Alumni and Friends

Welcome Alumni & Friends

In 2013-14 we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the birth of the School of Humanities, Social Science, and Education (HSSE), the forerunner of the College of Liberal Arts. This historic event marked the moment that liberal arts began in earnest to build its future as Purdue’s center for excellence in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

Our alumni vividly demonstrate that excellence in many fields and communities across the globe—so we’ve asked 50 of them to tell us more about their careers and lives, via a modified version of the Proust questionnaire. This survey of revealing questions was a popular parlor game in Marcel Proust’s time, made famous by his answers and adapted by Vanity Fair and the show Inside the Actors Studio. We hope you enjoy getting to know these fascinating and inspiring CLA alumni.

Robert Heiber

Robert J. Heiber

BA 1973, Communication – Radio, TV, & Film

When you pop in a DVD of a classic movie to unwind over the weekend, you might just have a Purdue grad to thank for the fantastic sound of some of your favorite old films. Bob Heiber is Vice President of Audio for Deluxe Media Services at Chace Audio by Deluxe, a group that specializes in the restoration and remastering of motion picture sound tracks, including those for films like West Side Story, Lawrence of Arabia, Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Patton. Heiber has been involved in film sound preservation and restoration since he joined the company in 1990, and as president of the board for The Rick Chace Foundation, named after the company’s founder, he has helped produce the series A Century of Sound: The History of Sound in Motion Pictures with the UCLA Film and Television Archive. But one of his personal experiences with film history also stands out when he thinks of his career.

“In 1988 I was working as an operations manager for Warner Bros. at the former Samuel Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood,” he recalls. “I was responsible for setting up the editing rooms, and one project was the restoration of Lawrence of Arabia, a personal favorite. One day when I visited the editing room, I saw Anne V. Coates, the film’s editor, with a rather elderly gentleman. She then introduced him as David Lean, the film’s director. Little did I know that in my next job at Chace Audio, I would end up supervising the remastering of the film’s soundtrack for both DVD and Blu-ray release in the late 1990s and 2000s.”

Read on for Heiber’s responses to our version of the Proust survey.