Stan Anderson died unexpectedly while out for an afternoon walk on May 26, 2009. If I set out to design a model civil society, Stan would be my model citizen. At every nexus in the life of a community—family, friends, workplace, and civic institutions—Stan's instincts were to care and to contribute. For 30 years a member of the political science faculty at the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California, he was a leading authority on, and advocate for, American applications of the (Scandinavian) office of ombudsman. If that term for an official who handles citizens' complaints is no longer foreign in the United States, it is largely because of Stan Anderson.
Stanley Anderson was born in Alameda, California, in 1928, the son of Victor and Stella Anderson and the younger brother of Robert Anderson, who has been on the faculty of Mills College for nearly 50 years. There must have been something special in the genes that produced two polymath professor/practitioner/scholars who both published books within this last year. After graduating from Oakland's Fremont High School, Stan served from 1946 to 1948 in the United States Navy, and shortly thereafter, in 1949, received his BA in philosophy from UC Berkeley. That he was able to earn his BA in three years, while serving in the Navy for two of them, is a measure of both Stan's acuity and his resourcefulness. When he came to Santa Barbara 12 years later he had an LLB from Boalt Hall (1953) and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley (1961).
In the three years between earning his law degree and entering Berkeley's graduate program in political science Stan realized that his calling was in education rather than litigation. His teaching drew upon his training in both the law and international relations, and his students include both members of the bar and of university faculties. As Stan was about to depart for Scandinavia to do research on his dissertation (and later book) on the Nordic Council, his supervisor suggested that he look into the ombudsman office. It proved to be an institutional embodiment of Stan's sense that grievances often could be resolved without resorting to litigation or political influence, but rather through fact finding and the largely informal intervention of an independent official. He championed the concept through his research and writing, beginning with a 1964 article in the American Scandinavian Review, “The Scandinavian Ombudsman.” The melding of Stan's scholarship and advocacy was furthered in 1963–64 by his assignment as an APSA Congressional Fellow to the office of congressman Henry Reuss, who had introduced a bill for the creation of a Congressional Ombudsman Office. The bill was not enacted, but its rationale was conveyed to a larger audience in an article coauthored with Congressman Reuss for the January 1966 issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: “The Ombudsman: Tribune of the People.” During Stan's stay in Washington an ombudsman proposal had been introduced in the Connecticut legislature; Stan visited its sponsor, and within a year published an article with the query “Connecticut Ombudsman?” in Case and Comment: The Lawyers' Magazine (March–April, 1965).
These early publications led to an invitation from the American Assembly to organize an Arden House conference on the ombudsman office, and to edit an associated group of essays collected in a volume with the broadened query Ombudsmen for American Government? (1968). With Stan Anderson's guidance, the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley had been tracking ombudsman developments for several years, and in 1971 formalized the collaboration by designating Stan as the principal investigator of its Ombudsman Activities Project. Later that year the federal Office of Economic Opportunity awarded the OAP a three-year grant to advise, analyze, and evaluate OEO-supported ombudsman proposals for Seattle/King County, Nebraska, and Iowa. (The OEO director was Donald Rumsfeld—go figure!) All three of these offices are still thriving.
Stan's engagement with ombudsman activities persisted throughout his life, both locally (at UCSB) and globally (at the 1984 World Ombudsman Conference in Stockholm he was designated an honorary director of the International Ombudsman Institute, and in 2006 he was an invited speaker at the annual conference of the United States Ombudsman Association). His last book—Reform in a Prison Hospital: A Doctor and an Ombudsman Blow the Whistle—is a powerful illustration of the role that can be played by ombudsman offices in protecting whistle-blowers from bureaucratic or political retribution. Fittingly, the setting for this case study is Nebraska, one of the many ombudsman offices he was instrumental in establishing or supporting. The typical greeting in those offices reflects Stan's instincts: “How can I help?” The help that Stan gave to American ombudsman offices was rooted in his publications, amplified by his networking skills, and sustained by his genial accessibility. Stan was remembered by the current president of the International Ombudsman Institute as one of the original giants of North American ombudsman scholarship and advocacy, and as a personal mentor.
Stan's years on the UCSB faculty included service as book review editor of the Western Political Quarterly, as vice chairman of UCSB's Academic Senate, and as chair of the department of political science. He did that for one year, and having satisfied himself that he could do it well, moved on. In 1982–83 he was with his family in London, serving as director of the UC Education Abroad Program Study Center for the United Kingdom and Ireland. Upon returning to UCSB he continued his work with the EAP for three years as its associate director for academic affairs. For countless years, extending beyond his retirement in 1991, Stan nurtured his students, together with his wife Mary, providing a haven from the rigors of graduate study, and after their graduation, keeping in touch. We were all moved by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, but only Stan thought to call one of our Ph.D.'s who was teaching in Mississippi to find out how he was doing. He was no less regardful of his colleagues, organizing memorial celebrations, assuring that benchmark birthdays were remembered, regularly visiting those who were enduring hospitalization or long-term care.
While Stan may have concluded early on that he was not by nature a litigator, he was nevertheless a lawyer who made good use of his training and law degree. He was a member of the United States Supreme Court Bar, for eight years chairman of the Ombudsman Committee of the American Bar Association's Administrative Law Section, and for 40 years a member of the Santa Barbara County Bar Association. While teaching he was a mentor and inspiration to many local attorneys, and after retirement was lauded by the local bar association for his pro bono work with indigent felony defendants. In 2002 he received the Santa Barbara County Bar Association's Richar Abbe Humanitarian Award “for his lifelong devotion to humanitarian service.”
I first met Stan in 1964, in Washington, D.C., where he was completing his Congressional Fellowship year and I was returning from my first year at UCSB to complete research on a project for the Brookings Institution. We arranged to meet for dinner, and then go to a baseball game at what later became RFK Stadium. I brought a friend from Brookings, and when the three of us got to the stadium we found two empty seats at one end of our row, and one at the other end. Stan stood in front of the row and asked if everyone could move over one seat, so that the three of us could sit together. It was a reasonable request, gently tendered, and they did. That was the Stan Anderson I came to know for 45 years, my model citizen. Were it not for problems of scale that require collective action, a libertarian community composed of Stan Andersons might actually work. Stan is survived by his wife Mary, his son and daughter-in-law Stefan and Chi, his brother Bob, and an extended family beyond counting.
