Harriet Fleisher Berger

Harriet Fleisher Berger was a trailblazer. She was a curious thinker and a practitioner of feminism before the term became familiar in the field of political science. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1938, married, and raised two sons. After graduation, she became a researcher at the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. This was a pathway for young women at that time since many of the traditional academic pathways were often limited for women. In addition to her research at the ILGWU, she also helped start the first union medical clinic in Philadelphia. Her family came from an aristocratic-type family, who owned a garment manufacturing business in Philadelphia which provided them with a comfortable standard of life. Throughout her life Dr. Berger, in addition to her teaching, actively worked as an anti-colonialist, a liberal, an environmentalist, a conservationist, a labor organizer, and a New Deal Democrat.

Early in her life, after her father sold his interest in the family garment manufacturing business which provided the family with considerable assets, her parents moved from Philadelphia to Boston. Her mother trained there as an architect, eventually becoming the fourth female certified architect in Pennsylvania, and her father attended Harvard to become a landscape designer. Her mother would have attended Harvard, but they had no such program for women in her field. These experiences helped to shape Harriet's views throughout her life.

During WWII she and her husband lived on the West coast where she became an early member of the Sierra Club of California, before it was a national or international organization. She was always a proponent that there could be full employment and at the same time the environment could be effectively managed, it was not a zero sum game.

After WWII she became involved in civic reform and Democratic politics in Philadelphia, along with her husband, noted attorney David Berger. Harriet raised two sons, Daniel and Jonathan whom she was very proud of. Eventually, her civic duty again called and she helped form the East Falls Community Council which addressed a variety of issues including land use as well as racial issues. As her children grew she decided to return to graduate school. She received her MA in Political Science in 1958 from the University of Pennsylvania. Her work included the recognition that the social sciences were not the same as the natural sciences and there may be excesses of science in the social sciences.

Harriet became a trailblazer, one of the first female to receive a PhD in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania in the post-WWII period, she wrote her dissertation on collective bargaining in the public sector. At Penn, she studied under Professor Henry Abraham, which lead to her to teaching courses in Constitutional Law, at Drexel. Dr. Berger was the first full-time female political scientist hired by Drexel University in 1967. Harriet was the first woman in our History and Politics Department at Drexel University. This fall our Department will be over thirty percent female.

Throughout her career she presented and published a number of scholarly papers and articles in the field of labor law, history, and politics, as well as the presidency. These included such works as “Clerk v. Mailhandler: Jurisdictional Disputes in the Postal Service” as well as “Nomination/Confirmation to the NLRB: A Constraint of Presidential Power?” Dr. Berger also participated in the NEH Visiting Fellowship Program.

Harriet Berger was an early advocate for diversity. She actively championed the hiring of minorities to our Department, well before formal affirmative action procedures were ever considered, which resulted in excellent hires.

Harriet embraced new ideas throughout her academic career. She actively sought to link the University to the neighboring community and the broader world. Harriet served as a Cooperative Education liaison for our students. At Drexel, many of the students work six months a year in the world or work and attend school for the other six months. This model is designed to promote learning in and out of the classroom. Through this role she sought to have students placed in public sector positions. She was always interested in what others were exploring as well as sharing her own work. She organized her students to go into the field on Election Day as poll watchers as a vehicle to better understand the political process. While at Drexel, Harriet was responsible for teaching American Government, Urban Politics and Constitutional Law, where she was an award-winning teacher.

Throughout her life, Harriet developed significant long-term personal and professional relationships with a number of political figures. As a result of her relationship with Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, she started a yearly trip to visit the US Supreme Court where students read about pending cases and then saw the arguments presented. On a number of occasions, Justice Brennan himself took time out to meet with her students. She actively mentored many, especially women, who then entered the legal profession. Dr. Berger introduced Constitutional Law courses at Drexel. While not involved in the creation of the School, this path has evolved into establishment of the Earle Macke School of Law at Drexel in 2006, which our Department is connected to in terms of scholarship and teaching.

Dr. Berger was also interested in Jamaican politics and maintained a friendship with Prime Minister Norman Manley and his wife, noted sculptor, Edna Manley. He was the first Prime Minister of the independent nation of Jamaica. She also had a personal relationship and was a supporter of their son, Prime Minister Michael Manley. This gave her a unique insight into other political systems. She capitalized on this relationship by coordinating efforts between Jamaica and the Drexel University Appropriate Technology program. Harriet used this and other numerous other relationships with public figures in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, nationally, and internationally, to link students and faculty with opportunities that they might otherwise not have.

Her interactions with other faculty always involved being engaged in the discussion of ideas, communication, and collegiality. In addition, Harriet was one who embraced the concept of the “Salon.” Each year she would invite a number of colleagues and friends to her home for a light meal, engaging conversation, and often a musical concert presented by members of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Dr. Berger was one who quietly did good deeds. Unknown to many, she personally provided financial support for students when they were in need. She successfully worked to encourage women to enter the field of law. She also supported progressive political candidates and causes financially, and with her energy.

After retiring, Harriet was a supporter and promoter of student artists as well as a financial contributor to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where she was also enrolled as a student. Dr. Berger passed away in May, 2012.

—William L. Rosenberg, PhD Department of History and Politics Drexel University

Elinor Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom (1933–2012) began her academic career as a trailing spouse; she was not even interviewed when in 1965 Indiana University recruited her more senior husband and intellectual partner, the eminent and also recently deceased Vincent Ostrom. Within a year and a considerable amount of inadequately compensated work (including teaching an American Government class at 7:30 am), she established her place as a member of the faculty and went on to chair the Political Science department in the 1980s. In 1973 she and Vincent launched the Workshop, which Indiana University recently rechristened as The Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis.

Lin continued to establish her place in the many years that followed: She was president of the Public Choice Society (1982–1984), Midwest Political Science Association (1984–5), and American Political Science Association (1996–7). At the time of her death she held the positions of Distinguished Professor, Indiana University, Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science and professor (part time) in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Senior Research Director, Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University, and Founding Director, Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity, Arizona State University, Tempe. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991, the National Academy of Sciences in 2001, and the American Philosophical Society in 2006. The recipient of the Johann Skytte Prize in 1999 and of more then ten honorary doctorates, she won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009—the first (and only) woman to do so and the second political scientist (following Herbert Simon). In 2012 Time Magazine named her as one the 100 most influential people in the world.

Lin's scholarly productivity and impact are staggering. She authored or edited over 30 books and over 600 articles and book chapters. As per Google scholar, her work has been cited about 54,000 times, with Governing the Commons alone having 14,000 citations! Looking at the range of journals in which her work was published and cited, it is clear she was a rare scholar who contributed to and was recognized by natural, physical, and social sciences.

According to Lin herself, her work focused on “ how to develop better analyses of how institutions affect behavior and outcomes in diverse settings” (Reference Ostrom2010). Governing the Commons (Reference Ostrom1990), her most famous book, documented cases throughout the world of community-based solutions to common pool resource problems and theorized the kinds of institutions and conditions that made it possible (or difficult) to govern the commons. She went on to build a more general framework of institutions (Ostrom Reference Ostrom2005; Crawford and Ostrom Reference Crawford and Ostrom1995). Using that framework, she analyzed, often with co-authors, a wide variety of phenomena, including development aid (Gibson, Ostrom, Andersson, and Shivakumar Reference Gibson, Ostrom, Andersson and Shivakumar2005), trust (Ostrom and Walker Reference Ostrom and Walker2002), and the most contemporary challenges to the commons (Dolšak and Ostrom Reference Dolšak and Ostrom2003). In a fairly recent article in Science (Reference Ostrom2009a), she offers “A general framework for analyzing the sustainability of social-ecological systems.”

Lin built theories, she tested them, and she extended them. Her goal was to make progress in understanding a wide variety of collective action problems. She used rational choice theory informed by advances in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics to ensure the realism of her assumptions about human reasoning and its limits. Her most elegant expression of her intellectual approach is in her APSA presidential address in 1997 (Reference Ostrom1998).

Underlying all that she did and that made her scholarship so compelling were three commitments. The first was that the best solutions to complex problems were often polycentric. Polycentricity implies that different governance mechanisms are efficiently provided at different scales. This held whether one was talking of a centralized state or a centralized municipal body. Her early work in the 1970s challenged the then prevalent notion about municipal consolidation. She and her students delved deeply into this issue and found that consolidation of urban services was problematic both on theoretical and empirical grounds. In conducting the fieldwork on police organizations, she often rode in police cars to observe how police personnel performed on their jobs. Her claim that no other political scientists had spent so much time in police cars as she did was a source of bonding and friendly competition with Margaret Levi, one of the co-authors of this piece, whose dissertation was on police unions.

She did not believe in institutional monoculture that tends to privilege the market or the state as the solution to governance problems. It used to infuriate her when the assumption was made that she was anti-government. She recognized that sometimes governments—and markets—were part of the problem, but sometimes they were a part of the solution. In her perspective diverse actors and stakeholders are always necessary albeit in different combinations and to different degrees, depending on the context and the problem to be solved.

The second commitment was that good research demands a vast array of skills and methods. The tools she used included case study research, fieldwork, game theory (which she learned in her 40s), experimental methods and agent-based modeling (learned in her late 50s), and remote sensing technology (learned in her 70s). But she was the first to admit that her acquisition of the skills and her practice of them in the most sophisticated ways required collaborators, often students who had become experts in a substantive area or in a method.

Collaboration constituted her third commitment. Nowhere does she describe the intertwined commitments to multiple methods and collaborative work better than in her interview in Annual Review of Political Science (Ostrom Reference Ostrom2009b) and in her recent co-authored book with Amy Poteete and Marco Janssen (Reference Poteete, Janssen and Ostrom2010).

All of the recognition and honors she received and all the major publications fail to capture how personally impressive, influential, and generous Lin was, and they certainly fail to capture the extent to which she created not only wrote about commons. She was and probably remains the person who served on the most committees at APSA. Her list of co-authors and students is immense.

Lin was a conscientious teacher. Students in her institutional analysis seminar were expected to write extensive memos on the assigned readings, and she would write a return memo, often handwritten, individually to all students. She always had time for her advisees, notwithstanding her arduous travel commitments. An invitation to drive with her to Indianapolis airport came with the promise of her undivided attention.

Lin chaired 70 doctoral committees and served as a member on 48 doctoral committees. She was a demanding mentor and expected high quality work. She attentively tracked the progress of her advisees, and she made sure that many had offices in the Workshop building. When she encountered a dissertating student, she would enquire with a smile, “Anything for me to read?” Beyond guiding their dissertation work, she invested considerable time socializing them into the norms and ways of the profession. No issue her students raised was trivial for her. Even when she was travelling (which she did a lot), her students could expect quick responses to their e-mails. Indeed, she remained in touch even when students graduated and moved elsewhere. Past students who authored articles could expect to receive an e-mail with comments from Lin. At professional conferences, after the usual courtesies she would often ask, “What are you working on?”—and then engage in discussion about the ideas and methods.

Lin established several organizations to study institutions. The most prominent among these is, of course, the Workshop. Not long arriving in Bloomington in the late 1960s, Lin and Vincent decided to create a research center outside the departmental setting where students would work as apprentices and journeymen with opportunities to learn from and collaborate with one another. In part, the Ostroms were inspired by the experience of learning from and working with carpenters to build furniture for their home. The Ostrom Workshop is a unique place, from the art decorating its walls, to the people who populate it, and to the rules governing its operations. It hosts students and scholars from multiple countries and disciplines. Doctoral students connected with the Workshop, as both Dolsak and Prakash know from first-hand experience, are known on the Bloomington campus as the Workshoppers. Faculty, students, visiting scholars, and staff share responsibilities for several daily activities. Lin and Vincent established an endowment, the Tocqueville Endowment, to fund scholarly activities. It is testimony to her commitment to this organization that Lin donated honoraria and prize money, including the Nobel Prize, to the Workshop. The growing size of the Workshop family, which included beloved and loyal staff as well as scholars, led to the hosting of conferences, the Workshops on Workshop, to bring together alumni to share their research.

Lin and Vincent were devoted spouses. It was a relationship of extraordinary intensity. He had a profound impact on her intellectual trajectory. Vincent was her unsparing critic and outspoken admirer. She dedicated Governing the Commons to Vincent for “His love and contestation.” They also shared a taste for adornment. Lin used to wear colorful blouses embellished with unique and beautiful necklaces. When she received a compliment for her jewelry, she would tell you that the necklaces are actually Vincent's property and that he selects one for her every day. Their home reflected their mutual love of craft, indigenous North American art, and friends, whose photographs abound.

Lin Ostrom was an extraordinary individual. Her legacy through her scholarship, her students, and the organizations she established will continue to inspire future generations. Here was a person who asked tough but fundamental questions about human behavior and was ready to learn appropriate techniques, collaborate with leading experts, and undertake travel to difficult terrains to explore these questions. Lin was inquisitive and open minded. She had a great sense of humor, and she took immense pleasure in the achievements of others. Above all, she taught us that humans have the capacity and duty to function as self-governing actors, that we can control our destinies—if we are willing to work together to govern and contribute to our shared commons and communities.

—Nives Dolšak, Margaret Levi, and Aseem Prakash, University of Washington, July 2012

Vincent Ostrom

Vincent Ostrom (1919–2012) began a career in public administration that initially established him as a leading scholar of natural resource policy, but his 60 years of scholarship and teaching have had an impact on our thinking about much more. Growing up on a farm in western Washington State, five miles from the US border with Canada, Vincent was accustomed to the waterways and forests of the Puget Sound. Travels by car along the Oregon coast and through the California deserts to attend Los Angeles City College in 1937, led to a life-long interest in the many ways people in vastly diverse physical environments sustain life together. He saw that institutions develop from the individual up, within the potential of nature. While human beings could put “nature” to their use—as his father had done by domesticating minks and breeding them for their specifically colored coats—the natural world was a partner in such enterprises, and not to be subdued. Such lessons impressed him deeply. From his job teaching at Chaffey Union High School in Ontario, California (1943–1945), Vincent observed the Imperial Valley “miracle” orchestrated by engineers George and William Chaffey, whose irrigation projects brought forth a half-million arable acres from the California desert—acres farmed by migrants of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression. The contrast between nature's devastation and man's creative potential could not be more clear. A lifelong quest to understand institutional design was born.

Vincent's position as an assistant professor in the University of Wyoming political science department (1945–1948) revealed other ways of life particular to the arid west, specifically the property rights institutions spurred by cattle drives through unfenced prairie. The collegiality of his three-person department, combined with opportunities to collaborate with specialists in agriculture, medicine, and engineering, enabled Vincent to create transdisciplinary working groups of graduate students and faculty to study natural resource problems and advise the state's legislative committees. While there, Vincent hoped to start research for a dissertation on the “politics of grass,” the roundup and system of brands recognized by stock growers associations. Instead, he resigned his position in protest, publishing an open letter, co-authored with department chair E. S. “Bert” Wengert (1912–1964), that explained their resistance to the university president's demand that Vincent and his working groups stop their “political” activities: conducting research for state and local officials. The resignation and public statement were typical of Vincent's commitment to truth and to his profession, which often demanded hard choices to advance understanding, even at the expense of his own narrow security. At times, it seemed nothing beyond this search for understanding mattered, except his love and respect for his life partner, distinguished Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom.

For Vincent, the quest focused on the critical distinction between constitutional choices that facilitated or hindered subsequent collective choices intended to address social dilemmas. During the 1950s and early 1960s, Vincent learned first-hand about the constitutional foundations of institutional design. After completing his PhD at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1950—on water service, not grasslands—Vincent was asked to consult on numerous commissions and conventions charged with constitutional level decisions that would affect resource use and the livelihoods for generations. He drafted a water policy for Tennessee and consulted on the Territory of Hawaii's bid for statehood. During his tenure as an assistant and associate professor at the University of Oregon (1949–1958), Vincent, who served as the vice-chair of the Oregon State Water Board (1957–1959), initiated a critical study of the Middle Snake River. The study enabled the state to evaluate and, at the time, contest various private and federal hydroelectric dam projects. As he and Wengert had said in their open letter of resignation, “the first approach to any public problem must be through information;” only research, study, and interpretation from within the given context can “bring facts to light” (Wengert and Ostrom Reference Wengert, Ostrom and Allen2012 [1948]). Footnote ¹ Such experiences convinced Vincent that diverse solutions are possible, even in comparable settings, and how important it was to understand the context of each institutional design.

In addressing these practical political puzzles of constitutional and collective choice, Vincent facilitated citizens' design of constitutional rules to manage common resources. His work in helping to draft Article VIII On Natural Resources for the Constitution of the State of Alaska is perhaps the best example of this collaborative approach. Rather than design for the constitutional convention delegates as “the expert” of public administration, as they had asked, Vincent asked them questions and wrote their answers on a blackboard in the College of Fairbanks classroom where they met. He helped them set their own aims into a constitutional language. Later, after the convention recessed for delegates to take their draft constitution to the people of Alaska, he helped them revise this language to fit the circumstances of the culturally and environmentally diverse territory. He showed local participants how to design for their own way of life, within a legal framework as diverse as the compound republic of which he would later write. As he observed the capability of citizens working together to resolve shared dilemmas, he became increasingly convinced of the importance of experiences in constitutional choice, not simply for the outcomes produced, but for the experience and shared understanding they could create. Collaboration, creativity, and practical experience became “essential foundations,” as he would say, in his brand of public administration.

Vincent's most important collaboration began as he and his wife, Lin, embarked on their lifelong love story. Their interests reinforced and complemented each other, and intellectual contestation became the language of their love. To anyone who met them, theirs was a unique union of private and public expressions of value. They shared not only work, but enjoyed “working” together: building their cabin on the Manitoulin Island and their home on Lampkins Ridge (both of which they designed together), making most of the furniture in each home, and helping start-up artists and crafters, and in the process gained an enviable collection of Native American art and jewelry, much of which they bequeathed to the original artisans. Together, their work was stronger as they listened to each other, combining their skills and artisanship to craft ideas as well as tools. As he put it, “Instead of arguing, we were inquiring and this course of inquiry has been a part, not only of our life together as a married couple, but as collaborators in the Workshop.”Footnote ² The quest for understanding and commitment to contestation which Vincent and Lin made over a life time, resulted in co-founding the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis and laid the groundwork for fundamental change across several disciplines.

At UCLA, Vincent, working with Charles Tiebout and Robert Warren, advanced new understandings of public economies as vital complements to market economies. They challenged the prevailing view of municipal government dominated by a single dominant center of decision making, “Gargantua,” (Ostrom, Tiebout, and Warren Reference Ostrom, Tiebout and Warren1961, 831). The analysis sketched the foundation for what became Vincent's lifelong preoccupation: the concept of polycentricity.

Ostrom, Tiebout, and Warren rebutted a central premise of bureaucratic administration: that mature, effective organizations must have a single locus of administrative control. According to this characterization, “overlapping jurisdictions” were a symptom of administrative failure. In contrast, they offered insights about the potential benefits of “polycentricity” in their analysis of the effective, efficient delivery of public goods in metropolitan Los Angeles. This theoretical contribution on metropolitan government, widely translated and reprinted, is today considered among the most influential works that contributed to the emergence of non-market decision making or public choice. In the 1970s and 1980s, Vincent provided an inspiration to Lin and her students to extend this analysis of metropolitan governance to urban service delivery and followed the progress of this work as it gained national and international recognition.

The founding of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis with Lin in 1973, represented not only a culmination of two decades of research and his service to the profession as the editor of Public Administration Review but also expressed his commitment to bringing together people, ideas, and practices. The Workshop provided the context for an alternative paradigm for understanding public affairs, as reflected in The Political Theory of a Compound Republic (Reference Ostrom1971, 1987, 2008) and The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration (1973, 1974, 1989, 2008). In each work, Vincent contested the paradigm associated with the administrative science of Woodrow Wilson which advocated centralization and an orientation that looked to experts able to separate “politics” from administration. “Democratic administration,” as Vincent Ostrom labeled the general idea of an engaged citizenry, challenged “bureaucratic administration”and its corresponding attitudes toward expertise, command, and control.

Rather than simply countering “bureaucracy” or hierarchy with “markets” and conflating organizational forms with the degree of voluntarism implied by a given structure (e.g. bureaucratic coercion against free markets), Vincent asked readers to consider a broader level of design, comparing the constitution of monocentric and polycentric frameworks in which a particular organization may function. He accepted the approach of political economy, methodological individualism, and recognized diverse types of “goods” or events as the subject of administration. But he went on to challenge some of the conclusions reached by Buchanan, Tullock, and other members of the Public Choice Society (of which he was a founding member). He suggested that whether a given organizational form “worked” (as a shorthand for various evaluative criteria including claims of efficiency, efficacy, effectiveness, and equity) had to do with the nature of the good to be administered and with the broader framework of constitutional choice in which a good—and the understanding of goods or events—was embedded. Public goods and common pool resources could become subjects of a collective action dilemma, but whether “tragedy” ensued depended as much on the constitutional framework surrounding collective choice and the corresponding shared understandings of goods and events that ultimately inspired individual and collective action. Self-organization and self-governance were possibilities; if scholars and practitioners hoped to make such civic virtues likely, they should consider the important differences between levels of collective, constitutional, and epistemic choice.

Transcending his early work on collective choice, Vincent examined systematically the constitutional choices that provide the foundation of federal systems. At the heart of his argument is the polycentric logic of Madison's design discovered in his careful reading of the federalist papers and his own observation working with the delegates to the Alaska constitutional convention crafting an article on natural resources. The exposition of institutional development articulated in The Federalist, coupled with the institutional analysis of Alexis de Tocqueville, resulted in The Political Theory of a Compound Republic, published by the Public Choice Society in Reference Ostrom1971. Encouraged as well by insights from James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock's Calculus of Consent (Reference Buchanan and Tulluck1962), Vincent insisted that we step back to consider the constitutional choices that frame collective action situations. Both the The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration and the detailed analysis of American federalism in Compound Republic marked a turning point in public choice theory, as well as in public administration.

These examinations of polycentricity and democracy helped to renew contacts with other centers of federalism, including the Center for the Study of Federalism at Temple University headed by Daniel Elazar (1934–1999). A fellowship at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld University to take part in a year-long research group organized by Franz-Xaver Kaufmann (1932–) on Guidance, Control, and Performance introduced Vincent to the work of German economist Walter Eucken (1891–1950) and the economic thought of the Freiburg School. Lin joined him for a semester to study game theory and formal modeling with Reinhard Selten, and the Bielefeld experience suggested to them how visiting scholars could take part in the Workshop effort. Soon they were placing a portion of their salaries into scholarship opportunities to fund scholars from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

Vincent spent his life contesting the trend in political science toward oversimplification and consolidation, and worried about the implementation of these simplified policies in democratic communities. These concerns culminated in the Meaning of Democracy and Vulnerabilities of Democracies. Here he argued that analysts had confounded voting with the civic learning experienced in the activities of self-government. As a result they often ignored the loss of social capital that accompanied the reduction in opportunities for meaningful self-government. Without these experiences, Vincent argues, democracy's very existence is threatened. The ideas were of more than “academic” interest. Without a science of association, learned by actually associating, “democracy” understood as self-governance, could not endure.

Vincent's contributions were recognized and honored many times throughout his career, including his Bentley chair in political science at Indiana University, recognition by Alaska for his contribution to constitutional design, the Daniel Elazar prize for federalism, Martha Derthick prize for best book in public administration, and the Gaus lecture at APSA meetings. What is most striking is the range of fields that have recognized Vincent Ostrom—natural resources policy, civic education, economics, federalism, constitutionalism, public administration, and more generally, political theory and policy analysis. It is testimony to the breadth of Vincent's contribution and interests that his work bridges and transcends the boundaries of so many disciplines.

Vincent's serious commitment to contestation shaped his relationships, and at times, was known to intimidate young graduate students. But, the many who were challenged came to cherish his kindness and respect for them as partners in a common enterprise. This respect did not attach to titles or professions, but, instead from work and commitment. Vincent met every person as he found him or her. He once suggested that while he enjoyed doing what he did (the Bentley Chair in Political Science at Indiana University), he always knew that if he could not do that, he would be happy contributing to society by making furniture and being a part of his community in that way. For Vincent, work was work, and if you worked, you contributed. This is a rare perspective shaped his relationships as much as his scholarship. What drew him to others was his desire to improve the circumstances and situations that we commonly faced as humans; what draws us to him is the importance of his quest to understand human affairs, not only for Vincent Ostrom, but for all people who aspire to self-governance.

—Barbara Allen, Ada M. Harrison Distinguished Teaching Professor of the Social Sciences, Professor of Political Science, Director of Women's and Gender Studies, Carleton College

—Roberta Q. Herzberg, Associate Professor of Political Science, Utah State University