One of Bob Salisbury's occasional poems begins:
I was weaned on a library card.
Calvin Coolidge was weaned on a pickle.
I was baptized there, in the library;
I really was.
The whole poem is a serious delight, but these few lines make some things clear: Bob was creative and witty, historical references came readily to his mind, and he was an enthusiastic reader.
Bob was the Sidney W. Souers Professor Emeritus at Washington University, where he chaired the political science department both early and late in his career. He served as vice president of the APSA, president of the Midwest Political Science Association, and president of the Missouri Political Science Association, and he had been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Rockefeller Center scholar. He had been confined to his home by breathing problems in recent years, but he remained engaged and intellectually active. In his last months, Bob completed a new essay about interest groups, which is scheduled for publication soon. He died on April 9.
In 1997, he was the recipient of the Samuel J. Eldersveld Career Achievement Award. He also received the Jack Walker Outstanding Article Award, twice—in 1989 for “An Exchange Theory of Interest Groups” (published in 1969), and in 1998 for “Interest Representation: The Dominance of Institutions” (published in 1984). The first of those articles was a pioneering contribution to rational choice theories of political behavior, and it is still influential more than forty years later. The award for the second article noted that it “argues persuasively that much of the highly effective representation of interests comes from corporate and governmental institutions which function without the constraint of a mobilized and active membership, thereby escaping the illogic of collective action,” and that the article “set the course for new institutionalist insights.”
Virginia Gray, now at North Carolina, and one of his former students observes:
During the time I was in graduate school at Washington University, Bob Salisbury was serving as department chair, teaching graduate seminars and large undergraduate courses, and publishing his major article “An Exchange Theory of Interest Groups.” Yet, I do not remember a harried, rushed professor who barely had time for his grad students; rather, I recall a professor who was a lot of fun to be around and who engaged in many social activities with the grad students.
John Sprague, who was one of Bob's colleagues at Washington University for several decades, recalls:
Bob was a man of many parts. In addition to being a marathon reader, he … played cards [poker and bridge]. He played the piano—mostly old-time Protestant hymns in the key of C. He insisted on participating in the softball and touch football games at our annual picnics and played golf in his early years. An avid fan of baseball and baseball statistics, Bob was a member of SABR [Society for American Baseball Research]. Bob enjoyed eating and often told tales about particularly good meals. He did the New York Times crossword puzzle faithfully every Sunday, and if he had been particularly efficient at a recent attempt, would not fail to tell you the number of minutes in which he had completed the task. Bob was an attender of classical music concerts and enjoyed opera particularly. Unlike many of us, words were his friend, and clear expression in writing was one of his greatest gifts.
In the mid-1990s, Bob collaborated with Wayne Fields from the English department in developing Washington University's program in American culture studies. Fields notes that Bob “was the person the rest of us went to when we were testing our ideas … Bob's intellectual enthusiasm was both deep and wide (as was his reading), and he willingly, even gleefully explored the possibilities in my underdeveloped thoughts, complicating and illuminating with a casual grace that belied the enormity of the gift he was bestowing.”
As chairman of the political science department at Washington University, Bob displayed excellent judgment in recruiting faculty who transformed a small department into one with national recognition. John Sprague describes Bob as “prescient … he led a systematic recruitment effort to expand the department in the directions that the discipline turned out to be fated to travel.”
Bob Salisbury—scholar, teacher, colleague, and administrator—he did it all, superbly. There are not many who could pull that off.
Finally, Wayne Fields again:
He believed in collaboration, in a university of shared learning, a place where we encourage and improve each other's work. His academy was a community, and he was an exemplary steward of all the personal and professional connections that are required to sustain such a fragile thing.
