A. Stephen Boyan, Jr.
A. Stephen Boyan, Jr., Associate Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), died on November 7, 2010 in Burlington, Vermont, following a long illness. Steve was a much valued member of the UMBC Political Science Department for thirty-one of the forty-four years it has been in existence. Steve's area of political science was constitutional law, with a particular focus on civil liberties and First Amendment issues. Much more than most contemporary political scientists, Steve applied his political science training and expertise beyond the reach of the university and the discipline to the wider world of public affairs and political engagement.
Of Armenian ancestry, Steve was born to Ara and Deil Boyan in Tenafly, New Jersey and was raised in Rutherford, New Jersey. In 1965, he married Catherine (“Kitty”) Stein, who had her own career as an elementary school teacher, and together they raised their son Justin, now a computer scientist and a Vice President of ITA Software. Steve received his AB in political science from Brown University in 1959, an MA from Tufts University in 1961, and his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1966. Upon completion of his doctorate, Steve received numerous job offers (those were the days) and accepted a position at Pennsylvania State University. However, he was not able to teach his preferred courses in that very large department and, after several years at Penn State, he applied for and was offered a position at the new UMBC campus (which had enrolled its first students the same year that Steve arrived at Penn State). Its four-member political science faculty included three of his former graduate student colleagues from the University of Chicago. Steve accepted this position and he arrived at UMBC along with three other more junior hires in September 1971, thereby doubling the size of the UMBC political science faculty. The house that he and Kitty had bought in Columbia, Maryland, was not ready by the beginning of the semester, so Steve spent the first month of his UMBC career camping in a local state park.
Steve taught introductory and specialized courses in constitutional law and judicial process. His particular forte was a course on First Amendment Freedoms. In the later part of his career, he also taught courses on ethics and public policy and environmental ethics, and he occasionally taught introductory American government as well. Steve was an assertive liberal and was not reluctant to make his political views known in the classroom. This often provoked the expression of contrary opinions by some of his students, whom he always treated respectfully and fairly — he found this to be an excellent way to engage students in his courses. Lisa Vetter, a UMBC political science alumna who is now a member of our faculty, took a class with Steve. She recalls that on first day “Steve strode down the middle of the classroom, stopped, thrust his finger in the air and proclaimed by way of introducing himself, ‘I'm a card-carrying member of the ACLU!’ I was very intimidated by him at first because he seemed to know absolutely everything and his passion for politics was utterly daunting. However, as time passed, I found Steve to be a generous person and respectful disputant who simply wanted all of his students to love politics as much as he did.” Despite a well-deserved reputation for being one of the toughest graders in the department, his courses were typically over-enrolled and he regularly earned some of the highest student evaluations in the department. On a number of occasions he won the Teacher of the Year citation awarded by the Political Science Council of Majors.
Steve was an active and feisty participant in department affairs. He expressed his sometimes contrarian views as assertively in department meetings as elsewhere, and he often constituted a minority of one on issues that came before the department. In such circumstances, he customarily voted “abstain,” but Steve could abstain more emphatically than the rest of us would vote “yes” or “no.” He served as a Pre-Law advisor throughout his career and often as faculty advisor to the Pre-Law Club as well. Though he did not seek the position, Steve willingly served as department chair for two years when others were reluctant to take on the task.
Steve served as department representative to the UMBC Faculty Senate for much of his career, and he often served as its parliamentarian. He was elected vice president of the Senate in 1988 and, following normal procedure, became president the following year. Because of special circumstances, he then served an unprecedented second term as President. During his presidency the issue of establishing procedures for dealing with charges of sexual harassment came before the Senate. Steve believed that the procedures originally recommended by a campus committee failed to provide adequate protections of the rights of those who might be charged with harassment. This was a controversial stand, especially in a body that usually works by consensus and is strongly inclined to accept recommendations that come from its committees. Steve faced considerable pressure to withdraw his objections but he stood his ground and the procedures were in due course revised before being approved by the Senate.
While still at Penn State, Steve published a University of Pennsylvania Law Review article on “Defining Religion in Operational and Institutional Terms,” which has been cited in many subsequent law review articles and in at least one Supreme Court opinion. Shortly after arriving at UMBC, Steve published an essay on “The Ability to Communicate: A First Amendment Right” that appeared in a volume on The Mass Media and Modern Democracy edited by Harry Clor. At the same time, the Watergate scandal was breaking open, which intensely engaged both Steve's academic expertise and his political passions. Over a period of a decade (1976–1986) he assembled and edited a six-volume collection on Constitutional Aspects of Watergate: Documents and Materials released by Oceana Publications. The first volume focused on constitutional grounds for impeachment, the second and third on constitutional controversies concerning “executive privilege,” the fourth on the national security powers of the President, the fifth on constitutional developments after President Nixon's resignation, and the sixth on Watergate lessons not learned. All volumes included Steve's own commentary on the documents and the issues they raised.
In the latter part of his academic career, Steve's interests moved beyond constitutional law and civil liberties to environmental issues. He published an article on “Political Obstacles to a Clean Environment” in New Political Science in 1994. Steve had been particularly impressed by William Ophuls' 1977 book on Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity: Prologue to a Political Theory of the Steady State and wanted to use it in his new environmental politics course, but he was concerned that much of the data and some of the arguments in the book were already dated. He contacted Ophuls and inquired whether he had any plans for an updated edition. The answer was no but Ophuls offered Steve the opportunity to revise the book himself and to be listed as coauthor of the revised edition. Steve took up this opportunity and devoted several years to the project. The result was the coauthored book Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity Revisited: The Unraveling of the American Dream, published in 1992 by W. H. Freeman. A chapter on “The American Political Economy: The Politics of Laissez Faire” was later reprinted in Debating the Earth: The Environmental Politics Reader edited by John Dryzek and David Schlosberg.
Steve was active in politics throughout his career. In addition to giving regular talks to local community and political groups, Steve was an activist himself. He participated in the March on Washington in August 1963 and heard Martin Luther King deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech. He also participated in the First Earth Day rally in 1970. Steve was active in local Democratic clubs and organizations and participated in many Democratic campaigns at all levels of government. Steve was active in Legicuum, a Unitarian-sponsored clean-government group in Maryland. He was a member of the Maryland State Board of the ACLU throughout his career at UMBC and served as its vice president for five years. He also served on the ACLU National Board for four years.
Steve was a leader in the Ethical Culture Movement and, while at UMBC, an active member of the Washington Ethical Society, where he organized its Earth Ethics project and its Whistle-Blowers Support Group. He served as editor of its Public Affairs newsletter and frequently delivered Sunday Platform Addresses. As an Ethical Society leader, he was licenced to perform marriages and in 2002 he officiated at the wedding of his son Justin to Amy Greenwald in a ceremony that incorporated elements of both Judaism and humanistic philosophy.
Steve was an energetic outdoorsman and a lifelong member of the Sierra Club. He hiked mountain trails up and down the East Coast and many in the West as well. At about the time he retired from UMBC, he and Justin undertook a long trek through the Himalayan foothills in Nepal. Steve was also a passionate skier, both downhill and cross-country, and he skied in many locales in the U.S. and Canada. When he was not off skiing or hiking, he was often playing tennis or squash.
In his fifties, on the basis of both health and environmental concerns, Steve became a committed vegetarian and lectured widely about the adverse consequences of factory-farmed meat. One of his last talks was a presentation on “How Our Food Choices Can Save the Environment” given to the Vegetarian Society of Hawaii in 2006, which can still be found on YouTube.
A memorial service was held November 28, 2010, at the Unitarian Universalist Society in Burlington. Steve was a terrific colleague and we all missed him very much after he moved to Burlington, and we miss him all the more now.
—Nicholas R. Miller, University of Maryland Baltimore County
Ada W. Finifter
Ada W. Finifter passed away on October 29, 2011 in Lansing, Michigan after a two-year battle with multiple myeloma. Ada was my colleague from September 1967, when we joined the Political Science Department at Michigan State University as Assistant Professors, until her retirement in July 2008. After she retired, she moved to New York City to take advantage of the cultural attractions of Manhattan, especially the theater. But she kept her condo on Lake Lansing, a popular recreational site near East Lansing, and returned to the Lansing area every summer. She moved to her condo in the summer of 2011, but became too ill to return to New York.
Ada was born in Brooklyn, New York, on June 6, 1938, and graduated from Brooklyn College Cum Laude with Honors in Political Science in 1959. She attended the University of Michigan, earning her MA in political science in 1962. She then served in the Peace Corps as a Professor in the School of Social Science, Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, Caracas, Venezuela in 1963–64. On returning to the United States, she began the PhD program in political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, earning her PhD in 1967 under the guidance of future American Political Science Association president Austin Ranney. Ada was promoted to Associate Professor at Michigan State University in 1972 and to Professor in 1981.
Ada edited several influential books, the most important of which were Political Science: The State of the Discipline (1983) and Political Science: The State of the Discipline II (1993). In Alienation and the Social System (1972), she analyzes controversies about the meaning of alienation and also presents some of the best Marxist and non-Marxist writings about this concept. Even though she lacked any special training in computer science, Ada wrote one of the first texts about using personal computers, Using the IBM Personal Computer: EasyWriter (1984).
Ada published four articles in the American Political Science Review: ”Dimensions of Political Alienation” (June 1970); “The Friendship Group as a Protective Environment for Political Deviants” (June 1974); “Redefining the Political System of the USSR: Mass Support for Political Change” (with Ellen Mickiewicz) (December 1992); and “Attitudes toward Individual Responsibility and Political Reform in the Former Soviet Union” (March 1996).
Her article on political alienation, based on a factor analysis of The Civic Culture survey conducted by Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba in the United States in March 1960, applied empirical data to the study of alienation—at a time when factor analysis was conducted by hand! Her article on “the friendship” group analyzed autoworkers in the Detroit area in early 1961shortly after the Kennedy-Nixon election. It is a pioneering study using contextual analysis.
Ada's study with Ellen was the first collaborative US-Soviet national survey of the Soviet Union, and they worked closely with the great Soviet sociologist Boris Grushin (1929–2007) of Moscow. They discuss how the attitudinal patterns they found in late 1989 may have contributed to the breakup of the Soviet Union and how they may contribute to the problems to be confronted by its successor states. Ada's final APSR article responds to criticisms of her article with Ellen, presents additional findings from their study, and provides analyses of the 1990–91 World Values Survey. She discusses several methodological reasons that surveys may yield different results, but most importantly argues that political scientists must be sensitive to the political context in which their surveys are conducted.
Ada published in other major political science journals, including the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and the Public Opinion Quarterly. Her survey of American emigrants in Australia, conducted with her husband Bernard M. Finifter in 1978 (they divorced in 1984), led to articles on the ongoing impact of party identification among Americans who emigrate and the psychological impact of renouncing American citizenship.
Ada was professionally active in the APSA and the Midwest Political Science Association. She was the program director for the 1982 APSA Meeting and in 1986–87 was president of the MPSA. Ada served on many important APSA committees. In his The Politics of Academic Culture: Foibles, Fables, and Facts (1998), past APSA President Heinz Eulau writes that Ada told him that his appointment of her to the Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession launched her professional career in the APSA. And, Eulau writes (114), “She remains a true role model for young political scientists of either gender.” And two other APSA past presidents, M. Kent Jennings and Charles O. Jones (who appointed her to be editor of the APSR) described her to me with identical words, “She was a real trooper.”
But Ada was more than a trooper for she was also a leader. When she entered the profession there were few female political scientists and only a handful of prominent women. Between 1978 and 2008 the discipline had been transformed, and Ada played a major role transforming it both by being a role model and by personally encouraging young women.
Ada edited the Review between March 1996 and December 2001. Many members of her Editorial Board can attest to her conscientiousness, but I was the only Board member who was also her colleague. Therefore, I personally can attest to how thoughtful she was in making editorial decisions. She often would come to my office and ask me to read a manuscript and the reviews and to give her my assessment. Her questions were pointed and reflected her deep understanding of the issues, even when the subject matter was unrelated to her areas of expertise.
Ada promoted the highest ethical standards. (She had chaired the APSA Committee on Professional Ethics, Rights, and Responsibilities.) She was extremely careful to avoid conflicts of interest. No editor could have been more thoughtful, careful, and professional in managing our flagship journal.
Even though Ada took great pride in the Review, she strongly supported launching a new journal that would publish articles that were accessible to a wider audience and that had contemporary political relevance. She also favored establishing a journal that would relieve the Review from publishing book reviews. Ada supported this change even though she recognized that such a journal, which we now have in Perspectives on Politics, might diminish interest in the Review.
Ada was a demanding editor, which some authors viewed as a flaw. Authors were often asked to work and to rework their manuscripts. She insisted that authors meet the highest scientific principles and that they present their quantitative work in a way that readers could interpret. But the work she demanded contributed greatly to the quality of the Review during the six years of her stewardship.
Finally, as past APSA president Theda Skocpol pointed out to me, “Ada was APSR Editor at a tricky moment of transition to a more inclusive journal. She took a lot of arrows, but did a conscientious job of working to include a wider variety of types of scholarship in the journal. She paved the way for a better journal and a better APSA.” Ron Rogowski, the current lead editor of the Review, agrees that Ada “did her utmost to make the Review…a more inclusive journal.” Moreover, she “consulted with many of us about how best to do that, when by the time of her editorship the Review's identity as an unfriendly venue for qualitative work seemed firmly entrenched.” But, Ron acknowledges, neither she nor her successors were able to change that perception. All the same, Ron writes, her efforts were “nothing short of heroic. I believed at the time, and continue to believe, that she virtually ‘wore herself out in harness’ as Editor, and that whatever success any of us have had as her successors is largely a product of her valiant efforts.”
Ada and I studied public opinion and voting behavior. Over the years, I read the vast majority of her work, and she read most of mine. In several cases, she read an entire book manuscript, once leading me to reorganize a book that had already been accepted for publication (and this before the days of word processors). She was a wonderful colleague, but more importantly, she was a friend whom I will greatly miss. And many of her former colleagues have written to me expressing their sense of loss.
Her brother and sister-in-law, Leon Weintraub and Nancy Weintraub of Potomac, Maryland, two nephews, and one niece survive her. For contributions, Ada established the “Ada Weintraub Finifter Endowed Fund in Jewish Studies.” Donations may be sent to the Jewish Studies Program, College of Arts and Letters, 301 Linton Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824.
—Paul R. Abramson, Michigan State University
Note: I am grateful to Nathaniel Beck, Paul Brace, Jack Citrin, Robert S. Erikson, Melinda Gann Hall, William G. Jacoby, Ellen Mickiewicz, Ronald Rogowski, Joshua Sapotichne, Saundra K. Schneider, Vladimir Shlapentokh, Brian D. Silver, Theda R. Skocpol, Paul M. Sniderman, and Leon Weintraub for their suggestions.
Richard I. Hofferbert
Richard Ira Hofferbert died on July 6, 2011 at his home in Florida. He was 74. I first encountered Rick when I was an undergraduate at Williams College in the early 1960s. He had joined the Williams faculty as an assistant professor with a freshly minted PhD from Indiana. I took a class with him on American state and local politics and another on public opinion and political behavior and experienced what all of the students who took classes with him throughout his career discovered—a teacher who, through his enthusiasm for the subject matter, wit, force of personality and intelligence, made the comparative study of public policy, whether across the American states or among national governments, exciting.
Rick was a small-d democrat from rural Indiana. Perhaps for that reason, he treated students as partners in the scholarly enterprise. More than any other professor, Rick exemplified what US President James Garfield, reminiscing about his alma mater, once said about Mark Hopkins, a professor of philosophy and long-time president (1836-72) of Williams: “The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.” Rick was my Mark Hopkins.
Several years later, I was completing a degree in politics at the London School of Economics and trying to decide whether to go to law school or continue graduate study in political science. One day as I perused college catalogues in the LSE library, I discovered that Rick was in the government department of Cornell University. That settled the question. I applied to Cornell and a few months later arrived in Ithaca as a first-year student in the PhD program.
While still a leading contributor, with Thomas Dye and Ira Sharkansky, to the empirical analysis of public policy in the American states, Rick was also developing a strong interest in investigating the variations in policy outcomes across the subnational units of other countries and identifying the social, economic and political sources of those variations. He immediately included me in his small research group, Compols, and, knowing that I read French and that France had a large number of départements and census reports going back to the mid-nineteenth century, suggested I start building a dataset for France. Long before finishing it, we wrote the first of our several co-authored papers on the electoral base of Charles de Gaulle's support in the early years of the Fifth Republic. (“Continuity and Change in Gaullism: The General's Legacy,” American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 27, February 1973, pp. 77–98.)
Rick was serving as Cornell's representative to the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research (ICPR, later ICPSR), headquartered at The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In 1970, he accepted an offer to become the executive director of the ICPR and a professor in the department of political science and arranged for three of us in the Compols group to accompany him to Ann Arbor and enter Michigan's PhD program.
Rick's administrative duties at ICPR took an enormous amount of time and energy. But he took them on with great enthusiasm and played the pivotal role in developing it into the organization we know today as the ICPSR. In particular, he broadened its scope beyond its American core by developing its ties with the European Consortium for Political Research and scholars and universities throughout Europe and beyond. As he did, he developed professional and personal relationships with scholars in Europe and elsewhere, many of whom became life-long friends and scholarly colleagues.
As time-consuming as those duties were, Rick continued to be first and foremost a scholar of public policy, and he continued to broaden the geographic and substantive focus of his study of policy. He received a National Science Foundation grant to study education finance in federal systems and embarked on a multi-year study of education finance in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland. The project combined extensive analysis of data for the subnational units of the four countries and interviews with policy-makers in the states, provinces, and cantons and resulted in several publications including an article Rick and I published. (“The Impact of Federalism on Education Finance: A Comparative Analysis,” European Journal of Political Research, Vol. 2, September 1974, pp. 225–58.)
Rick received his PhD when he was 25, three years after receiving the BA. He sometimes joked that, given my meandering path of graduate study, I might end up a “graduate student emeritus.” But eventually, I finished the dissertation and my long apprenticeship with Rick came to an end, at about the time Rick and Rose and their sons Mark and Sam moved to Binghamton.
Rick taught at Binghamton for 24 years until his retirement in 1999. During his years at Binghamton, Rick continued his research on public policy, wrote many articles and several books—most notably among the latter, Parties, Policies, and Democracy with Hans-Dieter Klingemann and Ian Budge, directed several research centers, rebuilt the doctoral program, developed a master's program in public policy analysis, and attracted many, many students to the study of public policy. At the time of his death he was Distinguished Professor Emeritus.
—David R. Cameron, Yale University
As with David Cameron, Rick Hofferbert entered our lives and changed their trajectories in ways that have proved rewarding through today and, we suspect, so long as we will inherit this good earth.
Rick's life began on April 2, 1937, in the rural environs of Grant County, Indiana. By age 20 he had the good fortune and great wisdom to marry his high school and lifelong sweetheart, Rosemarie Besemer Hofferbert—Rose to all who knew the two of them. At age 22 Rick graduated from Indiana University with an AB in political science, and he and Rose were rearing their first son, Mark. Just three years later, and one year before the birth of their second son, Sam, Rick earned his PhD from Indiana under the supervision of American democratic theorist and past APSA president, Charles Hyneman. That same year, 1962, age 25, Rick took a position at Williams College.
Rick's earliest scholarship, while still in graduate school, looked into the organization of the lieutenant governorship in Indiana. At Williams he continued to work on American state politics but with a broader perspective. His first post-doctoral publication was an article that sought to improve on the Ranney/Kendall and Schlesinger classifications of competitiveness of state party systems. This was at the time of the “reapportionment revolution” brought about by the Supreme Court decisions in Baker and Reynolds. As Rick would later recount, in class one day he was opining about how the revolution would remake many state party systems and, with that, the nature of public policies in, at least, the most grossly malapportioned states. One of his students was brave enough say: “Professor, you keep saying that without data one is hearing the thoughts of just another guy with an opinion; aren't your musings about malapportionment an example of you being one of those guys with just an opinion?” Rick returned to his office, called home to tell Rose he would be late, asked her to pass along his good-night kisses to Mark and Sam, pulled a copy of the Statistical Abstract of the United States from his shelf, and took it to the computing center to create a state policy data set. Lo and behold, “there is no obvious relationship between the numerical equality of a state's apportionment system and … the welfare orientation measure” (APSR 1966: 75).
With that finding and similar results in a series of articles over the next few years, Rick burst like a bombshell on the political science scene of the 1960s. In the two decades after the Second World War political science had concerned itself with power and democracy, focusing on the latter through the study of parties and elections on the assumption that they totally determined policy. Rick's study of policy outputs and expenditures across the American States showed that policies could be explained in terms of non-political influences, structural and socio-economic factors, with politics hardly getting a look in.
Suddenly public policy became a popular object of study, with “Does Politics Matter?” standing as a compelling question that political scientists needed to answer. In 1967, Rick and the family made the move to Cornell for a four-year stay. By the conclusion of the decade Rick's research and writing, along with and sometimes in direct association with political scientists such as Tom Dye and Ira Sharkansky helped to and a new focus for the discipline. In state politics research, Dye, Hofferbert, Sharkansky were the obligatory citations.
Rick himself was never a Marxist (to understate his position). As a staunch democrat he devoted the rest of his research career to reversing his own finding. Politics did matter; in particular, political parties mattered for what policy choices democratic governments made. But, we're getting ahead of ourselves. In the next 15 years Rick's scholarly output was interwoven with his contributions to institution building. For, in 1970, he left Cornell for Michigan to serve as Executive Director of ICPSR, and later, in 1975, he left Michigan for Binghamton to re-start its PhD program. It was during these years that Rick entered our individual orbits.
Ron Inglehart was at Michigan when Rick arrived and recalls those years. In 1970, Richard Hofferbert was recruited by the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research to direct the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, and to teach in the political science department. Directing the ICPSR from 1970 to 1975, Rick provided strong leadership, developing an extensive network of international members and broadening the archive's holdings considerably. He cultivated strong ties with foreign universities, as reflected in the fact that he was later invited as a visiting professor or visiting scholar at the University of Mannheim, the Berlin Social Science Research Center, the Free University of Berlin, the University of Essex, Strathclyde University, the University of Lausanne, and Bogazici University in Turkey. While at Michigan, he carried out extensive and innovative policy research and was a superb mentor of graduate students.
Rick was a wonderful colleague, full of intellectual enthusiasm. He greatly enriched both the intellectual and social life of the political science department while he was at the University of Michigan. When he left Ann Arbor in 1975 to go to Binghamton, he was missed tremendously. I personally really missed him and his family, but we kept in touch for many years and got together at various places from Binghamton to Berlin to Istanbul. He was one of my closest friends.
RI
It was during this period when Rick first crossed paths with Hans-Dieter Klingemann that proved to be a rich experience professionally and personally. Hans-Dieter fondly remembers their lifelong bonds in these ways.
Richard I. Hofferbert first entered West German academia in 1972/73. He had only shortly before arrived in Ann Arbor to serve as director of the ICPR (now ICPSR) when he met Hans-Dieter who was attending an ICPR Summer Course to brush up his skills in social science methodology. At that time I, Klingemann, worked at the University of Cologne's Central Archive for Empirical Social Research. Thus, it was quite natural that the two of us get together to discuss archival matters. In the end we came up with a joint project: the German Electoral Data Project. This project generated codebooks in English language and OSIRIS data files of all German national election surveys. It gave a boost to comparative electoral research. And three of the promising youngsters Rick had put to the task grasped the opportunity and wrote Germany Transformed (Kendall L. Baker, Kai Hildebrand and Russell J. Dalton. New Haven: Harvard University Press, 1981), a volume that has become a classic in German electoral research.
In 1975 Rick decided to leave the Midwest and move to the State University of New York at Binghamton. The ICPR priorities were left behind. The public policy whizz kid was supposed to continue in his original field and build a strong political science department. At that time I had left Cologne and joined Max Kaase to set up the Center for Survey Research (ZUMA) in Mannheim. Meanwhile, I met with Ian Budge to support an entirely new and original project that tried to chart programmatic profiles of political parties in the OECD world since 1945. Rick learned about this project at one of my visits on his farm in upstate New York. Sitting on the deck near the pond, sipping red wine, and smoking pipes we speculated what could be done with these data over and above testing spatial or coalition theories. It must have been the genius loci to suggest that they look at the relation of the parties' programmatic profiles and the spending behavior of governments. Rick was enthusiastic about it. He became a core member of Ian's party manifesto group and published extensively. In 1994 the first major results were summarized in Parties, Policies, and Democracy.
In 1980 I accepted a position at the Free University of Berlin. From 1989 to 2003 I also directed the Research Unit on Institutions and Social Change of the Social Science Research Center Berlin. This provided the ideal institutional setting to continue our long-term cooperation. In the 1990s alone, Rick (and Rose) visited at least six times. Rick had accepted a recurring visiting professorship formally linking him to the Science Center. These years turned out to become among Rick's most productive times. His interests in the impact of party manifestos on political decision-making persisted. The fall of the Berlin Wall added another item to his research agenda. He analyzed causes and consequences of transition from autocracy to democracy in Germany as well as in central and eastern Europe. His last book, The Dynamics of Democratic Satisfaction, co-edited with Christopher Anderson and published in 2001 as an issue of the International Political Science Review, had been devoted to this topic. In 1999 Rick stopped his travels to Europe because of his health problems. However, in the day of the Internet it was easy to continue the exchange of ideas.
In all these long years of academic cooperation our families have supported us and we have grown together. Rick, Rose, Mark and Sam, Hans-Dieter, Ute and Julia have become as close as one can ever get. For this I am eternally grateful.
Rick had a clear analytical mind. He also was a gifted writer. His German was impeccable. All those who had the privilege to work with Rick in Germany profited from this cooperation. I am proud to call him a friend.
HDK
Rick's colleagues at Binghamton appreciate how much success Rick brought to the political science graduate program and to the intellectual and social life of the department more generally. Every academic year that Rick and Rose were not on leave somewhere in Europe the fall semester opened with a Saturday gathering of faculty and graduate students at the Hofferbert farm. The only thing that Rick insisted must flow more freely than the beer and wine was conversation to ensured that everyone get to know one another as people. Michael McDonald recounts the thoughtfulness and unflagging effort he gave to making Binghamton's department of political science an enjoyable place to work and learn.
In 1975 Binghamton was at the earliest of early stages in its transition from a predominantly liberal arts institution to a doctoral granting institution. Rick was recruited with the hope of giving the graduate program immediate standing and charged with focusing the PhD program on a specific sub-disciplinary field. Of course, his chosen focus was policy analysis.
The late 1970s were not favorable to new projects in public higher education. The oil crisis and the upward slope on what was to become known as the “misery index” had much of the country and almost all of public higher ed in the doldrums. Rick was not to be discouraged nor deterred. He diagnosed his major challenges as twofold. First, he reasoned that any doctoral program, most especially a newly forming one, has to be able to recruit talented and highly motivated students. Second, in the face of austerity measures facing public higher education, with doctoral education the most expensive of all its forms, Rick wanted “his” graduate program not merely to avoid becoming costly but to provide a financial benefit to the University at large. To accomplish both, he decided to start not one but two new programs: a political science doctoral program focused on policy analysis and a Master of Arts in Public Policy Analysis and Administration (MAPPAA, for [not so] short).
The two-track graduate program would allow for recruitment of a half dozen of the best applicants to the doctoral program and 20 to 25 MA-level students. Several first-year courses would be cross-listed to ensure healthy seminar enrollments. The concurrent enrollments would keep costs down, and the large majority of MAPPAA paying their own tuition would ensure that the overall graduate program was a financial plus for the University. Moreover, the MAPPAA program would help to repay support from the State by educating policy analysts and public administrators to work in NY state and local government. Entwined in all this thinking about the graduate program carrying its own load financially were his thoughts about recruiting for the PhD program. The MAPPAA program would bring to campus a couple dozen students whose intellectual strengths and ambition the faculty could assess up close. The very best MAPPAA students, with the right amount of scholarly inclination, would be recruited into the PhD program.
After 12 years of resolute leadership, Rick had his first health related scare and turned leadership of the program over to others. He had constructed institutions that would endure. As his own scholarly interest broadened, he became an enthusiastic supporter of re-labeling the focus of the graduate program to the study of democratic performance. After another 12 years his MAPPAA program would mature to become an independent Department of Public Administration and a short time later a NASPA accredited MPA program.
What Rick did for the graduate programs at Binghamton he did for individuals, me most definitely. He would see a path that might be rewarding to take and invite her or him to join him. He would provide a few stepping stones, open a door or two, and invite you across the threshold. So long as you were professional in outlook and looking out for the well-being of others along the way, you could be on Rick's team. Nothing else mattered much. We were an odd set of colleagues in all the obvious ways—in stature, Rick was an imposing physical presence; in demeanor, Rick's personality was bigger than his physical presence; in political outlook, Rick relished wearing his conservatism as a badge—but the closest of colleagues in all the important ways—all institution building is win-win-&-win for your department, college, and university; all matters of opinion can be reasoned through in the light of evidence.
In early 1987, shortly after his heart scare, Rick came crashing through my office door with an excitement as if to announce he discovered gold in the hills around Binghamton. It wasn't gold he had discovered but the pre-publication manuscript of Wright-Erikson-McIver's “Public Opinion and Policy Liberalism in the American States” (AJPS 1987). Politics does matter! he exclaimed in his never understated way.
With his graduate director duties about to be turned over to someone else and with his just-then emerging interest in the party manifesto and policy project with Hans-Dieter and Ian taking root, Rick and I talked weekly about what was needed to take long, hard, sober look at representative democracy—what, if anything identifiable, were the mechanisms for popular control over public policy. His interests took him in the subfield of comparative politics while mine remained focused on American politics. By the early 1990s, however, our conversations led him to suggest that I join him, along with Ian, Hans Keman, and Paul Pennings, on the project they had planned to carry out during a year in the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. He then insisted, enlisting Ian to re-insist, to the directorship at the Institute that I be part of the team “or there will be no team.” Sincerely threatened?—who knows; as usual Rick was persuasive. That year was the most eye-opening and rewarding year of my professional and (my own and my family's) personal life.
Alas, new health issues for Rick intruded on and sometimes interrupted the work of our NIAS team. Rick, with Ian especially, plus the insights of Hans and Paul, had established such a foresighted plan that the project Rick brought me into has occupied most of my professional work until this very day. In fewer words, my life is immeasurably better because I knew Rick Hofferbert.
MDM
Having firmly established the graduate program that he and the university at Binghamton wanted for the political science department, Ian Budge remembers what he calls Rick's “mature years.”
In the eighties Rick returned to the explanatory variables in a comparative context. Better data were now available on the preferences of key political actors across many countries, and Rick had an unrivalled grasp of the details of expenditure. With Hans-Dieter Klingemann he started to put the two together with spectacular results.
It was Hans-Dieter who introduced us to exploit the time series of party preferences compiled by the Manifesto Research Group and applied previously to party policy movements and coalition formation. Rick generously brought me in to share his data and added my name to a research paper he had largely written and which won a prize at the Southern Political Science Association meeting in 1988. It became the basis of an influential article in the APSR in 1990, demonstrating a close link between American party emphases in their platforms and their expenditure priorities while in power.
Extending this research to ten countries in collaboration with Hans-Dieter, and reporting in a series of articles and a book in the mid-seventies, led us to meet in a variety of places in the United States and Europe, notably in Berlin at the WZB and at Binghamton, where Rick and Rose put us up at their farm. We swam in their pond, walked in their woods, and conversed endlessly about research and life. We were fortunate to be brought into the heart of their family, introduced to their sons, granddaughter, friends, and colleagues, inserted into the congenial Binghamton department and introduced to the surrounding townships and countryside. In Europe we spent time at the WZB in Berlin at the fall of the Wall and experienced the growing pangs of German reunification. Rick was always a practical democrat, passionately interested in real life as well as theoretical politics, a committed defender of individualism, choice, and human rights. Berlin gave him an ideal basis to explore these themes academically and practically, through frequent trips into East Germany and encounters with Rose's relatives and other friends from both East and West.
Research, academic and practical interests were all to be synthesized in a book planned to emerge from a stay at NIAS (Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies) in 1995-6. Rick was to get together with his Binghamton colleague Michael McDonald, along with Hans Keman and Paul Pennings from the VU Amsterdam, and myself to put the link between politics and policy beyond doubt. Indeed we spent a very happy year there together and prepared all the data for analysis.
Disastrously, however, Rick's health collapsed in the course of the year, in a most dramatic fashion. The situation characteristically and paradoxically emerged from his general optimism and belief in technological and medical progress. In the mid-eighties suffering from sinus problems, he had decided to simply solve them through an operation. This was botched and eight years later the growth of scar tissue almost mortally affected his breathing. With two operations during his stay in the Netherlands and one shortly after returning to America, he was in no fit state to continue with the project nor, eventually, in academic life.
He confronted health problems with a gallant insouciance, joking about being able to subsist totally on his massive intake of tablets. But he had to face a lot—sinuses, burst appendix, hip replacement, eye operations, and the heart problems which finally got him—always bravely positive about (most) doctors and technology. He himself always made the best of things, living life to the full, immersing himself in his warm and supportive family. In terms of his life-long research project however he had to pass the torch on to the rest of us. Without Rick's participation Organizing Democratic Choice has taken 15 years but is finally appearing—dedicated, justly, to his inspirational vision. DEDICATION: “To Richard I. Hofferbert, who initiated the project but was prevented from finishing it with us. We hope it lives up to his noble ideal of strengthening democracy by understanding it better.”
IB
Even those who came to know Rick in the last few years of his career could readily appreciate the power of his intellect, the force of his personality, and the energy he put into his professional life. Chris Anderson puts it in these words.
Rick Hofferbert seemed like a walking contradiction to this colleague who encountered him late in his career and who ended up being hired into the position he vacated. You could see him coming from miles away, and he was forceful up close—worryingly so to some. Yet those who knew him knew about the passion he had for his fellow travelers and his big heart for those who could use his help. He was a decidedly serious scholar, teacher, and colleague, but he didn't take himself too seriously. He was enormously accomplished, yet without an air about him and modest to the core. Rick had enormous energy—often more than more junior colleagues—despite debilitating health issues. He loved ‘doing’ political science and worked hard on it late into his career, yet seemed entirely content to retire and dedicate himself to new endeavors, including his family history. Perhaps more than anything, he was perennially optimistic when there was plenty to be pessimistic about in the modern public university. He clearly had invested a lot of his life in the Binghamton department and delighted when others shared his passion.
Rick was strongly opinionated about virtually everything (to understate just a bit), yet willing to change his mind when the evidence warranted it. He wholly embraced and lived by the principle he had passed along to his Williams' students: “Without data, you're just another guy with an opinion.” He believed in the democratic-ness of evidence and the decency of others, occasionally bewildered why not everyone was like him.
Whatever you made of Rick, he was someone you had to contend with—someone who would ask you questions, not to expose you but out of genuine curiosity; someone who actually cared a great deal—he'd even ask you whether you hadn't slept well the night before if you were flagging before the day was done. His days were done much too early, but it was a life well lived and lived to the fullest.
CJA
Richard Ira Hofferbert was promoted to the rank of Distinguished Professor by the State University of New York's Board of Trustees in 1997. This is a rank “reserved for professors whose work has brought them to distinguished international prominence in their field.” That description fit Rick as well as it could anyone. Sadly for his friends around the world in political science and most especially for those close to his home at Binghamton University, two years later, 1999, Rick decided to retire.
Rick and Rose spent the next 12 years living six months in Binghamton and six months in Florida. He found a new research project to engage his mind and entertain his family and friends in the form of documenting his and Rose's family histories. Even with this new research project at the daily forefront of his mind, he could not entirely shed his love of teaching. When in Binghamton, he offered pro bono services to a local civic association to help immigrants prepare for their citizenship exams.
This is how Richard I. Hofferbert is to be remembered: a man with a big heart, strong opinions, a love of family, a passion for research and ideas, a desire to open new and interesting doors, a knack for laying secure and fertile institutional foundations, and a keen sense of how to make all life experiences rewarding for him and others.
—Christopher J. Anderson Cornell University
—Ian Budge, University of Essex
—Ronald F. Inglehart, University of Michigan
—Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Freie Universität of Berlin
—Michael D. McDonald, Binghamton University, SUNY
Karl H. Kahrs
Karl H. Kahrs died on August 7, 2011 after a fall in the home he shared with Chris Brewer Kahrs, in Laguna Beach, California. The fall resulted in broken cervical vertebrae and a hospital stay prior to his death. He had suffered from Parkinson's disease for a number of years;
Karl Heinz Kahrs was born February 16, 1931 in Altona, Germany. He grew up during World War II, suffering many of the deprivations this entailed. As one of many whose education had been disrupted by the war or its aftermath,he obtained a “certificate of maturity” (Abitur) from The College of Social Sciences, Wilhelmshaven, Germany in 1953, an experimental college intended to give a second chance to get into the mainstream of higher education for people like him. He transferred to the University of Hamburg from which received a Diplomkaufmann (M.B.A.) in Business Economics in 1956. He worked briefly as a journalist and business affairs employee at a German newspaper and, after receiving his M.B.A., was briefly a management employee of Shell Oil and then in sales for a small rubber company. He was an active member of the German Social Democratic Party.
Karl, his wife, Ilse and young child, Till, emigrated to the United States in 1959, partially as a result of his unhappiness with political developments in Western Germany. After a year working in a steel plant in Salt Lake City Utah he took a position teaching at the U.S. Army Language School (later Defense Language Institute) in Monterey, California. After eight years he enrolled as a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, beginning in economics and shortly changing to political science. He received an M.A. in 1967 and a Ph.D. in 1970. At Santa Barbara he worked closely with Peter Merkyl, his dissertation advisor and a fellow German emigrant. He remained a close friend and colleague with Professor Merkyl for the remainder of his life, contributing essays to the latter's edited volumes The Federal Republic of Germany at Fifty and The Federal Republic of Germany at Forty-Five. He was an active scholar, writing both in English and German. He authored two books, Aktuelle U.S. Verkaufspratikan (co-authored by Till Kahrs) and U.S. Anatomie: Wie Amerika Regiert Wird as well as contributions to volumes edited by Richard F. Tomassen and by David Childs and Janet Wharton (Children in War). He authored numerous journal articles in both English and German. He was an active participant in the American Political Science Association, the International Political Science Association, The Council for European Studies, the Conference Group on German Politics and the California Seminar on International Security and Foreign Policy. He served as book review editor of East Central Europe/L'Europe du Centre-Est. He was a consultant to Frost and Sullivan for their “World Political Risk Forecasts;” He served on the advisory boards of Annual Editions: Global Issues and Annual Editions: Comparative Politics.
Karl was appointed as Assistant Professor of Political Science, and promoted to Associate Professor and Professor of Political Science at California State University, Fullerton, beginning in 1969. He served as graduate coordinator of the Master of Arts in Political Science program for a number years and one year as Associate Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. He traveled to Germany as a Fulbright Scholar in 1993, served as Resident Director for the California State University International Program in Heidelberg, Germany, and was a visiting professor at universities in Lancaster, England, and Hamburg. He participated in the Scholar-Diplomat Seminar at the U.S. Department of State in March, 1981 and in “Seminar for U.S. Opinion Leaders” at Haus Rissen, International Institute for Politics and Economcs in Hamburg, Germany, July, 1982. He obtained a Fulbright grant as German specialist for participation in a 1993 Summer Seminar in Bonn, Rostock and Berlin. Kahrs was awarded emeritus status in 1994 by California University, Fullerton and continued to teach half-time for a further five years and continued to teach a graduate seminar for several more years. He returned to campus in September 2001, to serve on a panel discussing “Terrorism: Why and What Can ′Be Done?” to a capacity crowd of students, faculty, staff and community members. He was an active participant in both national, and international conferences, especially concerned with German unification and politics as well as European integration both before and after his period of active teaching.
Most of all Professor Kahrs was a professor whose high standards as well as his geniality were known by all. No one got “a break” from Professor Kahrs, especially in matters of English grammar, writing style and proper citations. He sat on many Master of Arts oral examination committees where he was infinitely fair, patient, and unwilling to accept anything other than the finest performance from the person being examined. He was mentor to a number of graduate and undergraduate students who are now members of faculties at several universities in the United States and successful high level employees in both private and public institutions. One of these, a major financial analyst remarked on hearing of Professor Karhr's death that he had been the person who taught him to “ask myself how I know what I think I know;” He always worked in departmental affairs with full respect from all of his colleagues. He was the person to whom virtually everyone in the department went for information and opinion about issues of international politics, European politics and European integration, among other topics. He was frequently asked to appear on panels related to European affairs. One of his colleagues, on hearing of his death, commented “I learned more from Karl than any other colleague;” This opinion is shared by all of those of us who worked with him.
Karl was an inveterate traveler, having visited all seven continents and most of the states in the world. He continued traveling with his wife, Chris Brewer Kahrs throughout his retirement.
He is survived by his wife Chris, his son Till, and his grandson Nathaniel.
—Bruce E. Wright, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, California State University, Fullerton
Harold L. Wilensky
Harold L. Wilensky, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, passed away peacefully, at the age of 88, in his home in Berkeley, California, on October 30, 2011.
Born in New Rochelle, New York on March 3, 1923, Wilensky was reared in a liberal family, and that orientation remained with him throughout life. His undergraduate years (1942 and 1945–47) were spent at Antioch College, at a time when that institution was noted for its intellectual and social innovation. His collegiate years were interrupted by a term of service in the United States Air Force; he missed by an eyelash being assigned to the European Theater as a bomber pilot, whose survival rate was one of three. While at Antioch he worked in and around the labor movement and the Democratic Party as Midwest Field Director for the Voters Research Institute, then Research Assistant at the Detroit headquarters of the UAW when Walter Reuther was president, then assistant to the chief lobbyist at the Ohio C.I.O. Council, and later for three years at the University of Chicago Union Leadership Project. Over 60 years of productive scholarship in the social sciences, he remained steadfastly fair and sensible politically—committed but critical of both right and left extremes.
Wilensky always reached easily into sociology, political science, economics, and policy analysis. His academic career included 28 years on the sociology faculties of the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley, and the political science faculty at Berkeley from 1982 until his retirement in 1991.
Wilensky produced a remarkable body of research—75 articles and 13 books—that is interdisciplinary, innovative, rigorous, substantively rich, and focused on important real-world issues. He routinely engaged a wide audience, enlivening his work with a crisp, economical writing style. He made major contributions to understanding the impact of industrial transformation on the structure, culture, and politics of modern society. He was a pioneer in the study of the welfare state and social policy, with such works as Industrial Society and Social Welfare (1958) and The Welfare State and Equality (1975). He charted new ground in the study of intellectual life in Intellectuals in Labor Unions (1956). His prize-winning book on Organizational Intelligence (1967) focused on the structural and ideological roots of intelligence failures in government and industry. Among his dozens of contributions to scholarly journals, two, both published in 1964, stand out as classics with continuing relevance and influence—“The Professionalization of Everyone?” and “Mass Society and Mass Culture: Interdependence or Independence?”
Wilensky drew together decades of research and insight in Rich Democracies (2002), a master work of more than 900 pages of comprehensive data collection and analysis that is relevant, lucid and persuasive in its policy implications. He offers a powerful rebuttal to those who argue that more taxing and spending undermines economic performance, based on research on 19 countries over 50 years. To the contrary, he finds that the high tax/spend countries achieve far better social performance and equal or better economic performance more narrowly defined. The book systematically analyzes the effects of national differences in taxing, spending, and public policies on economic performance, political legitimacy, equality, job security, safety and risk, real health, poverty reduction, environmental threats, and the effectiveness and fairness of regulatory regimes.
At the time of his death, Wilensky had completed yet another book, American Political Economy in Global Perspective, (forthcoming 2012). In fact, he sent off the final page-proofs to Cambridge University Press on October 21, only nine days before his passing. This book concludes a 40-year project on the comparative political economy of advanced industrial countries, devoting special attention to the past 15 years of crisis and to contemporary American policies and politics. In an endorsement of the book, Jennifer Granholm, the former Governor of Michigan proclaims: “[Wilensky] shreds the notion that creating a healthy economy or citizenry requires that government shrink itself into oblivion; indeed, quite the opposite. The most successful countries with the highest quality-of-life, the most robust economies and healthiest democracies are ones that have an efficient-but-active government armed with smart economic and social policies.”
Wilensky recounted his intellectual development in “A Journey Through the Social Sciences” (In Hans Daalder, ed., Comparative European Politics: The Story of a Profession, 1997.) At the University of Chicago, he visited the office of the graduate advisor, none other than Milton Friedman, who asked him what he had been reading at Antioch that qualified him as an economist. Wilensky mentioned Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, J.S. Mill, and Joseph Schumpeter, among others. Friedman promptly told Wilensky that he was a sociologist and not an economist, and sent him upstairs where, with same list of books, he was awarded full support for his PhD studies under the GI Bill. Friedman's advice seemed right, but in the process economics lost a promising scholar.
Wilensky was a public intellectual in the best sense. He was rigorous in his scholarship, yet he was also unafraid to put his findings to work as a tireless advocate of New Deal policies and more recently for Medicare for all. He sought to chart a more inclusive, socially just course for US policy makers. In his view, the United States does not have to sacrifice prosperity and employment in order to be more inclusive and egalitarian. On the contrary, the United States could improve its economic performance if policy makers pursued a more progressive agenda.
Wilensky taught a wide range of courses on comparative political economy; the sociology of work, leisure, and mass communications; knowledge and intellectuals; complex organizations; the welfare state; and public policy. His former graduate students include many prominent figures in the fields of sociology and political science today.
Wilensky was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was twice a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
Colleagues and students will remember Wilensky's distinctive personal style as one that combined the highest intellectual integrity, unrelenting doggedness, indefatigability, and appreciation of telling humor.
He is survived by his partner of 32 years, Mary Roth Sharman; his sons, Stephen David Wilensky of Glencoe, California; Michael Alan Wilensky of Piedmont, California; Daniel Lewis Wilensky of Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey; and four granddaughters.
The family requests that memorial donations go to the University of California, Berkeley—to Cal Performances, to the Library Fund, or to a unit on campus of the donor's choosing.
—Neil Smelser, Professor of Sociology Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley
—David Collier, Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley
—Steven Vogel, Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley
