People like Glendon Schubert never die. Glen was an individualist who lived by his work, and I'm one of his products. I was not a born scholar. I had no idea of what “the life of the mind” was all about. College was for me merely four more years of high school. Academic achievement was just competition by other means, and grades were nothing but a way of keeping score.

Michigan State College (MSC, as it was known until my 1954 graduation) was the perfect arena for my kind of play. MSC had doubled its student body by 1949 (my year of entry), brimming with over-aged GI Bill students desperate to make up for lost time. The bloated, emergency-appointed faculty were also in competition—for recognition, promotion, and the all-important tenure. Everything about MSC raised the stakes—my kind of venue.

Glen Schubert was, within my range of experience, the most competitive of all of us, having earned that reputation not only as a champion handball player but through his joy of confrontation with his peers as well as his students. Graduate students and a few motivated undergraduates took his courses with trepidation because of his in-your-face pedagogy. But it was so packed with substance that defeat was as valuable as victory. Forty-five years later, in response to a questionnaire on mentoring circulated by APSA to former presidents, I wrote that Glen Schubert was the first teacher to demonstrate what it means to be an intellectual. Students also knew of his confrontation with his peers. Although his spot in the department of political science at MSC was Con Law and related subjects—based on his traditionalist Ph.D. from Syracuse—he frequently fought his colleagues against the growing influence of “political behavior.” He went so far as to take the summer campus-wide course in “statistics for the social sciences” to prove that his resistance to “the Michigan School” was not due to his fear or incompetence in math. He made the top grade in the class.

Thanks to his aggressive dialogue with constitutionalism, the separation of powers, delegation of power, administrative law, administrative legislation, and administrative adjudication, I decided that law school was actually not for me after all. Law was just too much about method and practice. Yet, I chose graduate school knowing little of what that meant, except that ideas would be units of competition. (I was influenced in my decision for graduate school by Glen Schubert and Joe LaPalombara, who was a rookie instructor at MSC at that time.)

Virtually all of my work since then can be appreciated in light of Glen's teaching at MSC, approaching politics through constitutional principles and political dynamics that emanate from their applications and their violations. I moved away from his substance as I passed through Yale and took on my own version—for example, from administrative law to public policy, from delegation of power to pluralism and “the end of liberalism,” from legislative and administrative processes to “policies cause politics.” And as a consequence, it was years before I recognized how much of a debt I owed Glen. Very late in his life, as it turns out, I was able to tell him, that my tardiness was a permanent source of regret.

We saw little of each other during my six years in and out of Yale, a six-year stint at Cornell, thence to Chicago, and then back to Cornell. We never got together for an extended conversation. Our encounters were at APSA meetings, usually in the hall of exhibits and limited to handshakes and his pat on my back expressing pride in one of his students. His work and mine had grown too far apart.

The intellectual distance between us was largely a function of Glen's intellectual voyage, not mine. I have stayed very much within his constitutional realm—or as they say these days, the institutional level. Meanwhile, Schubert was moving still further away from his base in a manner that I judge to be an essential part of his character, which was to go as far into a problem as was humanly possible. He moved from court cases to judges. Then to the decisions of justices and from that to judicial decision-making. Herman Pritchett, during our time together at Chicago, insisted to his colleagues that, although he had been the first to quantify the Justices, “It was Glen Schubert, not Herman Pritchett, who invented judicial behavior.” This was not an excess of modesty on Herman's part. It was his accurate attribution. And it is a just validation of Pritchett's tribute to Glen that the font of judicial behavior became and remains at MSU.¹

That is one of the Schubert legacies, the one that he would not rest with. He had gone on to another, and still another leap further back along the causal chain, toward more and more microscopic units of action—from Constitution and courts, to judges and their decisions, to their behavior, and then to the psychology of their behavior and then to the biology of their conduct. If death had not stopped him, it is likely that he would have plunged into the chemistry of choice.

Students of politics will be decoding Glen Schubert for a long time to come. He was one of the earliest to delve into the question of “the public interest,” a critical response to pluralism as it was just beginning to bloom. Schubert was first, or no later than second after Pritchett, to turn judges into ordinary human behavioral forces; and he took this as far as it could go. And his biology and politics rubric was an early contribution not only to political behavior but to the emerging discourse on the environment, environment policy, and sustainable development.

I dare to compare Glen Schubert with Arthur F. Bentley, whose one work in political science (The Process of Government, 1908) lay virtually unrecognized until David Truman rediscovered (or unearthed) Bentley in his The Governmental Process (1951). In this spirit I raise my glass to an extraordinary individual, an energetic competitor and a time-bomb for a political science that will eventually give him his due.