I was very interested in attracting good foreign students to Buffalo since it was difficult for us to recruit the best American students who were more likely to receive funding at the Ivy League schools or at the more prestigious state universities. In fact a majority of my doctoral candidates have been foreign. In the 1970s and 80s there was Peter Walther from West Berlin, who wrote about the German historians who fled to the United States during the Nazi period. He is now a researcher at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
Then there was Sang-Woo Lim, who had served time in jail in South Korea because of his involvement in student protests and afterwards was not permitted to continue his studies there, but did so well on the Graduate Record Examination that we offered him a doctoral fellowship. He wrote a thesis on the émigré sociologist Albert Salomon and now has a professorship at Sogong University in Seoul. Next came Liang-kai Chou from Taiwan, who wrote on the historiography of British labor and who is now a professor in Taiwan; then Lixin Shao from Beijing who wrote on Nietzsche in China and remained in the United States.
Supriya Mukherjee from Calcutta and New Delhi, who was very much interested in German Jewish culture and in educational reform movements in Germany, wrote on the German Jewish psychologist William Stern. Henry Darcy, my oldest doctoral student, had fled Nazi Germany to Belgium as a political refugee, escaped to France when the Nazis invaded Belgium, was handed over to the Germans by the Vichy French, and imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp until its liberation in 1945. He wrote a dissertation on the Lex Heinze, a vice and morality law sponsored by the government under Wilhelm II and bitterly opposed by the Social Democrats.
During my period as chair of the department from 1981 to 1984, the director of graduate studies rejected two Asian women applicants, Supriyah Mukherjee who had accompanied her Indian husband who was a doctoral candidate in the economics department, and Shih-deh Chang who had accompanied her husband Liang-kai Chou. I concluded that both were highly qualified candidates, and overrode the director of graduate studies.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 132f