Cleo H. Cherryholmes
Cleo H. Cherryholmes, a professor emeritus of political science and teacher education at Michigan State University, passed away at his home in Haslett, Michigan, on April 18, 2013, after a long battle with cancer.
Cleo was born on December 28, 1938, in El Dorado, Kansas, and grew up on a family farm. He won a scholarship to Yale University, where he earned his BA in 1960 when Yale had the preeminent department for the behavioral study of politics. He returned to Kansas to earn an MS in education from Kansas State Teachers College (now Emporia State University) in 1963 and began his doctoral studies at Northwestern University, earning his PhD in 1966 under the direction of Harold Guetzkow. Together, they developed the first edition of the Inter-Nation Simulation Kit (1965).
Cleo's PhD thesis was unusual because it was coauthored with Michael J. Shapiro, now a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Together, they authored a book, Representatives and Roll Calls: A Simulation of Voting in the Eighty-Eighth Congress (1969).
Although Cleo's interest in Congress waned, he retained a keen interest in theoretical developments in political science, most of which he found lamentable. In particular, he was highly skeptical about rational choice theory, which, he would frequently argue, had not advanced beyond proving Arrow's impossibility theorem. All the same, he taught our graduate level introduction to the discipline with a heavy dose of non-positivist philosophy of science.
Cleo spent his career at Michigan State University (MSU), beginning as an assistant professor in 1966, spending one year as a visiting professor of social science and education in 1969–70 at the University of Washington in Seattle. He was promoted to associate professor at MSU in 1970 and to professor in 1982. In 1995, he formally moved to the department of teacher education and retired in 2003.
In addition to his book with Mike, to numerous articles in scholarly journals, and to extensive work developing curriculum materials, Cleo is known for two major books, Power and Criticism: Poststructural Investigations in Education (1988) and Reading Pragmatism (1999), a work that professor Charles W. Ostrom, Jr. often assigned to graduate students in our seminar introducing them to political science. Cleo was pleased to attend the seminar and guide group discussions, even though he was no longer officially a member of our department.
Cleo was highly honored in the field of teacher education. As a tribute to his work, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Örebro University, Sweden, in 2000.
Neither of us can improve on the tribute to Cleo written by Suzanne Wilson, University Distinguished Professor and former chair of the department of teacher education at MSU (memo to the department of teacher education, April 19, 2013). Noting that his two books on pragmatism are classics, she adds, “Cleo was also devoted to our students, especially to those in our MA program. A gregarious and cheerfully challenging teacher, he loved working in our Graduate Studies Education Overseas program, where he interacted with MA students from around the world, both in classrooms and over good wine, bread, and brie…. Until recently…he regularly met with students in the Critical Studies readings group (which he created with David Labaree) where he endorsed pragmatism with tremendous enthusiasm. A serious thinker, popular teacher, and gracious and loyal friend, Cleo's jovial demeanor—characteristic perhaps of his rural Kansas background—masked a penetrating intelligence.” Mike dedicated his most recent book, Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn (2013, xi) to Cleo, “a life-loving friend who has battled adversity without complaint, and in retirement from academia, is still growing and changing.”
Paul Abramson was a friend of Cleo since 1967 and Chuck Ostrom was his friend since 1974. At a memorial service held in East Lansing on April 22, 2013, Chuck explained that he knew of Cleo's work in simulation since his graduate days at Indiana University, but never knew about Cleo's eclectic tastes in wine, food, and audio equipment and explained how his own life was enriched culturally by knowing Cleo. We remained close to Cleo after his move to the department of teacher education and after his retirement, although this became increasingly difficult in the last months of his life when chemotherapy sapped his strength. But until the last four months of his life, he continued to enjoy good food, excellent wine, and animated debate.
His daughter Diana Cherryholmes and his son Tim Cherryholmes survive him, as does his sister Elenor Joy Lambling and her extended family. Although his wife, Mary Conn, predeceased Cleo in 2006, her family remained close to him. His step-son Chris (Kristen) Conn and his children also survived Cleo.
Contributions in Cleo's memory may be made to Doctors Without Borders, 333 7th Avenue, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10001-5004; Habitat for Humanity, 1941 Benjamin Drive, Lansing, MI 48906; or the Capital Area Food Bank, P.O. Box 16224, Lansing, MI 48901.
—Paul R. Abramson, Michigan State University
—Charles W. Ostrom, Jr., Michigan State University
Charles F. Cnudde
It is with great sadness that I report that my friend Charles F. Cnudde passed away on Thursday, November 1 of this year, in Boston. Chuck Cnudde was the model academic: a great intellect, an outstanding scholar, an inspiring teacher, an effective administrator, and a warm and compassionate individual. His memory will be cherished by his wife Sue, daughters Kate and Emily, grandchildren Edward, Rowan, and Nicholas Borninski, son-in-law Thomas Borninski, and by a myriad of friends and professional associates who worked with him throughout his distinguished career.
Charles Cnudde was born in Macomb County, Michigan, in 1938. He earned an undergraduate degree in political science at the University of Michigan in 1960 and received his PhD in that discipline in 1967 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During his career he served with distinction on the faculties of the University of California, Irvine, the University of Wisconsin, Michigan State University, the University of Texas, Florida State University, and the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He was also the chair of the departments of political science at Michigan State and at the University of Texas, the dean of the College of Social Sciences at Florida State University, as well as the interim dean of the College of Criminal Justice, and was provost and vice chancellor of academic affairs at UMass Boston, from 1999 to 2001.
Chuck was an active and important scholar throughout his career, even after assuming significant administrative responsibilities. His early work (with Donald McCrone) that examined how party competition affects welfare spending in the American states remains a standard reference in the field, and his paper (with John Aldrich) on the use of logistic regression is a classic. He was also a pioneer in the development of statistical models to analyze political institutions. His research was published in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, American Behavioral Scientist, and other respected journals in political science and public policy. He was the author or editor of seven books, including Democracy in the American South.
Chuck began his administrative career at the University of Wisconsin where he was co-director of public policy and institutional analysis at the Institute of Environmental Studies. He was recruited from that position to the chair of political science at Michigan State University (MSU) in 1973. As his colleague Paul Abramson comments, “in the seven years Chuck was chair, he guided us with a high level of professionalism that greatly contributed to improving our Department. From the very outset he insisted on high academic standards, which he applied in both tenure decisions and in hiring decisions.” He was unusually adept at recognizing talent in young faculty and effective in creating an environment that enabled them to flourish. His success in strengthening the MSU department led to his appointment, in 1981, as chair of the department of government at the University of Texas at Austin, which quickly gained national recognition as a result of Chuck's stewardship. Those who served with him attribute his success to his vision, his fairness, his superb instinct about political science as a discipline, and to his willingness to share helpful insights.
In 1987, Cnudde left Texas to become dean of the College of Social Sciences at Florida State University (FSU), and for a time, interim dean of the College of Criminology at that institution. Here he made important contributions to the internationalization of the curriculum and of the student body in the College and to improving its resource base. Anticipating the importance of global education, Chuck sought innovative ways to internationalize the college curriculum. His interests in this area were far ranging, but two stand out. One was his interest in the political and ethnic conflicts that emerged out of the collapse of the former Yugoslavia. Through faculty exchanges and other programmatic initiatives, Chuck built relationships in Croatia and Serbia that predate the eruption of the Balkan Wars in the 1990s and that provide FSU students and faculty with continuing links to this section of the world. A second was the strong support he demonstrated for the FSU study abroad programs. Understanding the need for FSU students to internationalize their undergraduate studies, Chuck adopted a variety of programmatic initiatives that made it possible for students living in Florida to engage with multinational corporations, members of the UK Parliament, NGOs, and institutions such as the British Museum. His commitment to fundraising for these efforts became the catalyst for students to significantly expand their educational horizons. His fundraising was also the catalyst for what remains as the single largest gift ever made to the College of Social Sciences and to the creation of a major research center focused on public choice theory. His success in these areas led to his appointment as Provost at UMass, Boston, where he completed his administrative career. He returned to teaching and research in 2001 and to consulting with universities in England, Yugoslavia, Croatia, the Dominican Republic, and the United Arab Emirates. He was consultant to the founders of Abu Dhabi University.
Professor Cnudde was an exceptional teacher. He had great empathy for students, was accessible to them, and enjoyed their company. As chair and dean, he held annual events at his home to welcome graduate students to the university and routinely attended both undergraduate and graduate student gatherings. Many of his graduate students—Doug Hibbs, Robert Jackman, Paul Shumaker, and others—have made important contributions to political science. His mentoring of junior faculty was equally as important.
More than anything, Chuck Cnudde was a wonderful human being, kind, gracious, gregarious, generous to friends and associates, and helpful to any he encountered who needed assistance. He loved the company of his friends and colleagues; he loved preparing, eating, and sharing spicy foods; he loved drinking wine and singing party songs; and he invented a dance—the little white chicken—that enlivened the social groups he was a part of. He was a great Democrat. He loved his wife and family. They, like his many friends and colleagues, loved him in return. He will be greatly missed.
—Robert E. Crew, Jr.
A number of people contributed to this statement, including Paul Abramson, Burt Adkins, John Aldrich, Paul Brace, Tom Ferguson, Larry Malley, Irene Padovic, and Yan Yu.
Joseph Haberer
Our colleague and friend, Joseph Haberer (1929–2013), was a true intellectual, a force of life, and a mensch. He was critical to building the current shape of our department and university, not to mention our discipline and community. Joe's commitment to meaningful scholarship, justice, and excellence in education has made him a role model for many of us, who only wish we had his deep reserves of energy, unfailing commitment to the highest standards of scholarship, and laser-like focus on his goals. He accomplished so much while being a loyal friend, beloved husband and father, and general ray of “sunshine” into so many lives (as one student characterized it).
Joe's important work in the area of the politics of science and technology policy was likely influenced by his formative, early experiences as a Holocaust survivor, and his work in Jewish studies certainly was. Joe was born in Villingen, Germany, in 1929. Hitler came to power when he was only four years old, and his father (a clerk) was fired. It was during the Depression and Joe's family was very poor—too poor to flee the growing persecution they experienced. After Kristallnacht (1938), his parents sent him on the Kindertransport to England. His parents perished in the Holocaust, and Joe struggled to overcome illness and despair. He lived in an Orthodox Jewish Hostel, but some of this time was so traumatic it was permanently lost from his memory.
Joe immigrated to the United States in 1946, but he continued to struggle emotionally. As he would tell it, he struggled greatly with depression—but public libraries saved him! Without the aid of psychologists or therapists (which he reported were not so commonly relied upon in those days, and with depression being largely unrecognized) he read voraciously, including self-help books, and realized he needed to put himself out into the world more and to try to do more for others. He became determined to make a difference. He graduated with a BA from San Francisco State College in 1951, earning his MA from Columbia in 1954 and his PhD from University of California, Berkeley in 1965. Joe's first job was in political science at Rutgers University (1966–71). While living in New Jersey he met and married Rose Weiss, and they moved to Indiana, when Joe began teaching at Purdue University, in 1971.
Joe's early experiences with the Nazis undoubtedly shaped his scholarship. Indeed, his first book, Politics and the Community of Science (1969), outlined two models of thinking about scientific responsibility, and one of his main cases was the response of German scientists to the rise of the Nazis. The book sought to outline a theoretical framework for thinking about how scientists should relate to power, developing two models, Baconian and Cartesian models of scientific attitudes toward social responsibility. At Purdue, Joe was the driving force behind the Program in Science, Technology, and Public Policy in political science, an area that has taken on greater importance for the department as we collaborate across disciplinary boundaries with our colleagues in engineering, science, and technology. He also served on the review panel for the Ethical and Human Value Implications of Science and Technology (EHVIST) Program for the National Science Foundation, and served on the advisory board of Harvard's Program on Public Conceptions of Science. He developed many new courses at Purdue and participated in a nationwide network of scholars, the Science and Public Policy Studies Group. He was associate editor and frequent contributor to Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society and edited a volume in the Policy Studies Organizations' series, titled Science and Technology Policy: Perspectives and Developments, and edited a special issue of the Policy Studies Journal on science and technology policy. Joe continued his work on scientific responsibility by conducting further work on Einstein as model of a socially responsible scientist at the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace, Hebrew University in Jerusalem in the mid-1980s, and in a sabbatical at University of Wuertzberg, Germany, in 1993. Another related early course he developed for political science was the first undergraduate course in environmental policy, an area that is now a signature strength of Purdue's department of political science.
Joe also helped to establish Jewish Studies at Purdue and served as director of Jewish Studies from 1980 to 1994. He made many contributions to Jewish Studies and to the local Jewish community while at Purdue. For example, with Purdue professor William Kleine-Ahlbrandt of History, Joe initiated the Academic Holocaust Survivors Oral History Project, which involved extensive transcriptions of the oral accounts of nearly a dozen Holocaust survivors who were on faculty at Purdue. Joe also helped to organize the Greater Lafayette Holocaust Remembrance Conference, an annual conference in our community that has been held for more than 30 years. He also served as president of the Midwest Chapter of the Kindertransport Association (KTA). He was the founding editor of Shofar, and he continued as book review editor literally up until the time of his death, making late night phone calls from the hospital to Purdue University Press to ensure that the high standards of the journal were being maintained. Jewish Studies at Purdue established the Joseph Haberer book prize in Jewish Studies, awarded each year to an outstanding senior.
Joe's love of books—the books that saved his life—also greatly benefitted Purdue and everyone he knew. Purdue Libraries established the Joseph Haberer Collection in 1994 to recognize the more than $2 million of books and materials he donated to the library. He gave many books to friends and their children, thoughtfully picking out the book he thought would help someone's research or engage a particular child. His extensive personal library of cookbooks may also have contributed to his excellence as a generous and renowned baker of delicious treats.
He was a political radical in some ways, deeply suspicious of government and other authority structures, but also keenly aware of how much we need just institutions to fight poverty, hatred, and violence. He was aware of the power and limitations of scientific expertise and was keen to emphasize the need to critically review the exercise of expertise and authority, in general, in relation to the values of democracy and human rights.
In a late interview, Joe maintained that he felt he had finally fully recovered from his traumatic early experiences, and had managed, against all odds, to find great happiness in his life and to make a difference. He exhorted others to stand up to power, to speak out against injustice where they saw it, and to have confidence that everyone can make a difference. His energy, optimism, and humanity have inspired many students and colleagues to seek to emulate his commitment to making the world a better place. In particular, his effort to make a difference both as a scholar and as a person will continue to inspire us for many years to come.
Even as we mourn Joe's passing, then, we must take inspiration from him. Joe would want us to celebrate his remarkable, full, and impressive life. The example of this good, optimistic man and great scholar should motivate us with his commitment to academic excellence, his hope and his passion for justice, and his personal kindnesses and generosity to the many strangers in our midst. If each of us strives to be just a little bit like Joe (a demanding standard, to be sure) the world will be a better place.
As Joe wrote in a lecture in 1981:
Perhaps part of the good news is that our political experts are so often wrong. That opens up room for hope … It may depress you that (people who run the affairs of state) don't seem to know what they are doing, but I am, at least in part, encouraged by it. For this failure of the clever ones provides us with an opportunity. It should encourage us average citizens to take more interest in the affairs of state, to make our voices heard, to participate more fully. We may be about to see the resurgence of the democratic spirit, the emergence of a citizenry no longer willing to entrust its fate to the cadres of specialists and cold-warriors who have helped us get into the present mess.
Inasmuch as citizens become involved in the process of securing for themselves and for future generations a world that is more peaceful, more secure, more just and more humane, the good news may become very good indeed. Let's hope that this will be forthcoming!
—S. Laurel Weldon, Interim Vice-Provost for Faculty Affairs and Professor of Political Science, Purdue University
David Halloran Lumsdaine
David Halloran Lumsdaine, professor of political science at Gordon College, died on February 27, 2013, of complications following a heart attack. After 64 years of life, he left behind two brothers, two nieces and a nephew, numerous cousins, and many dear friends, colleagues, and former undergraduate and grad students.
Those who knew him well speak of Professor Lumsdaine's genius, confirming our instinctive choice of that descriptor as most apt. In the same breath, they have been quick to testify to his humility. And a potent combination it proved, as David's modesty allowed his genius to render true service to the communities in which he taught and lived: undergraduates, his friends and fellow academics, and his church. In the intellectual world, such a combination is rare; consequently David's approach to life stands out all the more prominently.
Born in New Haven, Connecticut, to social psychologist Arthur A. Lumsdaine and sociologist Marion Harper Lumsdaine (who were co-authors with Samuel Stouffer of the famed American Soldier study), David led a peripatetic childhood as his father's career required the family of five to move frequently from one college town to another. By his seventh-grade year, the Lumsdaines were residing in Los Angeles, where David and his older brother John later graduated from what is today Harvard-Westlake School thanks to a scholarship.
Lumsdaine continued his education at University of California, Berkeley, earning degrees in mathematics and engineering. He experienced the civil-rights and protest movements common on this campus in the 1960s and '70s, which led him to take a job teaching math to working-class, public-school students in East Palo Alto. After about a decade working in secondary schools, he completed his education with a PhD in political science (under the supervision of Stephen Krasner) from Stanford University in 1987.
As an associate professor of political science at Yale in 1993, he published Moral Vision in International Politics (Princeton University Press), a study of the roots of foreign aid policies in the post-World War II era. His work bridged the gap between normative and causal analysis, finding that international idealism facilitated global cooperation and arguing that a renewal of moral vision was therefore a prerequisite to the development of fruitful institutions in the world that emerged from the Cold War.
Professor Lumsdaine pursued these themes in later works; in his edited volume Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Asia (Oxford University Press 2007), he found strong support for the thesis that Protestantism had empowered the “poor and marginalized” and, as Sidney Verba's work has also demonstrated for the United States, taught them important civic skills. This more robust civil society in turn aided democratization in countries such as South Korea. If he had lived longer, he had hoped to publish on the larger question of the effect of domestic politics on foreign policy and saw his first book as a case study of this phenomenon.
“Dave's” teaching career took him to Yale, the Korea Development Institute, the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, Wheaton College (Illinois), and, since 2008, Gordon College, where he was Professor of Political Science. Along the way, he led study-abroad trips to India, Uganda, and China, taught thousands of undergraduates, and critiqued the budding research agendas of countless graduate students.
But these bare facts do only so much to disclose the man who was David Lumsdaine. Here was an individual who could, in the words of one colleague and friend, “maintain a solid faith in Christ's redeeming love and simultaneously pursue a rigorous research agenda and intellectual life.” Co-extensive with these commitments, David helped found the Yale Graduate Christian Fellowship, where he inspired a generation of believing PhD students in the early 1990s. At Gordon, undergraduates beat a path to his door. For “Dr. D” every student was a “good kid,” and his investment in their lives knew no bounds.
Thus, in multiple communities David Lumsdaine brought his extraordinary gifts to bear. He was an exceptionally compassionate listener (often while in his favorite haunt, the local pizza parlor), an unguarded enthusiast for Christ, and a devout Anglican. Very widely read, his mind formed a deep well from which he readily and gleefully drew passages from scripture, Shakespeare, the Book of Common Prayer, Mahatma Gandhi, Kenneth Waltz, Hilaire Belloc, and labor-union organizing songs.
David was particularly daring in his willingness to experiment with innovative teaching methods. For one course in international relations, he decided to dispense with the usual end-of-the-semester term paper and instead assign participants two-page critiques of each week's reading of classic international relations texts. Although his teaching assistants found they had a little more grading to do, the quality of class discussions improved dramatically. And one semester, to begin the first lecture in “Ethics and International Relations,” he had his teaching assistant blindfold him and lead him to the podium to demonstrate that, like Socrates, he was still seeking ultimate truth. In a seminar at Gordon, he similarly claimed that “the major point of this class is for you to educate me further.”
One might likewise remark on his sense of humor. Once, when he and the second author were changing planes at Chicago O'Hare during a conference trip, we had to take the neon-lit underground tunnel between terminals. For fun, he jumped on top of the loaded luggage cart and had the writer push him through to the other side. Both travelers laughed uproariously at the end of the tunnel. Or after a particularly wintry spell of Boston weather, he told his students at Gordon College, “So we didn't have class Tuesday. I was here but none of you were. And so I came and I was disappointed and I sobbed all day. But I guess I really can't blame you because of the snow day.”
Recollection after recollection portray David Lumsdaine as a best friend, a favorite professor, and a trusted counselor, and the evidence mounts that these claims were both valid and non-competing. Perhaps a still richer scholarly achievement, to say nothing of his health, was sacrificed to the care of others? The sheer fruitfulness of his human investments warns against reaching any glib conclusions on this matter, however. Better to recognize instead a faithful, humane model of calling to the academy and the divine, one to which prestige was alien, and talents, however extraordinary, were gifts to be given away in a life of service.
—Timothy R. A. Sherratt, Department of Political Science, Gordon College
—Joel S. Fetzer, Social Science Division, Pepperdine University
William E. Nelson, Jr.
March 19, 1941–May 16, 2013
Written 110 years ago, The Souls of Black Folk is as relevant today as it was at the turn of the twentieth century. In what many consider Dr. W.E.B. DuBois's seminal work, there are many issues with which he tackles, but there are few passages where education, race, and leadership do not protrude from the pages. How to advance the black race was DuBois's preoccupation in life. From his standpoint, a classical education was the way to go, not the industrial and vocational education promoted by Booker T. Washington. Of course, both men would ultimately prove to be right. In DuBois's mind, with a classical liberal arts education, blacks would learn to think critically and analytically about the world in which they lived. The slaying of oppression, poverty, and ignorance would be carried out by the cerebral among us. This cohort would be the teachers and leaders of the race. They would not be consumed with acquiring material possessions; rather they would be steadfast in their commitment to using their knowledge and skills to uplift the race.
A native of Memphis, Tennessee, William E. Nelson Jr., or Nick as he was affectionately known, was a product of DuBois's thinking. A professor of African American and African Studies (formerly Black Studies) and political science at The Ohio State University (OSU) for 40 years, few modern-day scholars exemplify DuBois's position more than Nick. As a college student Nick attended Arkansas A.M. & N in Pine Bluff (renamed the University of Arkansas, Pine Bluff). From there he journeyed to Atlanta University (AU) where he earned a MA in political science; and in 1971 he completed a doctorate in that same field at the University of Illinois. Although Nick was never one of DuBois's students, like DuBois, Nick was a devoted member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc.; he also took a master's degree in political science at Atlanta University, a historically black campus towered over by DuBois himself, in previous decades. For 40 years, Nick was a teacher and a mentor, shuttling undergraduates and shepherding graduate students through BA, MA, and PhD programs in both the humanities and the social sciences at OSU.
Off campus, Nick was immersed in community affairs. I know of few political scientists who were as widely known off campus as they were on it. Unlike DuBois, Nick was not a prolific scholar, but his work on black mayors and black comparative politics has left an important imprint on the academy. Over the years his journal articles appeared in such venues as the Public Administration Review, Urban Affairs Quarterly, National Political Science Review, and the Review of Black Political Economy to name a few. Said Paula McClain, Dean of the Graduate School at Duke University: “with Nick's passing, the discipline has lost a foundational scholar on the importance, influence, and lasting outcomes of the election of Black mayors. Nick was able to answer the question—“What difference do Black mayors make?” Robert Smith, professor of political science at San Francisco State University offered, “Nick was one of the great architects of Black Studies.” Charles P. Henry, former chair of African American Studies at UC Berkeley recalled: “William 'Nick' Nelson was a warrior for Black Studies in particular and Black Liberation generally. He was a pioneer scholar in researching Black mayors and later broadened his perspective to compare Black political progress in the U.S. and Great Britain. Through his leadership, OSU developed the largest department of Black Studies in the country.”
Like DuBois, Nick was an institution builder, serving as president of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists and African Heritage Studies Association as well as the National Council for Black Studies. What's more, he was a tireless champion of the oppressed, regardless of race. He served on countless city-wide committees with the expressed purpose of helping improve people's lot. Over his career, Nick did what DuBois would have expected him to do—to take what he learned and gained as a student from those institutions of higher learning and impart those gifts on others. In The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois maintained that “progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, a surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage-ground.”
Two years ago, I had the opportunity to co-teach a graduate-level course with Nick at The Ohio State University. The atmosphere was both electric and tense as Nick accentuated our lesson plans with personal vignettes that added both levity and real-world application. On occasion, Nick peppered unsuspecting students with question after question after question, until he found an answer that was half-way, lightweight satisfying. Sometimes, Nick's pounding was so relentless I felt compelled to chime in, if only, to offer the student a reprieve. As I sat captivated by Nick's presentations, at times, I became as much of a pupil as the other students. It did not take long for me to realize that whatever the topic, it was evident that Nick drew heavily from DuBois. In our graduate level course Black Political Movements and Organizations, Nick maintained that racism and discrimination not only stymied African Americans, but had a reverse impact on whites whose fear and loathing, distrust, and psychopathic hatred of African Americans diminished them as human beings.
There were few matters of a racial nature at The Ohio State University over the years on which Nick was not out-front. On that score, his legacy is permanently etched on that campus. There is no office or department or program of which race is central that did not benefit from Nick's advocacy, either directly or indirectly.
—Judson L. Jeffries, The Ohio State University
Alan Rosenthal
On July 10, 2013, Alan Rosenthal died at his home in Princeton, New Jersey. He was 81. According to the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, where he was director from 1974 to 1993 and a member of the faculty from 1966 to his death, the cause of death was cancer. From our different perspectives, we offer these three tributes.
A Legislative Life: The Work of Alan Rosenthal
On July 10, the state legislative institution lost its best friend, as Alan Rosenthal passed away at 81. It is no exaggeration to say that Alan was the foremost political scientist working in the sub-field—one that he helped to define. In his long and productive career, Alan Rosenthal has been described in many ways. Here are some of them, culled from the endorsements from the back of some of Alan's books:
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• “The foremost observer of comparative state government.”
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• “The most highly regarded academic student of the practical issues swirling around state legislatures.”
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• “Encyclopedic knowledge and unparalleled access to key lawmakers.”
All of these descriptions are true. My favorite description comes from Chris Mooney (himself a highly regarded student of legislatures) who began his review of one of Rosenthal's publications in 1998 thusly, “Alan Rosenthal knows the U.S. state legislatures better than anyone else. For the past 30 years, he has acted as a political anthropologist, going bravely into the field to bring back intelligence on these institutions, their cultures, and the people who inhabit them.”Footnote 1
That is exactly right. Alan spent hundreds—probably thousands—of hours in legislative halls and chambers. Alan was a firm believer in what the great congressional scholar, Richard Fenno, described as “soaking and poking,” the process of observing first-hand the legislature and the legislator. It is the process of talking with—and especially listening to—all manner of legislators, staff, lobbyists, and journalists. Alan absorbed himself into the state legislative culture. Alan's unique contribution was that he saw the legislative world, understood the larger meaning, and clearly communicated it.
Alan produced almost 20 books, more than 50 book chapters, and another 50 or so monographs, research articles, and magazine pieces. He wrote books on state politics generally, New Jersey politics and government specifically, and comparative work on governors and lobbyists. But it is his books that focus on legislatures for which Alan is justly celebrated. One, Engines of Democracy (2009), is a sort of compilation of Alan's legislative wisdom distilled into one book; it is his capstone book on state legislatures, and he would probably tell you that if you could read only one of his books about legislatures, Engines of Democracy would be his recommendation.
But limiting oneself to that singular work is not the way to truly appreciate Alan's mark. I recommend, instead, that one read my three favorite Rosenthal books as a trilogy, starting with Legislative Life (1981), proceeding to The Decline of Representative Government (1998), and finishing with Heavy Lifting (2004). Together, these three books provide a complete and true picture of the importance of state legislatures and how the legislative institution changed over a quarter century. They also bear witness to Alan's great respect for the legislative institution and his concern for its future.
Alan published Legislative Life in 1981. To my knowledge, it was the first comprehensive volume devoted specifically to the topic of state legislatures in almost two decades.Footnote 2 It was a thorough review of everything from running for legislative office to the role of leadership, committees and staff to the appropriations and oversight functions. Most importantly, it heralded the emergence of Rosenthal's method of research that he describes in Legislative Life as “synthesizing qualitative data obtained in the field with the more systematic data produced by the discipline of political science.”Footnote 3 Because of his descriptive and comparative approach, his fieldwork in collecting interviews, his obvious and genuine appreciation for the legislative institution and the people that serve, and his easy writing style, Rosenthal's Legislative Life is a classic in the comparative state politics literature 30 years after its publication.
Legislative Life is also important because it sets the baseline for where legislatures had been and where they were going. Alan argued that, by 1980, state legislatures had developed into important and capable policy-making institutions. In this book, Alan paints the picture of legislatures that, beginning with the reapportionment revolution in the 1960s and continuing through the modernization period of the 1970s, had reformed themselves into vital and viable partners in the state policy-making process. As Alan concluded, “The contemporary state legislature is the product of decades of development and change. No longer a relic of the past, the legislature has built up capacity and become heavily involved in the governance of the state.”
Seventeen years later, Alan published The Decline of Representative Government. The title alone tells us that Rosenthal's assessment of legislatures was no longer sanguine. In this book Alan chronicled a series of changes in the 1980s and 1990s that diminished the gains made by state legislatures. He saw that the capacity of the legislature to be an independent and equal branch was now threatened by forces inside and outside the legislative institution itself. In particular, Alan focused on a growing concern for re-election rather than policy making; the increase in the use of direct democracy by Initiative and Referendum and interest groups to either bypass or threaten legislatures; and the advent of term limits in a number of states. It is in this book that Alan most emphatically recognized the tension between the goals of the individual legislator and the needs of the legislative institution, and he warned of the need to reconcile the two. Written in 1998, his admonishment rings even more true and urgent today,
“Legislators have to take responsibility for their own institution. That entails any number of things: nurturing civility; keeping partisanship from damaging the legislature or the legislative process; maintaining the strength of the institution; and providing enough centralized power to facilitate consensus building.”Footnote 4
Legislative Life and Decline of Representative Government are essential reading for anyone who cares about the institution of the American state legislature, and who wants to understand them, how they operate and how they adapt. But I believe that Alan's best book is Heavy Lifting: The Job of the American Legislature, published in 2004. In this book Alan undertakes the most difficult task yet, to answer the question, “What makes a good legislature?” Alan argues that the quality of the legislature can be judged by three things: (1) how legislators represent their constituents; (2) how deliberative and fair-minded the legislature is in the business of making law; and (3) how well the legislature balances the power of the executive. Based on extensive survey data, interviews, anecdotes, and research from other scholars, Rosenthal builds a case for what legislatures should and can be. It is a brilliant book. The chapters on representation (chapters 2 and 3) are one of the best treatments of that subject in contemporary political science. His discussion of the interplay of the executive and legislative branches and the essential role of legislative leadership is spot-on. Heavy Lifting is the wisest book I know of about legislatures. Written by the wisest legislative scholar we had. It should be required reading for all legislators and anyone else who cares about the American legislative institution even half as much as Alan Rosenthal cared about them.
—Gary Moncrief, University Distinguished Professor and Internship Director, Department of Political Science, Boise State University
Portions of this article previously appeared in State Legislatures magazine, July-August 2013, and are reprinted by permission.
Alan Rosenthal: Colleague and Teacher
Alan Rosenthal was a remarkably unique man. He was equally at home as a guest clown in the Ringling Brothers circus as he was chairing New Jersey's redistricting commission three times. “Rosenthal” as he was known, was my colleague at Rutgers' Eagleton Institute for more than 35 years, and yet describing him is no easy task. He was complex and charismatic and full of wonderful contradictions. He was a delightful contrarian with an acerbic wit, who loved poking fun at almost any orthodoxy around him; a person who took his research seriously but not himself; someone who hated administration but somehow managed to launch four nationally recognized research centers.
He worked until he was 80, last year, and I mean worked. He was the most consistently productive academic I have ever met, writing a book every three or four years for at least four decades. And his routine never varied. At the beginning of a project were the site visits where he would record observations on 4 × 6 cards—many dozens of them. When he had finished his field work he would sort the cards into piles. Then, movement from one pile to another, occasionally regrouping, as if he was negotiating with himself what would become the book's chapters. From there it was yellow pads and black Flair pens until lo and behold, another book came out.
Rosenthal was a committed and passionate teacher, and he loved teaching his Legislative Process course. He last taught in the fall of 2012, and was, well, Rosenthal—a razor-sharp mind coupled with tremendous energy. Graduate students had to soak and poke around New Jersey, as Gary Moncrief described. They would have to trail state legislators in their districts and watch, as Karl Kurtz described, the sausage being made. He took great joy in connecting his academic writing and applied research to the classroom. To illustrate how lawmaking was different than sausage making, he set up a dinner competition at Eagleton, where four groups of sausage adherents—Bratwurst, Kielbasa, Chorizo, Italian—had to persuade the NJ Assembly Speaker (whom Alan had convinced to preside over the event) that their sausage was the best. They were free to bribe, log-roll, threaten, or use any other legislative technique to make their case.
As director of the Eagleton Institute, Rosenthal's administrative style could be called laissez faire. Convinced that no one in the central administration ever really read the annual accountability report he had to file, he simply changed the cover page and sent over the previous year's report. But Rosenthal led a transformative phase at the Institute into a golden era. Four venerable and distinguished centers started on his watch now stand: the Center for American Women and Politics, the Center for Public Interest Polling, the Center for Policy Research in Education, and the Center for State Politics and Public Policy (now the Heldrich Center). Alan's approach to administration was to find good people, encourage them, and let them build. There wasn't an ounce of professional jealousy in him. And over time, the Institute became an institution, based in New Jersey but with a national reputation in every area it worked.
Legislatures were his passion. He didn't just like them, he loved them. And he loved the people in them, whom he tirelessly defended as doing the best they could with whatever tools, talents, and foibles they had. Normatively, he was strongly committed to representative democracy.
He was ambivalent as a political scientist—poking fun at the discipline even while making central contributions to it. One of my favorite Rosenthal writings is The Nice Legislature. Railing against a political science he saw as overly quantitative, with tongue firmly in cheek, Alan decided to rank the 50 state legislatures. He first made the conceptual argument that citizens wanted their legislatures to be “nice.” Then he set out to measure: N stood for nourishment, measured by the number of four-star restaurants in the state capital; I stood for inspired, measured by college football wins; C was for convenient, operationalized as the hours it took to get to the state capital from Newark airport; E was for environmental, the number of days of sun per year. As he said in his conclusion, this may or may not mean anything, but it is very scientific.
My main memory of Alan is as a force, brilliant at what he did, quixotic, energetic, engaging, and committed. It would be easy to say he thought outside the box, but the truth is that he never realized there was a box. He took on academic life on his terms, and bettered it for all of us around him.
—Cliff Zukin, Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at the Eagleton Institute of Politics and Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Policy, Rutgers University
The “Wizard” of Representative Democracy
It happened like this: When Rutgers University Professor Alan Rosenthal went to Columbus, Ohio, to observe the General Assembly, he decided to test the old saw, “Two things you should never watch being made are sausages and laws.”
“After watching our legislature, he wanted to observe sausage being made,” says Richard Finan, former president of the Ohio Senate. “So I made several phone calls and got him an appointment to visit a sausage factory. When he returned from touring it, he concluded that the saying was a total myth. Sausage-making is nothing at all like lawmaking.”
Rosenthal turned this experience into a memorable article for State Legislatures magazine in September 2001. In “The Legislature as Sausage Factory: It's About Time We Examine This Metaphor,” he contrasted the highly private, regulated, inspected, and routine process of making sausages with the highly public, ever-shifting, on-the-fly, never-the-same process of making laws.
This story illustrates both the humor and acuity Rosenthal brought to his study of state government and politics. His rare ability to bridge the gap between academics and politics served him well.
He has written or edited numerous books, reports, articles and monographs. He's influenced the lives of thousands of students and two generations of political scientists. He's been honored with many awards, including the APSA's Charles E. Merriam Award in 1995 for “a significant contribution to the art of government.
The Merriam Award was appropriate because Rosenthal had a major impact on practitioners of politics: He helped to modernize and strengthen state legislatures, encouraging them to become equal partners in our three-branch government.
“Alan's good humor, keen intellect and incessant curiosity have enabled him to make lasting contributions to our understanding of representative government,” says David Frohnmayer, a former state legislator and University of Oregon president-emeritus. “In very few fields of political science scholarship is so much owed to the efforts of a single pioneering investigator. Alan Rosenthal is owed a debt of gratitude by all who study or serve in state governments.”
Rosenthal had been practicing the art of scholarship and practical politics since the late 1960s and early 1970s when he and the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University conducted studies of the Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Maryland, Mississippi, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin legislatures, to strengthen them and make them more effective.
Rosenthal directed and wrote or edited all the reports and recommendations on the eight states. Connecticut's report, written by David Ogle, a former student of Rosenthal's, is credited with persuading members of the Connecticut General Assembly to adopt sweeping changes.
The transformation in Hartford reflected the institutional challenges of the times: switching from biennial to annual sessions, creating nonpartisan offices for research and fiscal analysis, establishing a joint legislative management committee, converting bill drafting and more to the computer age, and raising legislators' salaries.
About the same time, Rosenthal and Donald Herzberg, the director of the Eagleton Institute, were conducting seminars for emerging legislative leaders. For 10 years, these workshops on the institution of the legislature made a profound impression on participants, many of whom later became legislative leaders, governors, and members of Congress.
Like many others who participated in one of these conferences, Martin Sabo, former Minnesota House speaker, NCSL president and congressman, says Rosenthal “taught me and other legislators the importance of the legislative institution and the responsibility to nurture it.”
Throughout his career, Rosenthal paid particular attention to his home state of New Jersey. In 1992 and again in 2001, he served as the independent, nonpartisan tie-breaker on the state's congressional redistricting commission. And in 2011, he served as the independent member on the state legislative redistricting commission, the obvious choice for the chief justice, because his name appeared most often on the lists submitted by both the Republicans and the Democrats. In 2011, Politicker NJ, an online political report, ranked Rosenthal No.1 among the state's 100 most powerful politicos, excluding elected officials, for his efforts to draw fair state political maps in the face of intense partisan pressure from both sides.
“Alan's knowledge of the legislative process and how the gears in Trenton turn is second-to-none,” New Jersey Senate President Steve Sweeney (D) says. “It's why governors, legislators and other elected officials have called on him to help resolve the issues that shape the state of New Jersey.”
Along the way, Rosenthal made lasting friendships with many governors, legislators, staff, and lobbyists—not to mention thousands of students. Tom Loftus, former speaker of the Wisconsin House, US ambassador to Norway, and author of The Art of Legislative Politics, says, “As speaker of the Assembly in Wisconsin for almost a decade, I cherished Alan's advice, interest, and friendship. Being the speaker is a rather lonely job in the sense that a friend without an agenda is hard to find. Alan was that friend. And, he was that friend to hundreds of others.”
“Federalism in the 20th century owes a debt to the life's work of Alan Rosenthal,” says former Michigan Governor John Engler, now president of the Business Roundtable. “His faith in the importance of state government and state and local decision making led him to report on and write about leadership and creative problem solving in all 50 states. He inspired many to imitate the successes, and more than a few to go where none had previously gone. I know because I was one who read Alan's work, didn't wait for Washington, and in the end made a small difference.”
Alan Rosenthal was the premier voice in America calling lawmakers to action, just as he did with a young lawmaker from Cody, Wyoming, more than 40 years ago.
“Alan Rosenthal shaped my legislative life,” says former US Senator Alan Simpson. “We first met when I was a young Wyoming state legislator. Alan was this amazing, creative, inspiring, warm, wise, and witty man. He became my mentor—one of the greatest influences on my life as a legislator—on how to make legislating work,” says Simpson. “He is ‘The Wizard’ in my mind.”
—Karl Kurtz, Director of the Trust for Representative Democracy, National Conference of State Legislatures
Portions of this article previously appeared in State Legislatures magazine, July-August 2013, and are reprinted by permission.
