Larry Adamsa A version of this
article first ran in the October 18, 2007, edition of the
Santa Barbara Independent.
A version of this article first ran in the October 18, 2007, edition of the Santa Barbara Independent.
Larry Adams, remembered as an inspiring teacher of political science by many students at the University of California at Santa Barbara in the 1960s and later at Bernard Baruch College in New York, died September 7 at age 71 in hospice in Santa Barbara. As testament to his enduring impact as a teacher, among the many who visited him in his last weeks were former UCSB students, despite the nearly four decades that have elapsed since he taught there.
Larry Adams has a special place in the hearts of former students not only because of his eloquence and command of subject but also because of his warmth and accessibility. He displayed a sense of modesty. Students could sense that, despite the depth of his knowledge, he recognized that there was much he did not know.
While his personal political views leaned leftward, his primary commitment as a teacher was to exposing students to a diversity of views in the free marketplace of ideas. One of his students at UCSB, Kenneth Khachigian, a noted conservative strategist and former speechwriter for two Republican presidents, captures the essence of Larry Adams in the classroom:
His exuberance for back-and-forth engaged dialogue interrupted what was clearly hours of his own homework written by hand on pages and pages of notes. You can count on one hand the number of professors who were as prodigious in their preparation. He enjoyed the cut and thrust of debate. It was the hardest “B” I ever worked for but he had demanding academic standards. As years went by he took personal responsibility for his failure to deter my wayward political ways—mock horror (or perhaps real) at the political path I took. My guess is that Larry took pride in any student who embraced politics as the result of his teaching. He was a fine man, a gentleman, easy to laugh, fierce in intellect, energized by the electricity in the dialogue.
Larry Adams was also admired for his courage in his lifelong struggle with hemophilia. Students at UCSB in the 60s recall the Larry Adams blood drives, the support for which from the UCSB community was another reflection of the regard with which he was held. Despite the pain and suffering he experienced, he was defiantly independent and determined to live life as fully as possible. A lifelong Dodger fan, Larry was undeterred from attending games in Los Angeles even at the risk of a visit to the emergency room.
It could be argued that the nature of his disease helped shape him as a reflective thinker. As a teenager, homebound for periods of time by his illness, Larry wrote a weekly column for a local Santa Barbara newspaper called “Window On My World,” which featured his observations on the political world.
And the fact that Larry had to deal with his own mortality at a very early age and accept that he had a disease he could never overcome may have influenced the perspective he brought to his classes. Larry also taught religious studies and religious themes were woven into his political science classes, especially his American Political Thought class. Stan Anderson, a UCSB colleague and close friend, notes that there was a tabletop photo of a bust of Reinhold Niebuhr, a theologian and democratic socialist, in Larry's room at the hospice.
John Kay, a professor emeritus of political science at SBCC grew up with Larry and was a college classmate and colleague. He recalls the impact of religion on Larry's thinking:
There was a definite spiritual side to Larry's intellectual and emotional development. Writers like Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Jacques Maritain, T.S. Elliot, et al. influenced his lectures and writing. These writers called into question the inevitability of progress, reaffirming the capacity of evil. And most of them assailed zealots who believed that, through politics, we can establish some sort of heaven on earth. To Adams progress through reason was surely important but reason alone was not going to cut it. A sense of charity, humility, love, and affection—an emotional and intellectual connection to the nobler aspects of our nature—was crucial.
Despite his skepticism about utopian visions of political change, Larry was a committed liberal political activist. He was a member of the Santa Barbara County Democratic Central Committee from 1968–71, attended the tumultuous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, and was an ardent supporter of Robert Kennedy and Cesar Chavez.
Larry organized the Santa Barbara campaign for Robert Kennedy in the 1968 California Democratic presidential primary and was at the Ambassador Hotel with UCSB students on June 5 when Kennedy was assassinated. In what must have been a Niebuhrian moment of personal grief, he was able to console the distraught students.
And despite the physical ordeal that running for office would have required, Larry considered running for Congress in 1970. Former California State Senator Gary K. Hart, whose longshot run against an entrenched Republican incumbent congressman in 1970 helped galvanize the progressive community in Santa Barbara, notes Larry's role in Democratic politics during this period:
When I first cut my teeth in Santa Barbara electoral politics in 1970, I got to know Larry Adams. The Vietnam War was still raging and SB Democrats were demoralized about the prospects of winning against (incumbent Charles) Teague. The call went out for someone to run and I said I would be willing. About the same time Larry Adams said he would be willing as well. Neither one of us was interested in running against each other and after a number of meetings and conversations, Larry decided to withdraw. Larry was a very knowledgeable person about politics and public policy. If he had run for office, I think he would have had a strong following and would have been an outstanding public official.
Larry left UCSB in 1971 to accept a teaching position at Bernard Baruch College, CUNY, a position he held until 1996, when he retired to Santa Barbara. In 1977 his book on Walter Lippmann, another one of those skeptics about political utopias, was published. His physical problems mounted in his last years but he displayed an active mind and interest in politics until the end.
Larry Adams was the first teacher I had in college. I am not someone who succumbs easily to giddiness but the feelings I had about him can only be described as adulation. I had many excellent teachers at UCSB but he was the only one who met every fantasy I had ever had about the perfect teacher. I know my feelings about him were shared by many other students of that period.
In researching Reinhold Niebuhr for this piece, I happened upon a quote from Barack Obama, who also considers himself a Niebuhr disciple. I did not get a chance to learn Larry's feelings about Obama, possibly the RFK of 2008, but I was struck by how Obama seems to be channeling a Larry Adams lecture from 1969:
I came away (from Niebuhr) with the compelling idea that there is serious evil in the world and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief that we can eliminate these things. But we shouldn't use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away the sense that we know these efforts are hard and not swing from naive idealism to bitter realism.
Fred Hoffman, Santa Barbara City College
Hayward Rose Alker, Jr.
“Troubled times breed reflective thinkers. As inhabitants of such an era we join those from other ages, other disciplines and even other civilizations in the search for historical understanding. We try to make sense of the world we live in, in order to distinguish what we can change and what we cannot, to illuminate the choices we may make, to inspire informed hope and counsel reasoned caution in our descendents, giving dignity to our own brief lives, our contemporaries and those before and after us.”—Hayward Alker.
Computational linguistics, mathematics and politics, hermeneutics, Orwell, grammar, Jesus, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Las Casas, Thucydides, dialectics, the prisoner's dilemma, historicity, interdisciplinarity. Emancipatory empiricism. Emancipation.
Hayward Alker was committed to humanistic social science that was about the creation of emancipatory knowledge to promote a more peaceful and just world. He thought that such a world was possible and that social scientists could be part of the movement toward that world. He taught as he learned, respecting all modes of inquiry, looking everywhere he could think of for insight, regardless of discipline, and taking everything seriously to see what others have to offer. In that sense, Hayward practiced a Quaker form of inquiry, looking for the inner light in all souls, so that he might see what they saw and be sparked by it.
I last saw Hayward at the 2007 International Studies Association meeting in Chicago as he was rushing to a session. He was ebullient, proudly describing himself as the “presidential spouse” because Ann Tickner was the president of ISA and in his mind it was her meeting. Hayward was so glad for Ann's success that the smile never left his face, and his arms never stopped moving as he described the panels he had just attended. Hayward was himself, eager to learn, eager to listen. He was overwhelming and I felt inadequate, energized, and inspired—all in the time it took us to get into an elevator and go down a few floors.
Renee Marlin-Bennett, Johns Hopkins University: “Hayward was incredibly knowledgeable in many scholarly disciplines. He didn't cross disciplines; he knit them together, making a richer, more meaningful whole. He faced the world with an incredible intellectual curiosity—a hunger. If he didn't know something, he would ask about it and ask for sources to read. And then he most definitely would read them. The word ‘polymath’ fit him better than anyone else I knew.”
Despite this breadth it is still possible to say that Hayward's work was characterized by three broad themes: critical and emancipatory empiricism; a pluralistic approach to the philosophy of social science and methodology; and an abiding interest in the deep structure of language and narratives. These themes, and Hayward's other interests, were consistent and cross-fertilizing.
First, and always, Hayward Alker was a disciplined empiricist. In one of his earliest published works Hayward collaborated with Bruce Russett, Karl Deutsch, and Harold Lasswell to produce the World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators (Yale University Press, 1964). Hayward wrote much of the analysis of trends and patterns either alone or with Russett and the authors describe the Handbook as a “scientific work.” Through the 1960s and 1970s Hayward published statistical analyses of inequality, the United Nations General Assembly, and conflict. In 1965, Hayward published Mathematics and Politics. His empirical work became extremely self-conscious and nowhere is this clearer than in his work alone and with various co-authors, including Dwain Mefford, James Bennett, and Roger Hurwitz on the Prisoner's Dilemma.
Hayward wrestled with extending the potentialities of mathematics, statistics, game theory, and simulations. Yet, he wrote, “I do not think … that ‘quantification’ is the only mode of formalization necessary or appropriate for the logical and empirical rigor and tractability that mathematical representations have given so many of the natural and social sciences. We must broaden and deepen the universe of scientifically relevant modeling approaches appropriate for the formal analysis of interpretive and theoretical world histories. Historical evidence, much of it textual, should not be reduced to quantitative time series, or otherwise ignored.”
Hayward became a philosopher of social science in typically autodidactic fashion. This self-consciousness about ontology and epistemology led him to a deeper understanding of the choices and consequences of various approaches and a commitment to pluralistic forms of inquiry. And Hayward's own analysis moved back and forth across these modes. So, in his later years Hayward could become excited by new quantitative findings while in his own work he was analyzing the tragedy (and comedy) of world history as narrative script, searching for underlying plots, deep structure, and associated transformational grammars. Hayward's interest in language, grammar, fairy tales, tragedy, and comedy was always emancipatory in the sense that he saw all these narratives as potentially revisable.
The point of self-conscious reflection on ontology and epistemology for Hayward was not simply to show how narrow most of us were in our work, but for us to realize how our unself-conscious choices could be made at least more conscious. We might better see our world and what others have to offer: “In every case, the reframing of the game/dilemma involved is from an abstracted, asocial world to a concrete, linguistically and historically described, heternonomous, social and political one; this has required a shift from a presumed to be isolated homo economicus to a contextually located homo collocutionis, historicus socialis et polticus capable, with some degree of autonomy and responsibility within porously bounded political societies of practically arguing for, or enacting his passionate commitments, beliefs, loyalties, principles and interests.”
Peter Katzenstein, Cornell University: “I sat in only one seminar that Hayward cotaught at MIT, I think in 1972. It was an evening class on artificial intelligence and Harrison White and a humanistically inclined big wig computer science professor were there as well. It was Hayward the way he was the last time I met him when Bob Keohane and I invited him to be a discussant at last year's ISA, I think, on anti-Americanism. There had been no change in the intervening 35 years—free association, wide reading, talking like a machine gun with 85% of the audience clueless what was going on even though it sensed that something was going on. Down on linear thought up on spontaneous synapses. Low on intellectual discipline, high on imagination and daring. That is what sticks most closely in my mind. Then I arrive at Cornell and in the first week see Hayward and rush across the street to say hello—slightly stooped walk, absorbed in his thoughts, shirt out of his pants, shoes with defective heals—only to find it was his twin brother …”
Roger Hurwitz, MIT: “As a theorist, Hayward began where others left off—literally. I recall his saying on several occasions, ‘I begin with the residuals.’ He was referring to his search for data and representations that traced the spark, spirit or choices that shaped human activities—those dimensions which behaviorist methodologies exclude by treating people and states as opaque and a-historical objects.”
Gary King, Harvard University: “I first got to meet Hayward when he was kind enough to write me about my then forthcoming book, Unifying Political Methodology. His first letter to me said something close to: ‘I propose we have lunch to discuss how to unify political methodology. I will read your forthcoming book and you will read an equivalent number of pages of my work. We will meet on Tuesday at noon in Harvard Square at …’ I showed up, had lunch, watched him wildly gesticulating, ducked at the right moments so I didn't get knocked out, and was drenched in a rain shower of often useful but always obscure citations to literatures that I didn't know existed. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing him present views, which in the course of a single paragraph could range from frustrating obfuscation to fascinating insight. I had a number of other lunches and meetings with him over the years (including two in front of large audiences), most with a similar surreal quality, and none of which I would have missed for anything. I've also benefited greatly by working with several of Hayward's former MIT students who migrated from one end of Cambridge to the other. Few people have the intellectual range or raw passion for their work as Hayward Alker. It was always a privilege to see him in action.”
Robert Keohane, Princeton University: “Vibrancy, originality, and imagination—thy name was Hayward! Every time I saw him, he had a new set of ideas. In the early 1970s, he introduced me to Herbert Simon's wonderful little book, The Sciences of the Artificial. I learned from him about simulations and hermeneutics; Thucydides and Braudel; the Santa Fe Institute; and practical reason. His range of taste and competence was astonishing, and he could not be contained within the boundaries of conventional social science. I have in my copy of Rediscoveries and Reformulations a handwritten note from him of May 31, 1996, that mentions four science books that he thought I might find interesting.”
Emanuel Adler, University of Toronto: “My first few minutes with Hayward were like this: I came to his MIT office to interview him about the arms control epistemic community (the ‘Charles River gang’). As soon as I said a sentence explaining the purpose of my visit, he hit the table with his fist, looked angrily at me, and said something like ‘they never invited me to be part of the group; my knowledge was not good for them.’ In time, we became good friends, but I will never forget that in our first encounter I almost ran away from his room.”
Andrew Linklater, University of Wales, Aberystwyth: “Hayward was off to Moscow on the day I was due to give a paper at USC. He and Ann invited me to breakfast at their house. Hayward cooked a fine breakfast. He then spent a good hour discussing my paper with me. There was I think then a mad dash to pack and get to the airport. The point I am making is that on top of everything else Hayward gave his time to people, in my case when there clearly wasn't that much time to give.”
Joshua Cohen, Stanford University, was an MIT colleague: “Hayward Alker powerfully identified with people in vulnerable positions. It was not just an intellectual thing, or matter of principle, but had great emotional energy behind it. So there was no greater advocate for younger faculty and graduate students. It was palpable, and many of us feel deep gratitude for it.”
Walter Hill, St. Mary's College of Maryland, and another former MIT graduate student: “I do not believe I would have graduated without his support.”
Gavan Duffy, Syracuse University: “Hayward asked me one spring when I was conducting my dissertation research how I would support myself over the summer. I told him I planned to take a loan and maybe find a part-time job. He immediately wrote me a check for $1,000 and gave it to me on condition that I not take the part-time job but instead focus full-time on the dissertation. Many years later, it became my task to secure Frank Sherman's international conflict events data research upon his untimely death. Frank and Hayward had worked together on this project for years, as it grew out of Hayward's earlier event data project. Hayward had been very concerned about Frank's financial well-being, as Frank's adjunct appointment had recently ended at the time of his passing. Among Frank's effects, I found Hayward's personal check for $2,000.”
Joshua Goldstein, professor emeritus, American University: “One of my first exchanges with Hayward was about a dissertation topic. He encouraged thinking big. He suggested ‘The Theory of Unequal Exchange’ adding ‘you know, integrating Marxist and liberal approaches.’ I said, ‘For my dissertation? Or my life's work?’ He gave an innocent little smile and said, ‘well, both!’ As you know, I decided on a narrower topic encompassing just the political economy of the Eurocentric world system since 1500, using multiple methodologies to analyze basically all available econometric series and great-power war data. Even then when I brought it in finished at 900 manuscript pages, he said, ‘Can't you get data for Asia, Africa, and Latin America?’”
LHM Ling, The New School: “‘So where's your name?’ Hayward asked me, smiling broadly while pointing to the bottom of the page. I had cited my first publication in a paper but left out the author's name. Trained in Confucian (female) humility, I thought the act would be too arrogant. But when Hayward noted its absence, I understood I could no longer proceed as usual. With that one gesture, Hayward transformed me into the political science Warrior Woman that I am today.”
Eric Blanchard, a graduate student of Hayward's at the University of Southern California: “As usual he was working on a mind boggling number of things. Hayward and his co-authors Tom Biersteker, Takashi Inoguchi, and Tahir Amin were finishing their project, Dialectics of World Orders after decades of work. He was also working on a paper ‘The Powers and Pathologies of Military Networks: Insights from the Political Cybernetics of Karl W. Deutsch and Norbert Weiner,’ and continuing his analysis of the Prisoner's Dilemma. Hayward was also enthusiastic about the reanalysis of Ronald Inglehart's world value survey data using a method developed in his ‘Statistics and Politics’ paper. This was consistent with his practice of reworking some of his previous work for large new projects.”
Laurie Brand, University of Southern California: “I last saw Hayward as he was preparing to leave for Italy where a choral group he sang with was to perform in Florentine churches. He was so excited—he loved to sing—as he loved community theatre—I still remember his showing me photos from a performance in a production on Block Island. So that is how I will remember him. That incredible intellectual ‘force of nature’ as our colleague Ron Steel called him upon learning of his death. The towering intellect who maintained an energy, a sense of wonderment at all the world still had to teach, and a joy and excitement for the continuing encounter. A true genius, and a human being of deep integrity who used his scholarship to try to imagine and fashion a better world.”
Gwendolyn Alker, Hayward's youngest daughter, of New York University: “My father was born with six fingers. He was also born the first of two identical twins: a fact that was only discovered quite late, perhaps after his extra thumb had been removed. As a scholar in the field of performance studies I have been taught to read bodies and personal histories as subjective and profound maps.
“What I learned from my father, among countless things, was that reaching for more is not only about using what we have available to us, but also utilizing what we have lost or do not even realize that we have. Sometimes we must wait for things to show themselves, and learn that the most obvious path can lead us astray. Sometimes we must wait to realize that our lives are always deeply linked to those who we don't see, but who we may come to love as much as our own selves. My father was undoubtedly a scholar of the finest measure, but he was also a spiritual and deeply principled member of his local and global communities. Through my unparalleled luck of having him as my first and most profound teacher, I have learned to reach for more as well as to be still and to listen to what I cannot yet see.”
Hayward was born in New York City in 1937 and grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. He was a straight-A student in high school and studied mathematics at MIT. Hayward obtained an MA in 1960 and Ph.D. at Yale in political science in 1963 where he wrote a dissertation on voting behavior in the United Nations General Assembly. In 1968, at the age of 29, Hayward became a full professor at Yale. Hayward joined the political science department at MIT in 1968 and taught there until 1995. Hayward was president of the International Studies Association in 1992. He joined the University of Southern California School of International Relations in 1995, the first person to hold the John A. McCone Chair in International Relations.
Hayward suffered a brain aneurism at his home on Block Island on August 24. He died some hours later in Providence, RI, surrounded by Ann Tickner and his three daughters, Joan, Heather, and Gwendolyn. He is also survived by his twin Henry, his sister Charity, and six grandchildren.
A week after he died, I looked through the door into Hayward's study in his home on Block Island. It was Hayward mid-thought, books and papers stacked on every surface, large windows open to the island he loved, to the sounds of late summer, the birds, crickets, children, and grandchildren, running and laughing. And in the house were the sounds of Ann, his former colleagues, students, and friends, and the voices of the members of the Block Island choir, where Hayward sang tenor.
In Rediscoveries and Formulations (Cambridge University Press, 1996) Hayward wrote an essay on the Cold War and the work of Harold Lasswell and George Orwell: “Patriotic political scientists are especially susceptible to the distorting temptations of national power or the fetishism of the state. After all, if we were not interested at least vicariously in the successes of the powerful and/or their supersession by the formerly powerless, we probably would not be very good at our jobs. But in an era riven by the expectation of violence, indeed the cataclysmic threat of aerial nuclear warfare, objectivity and decency were very hard to maintain. The ‘mental cheating’ of double think was especially tempting in a jingoistic time. But the self-righteous nostalgic hegemonism of imperial democracies, the rosy glow of Pax Britannica or Pax Americana, the superstate fetishism of English (and Russian) language international relations research have been serious problems for self-understanding…. [A]cademically speaking, self-serving theories and question-begging treatments of opponents—cheap putdowns directed toward those of alternative metatheretical orientations—were too often the rule, especially toward the Marxist tradition of scholarship which had much more scientific vigor in the First, Second, and Third Worlds than most behavioral ‘neorealists’ were willing to admit.
“Serious, uncoerced engagement with intellectuals from opposing and dominated states, as well as other traditions of interpretive scholarship, is both patriotic and scientifically defensible. Such activities can help finally correct such self-serving biases if only we come to realize that an international science of international politics oriented toward the universalization of human dignity was possible in the late Cold War, where it had remarkable effects on Soviet intellectual elites unable to reciprocate with such open self-critical engagement. It is possible now, in a world where many in the West see militant Islam as a fundamentalist threat. My Orwellian Lasswell, who tries to write and speak English so that ordinary people can appreciate and understand, would argue that real freedom transcends slavery if by that we mean unending, proud, non-imperialistic dedication to the cause of a more democratic world order.”
(The Alker quotes are from Rediscoveries and Reformulations, pages 267, 271, 412, and 262–3 respectively.)
Neta Crawford, Boston University
Jim Busey
Jim Busey, professor emeritus, who gave the first lecture at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and founded the university's political science department, died in June of 2007 of natural causes. He was 91.
Jim Busey taught at CU-Colorado Springs from 1965 to 1980. When he arrived here, the university was moving into a bankrupt tuberculosis sanitarium and Jim helped move hospital beds and medical equipment out to make room for desks and bookcases. Jim was also instrumental in establishing this school's independence from the CU-system's flagship campus in Boulder.
Fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, Jim Busey was a leading authority on Latin American politics, particularly Costa Rica. But he published widely, including scholarly articles on Latin American constitutionalism, political development, Central American integration schemes, and politics in Brazil, Canada, and Nicaragua. Via Jim's own little hand-turned printing machine, his Juniper Press cranked out a yearly Guide to Latin American Politics until 1992.
During a 31-year academic career, Jim held several positions, beginning at the University of Wyoming from 1949 to 1952. He taught at CU-Boulder from 1952 to 1965, when he came to Colorado Springs.
Born in Seattle in 1916, Jim began teaching in a one-room school house in Alaska in 1937 as part of the Roosevelt Administration's Civilian Conservation Corps. That job paid for his bachelor's degree at the University of Puget Sound. He then served as a military policeman in Alaska during World War II. Following his discharge in 1946, Jim earned graduate degrees from Ohio State University.
Independent and insightful, Jim had a dry sense of humor and a pleasing personality. He had a true depth of character and you could trust him.
Jim lived in Manitou Springs and is survived by his wife of 65 years, Marian, and son Philip, of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Those of us who knew Jim Busey affectionately remember him.
Paul C. Sondrol, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
William James Crowe, Jr.
Despite the dictum, “Don't look a gift horse in the mouth,” a nervous shiver ran through the U.S. Naval Academy's Department of Political Science at the prospect of welcoming back Admiral William Crowe over 50 years after his 1946 graduation. There was reason to be nervous. He graduated at a time when political science was not an approved major, much less the most popular one. He also far-out ranked any officer with whom we had direct contact. The broad experiences Admiral Crowe could bring to our students seemed like reasonable compensation should he put his rank ahead of personal relationships. The fact that he had twice stood up to Admiral Hyman Rickover's entreaties to join the nuclear submarine force in order to pursue his PhD. in political science created an endearing counterpoint. Rickover was so angry with Crowe's decisions that called him a “stupid bastard” and threatened to end his career. Admiral Crowe persevered, completing a doctorate in international relations from Stanford University in 1965, an experience he viewed as a major turning point in his life. The Navy “rewarded” him with the same assignment he would have been given without the degree, chief of staff to the commander of a submarine squadron.
Admiral Crowe took his marching (sailing?) orders from a famous predecessor, John Paul Jones, who asserted that, “It is by no means enough that an officer be capable … He should be a gentleman of liberal education, refined, manners, punctilious courtesy, and the nicest sense of personal honor.” He encouraged students to think outside the box. He had high standards for his students, but never dealt with them in a highhanded manner. As the tower's came crashing down during his class on September 11, Admiral Crow took off his military mindset and became professorial, warning against emotional cries for revenge and encouraging analytical endeavors designed to understand the broader issues. I remember him retreating to my office to watch one of the few televisions in the department to see the story unfold. When the call came to evacuate the building, Crowe meekly asked me if he could stay in my office explaining, “the media all have my office and home numbers and I really don't have a response for them. In all my years in the Pentagon, this was not a scenario we ever really considered.”
Navy officials did not know how to deal with a thoughtful independent thinker bent on using his intellectual skills to analyze issues and change policy. Crowe liked to remind students of his father's guidance that, “Your mind is like a parachute. If it won't open when you need it, it is not much good.” By 1980, the Navy planned to retire Crowe against his wishes. His friends mounted an unprecedented battle to save his career. His briefing of Ronald Reagan a few years later while commander of the Pacific Fleet so impressed Reagan that he rose to the top of the list as the successful nominee as chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 1985. George H.W. Bush asked him to stay on an additional four years, but Crowe turned him down. Unlike MacArthur's old soldier who fades away, Admiral Crowe came back into the headlines in 1992 when frustration with the campaign rhetoric questioning the suitability of a presidential candidate without military experience led him to endorse Bill Clinton, helping to lay that issue to rest. He was appointed by Clinton to serve as ambassador to Great Britain and served for three years. As Clinton joked at his memorial ceremony, “Bill Crowe endorsed me and I rewarded him with three difficult tasks, including taking on the British over Northern Ireland. He joked that I at least gave him a nice place to hole up in at the Court of St. James.” The New York Times called Crowe, “the most powerful peacetime military officer in American history.” Any one of his mini-careers would have made him a superior catch for a political science department. As it turned out, his alma mater had to wait in line a year while Crowe finished out previous commitments at two other institutions, the University of Oklahoma and George Washington University.
As anyone who knew him well could have told us, our fears of an overbearing presence were misdirected. Admiral Crowe wore his experience and accolades lightly. While most of his colleagues used the moniker “Admiral” when talking to him, he showed no offense when “Bill” slipped out. He turned out to be a delightful colleague, great raconteur, and effective teacher. He was fond of saying, “never take anything too seriously, especially yourself.” His seminars were highly sought out, and despite having a teaching assistant, he insisted on fully taking part in all aspects of teaching, including grading. Only planning to use his office two mornings a week, he willingly accepted a small internal office. Bringing over high-ranking politicians and journalists to Annapolis, Crowe was fond of showing off his cubbyhole of an office and warning his guests, “see, this is how the mighty can fall.” Above and beyond his ability to integrate personal experience and principles of international relations, we will miss his hearty laugh and seemingly endless repertoire of jokes. Unlike some who prattle on with jokes for joke's sake, Admiral Crow regularly used humor to make a relevant point in a way that would stick in his listeners' minds.
While even the best read of our colleagues could interpret events or explain theories, Admiral Crowe had a special advantage. As one of his students put it, “His first-hand vignettes of how NSC meetings within the Reagan cabinet unfolded made personal application of decision making much more real for the students.” Knowing the players, both U.S. and foreign, provided a significant benefit. He challenged students to better understand the cultural and personal background factors that animate behavior. In the words of one of his seminar participants, “In a discipline sometimes dominated by mute statistics and stale formulas, Admiral Crowe provided compelling explanation for the contributions of the qualitative, human factors of Political Science.”
For political scientists in a school where all students take two years of engineering school, Crowe was a useful counterpoint to those asserting that a technical Navy requires only technical graduates. He became a cheerleader for political science, extolling its substantive value and praising its ability to better prepare students as good communicators. His career seminars for students extolled “going where your heart and mind guide you.” And “Don't let anyone make your decisions for you.”
Admiral Crowe attempted to impress on the future officers in his classes basic American principles such as the sanctity of free speech, equality, and the value of human beings. He went beyond talking the talk to walk the walk. When an enlisted Navy bandsman whom he had met through their Oklahoma connection asked him to preside over his reenlistment, a task well below his pay grade, Admiral Crowe agreed without hesitation.
William J. Crow, Jr., naval officer-diplomat-educator, reflected the best of America's citizen-soldier tradition. He crammed a great deal into his 82 years, and the U.S. Naval Academy's Department of Political Science was fortunate to be a part of it.
Stephen Frantzich, U.S. Naval Academy
Milton C. Cummings, Jr.
Our colleague and dear friend, Milton C. Cummings, Jr., died on August 10, 2007, at the New Jersey home of one of his sons, ultimately losing a 12 year battle with cancer. He was 74 years old. He is survived by sons Christopher R. Cummings of Kentfield, CA, and Jonathan B. Cummings of New Vernon, NJ; by his daughter Susan S. Cummings of London; and by nine grandchildren.
Although a child of the East Coast—he was born in New Haven, lived for several years in Brockport, New York, and then moved with his parents to the Washington, D.C., area—Milt spent many summers on his relatives' farm in Kansas, and remained sensitive to the great variety of American experiences throughout both his professional and his private life. Milt was an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, from which he graduated with Highest Honors in 1954 and to which he often returned as an outside reader for senior theses. He won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford where he studied with Herbert Nicholas and David Butler. On his return to the United States in 1956, he entered the graduate program at Harvard University, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1960 under the supervision of V. O. Key, Jr.
Milt Cummings had a distinguished career as a political scientist that spanned more than 45 years, starting with his appointment as a research assistant at The Brookings Institution in 1959, and continuing past his retirement from Johns Hopkins and appointment as professor emeritus, until just a few months before his death. He left Brookings in 1965, having become a senior staff member the year before, to join the faculty at The Johns Hopkins University as an associate professor. He was promoted to full professor in 1968, and during the next 36 years served at various times as undergraduate coordinator, graduate director, and department chair. He served on many professional committees, including as a member of the Council of the American Political Science Association from 1979 to 1981.
Although he already had two co-authored books to his credit1
The Image of the Federal Service (1964) and Source Book of a Study of Occupational Values and the Image of the Federal Service (1964).
In the mid-1970s the focus of Milt's research began to move away from electoral politics and toward the study of cultural policy. Beginning with a 1976 article in Policy Studies Journal, and building on work that he had started somewhat earlier in sociology and economics, Milt was instrumental in developing cultural policy as a subfield of political science. Originally focusing on cultural policy in the United States, working on The Patron State: Government and the Arts in Europe, North America, and Japan (in which project I was privileged to be Milt's collaborator) returned him to the world of comparative politics. (In 1955, Milt had won the Oxford University Wylie Prize for an essay on Anglo-American relations.) While in the grand scheme of things perhaps not the most important work he did, connecting as it did to a personal love of the arts, this work brought Milt great satisfaction and joy. He was invited to teach arts policy as a visiting professor of political science at the University of Madrid in 1994, to take part in a White House Conference on Cultural Diplomacy in 2000, and to participate in a program and conference in Paris organized by the French-American Foundation and the French Ministry of Culture in 2003. As one of his colleagues put it, “When many of us were beginning assistant professors, Milt had the stature to give our work instant credibility. His intellectual work in this area and mentoring provided an invaluable contribution to the careers of many of us. Moreover, his sense of humor, love of the opera, and constant acts of kindness will be long remembered by many of us.”
As dedicated as he was to scholarship, Milt's dedication to his students was legendary. Having started teaching at Hopkins in 1965, he did not miss a class until 1995—an event noted by no less a figure than Baltimore icon, Oriole's “iron man” Cal Ripkin, Jr. His classes were always over subscribed. One of his colleagues (me) sometimes suggested that the department should find a second hand church pew or railway waiting room bench for the students who regularly queued up for his office hours—which always lasted well beyond their posted end. To quote just a few of the tributes from his former students: “His depth of character and devotion to all of us go without saying, and well beyond any words I could write”; “Dr. Cummings, or Uncle Miltie, as people often called him, was not only my favorite professor and a good friend, he was also a true inspiration and the main reason I chose to go to graduate school studying political science”; “it is probably staggering to know how many people he touched. He truly was a great man: I am better for having known him.” Temperamentally unable to turn students away, or to cut them short, Milt was noted for having a string of “hidey-holes” where he could prepare for his classes and work on letters of recommendation. He won divisional teaching awards in 1983 and 2002, and a university award for excellence in faculty advising in 1994.
Milt had an amazing memory for statistics, which (as with many experts on American elections) extended to baseball. The last social outing we shared was a trip to a Washington Nationals game; he had some difficulty climbing to our seats in the upper deck, but none at all in recalling batting averages not just from the previous Nationals season, but from many seasons of following the Orioles and from the old Washington Senators as well.
While scrupulously objective in his teaching and in his academic writings, Milt was a fiercely loyal FDR Democrat, who in his private conversations always referred to the Democrats as “we” rather than as “they.” Although sometimes challenged by events, his faith in the ultimate wisdom of the people remained as unshakable as his commitment to social justice.
As long time friend Michael Pinto-Duschinsky observed in an obituary in the The Times (London), Milt had the outward appearance of a member of the Washington establishment. He won research grants from all the major foundations; he was a member of Washington's Cosmos Club; in 1994 he was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by the State University if New York at Plattsburgh. As the rest of us became ever more casual in our dress, Milt continued to meet his classes in jacket and tie. Always ready to see the best in people, and always optimistic in facing any challenge, including that of his long and wearing illness, Milt Cummings was a true gentleman and a truly gentle man.
Richard S. Katz, The Johns Hopkins University
Morton Frisch
Morton Jerome Frisch was born in Chicago on January 26, 1923, the son of Harry I. and Gertrude Glicksman Frisch. He was in the United States Army from 1943 to 1946, serving as an anti-aircraft artilleryman in the Ninth Air Force in England and then in Belgium, and was decorated with the Belgian Croix de Guerre. He and Joelyn Alice Saltzman were married in 1949. Morton died on December 24, 2006, survived by his wife, three children, and six grandchildren. He and his wife attended Roosevelt University where Morton received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1949. He then earned his MA at the University of Chicago, studying particularly political philosophy with Leo Strauss and international relations with Hans Morgenthau, and took his Ph.D. in political science in 1953 at Pennsylvania State University, having studied especially with Neal Riemer. From 1953 until 1964 he taught at the College of William and Mary. During 1957–58 he was visiting professor at the University of Minnesota where he forged a strong friendship with Harold Chase. He was Fulbright professor at the University of Stockholm (1963–64) and later at Korea University. He taught at Northern Illinois University from 1964 until his retirement in 1992. He continued to teach as professor emeritus at Northern Illinois, conducting his last class on the day he was admitted to the hospital with the respiratory illness that ended his life.
Frisch conceived and co-edited with Richard G. Stevens, American Political Thought: The Philosophic Dimension of American Statesmanship (1971). It and a companion reader, The Political Thought of American Statesmen (1974), were widely used texts for some 20 years. After arriving at Northern Illinois, he persuaded Martin Diamond to leave Claremont and join him, and he also recruited Herbert Storing at the University of Chicago to teach classes at Northern. The three together made a formidable faculty in the field of American political thought until 1977 when Diamond and Storing moved to Georgetown and Virginia respectively. Frisch published with Diamond, The Thirties (1968), and single-authored Franklin D. Roosevelt (1975). He edited Selected Writings and Speeches of Alexander Hamilton (1985) and authored Alexander Hamilton and the Political Order (1991). In addition, he published several articles on Franklin D. Roosevelt, on “Democracy and the Class Struggle,” on Edmund Burke, and, in later years, on Shakespeare as a political thinker. His last book, edited with an introduction, was The Pacificus-Helvidius Debates of 1793–1794 by Hamilton and Madison, published posthumously (2007).
Mort was of that generation that went to war to defend Western Civilization against an unprecedented threat that had arisen from within the West itself and even from within one of the West's most civilized countries. But it was not just the West he defended. His most memorable description to me of his wartime service was about being stationed on the east coast of England with an anti-aircraft group attempting to shoot down the V-1 bombs aimed indiscriminately at English cities. This defense of the cities and its civilians is what the decent Western warrior was about. And now, whenever I hear the popular WWII song “The White Cliffs of Dover,” I am reminded of the man I knew who stood on those cliffs defending against those weapons, the product of what Winston Churchill memorably described at the time as “perverted science.” “Perverted,” at least because they were aimed not against the enemies' armies but against his hearth and home.
Following the war, Mort was drawn to the study of political philosophy after the manner of Plato. In that tradition, he belonged to the class of guardians. Anyone who knew Mort at all had to know that he had the soul of a warrior. Those students and professional friends who knew him well, knew him as a lover of wisdom. And those with experience of the world know how rare is the combination of the warrior's soul with the love of wisdom. It is rare, I think we learn from the classical political philosophers Mort loved, because these pull us in opposite directions. The warrior is drawn to defend the particular things about which he cares: his country, his family, his religious tradition. The lover of wisdom is drawn away from attachment to these particular things towards the things that are universal. This tension between the universal and the particular was where Mort's life was lived. And in his life that tension was, it seems to me, fructifying and mutually beneficial. The warrior in him came to the defense of the tradition of wisdom embodied in the books of Western political philosophy; and the wisdom in him came to the defense of that which was peculiarly his own; his family, his country, his students, and his Jewishness.
Strong loves, articulate convictions, and a willingness to defend them with actions, even at risk of life, of comfort, and of peace of mind, characterized him.
Professionally, he did what all of us are supposed to do. He served constructively in his academic posts. He was generous in his friendships and in his professional associations. He prepared his classes meticulously, he taught them inspiringly, and he counseled wisely. Many students remained his friend and prospered in commerce, law, government, and teaching, including many successful members of the political science profession.
I do not know whether he was a warrior before he went to war against the Nazis. Nor do I know if he loved wisdom before he encountered Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago after the war. But it seems to me that these qualities are the threads that weave through, hold together, and point to the unity of his life's work: his military defense of his country, his scholarly reappropriation and defense of Western political philosophy, his intellectual defense of the statesmanship of the American constitutional tradition, and his care and effort on behalf of his family, students, and friends.
Mort's life, so lived, blessed his friends and vexed his enemies; and that distinction mattered to him, for it both justifies the way of the warrior and is the natural introduction to what it means to be just. It is said in Proverbs 10:7 that “the memory of the just shall be for a blessing.” I take it one reason it blesses us is that it teaches, by concrete examples from that life, what justice is. The memory of Mort is that for his friends. We remember with gratitude how his being with us made our lives the richer; even as we cannot help knowing that his being gone makes them the poorer.
An additional obituary can be found at www.niu.edu/northerntoday/2007/jan16/frisch.shtml.
Gary D. Glenn Northern Illinois University
Keith Jackson
Emeritus Professor (William) Keith Jackson (BA, First Class Hons, Nottingham 1953; Ph.D., Otago 1967) died on August 15, 2007, aged 78 years. He succeeded J.G.A. Pocock as the professor of political science at Canterbury in 1967. He retired from this position in 1994, but continued to work for the university as a researcher and thesis supervisor until recently. His last publication, a revised edition of the Historical Dictionary of New Zealand (with Alan McRobie) appeared in 2006 and he was still reading thesis chapters during his final illness in the hospital. He would not have regarded the work he was engaged in at the end of his life as laborious or painful because he found political science to be a relaxation as well as a profession.
When at the University of Nottingham, Jackson was a student of James Clarke Holt, the medievalist, who later became well-known as the author of works on King John and the Magna Carta. Subsequently, while employed at the University of Otago, Jackson did a Ph.D. under the supervision of W.P. Morrell, a British imperial historian with a profound grasp of nineteenth-century institutional and political history. Working with Holt and Morrell gave Jackson a thorough and skeptical grounding in the underpinnings of political change. Holt's work on the Magna Carta looked beneath legal and ideological rhetoric of the later reputation of the Magna Carta to what actually took place between the monarch and the barons, while Morrell's steely eye never allowed flights of historical fancy to impede the truthful interpretation of empirical data. Holt and Morrell were both exemplars of the best kind of mid-twentieth century British historiography that focused upon the growth of national institutions without subjecting this to any predetermined political outcomes. This stance reflected the mood of the more respectable portion of post-World War II intelligentsia that was determined to avoid being trapped in the ideology of Marxism or in the arbitrary categories of Weberian political sociology.
Jackson was true to his training and this could be seen in his lecturing. While at Otago he emphasized the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, which—thanks to the work of Michael Oakeshott—was seen as a rational bulwark against the politics of unreason as that had appeared in fascism and Marxist-Leninism. The cruel underpinnings of these mass ideologies were the chief challenges to humanity during the late 1950s. What motivated Jackson then, and later when he arrived at the University of Canterbury and had to re-build political science from scratch, was not philosophical conservatism, but an insistence upon political neutrality when analyzing forces in the political arena. His Canterbury lecturing concentrated upon two subjects: New Zealand politics and Soviet politics; in both subjects it was a matter of pride to him that no student should be able to detect any bias, either for, or against, a political personality or a party.
In a larger country it would be unremarkable to say that a political scientist refrained from promoting the interests of a particular political party, but, in New Zealand, Jackson's display of neutrality was unusual. Many academics demonstrated commitment to the Labour Party together with a zeal in reforming society in general. Jackson's detachment seemed either clinical and cold or a façade concealing his allegiance to the National Party. However, neither of these imputations was true; his neutrality was simply part of a creditable attempt to be scientific about politics. In one of his first serious essays Jackson overthrew the fundamental myth that New Zealand was naturally progressive because the country's search for perfection had led to votes for women in 1893. Jackson demonstrated that the search of perfection was much less important than what he called “pragmatic” considerations (1962, 15–6). For Jackson such considerations meant that one looked for explanations of political change in the fine detail of what actually happened rather than in searching for constitutional or normative principles or examining basic political behavior. When he analyzed the abolition of the appointed upper house (the Legislative Council) by the National Party, Jackson disposed of the principled debates over the merits of unicameralism versus bicameralism, and of comments about the frustration over appointed Legislative Councillors owing their places to the previous government. To do this observed that there was no evidence for wide-scale support of unicameralism or dissatisfaction with the status quo even among the newspapers that normally supported the National Party; nor was the issue of constitutional reform prominent in the 1949 election that preceded the abolition. During the abolition debate principled objections to change were blunted by the swamping of the Council with new members favorable to abolition, and by a promise to consider suitable substitutes to the Legislative Council in the future (Jackson 1972, 194–7). Since acceptable reform suggestions were never discovered, New Zealand made a permanent change in its constitutional system without a crisis, a referendum, or a serious debate during an election.
For Jackson the real motivations behind constitutional change mattered less than the changes themselves. Rather than focusing upon the origin or causes of change, Jackson seemed to come to the conclusion that while the study of political change was the chief business of political science, it was such a multi-caused phenomenon that it was preferable to avoid this sort of discussion altogether lest in emphasizing motivation you distanced yourself from the study of political reality. This led to a rather odd corollary because Jackson was essentially emphasizing political action without actors. Since his studies had demonstrated that political change often occurred without politicians having clear goals, and even when it opposed their beliefs and interests, he reversed the scenario in order to recommend that we should be sympathetic to the prospect of change even if not clear about its significance or extent. He believed that New Zealand needed change, but that any demand for agreement for specific types of change before it happened would be a delaying tactic that would prevent any shift (Jackson 1973, 2).
Jackson continued to adumbrate the politics of change after the 1970s; he critiqued the New Zealand majoritarian system for its “almost painfully cautious gradualism in the institutional sphere” (Jackson 1987, 173). Since he did not believe that significant political change occurred in response to the demands of particular ideologues or the masses, his suggestion that we encourage change was an endorsement of political experimentation. This was not analogous to the kind of scientific experimentation where one has a tightly controlled environment and an experimenter who has a goal in mind. Rather it was an expression of faith in the outcome of unplanned change. If nothing else his stance showed that Jackson was not a conservative who clung to the wisdom that was inherent in tradition. The past offered no certainties to him, and there was no reason to respect it.
When he was not engaged in university work, Jackson served as a radio and TV commentator on New Zealand politics. He covered New Zealand party conferences from 1968 to 1989, election night coverage from 1975 to 1990, and gave general political commentary from 1957 to 1994. One could plausibly claim that Jackson's name was synonymous with political broadcasting in New Zealand during the 1970s and 80s. As in his academic work, his public performances strove for political neutrality. It is remarkable that he achieved this without sounding aloof.
On August 25–26, 2006, the School of Political Science and Communication held a conference called “In the Public Interest” to honor Keith Jackson. As a modest individual he had originally opposed being honored in this way, but when he realized that the occasion would take place anyway he decently changed his mind and participated by listening carefully to every paper, and commenting on many. The conference participants honor his memory as do his other colleagues and his many former students.
Mark Francis, University of Canterbury Christchurch, New Zealand
Muhsin Sayyid Mahdi
Muhsin Sayyid Mahdi died July 9, 2007, at the age of 81 after a long series of illnesses. He was the James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic at Harvard University, until his retirement in 1996, for some 27 years. Over the course of his career at Harvard, he had also been the director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the chair of the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC) at Harvard. Before teaching at Harvard, he taught at the University of Chicago in its NELC for 12 years. For many years, he was on the Advisory Council for the department of Near Eastern studies at Princeton. In brief, he played an important role in the formation of the higher echelons of Near or Middle Eastern studies in the United States. In addition to his teaching in the United States, which included UCLA, he taught or lectured at Paris (especially at the Institut du Monde Arabe), Freiburg, Morocco, Cairo, Pakistan, and Bordeaux.
Although Professor Mahdi once told me with some humility that the most important living scholar of medieval Islamic philosophy was Professor Michael Marmura of the University of Toronto, it is widely recognized that Professor Mahdi was the world's foremost authority on medieval Islamic political philosophy. At first this might appear to be an admission that Mahdi was a specialist in political theory. That would be misleading. Although he was also a scholar of political theory (well-versed in the whole history of political philosophy), he was, more importantly, the scholar who devoted his life to showing that medieval Islamic philosophy, especially Alfarabi's, was at its core political. Why this should be so might seem obvious. After all, Islam is widely recognized to have an understanding of religion that includes within it a political dimension. Yet that is not all that Mahdi argues; rather, he argues that the founder of Islamic political philosophy, Alfarabi, showed, more clearly than any of the great minds of the medieval Christian West, that metaphysics or ontology is radically incomplete and stands in some form of mutually dependent relation with politics. These dependent elements make up what Alfarabi calls political philosophy. The Western search for a purely theoretical grounding of philosophy is an illusory hope—more the product of the inspiration of revealed religion than of unaided reason. Alfarabi does not claim his as a peculiarly Eastern insight but describes a different Western tradition, which I believe (though Professor Mahdi might not have been so bold as to put it this way) is truer to the original insights of Plato and Aristotle than the Scholastic tradition. In brief, Mahdi's recovery of Alfarabi has contributed mightily to the rediscovery of the Western tradition of political philosophy as a whole. In blazing a path toward this recovery, Mahdi followed the path already initiated by his teacher, Leo Strauss—to whom he dedicated his magnum opus, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy.
Leaving aside the Western tradition of political philosophy, what can be said about Mahdi's recovery of Alfarabi (as well as of Ibn Khaldun) for the Islamic world? One of the most important preconditions for Mahdi's authoritative recovery was his unsurpassed mastery of Arabic over a wide span of the history of the language. Born in Kerbala, Iraq, schooled in Kerbala, and eventually in Baghdad, he attended the American University of Beirut on an Iraqi government scholarship. He lectured at the University of Baghdad for a year and won a scholarship to study economics at the University of Chicago when he was 22 years old. A native speaker of Arabic with an extraordinary passion for political philosophy, he was extraordinarily well-positioned to recover Alfarabi's works. After all, Christian thinkers had for thousands of years focused attention on the metaphysical and physical writings of students of Alfarabi, namely, Avicenna and Averroes. Western scholars such as D. M. Dunlop and E. I. J. Rosenthal were studying the writings of Alfarabi through the early and middle parts of the twentieth century, but they tended to interpret them through the lens of the Scholastic tradition. To this day, many esteemed scholars of Islamic philosophy treat Alfarabi as a foundationalist of the Neoplatonic tradition. None of these scholars, however, recovered so many and such important works as Mahdi, producing critical Arabic editions of Alfarabi's writings, especially his political writings, according to the strictest standards of modern philological scholarship. Again and again, Mahdi traveled the world to recover neglected manuscripts, without which truly critical editions could not be established. (In addition, Mahdi made Alfarabi widely available in English translations in his widely influential anthology Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook, co-edited with Ralph Lerner of the University of Chicago.) This recovery of largely forgotten texts has made possible the recovery of a lost tradition, which may in the long run be of even greater interest to Muslims than to scholars in “the West.”
In addition, Mahdi's dissertation on Ibn Khaldun, quickly published by Allen and Unwin and Macmillan in 1957, revealed one of the other great pillars of Islamic political and historical thought. Ibn Khaldun has become of special interest in the contemporary Arab world in part because contemporary Arab political scientists, as well as sociologists and anthropologists, see in Ibn Khaldun's thought an apprehension of what is peculiar to Arab civilization or culture, as well as of all cultures or culture as such. To an unprecedented degree, Mahdi sought to recover the original meaning of Ibn Khaldun's thought. Unfortunately, precisely because Ibn Khaldun's concerns are in many ways not foreign to contemporary thinkers, the differences between his thought and contemporary thought have all too often been obscured.
Professor Mahdi will be sorely missed by his students, who will remember warmly his gentle smile and demeanor, and who can only aspire to his extraordinary level of scholarly achievement.
Joshua Parens University of Dallas
Ray Seidelman
Ray Seidelman died at his home in Ossining, New York, on October 30, 2007, after a four-year battle with cancer. A memorial service held at Sarah Lawrence College on November 17 brought together hundreds to remember and commemorate his extraordinary character and career. Former students, colleagues, collaborators, friends, and family members spoke of Ray's tremendous energy, diverse interests, and wide learning, of his many sides that will be missed by many persons. He was a respectful mentor, an energetic and loyal colleague, an original and penetrating scholar, a man of wide learning, a loving husband and father, an avid outdoorsman, a local organizer, and a loyal friend. Passionately committed to democracy and social justice, feisty, raucously sardonic, with a heart of gold underneath, Ray was also a master teacher and a maverick political scientist.
Ray was born in Menlo Park, California, on August 6, 1951, and grew up there. Even though he spent the last 35 years of his life in the East, Ray always remained in one part of his spirit a Californian. He was fascinated by politics from an early age, and a two-year period spent in Turkey during his high school years, where his father was teaching, nurtured his interest in international politics.
An exemplary intellectual/activist from the turbulent 60s, Ray began his college years in 1969 at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He pursued his fascination with politics academically through the study of political theory during that brief period when Santa Cruz was graced with the simultaneous presence of Sheldon Wolin, John Schaar, and Peter Euben. And he pursued his commitment to political change through praxis, operating as a central figure in campus protest politics. Characteristic of his later political stance, even as Ray identified himself with the Left, he never gave up on electoral democracy. In 1972, he was an alternate California delegate for the presidential campaign of George McGovern.
Ray moved east to attend graduate school at Cornell, where he earned his MA and Ph.D. degrees. Although he began graduate work with the intention of becoming a theorist, the faculty at Cornell tapped into Ray's wide-ranging intellectual and political interests, and he became one of what was to be an increasingly rare breed: a political scientist who resisted—some might say defied—the pressure to specialize. Simply to list the teachers at Cornell who had the greatest impact on him is to mark his intellectual curiosity and scope: Sidney Tarrow in comparative politics, Theodore Lowi in American politics, and Isaac Kramnick in political theory. It is a testament to the impact that Ray had on these three eminent scholars that all of them attended his memorial service.
Deciding to write a doctoral dissertation on the Italian Communist Party of the 1970s, Ray spent nearly a year conducting research in Florence. After completing the doctoral degree, he taught one year at Hobart and William Smith College and three years at SUNY Albany. During his years in Albany, he made several lasting friendships and met his wife, Fay Chazin. Ray moved to his permanent academic home, Sarah Lawrence College, in 1982, and settled in Ossining, where he and Fay raised two daughters, Eva and Rosa. Restless and curious to know the world, he taught twice in Asia: in Nanjing, China in 1987–88 in the Johns Hopkins program, and in Seoul, South Korea in 1992–93 as a Fulbright Scholar. He inspired several of his Chinese students to become political scientists, and two of these now teach in the United States.
Ray's dissertation, written under the supervision of Sid Tarrow, was a study of neighborhood communism in Florence. In the wake of the radical movements of the 60s and 70s, the leftwing administration of Florence set up local political bodies known as “comitati di quartiere.” Examining the work of these committees in four Florence neighborhoods that varied in socioeconomic characteristics, Ray talked with activists, attended meetings, and poured over policy statements. He concluded that this Italian experiment in participatory democracy engaged political militants in the “long march through institutions.” More surprisingly, he found that it forged alliances between communists, non-communist leftists, and progressive Catholics around programs of concrete reform. As Tarrow observes, few realized at the time that what Ray had observed in Florence “was a foretaste of the breakdown of the sub-culturally divided Italian party system.” An article drawing from the dissertation research was published in Comparative Politics.
Although Ray began his academic career as a comparativist, his intellectual curiosity and chafing at professional specialization soon drove him into other fields of research. While at Cornell, he had undertaken a study of the history of American political science in collaboration with two fellow graduate students and housemates, Stephen Skowronek and Edward Harpham. Ray took up the project again during his years in Albany, and the result was his most important contribution to political science: Disenchanted Realists: Political Science and the American Crisis, 1884–1984 (1985, Albany: State University of New York Press).
Prior to the publication of Disenchanted Realists, political scientists seeking to understand the history of the discipline largely had to choose between either Bernard Crick's polemic against scientism or Albert Somit's and Joseph Tanenhaus's defense of it. Ray paints a more complex and detailed picture than Crick but retains the critical edge of the earlier work. In a series of paired portraits of leading political scientists from different eras—Woodrow Wilson and Lester Ward; Charles Beard and Arthur Bentley; Charles Merriam and Harold Lasswell; V. O. Key and David Truman; and Theodore Lowi and Walter Dean Burnham—he locates their common impulse to develop a reform political science. This reform discipline involved blending “scholarship and political advocacy, a science of politics with a science ‘for’ politics.” Ray calls this a “third tradition” in American political thought, one rejecting the conservative institutionalism of the Federalists and the radical populism of the Anti-federalists and their heirs in favor of a higher synthesis: a scientifically organized and authoritative national state that would win the enthusiastic support of attentive and engaged democratic citizens. Bringing this state, and these citizens, to life has been the aspiration and the dream of the “third tradition” of American political science.
As the title of his book indicates, the story Ray tells is marked by cycles of optimism and frustration. The eminent political scientists he studies saw their hopes repeatedly dashed, as a stronger state turns out mainly to service privileged elites and democratic publics “always fail to heed the scientific message.” A growing “hyper-professionalism” in political science has not been the crux of this problem, since professionalism has been more symptom than cause of political science's failure to reform American politics. Rather, he finds the root of the problem in the mistaken assumption that political science can wield the authority to forge an inter-class and modernizing consensus. Political scientists, he argues, have failed sufficiently to reckon with the recalcitrance of American capitalism and the persisting pre-modern dispositions of ordinary Americans. Ray's book ends with a mournful chapter on “The End of the Third Tradition,” in which political science, shorn of its reform hopes, closes in on itself: “The organization of modern political science may triumph over its original functions, becoming a mode of discourse of and for itself, heaving up great mounds of academic literature and specialized debate.”
Although published over 20 years ago, Disenchanted Realists has lost none of its relevance or its provocative punch. In the words of John Gunnell, it was a work “that no subsequent and serious student of the history of the discipline could ignore, and it remains a landmark study of the field.” The book vividly displays Ray's distinctive blend of scholarly acumen and political passion.
In the wake of the widespread responses that Disenchanted Realists stimulated, Ray conceived an edited volume on the history of the political science discipline. He invited James Farr, whom he had met in 1986 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, to join him as co-editor. The volume they produced, Discipline and History: Political Science in the United States, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 1993. This book is a study of both the history and the historiography of American political science, bringing together influential essays from the discipline's past with prominent articles of more recent vintage. The authors included in the volume span the years from Francis Lieber and John W. Burgess to David Easton and Robert Dahl, and the selections cover classic debates in the discipline over democracy, civic education, professionalization, behavioralism, and methodology. Ray contributed one of three original pieces, returning to the theme of “disenchanted realists” by way of analyzing the “disappearing democrats” in the academy. Discipline and History was well-received and found its way into graduate seminars across the country and abroad, reflecting the fresh interest in the history of political science that Ray's previous work had helped to spawn.
Another reflection of Ray's interest in how political science might speak to the public has been the multiple editions of the American politics textbook and the debate reader that he produced with Bruce Miroff and Todd Swanstrom, friends from his Albany days. The Democratic Debate: An Introduction to American Politics is currently in its fourth edition, and Debating Democracy: A Reader in American Politics is currently in its fifth; both books are published by Houghton Mifflin. These books bring together Ray's concerns as a scholar and as a teacher. Their genesis will not surprise anyone who knew Ray: they were conceived when a rained-out backpacking trip led to a Catskills evening where expressions of discontent over the pedagogy of introductory American politics texts, made more heated by a bottle of good whiskey, led to a determination to write a more provocative and politically relevant one.
The Democratic Debate is a “theme” text, organizing the traditional topics of an introductory American politics book around a debate between what the authors call “elite democracy” and “popular democracy.” Tracing this debate back to the original argument between the Federalists and the Anti-federalists, the book shows how it ramifies through American history and contemporary politics. Although the text seeks to do justice to both sides in this debate, it does not conceal its sympathy for the popular-democratic position.
Reflecting the intellectual preoccupations that Ray developed in his courses at Sarah Lawrence, his contributions to the textbook and reader were mainly in the areas of political economy, media, and mass participation. One of his innovations was a unique chapter devoted entirely to the puzzle of non-voting, a subject that he thought was essential to any reckoning with the status of democracy in the United States. The chapters that Ray authored were deeply researched and rich in details, but his trademark passion and humor repeatedly peeked through. Sometimes, when he allowed these qualities full vent, his co-authors had to remind him: “Ray, you can't say that in a textbook!” Even toned down, however, his co-authors agreed that his chapters were the liveliest and most engaging features of their book.
Though an accomplished scholar, anyone who met Ray quickly learned that teaching was his first professional love and priority. The passion, dedication, intelligence, energy, wide learning, and creativity he brought to the classroom touched successive generations of students. He presented a clear-eyed analysis of contemporary politics and inspired a strong sense of connection between understanding and informed action. Ray's mastery of his craft was recognized on many occasions: in May 2001, when the Sarah Lawrence graduating class asked that he give the Senior Lecture; in 2002, when he won the College's Lipkin Prize for Inspirational Teaching; in 2005, when the College awarded him the Sara Yates Exley Chair in Teaching Excellence; and most poignantly at his memorial service, when hundreds of former student traveled from across the country to remember how Ray informed and changed their lives.
Komozi Woodard, a longtime Sarah Lawrence colleague and member of the history faculty, said of his teaching: “Ray was an award-winning teacher at a school devoted to teachers. But even by those standards, Ray stood tall. If you listen to his students, they will tell you that studying with Professor Seidelman was a life-changing experience. After they discussed the issues and concepts raised by a number of books they read with Ray, they would go on to identify a number of political actions, marches and campaigns that they worked on.” Michele Tolela Myers, president emerita observed: “Ray was a magnificent teacher, the rare kind who made students want to work and make a difference intellectually and practically. He encouraged risk taking, respected everyone's views, and modeled an intelligent and passionate commitment to economic and social justice. His legacy is in the work of his students and colleagues, whom he continually inspired to work for equality and democracy in mainstream politics as well as in social movements.” And Dean Hubbard, Joanne Woodward Chair in Public Policy and Advocacy, called Ray “a role model for how to be a truly engaged public intellectual,” adding: “Ray was one of the rare political scientists who was not only fully conversant with theory but consistently provided opportunities for students to put those ideas to work in concrete political struggles. Students readily saw right through his thin crust of cynicism and were truly inspired by his example. Ray's crowning legacy is not just that he gifted legions of students with intellectual acuity, strategic acumen and a burning passion to make progressive change, but that he showed the way for so many of them to actually make career-long commitments to fighting for democracy and social and economic justice.”
As might be guessed, Ray was not a typical political science professor. Having traced the decline of the discipline's ambition to furnish an enlightening public philosophy of democratic self-governance back to its unrealistic founding ambitions, his teaching picked up where his critical analysis of this history left off. Ray believed passionately that it was possible to teach politics in an analytically rigorous and practically relevant way, while avoiding the twin pitfalls of disenchanted realism and the unrealistic invocations of public consensus and unhindered reform. In his classes, Ray sought to counteract his discipline's contraction into a largely detached and self-referential academic discourse and instead to return to its aspiration to be a science not only of but also for politics. As a result, the questions of the distortion and decay of democracy in American, as well as the limited opportunities for democratic reform, were at the center of the strikingly diverse courses he taught over a quarter century.
In his coursework, Ray was deeply committed to an empirically based analysis of the forces at work in both state and society that explain the current state of American politics. In this spirit, Ray taught classes on elections; the media; the political and social geography of American cities, suburbs, and exurbs; and globalization and political economy. In these courses Ray contributed to his students' understanding of the constraints imposed by the dependency of political parties on corporate and individual wealth; corporate ownership of the media and its consequences for the content and quality of public discourse; the political production of apathy; suburbanization and the segregation and cleavages it produces; and a political economy that robs Americans of the time and energy required to sustain civic engagement. Students left these classes with a powerful sense of the main institutions that structure contemporary American politics, including recent developments in political tactics and the scholarship devoted to their study. They also came away with insight into the social and political interests served and thwarted by these institutions, the structure for the exercise of power they generate, and the ways they channel and harness the practice of democracy. Equipped with the resources to connect political institutions and social structures to particular political tactics and outcomes, students who studied with Ray often became quite critical of the regressive, conservative, and shallow character of American politics without losing their belief in the basic decency of most people.
Ray did not believe that his hardheaded realism about the structural decay of American democracy at the national level led inevitably to withdrawal, apathy, or ironic detachment. True to the spirit of the West Coast democratic activism of his formative years, he defended the intrinsic value of political participation, remarking in his address to the 2001 graduating class: “Democracy is not what we have, it is what we aspire to be. So dare to aspire to it, for in the process you become a democratic citizen. It takes courage to live as a democratic citizen, and that's why we fight for it; this will involve you in great risks, but it's worth it because it will make you free.” He also taught about the persistence of possibilities for meaningful political engagement and the need to be alert to new issues, events, and movements that contained the potential to reignite a politics of protest and reform. In courses on the politics of crisis and reform; on social movement history and theory; on alternative visions of pubic policy; and on politics and imagination, Ray sought to document the places and occasions where deeper forms of democratic politics still live, where what is to be done is determined, within the limits of the possible, by the free deliberation of a body of equals.
Ray was perfectly suited to Sarah Lawrence's highly individualized and attentive teaching style, and soon became a fixture at a wooden table in the Sarah Lawrence Science Courtyard, a cigarette in one hand, a pen in the other, recording the progress of a student's independent research, making suggestions for reading, research strategy, or argumentative tack, frequently digressing with a story drawn from his own life or his extensive knowledge of political history. He was a walking bibliography who would rattle off a list of dozens of books and articles on whatever subject the student wanted to explore, was absolutely intolerant of intellectual laziness, and had a keen eye for the abilities and limits of an individual student so that he could walk them to the edge of their current learning and then coax them to leap. Though he often presented a gruff persona, he was in fact quite sensitive to his students and advisees' moods and solicited from them honest assessments of their own habits and limits so as to devise plans not only to get through the crisis du jour but also to avoid landing in similar trouble again.
Finally, Ray's commitment to sustaining democratic hope and engagement in dark times, without, as he once put it, “leaving your brain behind,” led to a further unique aspect of his pedagogy. He sought to facilitate students' efforts to participate in protest politics and in community-based and union organizing, not out of a sense of noblesse oblige or charity but as engaged participants, and as a way of applying, developing, and sharpening ideas learned within the classroom. Along with a number of other colleagues (especially the sociologist Regina Arnold), Ray was an indispensable advocate for the institutionalization of engaged community activism at the College. His energetic lobbying led to the creation of the Sarah Lawrence Community Partnerships Office and informed the shape of the Woodward Chair in Public Policy and Advocacy and the Institute for Policy Alternatives. He often taught service learning courses, was an enthusiastic chaperone for student groups attending political protests, and organized trips and conferences or lecture series to bring not only scholars but also activists to campus (most recently on post-Katrina reconstruction in New Orleans). Here, as in other aspects of his teaching and scholarship, Ray's dedication to combining unblinking analysis of unjust and antidemocratic political and social conditions with an abiding commitment to political struggle led to creative efforts to prepare students for lives informed by a capacity for smart, critical, and hopeful analyzing and organizing.
Bruce Miroff, SUNY Albany
David Peritz, Sarah Lawrence College
John Hugh (“Adam”) Watson, C.M.G.
On August 21, 2007, John Hugh (“Adam”) Watson died in England at 93. A graduate of Rugby and a scholar at Kings College, Cambridge, he served in numerous diplomatic posts, including British ambassador, assistant undersecretary of state, and undersecretary of state for NATO Affairs. A noted international relations theorist, Watson taught for many years at the University of Virginia, and resided both in Charlottesville, Virginia, and in Mayfield, East Sussex, England. In 1958 he was named a commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George. As recounted below, Watson had splendid dual careers in diplomacy and academics.
Adam Watson's most telling scholarly contributions came after his retirement from a fascinating and highly productive diplomatic career that spanned the period from 1937 to 1968. Stationed in the Balkans in the late 1930s, Watson became the last person to vacate the British embassy in Romania in the early stages of World War II, in his words “locking the door and making off with the key” after the government there joined the Axis side. In 1940 the British Foreign Office assigned Watson to its Cairo embassy, where he served as a special liaison to the Free French forces, in that way assisting the military campaign that eventually ejected Germany from the Middle East and North Africa. In 1942 Watson was instructed to handle the surrender of Egypt to Germany should the Allies lose the battle of El Alamein. By 1944 Watson had been transferred to the Moscow embassy to take advantage, among other attributes, of his fluency in Russian.
Late in the 1940s Adam Watson returned to London to work for Sir Ralph Murray at the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office that endeavored to counter Soviet propaganda during the early Cold War years. In 1950 Watson married American Katharine Anne Campbell, shortly after starting a five-year term at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., where he served primarily as a British liaison officer to U.S. intelligence. Thereafter, this time capitalizing upon his fluency in French, he directed the African Department of the Foreign Office for critical years that included much of the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya as well as the Suez crisis. In 1959 he became consul general in Paris, directing British relations with French colonies in Africa. Given his earlier experience as consul general at Dakar, Senegal, in 1960 the Foreign Office named Watson the first British ambassador to the Federation of Mali and, thereafter, to the west African countries of Togo, Senegal, and Mauritania. In the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis he was sent to Havana for a three-year ambassadorial stint, and later in the 1960s he worked with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, serving for a period as Britain's assistant secretary for NATO Affairs.
In retirement from diplomacy Watson spent five years counseling the British Leyland Motor Company, before again playing a notable role in public affairs, directing two Swiss human rights foundations in the mid-1970s. He chaired La fondation pour ene entraide europeenne intellectuelle, an organization that promoted intellectual freedom of expression, and he served as director-general of the International Association of Cultural Freedom. This group dedicated itself to bringing dissident intellectuals living in communist or authoritarian regimes to Europe for short periods to deliver lectures, make professional contacts, and find publishers for their written work, while supplying them with books.
As for his own intellectual contributions, in the late 1950s Watson was invited to join the precursor to the English School, the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, coming to serve as its chair in the 1970s. This elite study group brought together preeminent scholars from a number of disciplines and helped to develop the systemic study of international relations by examining the relations between states in different historical eras and across diverse civilizations. In 1964, after nearly two decades of research while in the British Foreign Service, Watson published his first book, The War of the Goldsmith's Daughter, examining the Muslim conquest of South India during the Middle Ages. For him this was an early milestone in what became a lifelong interest in imperial and hegemonial rule across time and space with a focus that stretched to pre-modern societies. After a year's sabbatical at Nuffield College, Oxford, Watson wrote a critique of colonialism, entitled Emergent Africa, published in 1967 under the pseudonym “Scipio,” a reference to the Roman leader who had defeated Hannibal.
Starting in 1978, Adam Watson served on the faculty of the University of Virginia, first as diplomat-in-residence and Gwilym visiting professor, thereafter as a professor of international relations and a member of the University's Center for Advanced Studies. In 1981 Watson completed The Origins of History, the last book of the late Sir Herbert Butterfield, his original mentor at Cambridge University, and in 1984 he co-edited with Hedley Bull The Expansion of International Society. In his own right he was the author of another six books: The Nature and Problems of the Third World (1968), Toleration in Religion and Politics (1980), Diplomacy: The Dialogue Among States (1983), The Evolution of International Society (1992), The Limits of Independence (1997), and Hegemony and History (2007). Several came to be considered foundational English School works, and over the years Watson garnered many impressive reviews within the international relations discipline. Bull, for instance, declared that Watson's work on diplomacy was “the most penetrating we have had for many years.” Barry Buzan and Richard Little termed The Evolution of International Society “magisterial,” and John Vasquez called it “a stunning success … a masterful piece of theoretical and historical analysis.” In his later years Watson turned his intellectual energy toward non-state actors, aid, and other economic factors, and the impact of international politics on individual human beings. Watson's many scholarly contributions in understanding international systems and societies were particularly distinguished by the breadth of his historical knowledge, coupled with his ability to distill insights from his knowledge of the practice as well as the theory of international politics. He is widely considered a founding member of the English School of international relations theory.
A prodigious reader with a great love of poetry, Watson included among his many intellectual achievements writing and helping to produce four plays for the British Broadcasting Service. He was also an extraordinary linguist, who had studied at the University of Madrid, Freiburg am Breslau, and Marburg an der Lahn. He spent his early boyhood as the son of a British banker stationed in Argentina, and he eventually added fluency in German, French, and Russian to his command of Spanish and English. Even late in life he felt comfortable with written Italian and Portuguese, though he confessed, well into his 80s, that his Romanian had become a bit rusty!
Adam Watson had the exceptional perspective of a leading practitioner as well as a top theorist of international relations. He had participated in the making and implementing of foreign policies from World War II through much of the Cold War. He had seen first-hand the likes of Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin, and V.M. Molotov, serving on occasion as Churchill's Russian translator, and he was closely acquainted with other historical figures, including Fidel Castro, George Kennan, and Kim Roosevelt. Nevertheless, when pressed on the issue at an International Studies Association panel held in his honor in Montreal in 2003, Watson firmly declared that he had no interest in writing an autobiography, preferring to spend his last years continuing to progress with what he termed his “voyage of exploration into the uncharted realms of international relations theory.”
Those of us who had the exceeding good fortune to know Adam Watson personally recall a man of great wit, warmth, and love of family. His interest in people, in what they might have to say and what he might learn from them, never flagged. His pale and penetrating blue eyes were constantly on the alert, assessing, scrutinizing, and questioning, but with a gracious and kindly light, particularly for his students with whom he regularly developed great rapport and took exceptional pains to keep up with over time. For many years at his house in Charlottesville Adam would bring together small circles of Virginia graduate students and faculty. Complemented by the cheese and wine, Adam would engage, stimulate, and, every once in a while, referee, with a touch that was light and caring and insights that were profound and original. His was that rare intellect that was prepared, to the last, not only to take a fresh look at important issues, but to join with others to try to create new and better approaches and explanations. Soon after his death, his longtime friend and faculty colleague at the University of Virginia, Inis Claude, recalled, “He was a man whose achievements, professional and intellectual, were nothing short of extraordinary, and whose personal qualities were equally great; he inspired admiration and affection in equal measure. We will not see his like again.”
Julie Bunck and Michael Fowler, University of Louisville
John Daniel Williams
Members of the American Political Science Association and political scientists everywhere have lost a wonderful friend—Dr. J.D. Williams, professor emeritus at the University of Utah, passed away on September 3, 2007. J.D. is survived by his wife of 61 years, Barbara (Bea) Williams, his brother, four children, 12 grandchildren, four great grandchildren, and countless friends.
J.D. Williams's academic accomplishments were many. J.D. earned his BA at Stanford in 1946 and worked at the Library of Congress before going on to Harvard to earn an MPA and Ph.D. J.D. returned to his hometown of Salt Lake City where he served as a faculty member in the department of political science at the University of Utah from 1952 to 1992. Professor Williams was the winner of many academic honors including the Rosenblatt Prize for Excellence, the University of Utah's most distinguished award.
J.D. was renowned as a teacher. He taught American politics and public administration to large undergraduate classes and small graduate courses alike. J.D.'s lectures were filled with quotations from John Stuart Mill, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and others whose words he used to inspire or provoke his students. In addition to teaching such standards as American National Government, J.D. taught unique courses that he created such as The Beauty of Freedom and The Miracle at Philadelphia.
J.D. was willing to speak out against wrongdoing whenever he saw it. He spoke out in the 1950s against McCarthyism and racial injustices and in the 1960s he spoke for federal laws advancing civil rights and for an end to the Vietnam War. In the 1970s, J.D. argued for the impeachment of President Nixon as well as for equal rights for women. In the 1980s, he called for an end to U.S. aid to South Africa's apartheid regime and full disclosure of the Iran-Contra scandal. Even in retirement, J.D. spoke out publicly, most recently against what he regarded as the Bush administration's policies violating civil liberties. J.D. was a man who loved good causes.
Professor Williams could even move national figures. In 1961, Martin Luther King, Jr., was late to a speaking engagement at the University of Utah due to bad weather. In his absence, J.D. spoke to a large audience for nearly an hour until he noticed Dr. King standing nearby, quietly observing. When they met, the civil rights leader and ordained minister addressed Professor Williams as “Reverend Williams”—J.D. was especially proud of that moment.
In 1965, J.D. Williams was named as the first director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics. The Hinckley Institute was named after Robert Hinckley, who served in President Franklin Roosevelt's administration and later co-founded the American Broadcasting Company, and was created to promote practical politics and encourage students to become involved in the political process. J.D. Williams believed that undergraduate students could be forever changed by political and governmental internships. During his decade as director of the Hinckley Institute, approximately 800 students served internships in Utah and Washington, D.C. Just as he encouraged his students to participate in politics, J.D. did so, too, running for the U.S. Senate and the Utah State Legislature. On both occasions, the voters chose another candidate—not an unexpected outcome for a passionate Democrat in a largely Republican state.
J.D. Williams had strong opinions about the public policy matters impacting Utah and the nation. He was never shy about speaking his mind. He believed that answers could never be known unless questions were asked. When sitting in an audience and the speaker was searching for a question, more often than not, up would go J.D.'s hand—and the quick verbal introduction of “J.D.” In 2005, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada spoke to a standing-room-only crowd in the Hinckley Institute. As he always did, J.D. identified himself as he prepared to ask a question, but before he could get the question out Senator Reid responded: “I know who you are, J.D.!” J.D. flashed a quick smile, and then asked his serious question about war and peace.
J.D. changed lives during his four decades at the University of Utah. He lived his 81 years the same way he taught: with passion and compassion—passion for the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and Bill of Rights, and compassion for his many students. At his retirement party in 1992, his former students filled the Salt Lake City Marriott Hotel's Grand Ballroom, all wearing large “J.D. TAUGHT ME!” buttons. Later that evening, he would say “It sure is nice to still be alive to hear and see all this.”
When asked in 1992 in a television interview how he hoped to be remembered, he answered thoughtfully: “He earnestly loved people. He was deeply committed to freedom. He had a life-time love affair with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. He had a vision of what the young student mind was capable of achieving.” J.D. wanted to be remembered as “a passionate small ‘d’ democrat who believed in the airing of ideas [and] an enormous toleration for opposing viewpoints”—in the tradition of John Stuart Mill—and that he respected “majority rule to protect the big decisions while still protecting minority rights.” J.D. shared Thomas Jefferson's belief that, “The earth always belongs to the living generation. What is our generation doing with the earth?”
In that same interview, J.D. choked-up when he said he wanted to be remembered as a professor who read every student essay and valued his students greatly. On the first day of class, he would tell his students: “I am not going to embarrass anybody. I am going to hold office hours.” And he would say to his new students: “Please come. You are the great fringe benefit of this profession. This professor really loves those students. I hope I will be remembered for that.”
Tim Chambless, University of Utah
