Randall Butler “Rip” Ripley, a leading scholar of Congress and public policy and an exceptional academic administrator, died at age 83 on October 8, 2021 in Columbus, Ohio, from complications of Parkinson’s disease.
Rip was born in Des Moines, Iowa. He graduated from DePauw University in Indiana in 1959 and moved on to Harvard, where he earned a Master’s degree and then a PhD in 1963. Rip held several research positions at the Brookings Institution between 1963 and 1967, after which he moved to Ohio State University where he spent the rest of his career.
During his tenure at Brookings, Ripley served as an intern in the office of the Democratic Whip in the House of Representatives, Congressman Hale Boggs (Louisiana). His internship service provided the basis for his 1964 American Political Science Review article “The Party Whip Organizations in the United States House of Representatives.” His 1967 book Party Leadership in the House of Representatives was the first book-length study of House leadership since the 1920s. That book was followed in 1969 by books on Majority Party Leadership in Congress and Power in the Senate, based partly on interviews he conducted with House members and on a series of round table discussions with senators from each party and with their staffs. These three seminal books and related articles presented the history of the party leadership in Congress, described its structure, discussed changes over the years in the distribution of power, and analyzed the situations in which the leadership could exert power over its members.
Ripley joined Ohio State University’s department of political science in 1967, where he also was a faculty associate of Ohio State’s Mershon Center for International Security Studies. Beginning in 1975, he obtained nine grants from the US Department of Labor, along with two from the state of Ohio, to study the implementation of various employment and training programs authorized by the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of 1973 (CETA) and the Job Training Partnership Act of 1982. Along with co-author Grace Franklin, Ripley published five editions of Congress, The Bureaucracy, and Public Policy, which was widely used in graduate and undergraduate public policy courses around the country. Other publications stemming from this research included CETA: Politics and Policy, 1973-1982, and two editions of Policy Implementation and the Bureaucracy. The employment and training research provided support and experience for numerous graduate students, helping to launch their research and teaching careers.
Altogether, Rip wrote a dozen books, edited another seven, wrote numerous journal articles and book chapters, and prepared major policy reports on CETA. He was editor of the Sage Professional Papers in American Politics from 1973 to 1977. His stature in the profession was reflected in his service as Secretary of the APSA Council in 1978 and as President of the APSA Public Policy Section in 1991-92. He also served as a consultant for federal, state, and local governments and organizations.
Rip became political science department chair at Ohio State in 1969. Rip’s emphasis was on hiring talent, nourishing junior faculty, increasing gender and racial diversity, and working together to achieve collective goals. He had inherited a department of about 20 faculty members and, with investments won from the college and central administration, grew it to about 35 positions. Rip was central in building and sustaining an outstanding department and in furthering the careers of a great many faculty members. His leadership brought the department into the ranks of the top political science departments nationally. Ripley helped found the department’s Polimetrics Laboratory, which was the largest to service a political science department in the nation. Rip also recognized that building and nurturing strong faculties went hand-in-hand with building a strong graduate program. He was ahead of his time in devoting significant departmental resources to recruiting promising graduate student cohorts and supporting them through their programs of study. The results can be seen in the remarkable number of the department’s PhDs holding positions of prominence in the best colleges and universities in the United States and other nations.
After serving as department chair for an astonishing 22 years, Ripley stepped down in 1991. A year later he became dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS) at Ohio State, and he served in that position until 2004. Rip was a bold leader of the college, as he had been of the department. He appointed strong department chairs who were scholarly leaders in their disciplines and enabled them to be effective administrative leaders. He made controversial decisions in the pursuit of achieving excellence. In times of draconian budget cuts, he protected the college’s top departments and he helped other departments become national leaders. He guided department chairs in assiduously seeking intramural funding through university-wide competitions and was successful in securing funding for several new department buildings and building renovations. At a time when the college was severely underfunded relative to its enrollments and its departments’ research preeminence, he adopted a decentralized budgeting system that secured additional resources for its departments and fueled their growth. Throughout his more than a decade as dean of SBS, he was an unabashed champion of high academic standards and a strong supporter of both minority and female recruitment and equity. By the end of his tenure as dean, SBS included an impressive number of the university’s acknowledged top departments.
Ripley received Ohio State University’s Chairperson Recognition Award in 1991 and its Distinguished Service Award in 2011. He also was called upon regularly to serve on, and especially to chair, search committees for university administrative positions and to review such university units as the graduate school. Rip retired officially from the University in 2005, but he continued to teach as a professor emeritus through 2017, focusing on his interests in the US Congress and Canadian government. He stimulated student interest in Canada through a Canadian government course in the fall term, after which the students could serve as interns in the Canadian legislature in Ottawa. Those internships provided valuable experience for a great many students. (Canadian MPs complimented many of these interns for how well they were prepared and how valuable their service was). In recognition of his interests in American and Canadian politics, there is now a Randall Ripley Fund in Political Science to promote graduate student research in US and Canadian politics.
Rip Ripley was the proverbial Renaissance Man, well read and knowledgeable across an amazingly diverse array of topics —including things most people never even hope to know. He was always willing to engage in spirited conversations with colleagues and friends about any of them. Rip was a voracious reader of several books at a time, ranging from the classics of Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, and Graham Greene to the escapades of Craig Johnson’s Sheriff Walt Longmire in Wyoming, Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins and James Lee Burke’s tales of Dave Robicheaux. He was equally at home in devouring countless works of non-fiction, particularly focused on world history, or discussing the latest shortcomings of his Cleveland Indians baseball team, whose games he would listen to on radio, eschewing the “modern” convenience of a television. Rip was an avid railroads enthusiast and enjoyed the occasional day trip of chasing trains and, as they made their way through Ohio’s small towns, registering their engine numbers to see where he might have encountered them before. He was an accomplished horseman and enjoyed trail riding from his Pataskala farm, particularly with his beloved steeds Zephyr and Chief.
Ripley was devoted to classical music, opera and live theater—and could make a convincing argument that Verdi’s opera Otello was the only adaptation of a Shakespearean play that actually improved on the original. Rip’s passion for Shakespeare and all things Canadian (he was a regular reader of Toronto’s Globe and Mail) had their intersection in teaching the comedies and tragedies of Canadian politics and in regularly attending the Stratford Festival in Ontario. He served on the Board of Governors of the Stratford Festival, a rarity for an American. At one Board meeting in Toronto, he was the sole Board member to take up an invitation to attend a live CBC broadcast of a Shakespearean play that evening, upon which Stratford’s Artistic Director quipped, “Ah, a Board member who likes theater!”
Rip is sorely missed by all who knew him, truly one-of-a-kind as a person and as an academic leader. He is survived by his spouse, Grace Franklin, son Fred Ripley, daughter Vanessa Ripley, and first wife Vivian Ripley. ■
