T o come of age, as I did, in a single parent household with a mentally ill father languishing in another state, never knowing my father’s father and losing my one adored grandfather as a boy, meant that I looked to other men for how to be. At some point, Henry Rosovsky, who died at the age of 95 last Veterans Day, became my third grandfather, as we both referred to him. An acclaimed academic reformer, Rosovsky would change the public idea of what it means to be a modern educated person. For me, it was my private good fortune to have in him my own Eminent Professor of Life.

Rosovsky, as a small Jewish boy in the Free City of Danzig (later Gdańsk), Poland, walked to school accompanied by an enormous Great Dane to protect him from local fascists. Eventually, Nazi incursions on daily Jewish life forced Rosovsky’s family of four to flee, first to Belgium and eventually across the Atlantic. By the winter of 1941, when he was 14, he was beginning again, at Joan of Arc Junior High, in New York. There, his European cold-weather school attire — short pants and woolen stockings — made him unpleasantly conspicuous. The purchase of a lumber jacket and long pants eliminated the problem. That ease of assimilation as a teenager was something Rosovsky would think back on at times including when he saw that Black train passengers in North Carolina rode separately in a Jim Crow car and, later, in Miami Beach with his mother, where he noted the many apartment buildings with large signs out front banning Jews from entry. Rosovsky would eventually dedicate his life to reimagining higher education as a force for tolerance and inclusivity. Keep Feet Warm

After military service, first in World War II and then again on the frozen battlefields of Korea’s 38th parallel, Rosovsky came home with damaged feet, a purple heart, and a feeling for Asia that deepened throughout his career as an economic historian specializing in Japan.

But first, he would meet his wife. At a New York party in the mid-1950s, Rosovsky encountered a striking Israeli student named Nitza Brown. He immediately saw fit to warn her that her country’s lack of compassion for Palestinian refugees would create endless Middle East conflict. He was prescient and, after a sharp debate, smitten. This was the beginning of an animated lifelong conversation featuring many more debates, these often concluding with an “Oh, Henry!” and her dismissive wave. Over the years, it would be observed that out of his wife’s hearing, Rosovsky brought her up often as the image of perfection in an imperfect world.

Rosovsky began teaching economics at Harvard in 1965. He would chair the department and, in 1973, become the university’s first Jewish Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He would twice serve as Harvard’s acting president.

As an administrator in the 1970s and ’80s, Rosovsky committed himself to transforming Harvard — in his view still too much of an old-boy, Anglo-Saxon finishing school — into a modern university. He added rigor and range to the Harvard undergraduate education by requiring that all degree candidates take a series of courses in the sciences, arts, and social sciences. What became known as the “Core Curriculum” followed a worldly premise: When young people engage widely with the life experiences of those from differing backgrounds, Rosovsky said, they achieve “intellectual sympathy for one another.” Other of his recommendations were the founding of what would become Harvard’s department of African American studies and the university’s Center for Jewish Studies.

When pressed to answer his own oft-posed question to students about which global resource they considered the most undervalued, Rosovsky’s answer was women. He supported the founding of the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh, and in his 1991 book, “The University: An Owner’s Manual,” he called out the minimizing of sexual harassment on college campuses.

A bespectacled pipe smoker, Rosovsky appeared unprepossessing, but as the bespoke tweeds and flannels he ordered from a local Italian tailor suggested, he was no dismal scientist. In conversation, he could display decanal erudition, but his personal outlook was searching and nonjudgmental. His view of his longtime secretary’s side business selling sex toys was that the economics department had a successful entrepreneur on the payroll.

Though he referred to himself as “someone who lives in the old times,” my third grandfather was a true believer in sunscreen and dental floss. He exhorted the young to call out immorality and evil and to stay the course with worthy causes across the many years it might take a society to embrace them. He enjoyed Japanese tea rituals, vintage Hudson sedans, Duke Ellington, classic detective novels, films by Alfred Hitchcock and Carol Reed, aged Macallan whisky, and the eccentric ways of his mentor in economics at Harvard, Alexander Gerschenkron, who really was my grandfather, on my mother’s side, and who introduced me to Rosovsky in the mid-1970s, when I was a teenager.

Gerschenkron was an economist of such range and distinction that he could critique a hundred different translations of Shakespeare and lectured at Harvard on Tolstoy. Rosovsky esteemed him to such an extent that he lugged Sartorius von Waltershausen’s “Economic History of Germany” — a gift from Gerschenkron — through Korea in his soldier’s knapsack. At Harvard, in imitation of his mentor, Rosovsky kept a bottle of Rémy Martin VSOP cognac and two tiny glasses in his bottom desk drawer for toasting grad-student achievements. With me, Rosovsky referred to Gerschenkron as “The Master,” and “Your Distinguished Ancestor,” and “The Reason I Put Up With You.”

All my life, to Rosovsky I was “Nicky Boy,” which is what Gerschenkron had called me. Rosovsky never let me pay for anything, explaining that this was Gerschenkron’s rule with the younger and should likewise one day be mine. He taught me that it’s exemplary to be curious but even better to be optimistic, and to keep every love letter I’d ever receive. No matter the hardships life presents, he believed, adversity is really an opportunity for ingenuity. On the tennis court, Rososvky, nearly 40 years older than me and playing on feet damaged during the frigid retreat from the Yalu River, would offer commentary on my shots as they sailed past him, an exaltation of adjectives that were much funnier than I was good. By literally outwitting me, he always left our games the winner.

We followed the Red Sox together from afar, just as Gerschenkron and I once had. Rosovsky discussed the pastime with a brio that made what I already enjoyed seem even better. Much of this had to do with the losing. By 2004, the Red Sox had not won the World Series in nearly 80 years, establishing a Chekhovian reputation for imaginative defeat. As the Series began, Rososvky prescribed daring and more daring, by quoting the French revolutionary Georges Danton: “De l’audace, encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace.” Rosovsky meant that such committed audacity is always what it takes to achieve a new order of things.

Yet with Boston on the cusp of victory, Rosovsky himself remained cautious, now offering Danziggian reflection: “The demons of past years remain a haunting memory.” And when the Sox finally won, Rosovsky was melancholy. He liked the effort of overcoming, he said, far better than victory. Anybody could win, but only the Red Sox could lose like that.

We eventually toasted the World Series victory with a tiny glass of Rémy Martin. Thinking back, I see that rare was our visit when he didn’t find some reason to raise a tiny glass. Happy is the man who lives to praise others. And just as storytellers understand that sad stories achieve more lasting emotional purchase if they begin with humor, tactically minded third grandfathers know that playful calumny and derision are the effective precursors to fond encomiums at parting. Following Gerschenkron, Rosovsky called these farewells “honey in my ear.” As in, “Nicky Boy, seeing you is (almost) like a quick brandy with The Master.” As in, “Nicky Boy, we will remember only your good intentions.”

Nicholas Dawidoff is the author of “The Fly Swatter,” a memoir of his grandfather and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and the just-published “The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice and the American City.”

Warm Running Socks Work at Boston Globe Media