George Henry Collier

George Henry Collier, of Delaware Township, New Jersey, died in the early evening on April 18, 2015. The cause was prostate cancer. He was 94.

George was born in Minneapolis on January 3, 1921. His father George was a traveling salesman; his mother Nettie was a homemaker.

One of four siblings, George grew up in the still-small city of Minneapolis, in a neighborhood surrounded by a creek. He led a mischievous boyhood, wandering freely after school, climbing atop the many houses that were under construction in that period of suburban expansion. In high school he and a friend often went canoeing by themselves in the boundary waters of northern Minnesota.

It was a time of depression and drought, but through “some unknown quirk in my wiring,” he later wrote, he remained “an optimist who believed in progress.”

George attended the University of Minnesota from 1939 to 1942, and after a four-year hiatus to help with the war effort, he returned to complete his undergraduate and Master’s degrees in 1947. Prior to the war, George was a work-study student of the renowned behaviorist B. F. Skinner – an experience that would shape his career even as it left him with countless stories to tell about the famous scientist whom he called “Fred.”

In 1947, when he was accepted to Yale’s doctoral program, George received a telegram from Skinner, by then at Indiana, urging him to join the Psychology department there. Though his mentor would soon move to Harvard, George stayed at Indiana, where he memorized Skinner’s The Behavior of Organisms, was briefly married to an older doctoral student, and ultimately completed his Ph.D. in human visual psychophysics in 1951.

Over the next ten years, George held teaching positions at Northwestern University, Duke University, and the University of Missouri. In 1962 he accepted a position as Professor of Psychology at Rutgers College (now Rutgers University), where he taught for the next three decades while running a research program fueled by dedicated assistants. He directed fifteen dissertations, and many of his students went on to influential academic careers themselves.

George served as the Rutgers Psychology Department’s chairman for nine crucial years, during which he built it into a top-tier program.

George’s research program received continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health for forty-six years. He published nearly 150 articles, his most significant contributions coming in the field of nutrition. His meticulously designed experiments sought to understand the feeding behavior of animals, specifically how much work an animal was willing to perform to nourish itself, and how an animal could regulate its work output. Though he initially researched the physiological determinants of reinforcement by food, in his later work George took account of extra-physiological determinants (such as cognitive stimuli or evolution). In the process of developing this new approach, George essentially invented an entire field of research.

For his achievements, the Rutgers Board of Trustees in 1986 conferred on him its Distinguished Research Award, and the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior in 1997 honored him with its Distinguished Career Award.

George was a dedicated participant in his professional community. He served as President of the Eastern Psychological Association and as Divisional President of the American Psychological Association, and he was a member of numerous international societies. He also sat on the editorial boards of the leading journals in his field.

World War II had a profound and durable impact on George. He broke off his undergraduate education to enlist in 1942; the Army quickly discerned his intellectual gifts and sent him to Europe to interrogate POW’s and prepare intelligence reports. George arrived in the European theater on April 7, 1943. After D-Day, he was sent to France, where he served in a reconnaissance unit and was engaged in the Rhineland campaign. He was awarded several medals for his service.

George often reminisced about what he called “Uncle Sam’s Guided Tour,” though he rarely spoke about battle itself. Instead he told stories about congenial interactions with enemy soldiers, with whom he would sometimes drink and commiserate about the horror of war; about hard winter nights spent in trenches and the frostbite that left him with minimal use of his toes; about crawling on his belly behind enemy lines to gather intelligence. He also recalled the sometimes unbearably long stretches of empty time, during which he read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in its entirety.

George never spoke about his war experience without great emotion. For the rest of his life he held a deep-seated opposition to war that was born of his first-hand experience. In the late 1960s returned all his war medals to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

George married Joanne Schaniel on Christmas Eve in 1951. Over the next decade they had three sons: George, Jr., Jonathan, and James. As a couple they were deeply committed to social and political engagement, and in the 1960s they spent many a family weekend attending rallies and protest marches. A lover of wilderness, George also brought his sons on several months-long camping adventures in spectacular locales like the Olympic Mountains, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, and Glacier National Park.

In 1977, George married Carolyn Rovee, a noted child development specialist at Rutgers, and became stepfather to her two sons, Benjamin and Christopher. Working down the hall from one another at Rutgers, George and Carolyn shared professional as well as home lives: they read and commented on one another’s work, covered for one another’s classes at times of illness, and participated in one another’s research programs. Their students flowed easily between their adjacent laboratories.

In the 1980s, George visited Brazil at the invitation of a colleague at the University of São Paulo. He returned to Brazil five times in the next decade, to lecture, teach, and visit the friends he made there. In later years he spoke effusively about the country. His hosts at São Paulo always said “he had the soul of a Brazilian.”

For his last four decades, George took great pride in maintaining a family farm in Delaware Township, New Jersey. In the hot summers he would shovel tons of manure from the chicken coop; in the winters he would chop wood for the fireplace in the forested ravine behind the property; in the spring he would help sheep to deliver their lambs. His muddy boots by the side of the front door were a fixture that welcomed visitors to the house.

George retired in 1991, and though he continued to teach an occasional class at Rutgers, much of his last two decades were spent on his farm with his beloved dog, Hannah, a white golden retriever who for nearly sixteen years accompanied him on walks and runs in the fields outside his door. After Hannah died, George adopted Bo, another golden retriever, who rarely left his side. When it was no longer easy to walk, George used a golf cart to take Bo on daily runs.

Even as he became less mobile, George continued to feed his voracious appetite for knowledge. He read history after history (maintaining a habit he’d picked up during the war), and he took up poetry, which he wrote with characteristically pungent wit.

In his final years, George was cared for with great affection by Beth Harper, Tara Krommelbein, and Zena Ali. For the final three years of George’s life, his son James also lived with and took care of him.

George was preceded in death by his wife, Carolyn Rovee-Collier, who passed away in October, 2014; his brother, Phillip Collier; and his sister, Jeanne Denham. He is survived by his sister Nancy Beaver, of Springfield, Virginia; his sons George, Jr. (“Chip”), of Califon New Jersey; Jonathan, of Tampa, Florida; and James, of Stockton, New Jersey; and his stepsons George Benjamin Rovee, of Alison Park, Pennsylvania; and Christopher Rovee, of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Burial in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia is being planned at a later date under the direction of the Holcombe-Fisher Funeral Home, 147 Main Street, Flemington, NJ..