In Memoriam

Sidney Verba, APSA President (1994–95)

Political science lost one of its most respected—and beloved—colleagues on March 4, 2019. Sidney Verba of Harvard University made lasting contributions to several fields within political science at the same time that, as head of the Harvard’s library system, he pioneered the application of emerging digital technologies to the way information is accessed, stored, and used by libraries. Verba is remembered for his foundational contributions to political science; for his generous good citizenship in each of the many venues in which he operated; and for his warmth, humor, generosity, decency, fairness, and inclusivity to all who had the good fortune to encounter him.

Sidney Verba was born on May 26, 1932, in Brooklyn to Morris and Recci Verba, immigrants from an area of Imperial Russia that is now part of Moldova, who ran a small curtain and drapery shop. He was educated in the local public schools. At James Madison High School, a neighborhood high school that counts among its graduates multiple Nobel Prize winners, a Supreme Court justice, three US senators, and Neil Diamond, he was named valedictorian of his class. (His immediate successor in that role was Ruth Bader.) While at James Madison, a counselor called him in and told him that, since he had a good academic record, he should think about applying to a good college like Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Knowing nothing about these places, he repaired to the school library and looked them up in the encyclopedia.

A first-gen student at Harvard College, he majored in history and literature before matriculating in the graduate program at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, with the goal of entering the foreign service. After receiving his MA, he stayed on at Princeton in the Department of Politics, first in the PhD program and then as a faculty member, achieving tenure at 28. He subsequently taught at Stanford and the University of Chicago before moving in 1973 to Harvard, where he enjoyed a long career.

RESEARCH

Verba used to tell graduate students, “I don’t do research. I write books.” Of course, he did both—conducting research that resulted in more than 20 books and dozens of other publications. With wide-ranging substantive interests, he made contributions to a number of subfields within political science—most notably comparative politics and American politics but also international relations and political methodology. As varied as his subject matter, the core characteristic of Verba’s scholarship was a capacity to train empirical evidence—usually drawn from surveys of citizens—on essential questions of democratic governance and the role of citizens within it, making a major contribution to what is known as empirical democratic theory. He was a master of seeing complex patterns within data and then crafting the analytic narrative that not only explicated those patterns but reminded the reader why we care about the matter under scrutiny. (Extended and illuminating discussions of Verba’s research can be found in Paul Sniderman’s “Sidney Verba: An Intellectual Biography” in PS 27(3) and an interview with Verba conducted by Nancy Rosenblum in 2010 which can be found by searching “Sidney Verba Nancy Rosenblum interview” on Google.)

For the first in a long series of investigations based on surveys of citizens, The Civic Culture (1963), Verba teamed up with his mentor, Gabriel Almond. The Civic Culture, a cross-national study that asked what is required of citizens and elites for stable and functioning democracy, more or less invented the field of comparative political behavior. Written at a time when World War II still cast a shadow and new nations were emerging from colonial empires, Almond and Verba announced their intention in their first sentence: “This is a study of the political culture of democracy and of the social structures and processes that sustain it (p. 3).” What they aptly named the “civic culture” is “the mixture of attitudes that support a democratic system (p. 505).” Almond and Verba explored the role of such social institutions as the family and the workplace and the significance of education in nurturing and sustaining the norms that foster democracy. Based on interviews with 1,000 citizens each in five countries (the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and Mexico), The Civic Culture—which was groundbreaking in comparative politics for its use of survey data to study five democracies—was informed by self-conscious methodological concern with the difficulties of making systematic cross-national comparisons when nations differ from one another so fundamentally.

Verba followed up with another multi-nation study, this time moving away from the emphasis on democratic norms to focus on a more concrete dependent variable, citizen political participation. Anxious to overcome academic imperialism, in each of the seven countries he worked with local collaborators who then were free to use the data in their own scholarship. Many also became coauthors with Verba.

Before the major comparative book appeared, Verba and Norman Nie published a book based on the American data from the cross-national survey. Participation in America (1972) probed a question to which Verba returned over and over in ensuing decades: the consequences for democratic equality among citizens when the voices of the well-educated and affluent are more likely to be heard through citizen participation. With a broad understanding of political participation that goes well beyond voting, Verba and Nie investigated the social class roots of disparities in participation and demonstrated how such disparities vary across particular participatory acts and how they are modified by affiliations with voluntary associations and political parties. A notable aspect of the study was the analysis of interviews with seven community leaders—for example, the head of the school board and the president of the local chamber of commerce—in each of 64 communities where ordinary citizens had also been interviewed. As measured by “concurrence,” or agreement between community leaders and citizens on the agenda for community action, “where citizens are participant, leaders are responsive” (p. 335). But the level of concurrence in high-activity communities is higher for those who take part, who are more likely to be upper status, than for those who are inactive. Even among the very active, concurrence is higher for upper-SES (socioeconomic status) activists than for the small number of lower-SES activists with the result that participation is especially helpful to those who are already better off.

Focusing on national as well as individual differences in Participation and Political Equality (1978), Verba and Nie, joined by Jae-on Kim, returned to the question of the way that inequalities with respect to social and economic matters have consequences for political inequalities. The seven countries in the cross-national study—Austria, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Nigeria, the United States, and Yugoslavia—included established liberal democracies, fledging new democracies, and one socialist system, touted for its “participatory democracy.” With varying strength, the relationship between SES and political activity holds for all seven, but it is especially strong in the United States in comparison with the other rich countries on the list. An important factor in explaining the differences among nations in the representativeness of participant publics is the operation of linkage institutions: the extent to which there are parties and voluntary associations tied to social class and other prominent political cleavages and the way that they mobilize or depress political activity among those of differing SES levels.

A decade later, Verba revisited the question of the roots of participatory inequalities in the United States, this time with Kay Lehman Schlozman and Henry Brady. A new survey, administered in Spanish as well as in English, oversampled African Americans and Latinos as well as those who have engaged in such relatively rare acts as making a large campaign donation or attending a protest. The investigation sought to go “beyond SES” and to understand the causal mechanisms linking the components of socioeconomic status to political participation. Their volume, Voice and Equality (1995), put forth the Civic Voluntarism Model which anchored political participation in three sets of factors: resources such as time, money, and skills that make it possible to take part; psychological engagement with politics; and location in networks through which citizens are mobilized to take part. Different configurations of these factors—all of which are fostered by educational attainment and all of which are developed in the nonpolitical domains of adult life—are germane for different participatory acts. For example, a variety of factors have a substantial effect on such time-based forms of participation as contacting a public official—among them education, interest in politics, requests to take part, and civic skills. In contrast, only one factor, family income, has a substantial impact on making campaign contributions, especially big ones.

Soon thereafter, Nancy Burns joined Verba and Schlozman in a work, The Private Roots of Public Action: Gender, Equality, and Political Participation (2001) that investigated the small but persistent gender difference in political activity and elaborated the Civic Voluntarism Model. Private Roots further specified the way that experiences at home, in school, at work, at church, and in non-political organizations shape adult political participation and demonstrated that the gender gap in political activity results from the fact that men are, on average, able to accumulate a larger stockpile of participatory factors, rather than from gender differences in the way that these participatory factors are converted into political activity. This finding also applies to intersectional groups defined by gender and race or ethnicity: female and male non-Hispanic whites, African Americans, and Latinos. Private Roots brought politics into the analysis, showing that women (but not men) who are in an environment in which there are women contesting for or holding visible elected office such a senator or governor are more likely to be psychologically engaged with politics, which in turn enhances political participation. Verba’s last published paper, for which the team was joined by Ashley Jardina and Shauna Shames, demonstrated that—with the very significant exception of campaign giving, especially giving large sums—the gender gap in political participation has more or less disappeared, largely as the result of women’s gains in educational attainment in recent decades. Furthermore, with the substantial rise in the fraction of women citizens exposed to women in visible public office, such exposure no longer seems to have an impact on psychological engagement with politics.

Although his work became increasingly sophisticated in making causal connections, Verba never forgot that we care about participatory inequalities because they have consequences for the democratic promise of political equality. A direct outgrowth of his concern with the underrepresentation of the political voices of the disadvantaged was a concern with groups. Even when disparities in activity among groups could be explained by deficits in education, income, or civic skills, he emphasized the descriptive finding: a relative reduction in political input from African Americans, Latinos, or people who live in substandard housing or rely on means-tested benefits. Moreover, he made clear that the group-based resource disadvantages that operate so powerfully in explaining group differences in political voice are not merely coincidental but are organically related to shared group experiences.

Meanwhile, Verba returned to the concern with political methodology that had emerged earlier in the context of the cross-national surveys. Together with Gary King and Robert Keohane, Verba produced the highly influential Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (1994), known familiarly as “KKV.” KKV originated in a jointly taught course in which several cohorts of Harvard PhD students were exposed to these three versatile scholars as they sought to build bridges between quantitative and qualitative research. KKV functions as a handbook for those seeking to improve research standards for both quantitative and qualitative work and those seeking to increase communication between practitioners of the two kinds of research. The lessons from KKV continue to be staples of political methodology courses, and the dialogue it stimulated between qualitative and quantitative scholars has greatly enriched political science.

SERVICE

As befits someone whose intellectual life focused on the political life of citizens, Verba was a good citizen in every endeavor in which he was involved. He was called upon frequently to serve the profession including as President of APSA (1994–1995). He chaired the Social and Political Science Section of the National Academy of Sciences before becoming chair of its Committee on Human Rights, which advocates on behalf of scientists, engineers, and health professionals around the world who have been subject to serious human rights abuses, especially those whose professional activities or exercise of free speech have led to reprisal.

Meanwhile, Harvard administrators recognized him as a Stakhanovite worker with a talent for bringing people together and installed him as chair of a series of what became known eponymously as “Verba Committees.” When a knotty problem arose, Verba would be asked to lead a committee of faculty drawn from across Harvard’s famously autonomous schools. With his formidable patience, facility for understanding where each stakeholder was coming from, desire to ensure that everyone’s voice was heard, and gift for pulling out the perfect Shakespeare quote that would elucidate the source of tension or the perfect joke that would defuse it, he would shepherd the committee to an acceptable compromise. These skills were prominently on display in his service chairing the faculty committee advising on the presidential search in 2007, which led to the appointment of Drew Gilpin Faust.

He also served the university in multiple formal administrative positions, among them, chair of the Department of Government and associate dean for undergraduate education. In 1984, he was named Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor. Appointment as a University Professor is the highest academic honor that Harvard bestows upon members of its faculty. The Pforzheimer University Professor was also director of the Harvard University Library, which happens to be the largest private library in the world. Working with a team of dedicated and expert professionals, Verba added his library responsibilities to an already full portfolio, learning about library management and identifying the possibilities for libraries to take advantage of rapidly developing digital technologies. Among the initiatives he advanced were the development of the integrated online catalogue; planning the Harvard Depository; overseeing the creation of the renowned Library Preservation Program; and conceiving and implementing the Library Digital Initiative. Verba considered the Digital Initiative as bridging his two worlds, conceiving the opening of access to the Harvard collection to scholars worldwide as a form of democratization. His disciplinary colleagues in political science often had no idea of Verba’s other day job as a librarian and the formidable reputation he enjoyed as a library administrator and innovator. Reciprocally, people in the library world were frequently astonished to learn that Verba had a simultaneous career as a distinguished political scientist.

While serving as university librarian, Verba never gave up teaching and continued to engage in academic research, producing at least seven books. When asked how he could possibly accomplish everything he did, he would deadpan, “There is nothing in life that is worth doing that’s not worth doing superficially.”

RECOGNITION

When asked about awards and honors, Verba would refer self-effacingly to having earned the General Excellence Medal in elementary school at P.S. 235. In fact, however, he was honored in just about every way possible. In 2002, he was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize. As described on its website, the Skytte Prize, “often considered to be the political science equivalent of the Nobel Prizes, is the most prestigious award within the field of political science.” He won several other career awards, including the James Madison Award from APSA; the Helen Dinerman Prize from the World Association of Public Opinion Research; and Warren Miller Prize from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society as well as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A number of his books have been recognized with book prizes: Participation in America (APSA’s Gladys Kammerer Award); The Changing American Voter (APSA’s Woodrow Wilson Prize); Participation and Political Equality (APSA’s George H. Hallet Award); Voice and Equality (APSA’s Philip E. Converse Prize and the AAPOR Book Award from the American Association for Public Opinion Research); The Private Roots of Public Action (co-winner of APSA’s Victoria Schuck Award); and The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy (PROSE Awards from the American Association of Publishers). In 1999, he delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Brasenose College, Oxford. Among his honorary degrees was one from Harvard University.

SID

While Verba’s CV attests to his pioneering contributions both as a political scientist and as a library director, it cannot convey the human qualities—his wisdom, good judgment, decency, empathy, approachability, warmth, and legendary sense of humor—that made him both respected and loved by everyone whose lives he touched.

Quoting the line from “As Time Goes By,” he would occasionally observe, “The fundamental things apply.” In his scholarship as well as his professional comportment more generally, the fundamental things blended the values that form the underpinnings of American democracy with the principles upon which the American academy rests: freedom of expression, commitment to the truth, equality, nondiscrimination, tolerance, standards of professional excellence, procedural fairness, responsibilities to students, colleagues, and institutions. Understanding that these fundamentals do not always fit together comfortably, he had a knack for achieving balance.

As befits someone who put equality at the center of his research on the role of citizens in democracy, he did not pull rank. Members of his collaborative research teams—from coauthors to undergraduate research assistants—were treated not simply with respect but with the expectation that their input would be taken seriously. Undergraduate team members were incredulous when the big-shot senior professor walked into the project meeting carrying paper bags full of sandwiches for lunch and, then, took detailed notes as they discussed the problems they were encountering in coding the data. The staff in the Library Director’s office never quite got used to the fact that he kept his own calendar, did his own Xeroxing, or, because he was usually the first one in the office in the morning, got the coffee going.

He used to tout the benefits of collaboration by pointing out that “you do a fraction of the work and get all the credit and none of the blame.” In fact, he did the opposite of what he said. Understanding that his own contributions would not go unrecognized if he shared authorship with younger scholars, he was liberal with credit. A quick, and incomplete, enumeration across his publications shows that that he had at least three dozen coauthors, nearly half of whom began collaborating as graduate students, all of whom deemed it a privilege to have joined in intellectual inquiry with him.

But, of all the fundamentals, the most fundamental of all was his devotion to his family. A feminist before the Second Wave women’s movement put the word back into our vocabularies, he was the adoring and proud husband to Cynthia (Winston), his wife of 65 years and a musicologist and university administrator; father to Margaret of Mono City, California, Ericka of Santa Monica, California, and Martina of Hastings-on-Hudson, New York; father-in-law to Jack Shipley, the late Cesar Torres, and Thomas Beaudoin; and grandpa to David Cesar Verba and Amelia Verba-Beaudoin.

—Kay Lehman Schlozman, Boston College

—Henry E. Brady, University of California, Berkeley

Sidney Verba, whose research was animated by a concern about equality of political voice, believed that the promise of American democracy is compromised when some people have a megaphone and others speak in a whisper. In order to enlarge the number of voices heard, we have collected anecdotes, jokes, and tributes that capture who he was and how much he meant to us. What follows are excerpts. To read these reminiscences in their entirety, or to add your voice to the chorus, please visit https://www.iq.harvard.edu/verba.—KLS, HEB

In 1976, we defended our University of Chicago dissertations — together in the same room! Sid was on both committees, and he presented us with a poem in honor of the occasion. It began:

What joy to see

A PhD

Come to its full fruition.

Today it’s true

We’re seeing two

Complete their awesome mission.

He went on to describe our dissertations in verse and concluded:

So let’s rise and say

A loud hip hooray;

Two new certified scholars we cherish.

May they never turn back

As they speed down life’s tenure track;

May they publish and never perish.

—Kristi Andersen, Goldie Shabad

The Yiddish word dertseylung captures the significance of finding the perfect allegory, metaphor, analogy—often with humorous connotations—to describe an unusual setting or to unnerve a tense discussion. Sid personified the dertseylung, not to mention the other Yiddish word on everyone’s lips when describing him—he was a Mensch.

—Anthony Broh

When I was on the job market, I asked Sid for advice on dealing with tough questions during job talks. He told me that whenever I wanted to end a pointless argument and move on I should say, “Be that as it may...” and then talk about something else. It still works like a charm.

—Traci Burch

The main thing that stands out in my long list of memories of Sid is the astonishing way he built and managed collaborations over his 60 years of coauthorship. Never once did he do any of the standard things that make trouble for such relationships. In fact, with humor and reason, he worked to get those standard human things—anger, resentment, selfishness, meanness, irritation, envy, and the like—out of the way entirely. I was lucky in my time with him.

—Nancy Burns

As I was finishing grad school and heading off to become a baby professor, Sid described attending a recent college reunion, at which many of his former classmates—most of whom had gone into law or business—kvetched about their jobs. They had all retired as soon as possible. In contrast, Sid told me how much he pitied those classmates, as he was still going strong. Almost offhandedly, he said something that has always stuck with me: in what other job would I be able to keep doing new things? Here was Sid Verba, with all of his accomplishments, at an age when most people would be eager to retire, gleefully taking on new challenges. I will miss him. As will we all.

—David Campbell

As an advanced graduate student completing his doctoral dissertation for the Department of Politics at Princeton University and lead graduate researcher for Gabriel Almond, Sidney Verba warmly welcomed me to the research team for the Civic Culture study in January 1959. He set an extraordinary example as mentor, colleague, and friend. Sid leaves a legacy of path-breaking scholarship, rare kindness, and fundamental decency that will continue to guide the next generation of students and scholars.

—Louise K. Comfort

Working with Sid, Nancy, and Kay on the Citizen Participation Study was one of the most amazing experiences in my life. I still remember conversations that we had. Somehow we got talking about faculty/student relationships. Sid said that he had been talking to his fellow male professors about sexual harassment and I offered that a young econ professor had asked me out when I was an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz. I had turned this guy down repeatedly. So Sid’s question to me was this: what did you think about him? And I said that I thought he was pathetic. And Sid said in this animated voice: “Exactly: that’s what I told them. They think you’re pathetic!”

—Jesse Donahue

When I was a graduate student at Stanford, Sid was my dissertation adviser. With an innocent sense of accomplishment, I sent him first drafts of several chapters about a month later. He responded with his usual encouragement and with an admonition in the form of a story:

A matronly lady walked into a delicatessen in New York City and told the man behind the counter that she wished to buy lox. He cut a few slices and looked up. “Cut, cut,” she said. He cut several more slices before looking up again. “Cut, cut,” she repeated. Back to work he went; but when he looked up a third time, her response was the same: “Cut, cut.” At this point, the man behind the counter is convinced that the lady must be having a large party, so he cut many more pieces, thinking that this is his lucky day. Well into his labors, the lady stops him. “I’ll take the next two slices.”

I suspect Sid has told this story on many similar occasions. It just might be the best advice anyone writing a doctoral dissertation can receive.

—John O. Field

Shortly after I arrived at Harvard, Sid knocked on my door one day and asked if I wanted to go to the movies. Well, I thought, this is new to me, but maybe taking a study break and going to a movie with a colleague is standard practice at Harvard. It turned out that one of the theaters in Harvard Square was showing an English documentary called 28 Up. In 1964 the makers of the documentary had chosen 20 seven-year olds from different class backgrounds. Every seven years (more or less) they checked in on the kids to show how their class position at birth determined their life prospects. So, while munching popcorn at a matinee, Sid was actually hard at work doing research on his life’s interest: the study of inequality.

—Morris Fiorina

Sid taught by example. He listened more than he talked, and there was exceptional wisdom in how he listened and what he chose to say. As I studied the churches and synagogues of Boston, he asked me one day if I’d come across the story of the Jewish Robinson Crusoe. “The Jewish Robinson Crusoe?” I asked, thinking (as I often did) that some serious lesson was about to unfold. “Umm...no.” “Well,” Sid responded, “the man lived alone for years on an island until a ship arrived to rescue him. Before he boarded the ship, Crusoe asked the sailors if they wanted a brief tour of his island. Curious, they agreed. So Crusoe showed them around—taking them to his home, the shops he’d built, the schoolhouse, the town hall, and the synagogue, complete with a Jewish star in front. As they were getting ready to leave, one of the sailors asked Crusoe about the one building he’d walked past without explanation—a building that, to the sailor’s eyes, looked just like Crusoe’s synagogue. ‘Oh,’ said Crusoe, ‘that’s the synagogue I wouldn’t be caught dead in.’” And that, in a nutshell, became my dissertation.

—Gerald Gamm

Soon after I arrived at Harvard, I was distressed about what I perceived to be an unfair criticism of me from a political science colleague. I mentioned it to Sid when I saw him in the hallway soon thereafter, and he immediately told me that he too had been criticized by the same person in the same way.

I’m not sure that I believed it then, and I am even less sure now that his description of the incident regarding him was true—but I was comforted and remain grateful for his ability to offer support without either challenging the criticism itself or the person making it, and without patronizing me by saying something like “don’t worry about it.” I remember this brief exchange as a synecdoche for his empathy and tact.

—Jennifer Hochschild

I remember sharing a cab ride with Sidney at MPSA in 2006, when I was a new grad student. I was traveling to China for the first time the next morning, and told Sid. He let me talk about all the exciting things I was going to do for 15 minutes, before offhandedly mentioning that he had been there decades earlier as part of an official Harvard delegation and that he thought I’d love it. This strikes me as illustrative of Sidney’s character—simultaneously a man of such stature and intellect that, of course, Harvard would want him representing them abroad, and a man of such humility that he’d listen patiently to me prattle on about a country he knew so much more about. I learned so much from Sidney, but how to respectfully treat others as equals is the lesson I’ll try to remember the most.

—Philip Jones

If I were to identify one thing about Sidney that I have tried to emulate it is how he treated others: everyone was deserving of respect and kindness. I repeat many of the things he said to me over the years: a dissertation gets written a page at a time; the PhD is just your union card; the task expands to the amount of time you have available to do it; and, about having young children, the days crawl but the years fly. Mostly, I try and emulate the respect and kindness he taught me.

—Jane Junn

Not many people of serious depth, rigorous thought, and normative purpose can light up life with such spirited and incisive humor, keen observations, and unforced warmth. Sid knew what matters. Everything for him, from the personal to the political, came back to decency.

—Ira Katznelson

A favorite Sid witticism: “Garbage is garbage but the history of garbage is social science.”

—Robert Keohane

For me, Sid represented everything that is good in humanity and the merit-based incentive system in the US. When Sid invited me as a coprincipal investigator of the Cross-National Project, I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley, with limited facility in English, and really not much to show except whatever Sid saw in me. My academic career here in the US would not exist without his sponsorship and encouragement.

—Jae-on Kim

Even when Sid wasn’t well, he always had a nice nonconflictual way of adding insight to the conversation, and taught me new things every time we interacted. Sid had a deep understanding of politics, both at a scientific level and an intuitive level. I always marveled that when Sid was in the room at Harvard, everyone acted like adults. No one was capable of acting out when he was there. I don’t know exactly how he was able to do that, but he defined the “adult in the room” without ever coming close to criticizing anyone. He didn’t even have to look at you. He somehow just had a presence that made others act in ways that was in everyone’s interests.

Sid was so special to so many people, to so many organizations, to so many groups, and to such a large part of the world that we will all forever be shaped by familiar echoes of Sid and his impact. I am proud to be constructed from many of those echoes myself.

—Gary King

I think my best memory of Sid was when he and I had one of our first project meetings in his office in Littauer. I expressed concern that I didn’t have any new ideas for research. His reply: “I don’t have enough time to work on all of my ideas!” That always stuck with me, and has motivated me as a scholar and a person. Sid was truly one of the greats.

—Casey Klofstad

Sidney Verba made a difference in my own life for many reasons. He was arguably the strongest member of the SSRC Committee on Comparative Politics, of which I was happy to be a member. To place Sidney at the level says a great deal, given who were its other members. There was also the astonishing supply of apt and sometimes hilarious stories Sidney could tell. He was, I think, unique in sensing exactly when one of those tales, or one of those quips, was needed, or would make a difference.

—Joseph LaPalombara

I asked Sid to read a draft of Beyond Adversary Democracy. Like an incredible dear, he read a manuscript from a young scholar whom he hardly knew and had not had as a student. When I talked with him on the phone to get his reactions on the manuscript and told him how daunted I was with what I was doing, and said I thought perhaps I should not publish it but keep on working to make it better, he cheerily remarked “A thing worth doing is worth doing badly.” I have probably repeated that remark to myself a thousand times.

—Jane Mansbridge

Sid was a brilliant political scientist, but more important he was brilliant human being. He could be the smartest person in the room but somehow make everyone else think they were. His humor and low key style and genuine interest in others made us all want to be with him. We still do.

—Joseph Nye

One of the most memorable SV quips is the famous “Always collaborate. That way you can do 1-Nth the work, take all of the credit, and none of the responsibility.” He never meant it literally of course, but that he uttered it more than once reminded me that he was mostly excited when putting energy into learning and explaining something with his research, all without any overt concern about his status in the enterprise.

—John Petrocik

We all know about Sid’s scholarship (one of the most important social scientists of the 20th century) and administrative leadership, his dapper dress and his unfailing humor, so I’ll simply mention one anecdote among many that illustrate his extraordinary human sensitivity. When Sid recruited me to Harvard, I had never been in Cambridge in my life, and Rosemary and I were quite happy in Ann Arbor. Not knowing Sid at all at that point, I assumed that the chair of the Harvard Government Department would be smart, but slightly stuffy. But when Sid and Cynthia picked us up at the hotel, the first place they took us was to Mike’s Pastry in the North End to sample the extraordinary cannoli. He was saying in his signature gentle way, “if you are comfortable with the Catanesi, you’ll like us, too.” We were, we did, and we came. And we quickly came to love him.

—Robert Putnam

Sid had the office two doors down from me on the fourth circular tier of CGIS. When I walked by, his door was often ajar. I would look in, and we would smile at one another. There was the great comfort, the moral comfort, of knowing that a good man worked there.

—Nancy L. Rosenblum

For decades, Sidney was a source of inspiration. When I was born, he composed a poem:

Who was the bravest in the lion’s den?

Who was the boldest of the frontier men?

Who was the nineteenth-century speaker?

Who was the Pentagon Papers leaker?

Who invented benign neglect?

And who, when he’s thirty, or forty, or fifty, will still call his parents collect?

And, when in graduate school, feeling stuck, I did the equivalent of calling collect and appeared in his office, he said what needed to be said: “The only good dissertation is a done dissertation.”

—Daniel Schlozman

When I was an impressionable undergraduate, Sid was my living proof that someone could be both a brilliant political scientist and a kind, loving, compassionate, and funny human being. He put a human face for me on a whole discipline.

—Shauna Shames

He always claimed that his family reproduced by reverbaration. Sid and Cynthia each year celebrated a Passover Seder with many of us in attendance. Sid—that well-known religious Jew—led the reading of the Haggadah, a narration of the Exodus story. But we never ever finished—too many hungry mouths demanding we move on to dinner—so Sid, every year without exception, left us stranded in the desert never quite making it to the Promised Land.

—Kenneth Shepsle

Of course I have a thousand memories of Sid as a teacher and colleague at Harvard, but Bill and I also have many fond memories of time with Sid and Cynthia on Mount Desert, Maine, where they rented a place in August for many years. We would run into Sid often at the Beech Hill farm stand, go to concerts with both of them, and often enjoy dinners with drinks, laughter at Sid’s jokes, and talk about life, politics, and the world.

—Theda Skocpol

Throughout his long and distinguished career, Sid Verba was an inspirational and visionary leader in political science whose positive impact on the discipline and the American Political Science Association will long endure. He was a past president of the association and his scholarly contributions to our understanding of citizenship, democracy, and politics continue to greatly influence the discipline’s research, teaching, and public engagement, and the civic participation of the citizenry.

—Steven Rathgeb Smith

I was Sid’s doctoral student at Harvard. After a while, I moved up to Ottawa to work on the dissertation. I took a trip back to Cambridge to consult with Sid and got a very bad flu. I ended up in the infirmary at Harvard Student Health. But I still wanted to talk with Sid about my results! He came to the infirmary and sat with me going over tables, in this highly unconventional setting. After patiently hearing out all of the exceptions and complications I was raising, he gently told me to forget those and to focus on the big picture. “Pay attention to the forest, not to the trees.”

—Carole Uhlaner

Sid’s passing has brought back so many of his admirable qualities that it would take a long page to list them all. But as a former graduate student what I remember most was his engaged patience. I always knew that he was on my side, and that was a great gift.

—Richard Valelly

A Berkeley PhD who baked a cake and decorated it with colored icing as the cover of Designing Social Inquiry by Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba wrote on Twitter:

After I made this cake of KKV, Sid Verba emailed me the following: “You know, Sherry, even after a career as long and varied as mine, one never really knows if one’s work really has an impact. This is the most tangible evidence of impact I’ve ever seen.” He’ll be missed.

—Sherry Zaks

Keep PS Informed

Help us honor the lives and work of political scientists. To submit an In Memoriam tribute, contact PS editorial associate Nick Townsend at ntownsend@apsanet.org.

Rudy de la Garza

Rodolfo (Rudy) O. de la Garza died on August 5, 2018, after a series of illnesses. Rudy was the Eaton Professor of Administrative Law and Municipal Science in the Department of Political Science and Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, a position he held since 2008 after first being appointed Professor of Political Science at Columbia in 2001. He previously held appointments at the University of Texas at Austin as the Mike Hogg Professor of Community Affairs and Political Science; at Colorado College; at University of Texas–El Paso; and at Harvard as a visiting professor. Rudy helped found and was a leading figure in the field of Latino politics and policy making, especially the social scientific dimension of the field.

He was born August 17, 1942, the child of Sofia Oropeza, who was born in the state of Sonora, Mexico, and Esteban Rios de la Garza of Seguin, Texas. Sofia had emigrated to Texas from Mexico and found work as a waitress in Tucson, Arizona. Esteban fortuitously worked as a cook at the University of Arizona—fortuitous because as a young child, Rudy frequently accompanied his father to work, an experience he claimed awakened his desire to become a professor one day and work at a university. Rudy set his sights high as a youth when college application season came around, submitting a range of college choices including fancy Ivies on the east coast and Stanford in the west. These early applications to college didn’t sit well with his guidance counselor when Rudy slid a crumpled up application across the desk. It was rejected and tossed into the trash by his counselor as messy. “You can take those elite schools off your list because you’re not going to get in and your parents can’t afford them anyway,” he told Rudy. Not happy about the process and discouraged about the financial side, Rudy applied to University of Arizona, where he went on to obtain no fewer than four degrees—his BS in Marketing (1964), BFT in Marketing (1965), MA in Latin American Studies (1967), and PhD in Government (1972)—as well as the university’s Alumni Association Distinguished Citizen Award.

As a leader in the field of Latino politics, especially the social scientific dimension of the field, Rudy employed a variety of methodological approaches: statistical methods and aggregate data, survey research, elite interviews, ethnographic study, and close scrutiny of data validity and reliability in voting studies. His careful analysis of empirical evidence challenged established frameworks and common wisdom in the study of Latino politics, and pioneered the explicit use of social scientific and public policy analysis to the study of local and national racial and ethnic issues in the United States.

Rudy’s research interests combined political behavior and public policy. In political behavior, he specialized in ethnic politics, with particular emphasis on Latino public opinion and electoral involvement, and his primary interests in public policy included immigration and immigrant settlement and incorporation, which became a major focus of his teaching of undergraduate and graduate students. He collaborated with numerous colleagues and students and encouraged their work. He recently completed with Alan Yang a major forthcoming book, Americanizing Latino Politics, Latinoizing American Politics. Drawing on extensive opinion survey data, the book makes the provocative claim and persuasively shows that “Latinos have increasingly converged across national origin in terms of their political behaviors, policy preferences, and beliefs.” While their level of political engagement is related to their measurable level of Americanization, the Latino policy agenda embraces this dual set of issues both important to the American mainstream and also of primary concern to Latinos.

He edited, co-edited, and coauthored numerous other books including The Future of the Voting Rights Act; Muted Voices: Latinos and the 2000 Election; Sending Money Home: Hispanic Remittances and Community Development; Latinos and US Foreign Policy: Lobbying for the Homeland?; Bridging the Border: Transforming Mexico-US Relations; At the Crossroads: Mexican and US Immigration Policy; Awash in the Mainstream: Latinos and the 1996 Elections; Latino Voices: Mexican, Puerto Rican and Cuban Perspectives on American Politics; Barrio Ballots: Latinos and the 1990 Elections; and The Chicano Political Experience. He also published in leading professional journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Latin American Research Review, Social Science Quarterly, and International Migration Review.

Rudy’s public engagement also included his participation in the evaluation and design of community service programs, including increasing immigrant access to health services in California, and in evaluating Texas’s state-sponsored naturalization campaign. Additionally, he chaired a series of seminars on Latinos and foreign policy that have emphasized increasing Hispanic involvement in international affairs. He served as vice president of APSA and received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Committee on the Status of Latinos in 1993. He was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Other dimensions of Rudy’s life were less well known but were of no surprise to his friends and associates. They relate to his immediately recognizable, unpretentious, and straightforward Rudy-style. He always said he had “knocked on doors, broke down walls” most of his life to get where he wanted. He meant it literally too, since he sold encyclopedias door-to-door to support himself throughout college. In the 1960s and ‘70s he served as Student Affairs Officer and Assistant Director of the Binational Center for USIA in Cochabamba, Bolivia (where his next door neighbor turned out to be Che Guevara’s assassin). He took his style on the road to monitor elections in the Dominican Republic and to oversee Mexican elections in the Salinas years (and ruffle Salinas’s feathers, bluntly challenging his administration’s practices). Rudy emerged persona non grata in Cuba from a meeting where he raised questions about why the only Blacks in the room were the servers; he worked with La Raza. It was alleged that he “walked” into a CIA recruitment office announcing his intention to join and read Che Guevara’s diary while there. Nobody appreciated irony more than Rudy, and, needless to say, his friends and colleagues remember most Rudy’s splendid outsized sense of humor; he made them all laugh out loud…a lot!

The most important part of Rudy’s life, of course, was his personal life with Ileana; their daughter, Sofia; and the boys, David and Daniel. Rudy met Ileana in 1988 when he was the principal investigator of the Latino National Political Survey, and Ileana, in a second job, was working as field supervisor to the study. They met during the study’s pre-trials in Philadelphia and began a long-distance relationship until Ileana and the boys moved to Austin in 1989. They lived in Boston when Rudy was a visiting professor at Harvard in 1990. In 2001, they all moved to New York when Rudy joined the Columbia faculty.

—Kay Achar, Columbia University

—Ileana Corbelle, New York, NY

—Robert Erikson, Columbia University

—Robert Jervis, Columbia University

—Judith Russell, Columbia University

—Robert Shapiro, Columbia University

—Alan Yang, Columbia University

Robert J. Huckshorn

Robert “Bobby Jack” Huckshorn, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Florida Atlantic University, died on December 6, 2018 at age 90 from complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). He is survived by his wife Carolyn, their three daughters, and two grandchildren.

Education changed Bob’s life. Bob was raised in modest circumstances in a small town in the Missouri Ozarks. After college, he taught high school very briefly, but long enough to meet the teacher who became his wife of 68 years. Bob was drafted and served in the Army intelligence corps during the Korean War. Bob continued his education after his military service, receiving a PhD in political science from the University of Iowa. He then went to work for the Republican National Committee during the Kennedy administration. Finally, after having moved the family across the country during his military and political party work—moves that his daughters called their nomadic period—Bob and his family decided to settle in South Florida in 1964. At his memorial, family and friends recalled Bob’s love of this country, which they described in specific terms as family road trips and general terms as deep appreciation for the opportunities that the country provided him and his family. Bob’s father was a Ford mechanic, so Bob was a lifelong Ford customer because loyalty mattered to him. A lifelong Republican, he finally changed his party registration, whether because of the changes in the Republican Party that he knew so well or living in a household where his wife and daughters were Democrats active on gender issues.

Bob had already left the political science department to become an administrator when I joined the political science faculty, but he liked to keep abreast of developments in the field by regularly crossing the administrator–faculty line to talk with junior faculty. He was a lifelong, avid reader. He also was a builder. Bob was recruited to FAU in 1964 as a founding faculty member to help build a new university, a new department of political science, and a new chapter of Pi Sigma Alpha. During his 38 years at FAU he served as department chair, dean of the college of social science and interim dean of another, associate vice president, associate provost, and vice president. He presided over the creation of the nursing program that developed into a well-respected School of Nursing. Then, late in his administrative life, he led the effort to build the new Jupiter campus as an expansion of FAU’s northern service area—an effort that he and his team described as an exciting adventure. Bob’s lifelong interest in institutional and organizational development was rooted in his experiences with institutions that fostered personal and professional development.

Bob was a good teacher, scholar, and colleague. One of my colleagues, who as a graduate student took one of Bob’s seminars, remembered it as the best seminar he took. Bob’s competence, his quiet but assured confidence, and his understated humor brought out the best in students and colleagues. He was engaging partly because he was engaged in politics. His scholarship on the dynamics of American political parties—particularly the organizational lives of state parties, their changing roles in campaigns and elections, and their relationships with national parties—made major contributions to the field. He coauthored with other leading figures in the field, and younger scholars who subsequently became leading figures in the field. Bob’s collaboration was not limited to his research; his collaborative approach to administration contributed to his success as an academic leader.

—Timothy Lenz, Florida Atlantic University

Donald Kommers

Donald P. Kommers, the Joseph and Elizabeth Robbie Emeritus Professor of Political Science and Law at the University of Notre Dame, died on December 21, 2018 in Notre Dame, Indiana. He was born in central Wisconsin on August 26, 1932 and was educated there until he went to Washington to take his undergraduate degree at the Catholic University of America. After two years in the United States Marine Corps as the Korean War was winding down, he returned to his home state to study at the University of Wisconsin where he received his MA and PhD. Throughout his life, Don consistently and passionately reflected the stable, progressive values of the Badger State. He taught in the California State College system for four years before joining the Notre Dame faculty in 1963 as assistant professor. His excellences as scholar and teacher raised him through the ranks to the point where he was awarded the Robbie Chair in 1991. In the Political Science Department, he taught a number of courses in American and comparative government from his first years. He was especially revered as a teacher for his course on constitutional law taken by hosts of students over the years. He also was a presence in Notre Dame’s Law School where his seminar on comparative constitutional law was a gem that attracted students across the university. He had developed into a pioneering and world-renowned specialist on comparative constitutional studies and the German constitution and constitutional tradition. He served Notre Dame as director of the Western European Studies Program (1969–89) and initial director of its Center for Civil and International Human Rights (1976–81).

His most notable service to Notre Dame and to the profession came in his time (1981–94) as chief editor of The Review of Politics. Don brought to The Review his characteristic energy along with a vision of how Notre Dame’s already widely esteemed journal might be further professionalized and contribute in new ways to the university’s rising stature under President Theodore Hesburgh’s leadership. With his typical enthusiasm and determination, he instituted new policies and practices that tied The Review more to the university’s emphasis on enhancing research and graduate education. He established a largely outside advisory board to supplement an internal circle of associate editors and friends, and provided for systematic manuscript review procedures, both critical steps toward making The Review among the most respected journals on politics. He instituted the office of book review editor with appropriate autonomy, and he worked out the arrangements for the service of graduate interns, engaging them directly in the valuable experiences of observing and participating in manuscript assessments. All these important innovations remain in place today.

Don sought to widen the range of interest of The Review from one that emphasized philosophical and historical approaches to politics, to comparative political theory and constitutional studies including non-Western political thought and institutions. He used special thematic issues to draw attention to these wider horizons. Upon his appointment as editor there arose among some Arts and Letters faculty a concern that he might steer The Review away from its traditional concerns to a narrower and more conventional political science with its then regnant quantitative emphasis. Don reminded all concerned that he majored in philosophical and literary studies at Catholic University and sought only to enrich the strong humanistic and interdisciplinary tradition of The Review. His appointments to the outside advisory board, to the office of book review editor, and to graduate internships came to be compelling evidence of his commitment to this enrichment over any displacement. He successfully linked his vision for The Review to that larger one that sparked the leadership of Father Hesburgh, namely making Notre Dame an even greater Catholic university, an outstanding university in every respect and one faithful to its Catholic heritage.

Especially notable among Don’s many publications, including over 100 major articles, is his book, The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany, a highly acclaimed work now in its fourth edition. He was also the senior author of the widely used collegiate course book, American Constitutional Law: Essays, Cases, and Comparative Notes, likewise in its fourth edition. National and international recognition of his achievement came in abundance. He received honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Heidelberg and St. Norbert’s College (Wisconsin). He was granted the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association, the Alexander von Humbolt Prize for Senior Scholars, and the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. He was also the recipient of major fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Max Planck Society, Rockefeller Foundation, German Marshall Fund of the United States, US Fulbright Program, Andrew Mellon Foundation, and National Endowment for the Humanities.

In 2010, Germany’s Federal President awarded Don the Distinguished Service Cross of the Order of Merit for his three decades of scholarship on German life and law and for having “remarkably enriched both American and German legal systems and building a bridge between our two countries as few others have.” Two years later he was honored with a symposium on his work sponsored by the Adenauer Foundation, Germany’s Ministry of Justice, and Berlin’s Institute of Advanced Study for “his extraordinary body of work in German constitutional scholarship.” The symposium was titled “The Curious Life of the Grundgesetz (Germany’s Constitution) in America.”

Donald Kommers is survived by Nancy, his wife of 64 years, three children, and five grandchildren. Many of his colleagues at Notre Dame especially remember his wonderful collegiality, and at The Review of Politics his successors in the editorship remember, with great appreciation, his friendship, energy, and leadership. May he rest in peace.

—Walter Nicgorski, University of Notre Dame

John F. Kozlowicz

Dr. John F. Kozlowicz, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater died December 19, 2018. Koz, the moniker by which he was known by all, began his career at UW–Whitewater in 1968, retired as professor and department chair in 2005, and continued to teach one of his beloved judicial politics courses each semester until his passing. Koz’s career was the embodiment of the “Wisconsin Idea”—the University of Wisconsin System principle that the university should extend beyond the boundaries of the classroom and into the communities it serves.

Koz was born June 1, 1941 to Frank and Esther Kozlowicz and grew up in the Chicago area. He graduated with a BS in Political Science from Loyola University (Chicago) in 1963. He went on to pursue an MA in Political Science at Northern Illinois University and then earned his PhD at the University of Arizona.

Koz joined the UW–Whitewater Political Science Department in 1968 and served as its chair from 1981 until his retirement in 2005. During his early tenure in the department he developed the public law curriculum and assumed the role of pre-law adviser. In subsequent years, he led the effort to establish a Legal Studies minor and paralegal certificate program. In his role as department internship coordinator, he created a network of placement sites across southeastern Wisconsin that the department still relies on today.

A testament to Koz’s exceptional skills in the classroom is the number of times his teaching was acknowledged for its excellence. He was recognized not only within his college and university but also at the state and national level. He was an invited participant at APSA’s first annual Teaching & Learning Conference in 2004. In 1996, he received the University of Wisconsin System Regents Teaching Excellence Award, a system-wide award acknowledging outstanding career achievement in teaching. He was also awarded the highest teaching honor at UW–Whitewater, the W.P. Roseman Award for Excellence in Teaching, in 1991 as well as its Saunders Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Humanities in 1989. The College of Letters and Sciences’ Order of Omega recognized him three times as its Outstanding Teacher Award recipient.

A strong commitment to continuing education led Koz to extend his teaching beyond his classroom on campus to many other venues. In 1990, a grant from the Bicentennial Commission of the United States funded an Institute for Middle and High School Teachers in southeast Wisconsin. Grants from the United States Department of Justice and the Wisconsin Department of Justice resulted in two separate training programs for police officers. For a decade, he coordinated the campus’s Elderhostel (Road Scholar) Program which brought people to the area for educational and social retreats. Koz was one of the first people at UW–Whitewater to experiment with online teaching and was an early adopter of other classroom technologies. He recognized early on that online education could provide access to education for those who otherwise might not be able to pursue higher education. Shortly after he concluded his term as department chair, the Political Science Department was one of a small number of departments on campus invited to seek Higher Learning Commission (at the time the North Central Association) approval to offer its program wholly online.

The nature of our discipline often leads to significant civic engagement and public service. Even with this expectation, Koz stood out for his involvement in the community. He was a longtime member of the Walworth County Coordinating Committee on Criminal Justice and served for 15 years as a member and president of the Elkhorn, Wisconsin Police and Fire Commission. For almost 20 years he coordinated the campus’s Fairhaven Lecture Series hosting an array of speakers each Monday during the academic year at the Fairhaven Retirement Community in Whitewater. His role as coordinator included selecting each semester’s theme, recruiting speakers from among his colleagues across campus and beyond, and facilitating the lectures. Koz was a frequent guest on a number of radio programs offering commentary on local, state, and national politics. He also hosted the weekly “Political Science Forum” on the campus radio station. Koz was very generous with his time, eagerly agreeing to speak to the smallest gathering about politics or the law. Although he was the invited expert, he was always respectful of others’ contributions to the discussion and maintained a fair and balanced approach well before it became a popular news network’s tagline.

As a colleague, Koz was delightful to be around. He was kind, generous, and quick with a joke. He created a welcoming environment in the department and his office was frequently the site of impromptu gatherings for faculty and students as well as an occasional former student in town for a visit. In the fall he would distribute bags of cranberries he picked up on his trips “up north” and every Fat Tuesday he would bring in a few dozen Pączkis to celebrate his Polish heritage.

A memorable testament to Koz’s impact was a fundraising dinner in his honor that endowed the Dr. John F. Kozlowicz Scholarship in Legal Studies. At that event, dozens of former students and colleagues gathered to honor Koz. The attendees included current and former elected officials, attorneys, lobbyists, public administrators, media, and others. Several rose to speak about Koz’s impact on their lives attributing their success to his training and mentorship.

In retirement, Koz cherished having more time to spend at his cottage in Eagle River, Wisconsin kayaking, reading, and visiting with his grandchildren. He remained an avid political junkie and continued to provide radio commentary through the 2016 election. Even after spending 50 years working and living in Wisconsin, Koz retained his loyalty to Chicago sports teams enthusiastically cheering on the Cubs, Bears, and Bulls.

He is survived by Joan his wife of 48 years, two daughters, Catherine Kozlowicz and Emily (Sam) Duchac and his two grandchildren, Harrison and Claire Duchac. He was preceded in death by his son David and his parents.

Koz’s favorite holiday was Groundhog Day. So, in the spirit of the movie by the same name, here is hoping that he is somewhere reliving his best day over and over again.

—Susan Johnson, University of Wisconsin–Whitewater

James Lightbody

James Lightbody, Professor Emeritus of the Political Science Department at the University of Alberta, passed away October 17, 2018 at the age of 73. Jim was a devoted partner, father, grandfather, mentor, colleague, and teacher.

Jim was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, October 11, 1945. He grew up in the Silver Heights suburbs on the western edge of Winnipeg. In the fall of 1963, Lightbody entered United College, now the University of Winnipeg, as an English major. Tom Axworthy, former Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and current Chair of Public Policy at the University of Toronto’s Massey College, was a classmate of Jim’s at United College and a lifelong friend. He recalls that Jim “made a name for himself at United College demonstrating the qualities of humor, energy, and analytical ability that made him such an outstanding political scientist in his subsequent career at the University of Alberta. Known for his refreshing wit, he became an active member of the student council and editor of the Uniter, the college newspaper.”

After obtaining his BA in 1966, Jim shifted more overtly toward studying politics by switching to do a Canadian Studies MA at Ottawa’s Carleton University. By the time Jim completed his dissertation at Queen’s University in 1977, he had moved the focus of his professional life almost entirely toward the study of local government. At Queen’s he studied under John Meisel, a pioneering scholar of Canadian political behavior and public intellectual. Lightbody’s doctoral dissertation, titled “Adapting Urban Institutions: The Reform of Winnipeg” 1971, foreshadowed the mix of scholarly and public activities he would engage in, like his supervisor, throughout his professional life. Tom Axworthy remembers that “(s)o prominent was Jim Lightbody in his graduate class at Queen’s that John Meisel, the dean of Canadian political scientists, when meeting former graduate students (many of whom went on to university careers) invariably would ask “How is Jim Lightbody?””

Jim Lightbody’s first permanent academic appointment also was his last one. In 1971 Jim joined the University of Alberta’s Political Science Department as an assistant professor. There he spent the next 47 years teaching, researching, and mentoring countless students, colleagues, and political aspirants about the importance of local government in Canada. For the younger colleagues in the department, Jim reminded them that the academic job market was once very different (Jim was hired six years before defending his dissertation). Furthermore, technology and “publish or perish” were not the primordial imperatives they are today and authentic collegiality was the norm rather than the exception.

Jim’s many years of experience in politics and the academy made him a valued mentor and colleague to us both. He had a dry, often biting, sense of humor anchored in a subtle, but healthy, skepticism about city governance, and those who function within it. Such a healthy perspective can only be developed through years of practice and study. His skeptical view translated well to university governance and was appreciated by many junior colleagues as they navigated the complexities of new departments, faculties, and institutions. After 47 years in academia studying cities, Jim knew where the bodies were buried in both institutional settings.

However, Jim was always a scholarly idealist and never stopped reveling in the pursuit of high-quality scholarship. Indeed, Jim left behind an impressive body of work, much of it reflecting the lasting imprint of his initial training in English. Indeed, Jim was always on the hunt for a twist of phrase, or rhetorical skewer he could embed in an article, plant with a reporter, or project on live local television. In 1989, Jim Lightbody reworked the title from the classic Hemmingway novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls into “With Whom the Tolls Dwell: The Great Edmonton Telephone Dispute, 1984–1987” for an article in Canadian Public Administration to depict a revenue dispute between publicly-owned telephone companies; one owned by the Province of Alberta, the other owned by the City of Edmonton, Alberta’s capital city. It was an important case study depicting the asymmetrical bargaining strategies deployed by municipalities in their ongoing struggles with higher orders of government.

Jim Lightbody was a fixture in local print and broadcast media, offering incisive commentary on everything from civic electoral contests, to the organization of city administration, to the ritual dysfunction of snow removal (a frequent problem six months of the year in Edmonton). One of Alberta’s leading investigative reporters would run some of his stories about municipal and provincial affairs by Jim to test the accuracy and solidity of his revelations.

Yet, press commentary was just a relatively small part of Lightbody’s public engagement. Indeed, from his earliest days as a student at United College to the end of his life, Jim was always engaged in trying to shape the public policy process to improve the lives of citizens, to make politicians for responsible and accountable to those they were elected to serve. He became President of the College’s Liberal club, establishing a connection with the Liberal Party that he maintained throughout the rest of his life. In 1967–68, Jim was President of the Canadian University Liberal (Party of Canada) Federation. That position put him on the National Executive of the Liberal Party Steering Committee for the 1968 Federal Liberal Leadership convention at which Pierre Trudeau was elected leader. Axworthy, who also served the Liberal Party for decades, recalls that Jim “was one of the young Liberal leaders most sought out by the various contenders for the Liberal leadership in 1968.”

Between October 1978 and June 1980, Lightbody was commissioned to study the efficient delivery of public services by Edmonton and surrounding municipalities. He concluded that annexation of several Edmonton suburbs should be formally put before the province’s Local Authorities Board. It was a set of conclusions that set off a firestorm of debate that remains unresolved. Jim Lightbody was deeply involved in city and provincial political campaigns. He served as Senior Policy Adviser to Laurence Decore (1982–1988). In 1982 Decore decided to re-enter Edmonton municipal politics and Lightbody served as Decore’s campaign manager in the 1983 municipal election. In that election Decore won in a landslide over the incumbent mayor, Cec Purves. When Decore moved into provincial politics as the leader of the Liberal party, Jim became the Platform Chair for the Alberta Liberal Party in the 1989 election. He dipped his toes back into city campaigns as Policy Director for mayoral candidate Bill Smith in 1992. Smith unsuccessfully tried to unseat the incumbent Jan Reimer in that election.

In recent years, Jim’s active advisory role in civic campaigns declined. However, his influence on their conduct has not, as a stream of advisers to mayoral candidates, would-be city councilors, or school board trustees have sought advice in his university office.

Jim was very humble. He never sought accolades or acknowledgments, for his efforts always stemmed from a genuine sense of responsibility to society and a desire to make things better and more just. However, being elected to the College of Fellows in the Royal Canadian Geographical Society (RCGS) in 2016 was a singular honor that meant an awful lot to Jim, and about which he was very proud. He appreciated it as a recognition of his deep commitment to Canada and of his passion for educating people about the country he loved. For Jim, becoming a Fellow of the RCGS was “the cherry on top” of his career—a big “thank you” for a job well done.

Two of the major normative themes that animated Jim’s participation in politics—the valuable contributions metropolitan amalgamation and urban political parties can bring to urban governance—figured prominently in his major book, City Politics: Canada. He developed those themes while giving students, as one reviewer put it, “the main conceptual tools they will need for advanced research into Canadian urban politics.” He also linked those themes to the big political issues that drew Jim into politics—democracy, participation, and innovation. Patrick Smith, a municipal government specialist at Simon Fraser University, never teaches a local government class without having his students engage with some of Jim’s work.

As Jim would frequently tell his students, politics begins with city politics because everyone lives in a municipality. Jim was a vocal champion of the Municipal Internship Program funded by the Province of Alberta, a program designed to give undergraduates hands-on experience with city government. Jim wrote countless letters of recommendation to support students interested in city politics. Many of those students now work for municipalities all over Canada. For many of those students, Jim’s second-year city politics course was transformative. A key component of that course required students to attend an open session of City Council as part of a research project. It is a piece of experiential learning that a former student, and current City of Edmonton employee, told us was the basis of their professional effectiveness.

Jim’s loss will be felt through the loss of training and scholarship available to students at the University of Alberta and to graduate students elsewhere. Smith appreciated the care Jim showed for students when he was an external examiner. However, we also see Jim’s loss as symbolic of the broader erosion of connectivity and engagement citizens have with local government. Although some recruitment focus by universities has been maintained in areas such as urban planning or urban studies, writ large, the focus on urban politics among Canada’s leading political science departments is minimal.

The well-documented struggles of newspaper publishing have been acutely felt in municipalities. As news outlets simultaneously become more consolidated and pluralistic, one of the biggest casualties has been the coverage of civic politics. Since 2010, according to a recent Canadian Government report on the news business, the number of journalism jobs in Canada has declined 30%–225 weekly and 27 daily newspapers have stopped publishing. In just the past few years, the Edmonton Journal has seen its newsroom capacity in local business, city hall, and provincial affairs coverage decline significantly. The inspiration for local government Jim Lightbody instilled in his students, his scholarship about local politics, and his public participation in local politics represented an important stop-gap in the erosion in our awareness of the importance of how municipalities work. The study and teaching of municipal politics in Canada are poorer for his passing.

—Greg Anderson, University of Alberta

—Ian Urquhart, University of Alberta

Robert Sharlet

Robert Stewart Sharlet, 83, Chauncey Winters Research Professor Emeritus of Political Science, formerly of Niskayuna, Schenectady, and Scotia, New York, died in Saratoga Springs, New York on January 26, 2019, after a brief illness. Born to Irving and Evelyn Sharlet (Sedersky) in Boston, Massachusetts, on August 11, 1935, Bob attended public schools in Glens Falls and Albany, New York, and graduated from The Albany Academy in 1953. After attending Brandeis University for a year or two, Bob joined the US Army where he studied Czech at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in Monterey, California and served in Army intelligence in West Germany.

After the Army, Bob attended Wesleyan University before returning to Brandeis, from which he received his BA with Honors in American Civilization in 1960. His mentors at Brandeis were Leonard Levy and John Roche. As Bob wrote in his 2010 memoir, “Levy later won the Pulitzer Prize for History and became our premier constitutional historian. Roche was a well-known liberal public intellectual and Democratic Party leader who later became President Lyndon Johnson’s intellectual adviser in the White House.” However, with his intellectual curiosity in Russia and the Soviet Union, having been engaged by a course with Professor Louis Fischer, Bob subsequently took a course on Marxism with Herbert Marcuse. Thus, began his marriage of law with his curiosity about things Russian and Soviet, a marriage that lasted the remainder of his teaching and scholarly life. And so, at Indiana University in 1960, Bob made the conscious decision “to combine my new interest in matters Russian with my innate fascination with law.”

Bob received a Certificate with Distinction from the Russian and East European Institute and an MA (1962) and PhD (1968) in Political Science from Indiana University. He attended the Moscow University School of Law in the USSR (1963–64) and later received a Certificate in Foreign and Comparative Law from Columbia University Law School (1975). Bob’s first professional publication was an eyewitness report on a Soviet “comrade’s court” which appeared in The Nation in 1965. His first academic position was in the Political Science Department at the University of Missouri, Columbia (1965–67), where he was dubbed by Esquire one of 33 national “super-profs.”

Bob then moved to the Political Science Department of Union College, where he spent the rest of his academic career (1967–2002). There he specialized in the Soviet Union, Russia, and Eastern Europe, and also taught courses on political justice, human rights, and one of the first American courses on the Vietnam War. From 1996–2002, he served as Union’s Chauncey Winters Professor of Political Science. Bob was also a visiting faculty member at Yale, Columbia, University of Wisconsin Law School, The State University of New York at Albany, and several other institutions. He was a frequent source for major news outlets including the New York Times, US News and World Report, Time, CBS News, NPR, Voice of America, and a number of Soviet and European media organizations.

Bob, Erik Hoffmann, and I participated in several projects together over the years. Our first major professional triumph came in 1967 when we organized a panel for the 2nd Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) titled “Soviet Area Studies and the Social Sciences: Methodological Problems of Area Research.” We got Abraham Brumberg (editor, Problems of Communism) and Richard H. Solomon (University of Michigan) to serve as discussants and got Alfred G. Meyer (University of Michigan; a heavy-weight in Soviet studies) to chair it. The panel drew quite a crowd, including Zbigniew K. Brzezinski in one of the front rows. And so began what some in our field of Soviet studies referred to as the “Indiana Mafia.” [The three of us had taken Professor Milton Hobbs’ seminar on the philosophy of science for political scientists during our first year of doctoral study at IU; armed with new epistemological tools we began to wreak havoc in other professors’ courses and, most of all, in Soviet studies by pouring scorn on the so-called “totalitarian model” that had dominated Communism studies up to that time.] Several decades later, Blair Ruble used the term “Indiana Mafia” to refer to the Young Turks in the field of Soviet studies in his introduction of my presentation at the Kennan Institute in the Library of The Castle at the Smithsonian Institution (Kennan Institute Occasional Paper #266). While “they left a remarkable legacy,” Blair said, “they proved to be more benign than the Russian mafia, but at the time that was not apparent to many folks.”

The human rights organization Amnesty International asked Bob to chair its East European Coordination Group in 1977. During his seven-year tenure in that post, he testified before Congress and oversaw the human rights cases of a number of dissidents who went on to become leaders in their newly independent countries, including Vaclav Havel, the first president of the Czech Republic.

Soviet Constitutional Crisis (1992), Bob’s first book after the collapse of the Soviet Union, began simply: “History is strewn with the wreckage of empires.” He published seven other books, notably the widely-cited The New Soviet Constitution of 1977 (1978), and roughly 200 academic articles, chapters, and other essays. One of his most significant contributions was his work on what he described as the USSR’s “contra-system.” “Beneath the officially imposed calm surface” of the Soviet Union, he wrote, there existed “a roiling alternative realm” of economic and social, as well as political, dissent that he believed foretold the Soviet empire’s disintegration.

In addition to his academic and human rights work, Bob served as a Research Associate at the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (1965–67) and Senior Coordinator of the Rule of Law Consortium (1994–96), both in Washington, DC. He consulted for the US Agency for International Development, the CIA, the US Supreme Court, the State Department, and for the Parliament of the Republic of Georgia, the Constitutional Court of Belarus, and Constitutional Commissions of Russia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan.

After his retirement, Bob turned full-time to his final book, Searching for Jeff, a biography of his younger brother, Jeff Sharlet (1942–1969), an early leader of the Vietnam GI anti-war movement and founder of the first underground GI paper, Vietnam GI. Jeff’s important work was documented in the 2005 film Sir! No Sir! which was dedicated to Jeff and other members of the Vietnam GI anti-war movement. To write the book, Bob drew on his skills as a scholar, compiling a significant archive of 1960s anti-war activism, his early experience as a journalist, and his lifetime as a reader of creative works. Bob described the tribute to his beloved brother, which he completed just before his death, as his “greatest accomplishment.” Jeff died of exposure to Agent Orange during his tour of duty in Vietnam. As a friend of Jeff during our IU days together, I was able to provide Bob with some details of Jeff’s post-military anti-war activities not known to him.

In addition to his parents and his brother Jeff, Bob was predeceased in 1989 by Nancy Sharlet (Goodlin), his second wife and the mother of his children. He is survived by his partner of 44 years, Fiona Burde; his daughter Jocelyn Cordelia Sharlet; and his son Jeffrey Charles Sharlet, and their families.

When Bob and I were at IU in the early 1960s, we attended a lecture given by a visiting Azerbaijani–Soviet lawyer and legal scholar, D. A. Kerimov of the Juridical Faculty of Leningrad State University. Kerimov was introduced by an IU faculty member of the Russian & East European Institute. At the conclusion of the introduction, Kerimov rose to the lectern to thank his IU colleague and said of him: In my country, your professor is held in very high regard and my colleagues have paid him the very highest compliment: on ochen’ serioznyi chelovek [He is a very serious fellow]. Years later, Professor Kerimov took Bob under his wing during Bob’s mission in Leningrad and the Leningrad State University Juridical Faculty.

The Indiana Mafia has lost one of its founding sons—an esteemed colleague, and dear friend for nearly 60 years. I repeat Kerimov’s words here in tribute to my dear friend: Bob, you are a very serious fellow. And, I must add: you are sorely missed. ■

—Frederic J. Fleron Jr., The University at Buffalo (SUNY)