Our long-time colleague Gordon E. Baker passed away on January 13, 2004, a little more than a month after celebrating his 80th birthday. Gordon was born December 6, 1923, in Poughkeepsie, New York, but was raised in Tacoma, Washington.

Gordon was a member of the World War II generation. He received several medals for valor while serving as a corporal in the combat infantry under U.S. Army General “Terrible Terry” Allen in Belgium from 1943 to 1946. After the war he returned to his education—graduating from Reed College in 1948—and to a marriage that would last for more than half a century. He received an M.A. from the University of Washington in 1949, did postgraduate work at Brown University, and received his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University in 1952. That same year, Gordon began his teaching career at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in what turned out to be a lifetime appointment. He advanced to full professor in 1965, served as department chair from 1965 to 1971, and became professor emeritus from 1993. He was recalled seven times to teach after retirement, the last time in the winter of 1998.

His most influential work was undoubtedly The Reapportionment Revolution: Representation, Political Power, and the Supreme Court (1966); an earlier book was Rural Versus Urban Political Power: The Nature and Consequences of Unbalanced Representation (1955). Later contributions to the literature on gerrymandering appeared in books edited by Nelson Polsby and Bernard Grofman. He was consulted by court-appointed Masters who redrew the boundaries of California's legislative and congressional districts (a distinction shared by Condoleeza Rice, who—he later said—was not yet in over her head). In subsequent years he served as a consultant and expert witness on reapportionment and related litigation in the states of Wyoming and New York.

An expert on American political thought, Gordon co-authored (with his Princeton mentor Alpheus T. Mason) Free Government in the Making: Readings in American Political Thought (fourth edition, 1985). Gordon's research won support from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Social Science Research Foundation. In 1979 and again in 1980, grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities funded his direction of special eight-week seminars for college teachers to “work under the supervision of a distinguished scholar”; the acclaim of his students in these seminars recognized his comparable distinction as a teacher. In service to the profession, he was a member of the American Political Science Association's Council from 1968 to 1970, serving on its Executive Committee in 1968–1969.

Gordon was far from a clean-desk man. His close friend Don Balmer of Lewis and Clark College—their association went back to graduate school days at the University of Washington—was recruited to teach at UCSB in the summer of 1979. But his real challenge was to clean out Gordon's office:

Happily, Gordon clung as closely to his friends and former students as he did to the material that never found its way to his waste basket.

Gordon was an indispensable figure in the evolution of Santa Barbara Teachers College into UCSB, a major research center. He led the department at a pivotal period in its growth. In departmental governance, Gordon was a Jeffersonian democrat: his department was a democracy, not an oligarchy. Not fanatical about consensus, Gordon nevertheless thought it beneficial for his department, and worth spending some time to achieve. But at heart he was inherently conservative: he could leaven Jefferson with Burke. Favoring discipline and experience over consciousness raising, he resisted the more radical proposals urged by student activists of the 1960s and 1970s. Long after he had left the chair, he remained the department's memory and the guardian of its precedents. His command of the rules of departmental practice, most of which he had nurtured into existence, was astonishing.

Gordon was a caring, gentle man whose mentoring was warmly remembered in cards and letters sent by dozens of his students to mark his 80th birthday. He was a model as well for his colleagues, especially the junior faculty who were nurtured by his strong sense of fairness. While that sense may not have leveled all ranks—to borrow from Gordon's beloved Gilbert and Sullivan—it came close: in presiding over the department's relocation to a new building, he assigned office space on the basis of use rather than seniority. All department chairs will appreciate the grit it took to give a larger office to an assistant than to a full professor.

His optimistic, informal style was pervasive and hardly ever left him, even during his struggle with a debilitating stroke. One of the endearing attributes that sustained him in this trying period was the joy he always could find in small things: his quest for the perfect dessert remains the stuff of legend in UCSB food management circles.

Gordon Baker will be sorely missed. The strength of character so much admired by his friends, colleagues, and students is captured in one of his favorite quotations: “The teachers you seek: Truth, Wisdom and Strength … They are all within you.” He was preceded in death by his son Jefferson, and he leaves behind his wife June and his daughter Lesley.