its Diamond Jubilee Campaign, which rasied more than $1 million in 1955 for the construction of McKibben Hall and the Mudd Laboratory Building.

By all accounts, Goodhart was a democratic administrator. He expanded the school’s executive committee to include representation from all departments and consistently put major issues to a faculty vote.

He then returned to school for a residency in psychiatry and was in private practice in Los Angeles for 15 years. He also taught for a period at UCLA.

Goodhart was born July 12, 1913, in Riverside, Calif., and attended public schools in Long Beach. In 1941, he married Ruth Forrester.

He served in the Army Medical Corps during World War II. In 1974, the Goodharts retired to Santa Barbara.

He died April 10 in an assisted living facility in Santa Cruz, where he and his wife, who died in February, had resided. The couple had no children.