In Memoriam

Philip E. Converse

Philip E. Converse, a distinguished political scientist and social psychologist, died in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on December 30, 2014, from complications associated with chronic lung disease. Phil had returned to Ann Arbor after his retirement from his last administrative appointment as director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford in 1994. He spent more than 40 years of professional life at the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan, starting as a graduate student in 1956 and finishing as the Robert Cooley Angell Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Political Science. Along the way, he served as director of the Center for Political Studies (CPS) from 1981 to 1986 and of the Institute for Social Research from 1986 to 1989 prior to his tenure at CASBS.

Converse was a towering figure, responsible for an extraordinary number of foundational works in the behavioral study of politics. Converse wrote on social class (in his remarkable dissertation); ideology and belief systems; voters and elections—in The American Voter, Elections, and the Political Order and in a succession of brilliant reports on the elections of 1960, 1964, and 1968; partisanship; political representation—most notably, in Political Representation in France, the altogether splendid book he wrote with Roy Pierce; the development and stabilization of party systems; the human meaning of social change; and much more. What is perhaps most extraordinary about the work, taken either piece by piece or in the whole, is how well it has stood up, both to intense academic scrutiny, and to dramatic transformations in society and politics. Converse remains absolutely central to the field. There is really no one else like him.

Phil’s penchant for data and the empirical world started at an early age, before he became a social scientist. As a teenager, he enjoyed hitch hiking, and he once made a trip across the country and back from coast to coast, keeping track of the length of each segment of his journey.

Phil studied English literature as an undergraduate at Denison University, with a minor in comparative literature. He extended his study with a master’s degree from Iowa State, where he also participated in the creative writing program. This training was formative as he became well known professionally for his stylish prose.

His time at Denison was a critical juncture in his life because he met his wife Jean there. She was the first social scientist in their marriage. She began graduate work in Ann Arbor in 1952 and became active in the Stevenson campaign there. Phil had been drafted as part of the Korean War expansion of the US military, but instead of being sent overseas he was assigned to a military hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan, with the task of editing the base newspaper. While on a visit to Jean, Phil attended a lecture on the 1952 campaign by Warren Miller, and they spoke about Phil’s interest in the prospect of collecting panel data. Miller was interested in adding someone to the nascent election study project who had writing skills and encouraged Phil to think about graduate work. First, Phil and Jean took a year away in France, and then Phil returned to Ann Arbor for a master’s in sociology and then a PhD in social psychology.

During his graduate career, Phil became an assistant study director in the Survey Research Center, working closely on the 1956 election study with Angus Campbell. This work became a central element of his dissertation. After the 1956 survey data were collected, Miller developed the idea of a book-length project, which eventually became The American Voter after Donald Stokes joined Campbell, Converse, and Miller on the project. This volume formed the foundation of the behavioral revolution in political science, attracting a specific generation of graduate students to the discipline and establishing the department at the University of Michigan as the locus of this kind of research.

Many of the concepts central to the study of elections and voting behavior were developed at Michigan in the course of these early surveys and the preparation of The American Voter. These include party identification, the funnel of causality that leads to candidate choice in an election, and the normal vote. Converse participated actively in the theorizing that led to these developments, and he expounded on them in his own writing and with his collaborators.

In 1964, Converse published “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” arguably the most important analysis of public opinion modern political science has yet to offer. After painstaking empirical analysis of national surveys covering the 1956, 1958, and 1960 presidential and mid-term elections, Converse concluded that most Americans were indifferent to or mystified by liberalism and conservatism as political ideas; that their opinions on government policy displayed little evidence of coherent organization along ideological lines; and even on matters of obvious national importance, relatively few possessed real opinions. Most Americans, in Converse’s judgment, were innocent of ideology. Publication of Converse’s essay set off a huge scholarly commotion, and it is not over yet. In 2013 alone, on the eve of its 50th year anniversary, “Belief Systems” was cited almost 700 times.

In 1979, Converse coauthored two important pieces of panel data analysis with his former student and collaborator Greg Markus which appeared in two issues of the same volume of the American Political Science Review. The first article, “Plus Ca Change…: The New CPS Election Study Panel,” compared and contrasted changes in the 1972–1976 panel data from the National Election Study with observations found in its 1956–1960 panel. The analysis looked at changes in “continuity correlations” at the individual level for party identification and political attitudes and observed similar consistencies in the two data collections assembled almost 20 years apart. The main observations were that the consistency in partisanship among the same individuals was much stronger than that for various issue measures, a difference that “remained absolutely stark”; and that overall the relationships in the 70’s were remarkably similar to those in the 50’s despite the shifting political landscape, both domestic and in foreign affairs, in the intervening period.

The second essay “A Dynamic Simultaneous Equation Model of Electoral Choice” developed a general model of candidate preference and investigated the correlations between issue positions held by voters and those they associated with the candidates in the same 1972–1976 panel data collection. The model and associated analysis distinguished between the projection of citizens’ views onto the candidates and the persuasive effects of the candidacies on citizen preferences. This analysis was based on a broad review of intervening theoretical developments since the publication of The American Voter and a synthesis of methodological developments in modeling electoral choice. Through the panel design and application of more advanced methods, the Converse and Markus analysis reemphasized the central role of partisanship as a precursor to candidate choice, on its own and through its conditioning of particular issue emphases and relative candidate assessments.

One of Phil’s later passions was genealogy, specifically of the Eaton family. In additional to its historical aspects, it provided Phil with another opportunity to extend his fondness and penchant for data collection. With the discovery of the extensive compilation that his great grandfather, William H. Eaton, had deposited in the New England Historic Genealogical Society, he began a major project on his family’s history that resulted in the publication of An Eight Generation Genealogy of the Eatons of Salisbury and Haverhill Massachusetts. Always the gracious and magnanimous collaborator, he acknowledged another deceased relative as coauthor of the patrilineal family treatise that he finished and had published. In the process of completing this work, he also developed an innovative way to indicate the degree of confidence that one could place in the evidence linking one generation to another. Phil was an early adopter of genetic genealogy, and he encouraged his male relatives to submit cheek swabs to a central repository as the project administrator for three family groups. These samples were used to create a genetic map that accompanied the traditional family history and produced a few surprises, as such projects often do.

Among his many honors, Phil was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1968), the National Academy of Sciences (1973), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1977), and the American Philosophical Society (1988). He was a Fulbright Fellow in France, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He received the AAPOR Award for Exceptionally Distinguished Achievement from the American Association for Public Opinion Research in 1986, the Harold D. Lasswell Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution to Political Psychology in 1990 and the James Madison Award in 1996 from the American Political Science Association, and the Helen Dinerman Award for career contributions in public opinion research from the World Association for Public Opinion Research in 2003. He was elected President of the international Society of Political Psychology (1981) and the American Political Science Association (1984).

—Donald Kinder, Philip E. Converse Distinguished University Professor, University of Michigan

—Michael W. Traugott, Director, Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan

Byron W. Daynes

On June 7, 2015, our good friend and colleague Byron W. “Bill” Daynes passed away after a brief illness. Bill was born on October 26, 1937, in Salt Lake City, Utah. He received his BS and MS degrees from Brigham Young University and his PhD from the University of Chicago. Among others he worked with at Chicago were Ted Lowi and Duncan MacRae, Jr. Bill taught at DePauw University (1971–1990), where he also chaired the political science department, and at Brigham Young University (BYU) from 1990 until his retirement in 2013.

Bill’s scholarship focused on environmental policy, social policy, moral policy, and the presidency. He wrote books on how Franklin D. Roosevelt shaped American political culture, on Roosevelt’s dealings with Congress, and on the New Deal’s impact on public policy. Other presidents Bill wrote about included Madison, Jefferson, and Clinton.

Moral Controversies in American Politics, which Bill coauthored with Raymond Tatalovich, is now in its 4th edition. It outlines how issues that are contested in moral terms differ from issues that divide people according to their economic self-interest (Tatalovich and Daynes 2011). Bill wrote an early book that examined community conflict over abortion policy (Tatalovich and Daynes 1981) and, in a coauthored work, addressed how the electoral consequences of attitudes toward abortion changed between 1972 and 1992 (Wattier, Daynes, and Tatalovich 1997).

Moral policy was not the only controversial field that Bill was willing to engage. His most recent book on the environment, US Politics and Climate Change: Science Confronts Policy, was coauthored with Glen Sussman and published by Lynne Rienner in 2013. In it, he and Sussman parse the growing disconnect between, on one hand, the substantial scientific evidence for the ill effects of climate change and, on the other, the indifference to these findings at the national level. Treating each branch of government in turn, they try to explain why the federal government has failed to lead a change in environmental policy (Sussman and Daynes 2013). Combining his interest in the presidency and environmental policy, he coauthored White House Politics and the Environment, again with Sussman, which was published in 2010 by Texas A & M Press. Part history and part political science, this book compares the environmental policies of each modern American president and concludes that, for better or worse, the executive branch has substantial influence over the American public’s interaction with the environment (Daynes and Sussman 2010). Bill had previously published American Politics and the Environment (2002) with Sussman and Jonathan West. Because of his interest in Clinton’s presidency, he felt especially honored when he was named a William J. Clinton Distinguished Fellow (2006–2007) and to be asked to deliver the William J. Clinton Distinguished Lecture in 2006.

While these three foci are woven through much of what he published, he also wrote about trade policy, the founding, religion and public policy, and term limits, among other topics. Bill was thus a scholar with broad interests who applied his formidable analytic talents to many topics.

Collaboration was a hallmark of Bill’s work. Raymond Tatalovich and Glen Sussman were his most frequent collaborators, but he often coauthored or coedited volumes with other scholars as well. Glen Sussman, one of Bill’s frequent collaborators observed that Bill was the “consummate research collaborator and coauthor,” who “always carried his fair share of the work.” Sussman adds, Bill was “kind, gregarious, conscientious, and gracious.” Ray Tatalovich, a classmate of Daynes’ at Chicago, observed that he and Bill complemented each other in their work together and that Bill was “a very precise, careful, judicious researcher and writer.” We observed that Bill made the most of professional meetings, especially ones in Chicago, where he would meet with his coauthors and map out research topics and work on draft manuscripts.

Above all, however, Bill loved teaching and sharing his passion for political science. His students regarded him as a wise and trusted advisor; he believed, more than they themselves sometimes did, in their potential to achieve their goals. Showing a genuine interest in their wellbeing, he encouraged them to pursue opportunities that were both challenging and rewarding. Students enjoyed Bill’s rigor, knowledge of the subject matter, and sense of humor. He was unabashedly biased, but students praised him for fostering open discussion. Indeed, they admired him for his liberalism, even though most considered themselves politically conservative.

Though he mostly taught courses on policy, constitutional law, and the presidency, he liked to do new things as well. A few years before his retirement, Bill created a new course on Japanese internment during World War II. The course fit Bill’s strong civil libertarian streak, as it concerned issues of national security and civil liberties from World War II to the present. He took students in the class to Topaz, a nearby internment camp, to help them understand the plight of those interned there. Bill also developed a course called “American Politics through Literature.” Students enjoyed the opportunity to discuss American politics through political novels, such as Warren’s All the King’s Men, Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Orwell’s 1984, and Richard North Patterson’s Protect and Defend.

He was an active member of the profession. He was invited to present at many special conferences on topics such as environmental policy, social policy, the presidency, and specific presidents. Rarely did Bill miss an APSA meeting during his career. He used conferences to network with other scholars, many of whom he would eventually collaborate with, and to gain new insights on areas of interest to him. Bill was a political scientist’s political scientist.

Bill’s work habits, even in retirement, were extraordinary. He was actively working on research projects until just a few months before his death. Throughout his career, he would spend most days working normal hours in the office, go home for dinner, and then come back in the evening. He was in the office most Saturdays as well.

But Bill had a life that did not revolve exclusively around work. Bill and his wife, Kathryn, were the parents of three children and three grandchildren. He was devout in his church, even serving as the head of a local congregation in Indiana. A long-time supporter of the arts, he was a patron of the Utah Opera Company and the Utah Shakespeare Festival. But he also was an avid fan of BYU sports. He spent many hours in his office on Saturdays working on various research projects while simultaneously watching a BYU basketball or football game.

Bill and Kathryn were deeply committed to BYU. She was a professor in the history department until her retirement in 2012, while Bill taught in the political science department until he retired in 2013. Bill was important to our department for many years. We will deeply miss him.

—Richard Davis and David B. Magleby, Department of Political Science, Brigham Young University

Jay Goodman

Jay Goodman, beloved professor of political science and a respected political advisor who taught politics at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, for half a century, died on May 2, 2015, at the age of 75. Both a scholar and a teacher, Jay Goodman made extraordinary contributions to Wheaton College during his 50 years of service, including building the department of political science as a separate entity from the department of history. He taught thousands of Wheaton students, was a committed mentor, tracked changes in legal training as pre-law advisor, brought the world of politics into the classroom, and supported his colleagues in our communal work of collegiate teaching.

Goodman, a well-known figure on campus, started and ended his teaching career at Wheaton, joining a newly fashioned department of government in 1965. Within a year, he became head of the department, and over the years he held various leadership positions on campus, most recently as program coordinator of legal studies.

A two-time winner of the Faculty Appreciation Award, the all-campus teaching honor awarded by graduating senior class each year, Goodman had a lasting impact on his students. In an article published in the winter 2015 issue of the Wheaton Quarterly celebrating his 50th anniversary, numerous former students raved about Goodman’s knack for making them feel important. “I walked into that great room in Mary Lyon where he held 101 and I felt like I’d found home,” Mary Anne Marsh ’79 said in the article. “Just the room, the setting, his presence, his irreverence, his knowledge, his clear passion for politics in all of its forms—good, bad, ugly, and glorious—I felt like I had found the place where I had always belonged.” “What you learned wasn’t exclusively rooted in a textbook,” Christopher Esposito ’94 said in the article. “He made it real-world. He helped you see and connect dots. Whenever I talked with him in or outside of class, I either learned something new or walked away with a different perspective on something.”

The political science professor’s engagement with students went well beyond the classroom. He was a regular in the dining halls, and students prized an invitation to join his table. Goodman was a familiar figure in every corner of the campus, walking one of his faithful canine companions (Emmy, Max, and Zoe) and attending lectures, arts events, and athletic contests with his wife Gail Berson, dean of admission emerita. Indeed, the couple forged, mentored, and befriended many students, developing lifelong relationships.

Goodman earned a bachelor’s from Beloit College in 1961. After graduation, he won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and earned a master’s from Stanford University and a PhD from Brown University. In 1978, while teaching at Wheaton, he received a law degree from Suffolk University Law School, where he also served on the Law Review.

Goodman is the author of nine monographs and books on politics, including the textbooks The American Democracy and The Dynamics of Urban Government and Politics. He also wrote dozens of book reviews for the Rhode Island Bar Journal and many articles about legal issues for other publications, including the Suffolk Law Review.

A longtime resident of Providence, Rhode Island, Goodman played an active role in state politics since his early days with the Young Democrats at Brown University. He served as Rhode Island chairman of Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1968; was on the staff of Edmund Muskie’s 1972 presidential campaign; and has advised several state leaders, including governor Joseph Garrahy, lieutenant governor Richard Licht, and Providence mayor Joe Paolino.

Under Governor Garrahy, he served as the volunteer head of the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency which led state operations in dealing with the Blizzard of 1978. At that time, Garrahy dispatched Goodman in a helicopter to scope out the scale of operations that would be needed to dig out the state from more than 27 inches of snow.

He was later appointed by then-Providence Mayor Paolino to serve as chairman of the Providence Civic Center Authority, a post he held from 1984 to 1992. At that time, the Civic Center was a $12 million a year, municipally owned, 15,000-seat arena. During Goodman’s tenure as chairman, the Civic Center became the seventh largest rock and roll music venue in the country, hosting acts ranging from The Cars to Bruce Springsteen and the Grateful Dead. Mr. Goodman enjoyed helping to run the logistics of the arena, right down to improving the chair upholstery, and attended most of the shows.

He also served as a member of the Capital Center Commission, 1992–2005, appointed by then Providence mayor Buddy Cianci. The commission was a joint city-state agency, helping to oversee key parts of the “Providence Renaissance” in urban planning, which included the construction of the Providence Place Mall, Waterplace Park, and the Riverwalk, now home to the city’s annual WaterFire events.

Goodman took great pride in Wheaton and the accomplishments of his students. In a piece he wrote for the Summer 2010 Wheaton Quarterly, Goodman celebrated the college’s fast-expanding list of national award winners—students who, with the support of faculty and staff, have repeatedly won highly competitive scholarships and fellowships such as the Marshall, Rhodes, Watson, and Fulbright.

It was the kind of support Goodman gave easily over the years, in his classes, as a faculty advisor, in personal conversations, and in the informal chats he often enjoyed with students. As Marshall Scholarship winner Gabe Amo ’09 put it in the 2015 Quarterly article: “He had a plan for me that I didn’t quite have for myself at the onset. And then, as years went on, it was the commitment. He was the king of the follow-up.”

Goodman is survived by his wife, Gail Berson; his son Bob Goodman (Naama Goldstein) and stepdaughter Jessica Weaver; grandson Amishai GoodmanGoldstein; and siblings Fay Cohen (Michael) and Suzanne Liss (Michael); as well as nephews, a niece, and cousins.

—Gerard Huiskamp, Department of Political Science, Wheaton College

Jack W. Peltason

Jack Walter Peltason passed away on March 21, 2015, in Irvine, California, at the age of 91, from complications of Parkinson’s Disease. A man of exceptional gifts, he was a giant as a scholar in the field of public law (now: law and courts) and a talented university administrator, and an extraordinary human being.

A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Jack received his undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Missouri (at Columbia) and his PhD from Princeton, where he studied with Edward Corwin. He first taught at Smith College before moving to teach at the University of Illinois. As an administrator, he was to serve as chancellor at Illinois and University of California, Irvine, and as President of the American Council of Education and of the University of California system. Most people associate him both with Illinois and with California, particularly UC, Irvine.

SCHOLAR

Jack was a major contributor to scholarship in public law (as it was then called). Indeed, he was a leading founding figure of the study of law and courts from the perspective of political science. His Federal Courts in the Political Process (1955) encouraged political scientists to study courts in the larger context of interest group activity and the political process. This was followed by Fifty-Eight Lonely Men: Southern Federal Judges and School Desegregation, in which he examined US district judges’ coping with the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education; his son Tim (a professor of English at Wellesley) properly notes that this book “combined his interest in judicial behavior with his lifelong commitment to the cause of racial justice.”

Important as both these books were and are—they still have “legs” more than 60 years later—far more students learned from Jack’s writing in two other books, each of which were published in an exceptional number of editions. One was the predominant American government text for 50 years, Government by the People, which has sold more than a million copies. First published in 1952 (by Prentice-Hall) and coauthored for decades with James McGregor Burns, it is now in its 26th edition (now published by Pearson). The book began when Jack was at Smith and Burns was at Williams and they wished to have a textbook that was balanced, current, and accessible. As a current coauthor, David Magleby, notes, over time it was among the first texts to integrate diagrams and line art and later incorporated survey and other quantitative data. In due course, Burns and Peltason themselves stepped back gradually from the book while successfully transitioning to other coauthors. Those who joined the enterprise, a joint one with a tradition of all authors reading all chapters and everyone responsible for reading and revising each other’s prose, were Tom Cronin (starting with the 10th edition), David Magleby (15th), and David O’Brien (19th). Present authors are Magleby, Paul Light, and Christine Nemachek.

The other book, so extremely important in teaching about the Constitution, is Understanding the Constitution (later Corwin and Peltason’s Understanding the Constitution, which Jack first coauthored with Edward Corwin in 1949 and which then went through 17 editions; the last appeared in 2008 and is still in print. The book’s overarching purpose can be seen in Jack’s statement that it was “not enough to celebrate the Constitution. We should also . . . cerebrate about it,” and he sought “to go beyond generalities [to] discover the major constitutional issues of our times.” For most editions, Understanding the Constitution was Jack’s solo effort, although primary readers, one of us among them, would press, not always successfully, for rearrangements. Sue Davis joined Jack as his coauthor for the 15th edition and became solo author for the 17th. She notes, “From the beginning of our collaboration, Jack graciously gave me full control of the revisions,” which led to the 15th edition being “strikingly different from its predecessors” to reflect significant changes in scholarly approaches to the study of constitutional law as well as numerous developments in the interpretation of nearly every provision of the Constitution.

It is important to recognize that Jack continued his coauthorships even while administering universities, just as, while serving as chancellor at UCI, he would come to the political science department to attend talks and conferences. In spite of the heavy demands of his administrative career, he always remained a scholar and was also involved in his discipline, as when he worked with the late Austin Ranney to preserve the APSA against challenges from those, including anti-Vietnam War activists, who saw it as a tool of the establishment. And he also remained a teacher, beyond the educating his writing accomplished. While Jack was UCI’s chancellor, at Mark Petracca’s suggestion for two years he cotaught a course for upper-division students to commemorate the Bicentennial of the US Constitution. In deference to Jack’s schedule, it met three times a week, with Jack lecturing one day, Mark the next, and a guest lecturer the third. Mark reports that Jack’s lectures were wonderful reports and the students loved him. They loved the idea of taking a course co-taught by the Chancellor, particularly as Jack was, unlike many administrators, a very visible figure on campus so he was the sort of chancellor students knew.

ADMINISTRATOR

Jack was “one of our own,” a political scientist who became a university administrator and served higher education well in so doing. He became an administrator early—at 36, when, already a full professor at Illinois, he became Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Then, before the UCI campus even opened for students, he began his service as its Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, helping to determine which disciplines were to be offered and to recruit initial faculty.

Then came his move back to Illinois to be chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he served for ten years. (As his son Tim observes, “[W]herever he worked, they always wanted to have him back.”) Ed Kolodziej, who chaired the political science department there when Jack was chancellor, writes, “Thanks to his deft personal touch and light guiding hand, the stature of the university improved both in the growth in numbers and in the quality of the faculty, notably in the sciences and engineering.” “Keen to expand the holdings of the library,” Jack also helped make it the second largest university library after Harvard, and he also ensured its technological leadership that would make it among the first university research libraries to go completely online. In all of this, Jack did not ignore his own discipline; Ed notes that Jack discreetly “was unflagging in his support of the newly installed leadership of the department to again place the unit on a path toward excellence.”

Nor did he ignore the student body—far from it. One of matters Jack considered most important and a further part of his giving meaning to civil rights, and for which he pushed early in his time as chancellor, was the creation of Project 500, the recruitment of 500–600 low-income students of color. What Jack did for the student body earned him the sobriquet of “the Students’ Chancellor.” He kept the university open during the nation-wide campus upheavals stemming from opposition to the Vietnam War. In supporting students’ right to protest, he was “convinced that they would conduct themselves responsibly in making their message heard.” Of course, as “the Students’ Chancellor” in touch with the heart of the students who are the heart of a university, it did not hurt that he defeated all comers in the campus yoyo contest.

The next step in his astounding career in higher education came when he was named President of the American Council on Education in Washington, DC. Among his accomplishments at this pinnacle of American higher education was the founding of the Business Higher Education Roundtable. Yet after seven years, he returned to Irvine as UCI’s second chancellor, a position in which he was to serve for eight years, which were “the most uncomplicatedly happy and positive of his administrative career,” according to his son Tim. He oversaw significant enrollment increases, major building projects, and the creation of endowed chairs; he attracted the National Academies of Science and Engineering to build a western center on the UCI campus; and he created vibrant community support for UCI.

He was to rise still higher, in 1992 becoming President of the University of California system, a position in which he served for three critical and challenging years. As long-term University of California Vice President and Director of the Budget Larry Hershman has noted, Jack “kept the campuses and the Office of the President together at a moment when this institution was in real danger of coming apart. He saved the University.” This accomplishment was reiterated by UC President Janet Napolitano in observing, “During turbulent times, Jack stepped into the breach and served both the University of California, and the people of California, combining political savvy with strong academic values to carry the University to even greater heights.” When Jack received the university’s highest award, the President’s Medal, in 2014, President Napolitano called him a “statesman of higher education” and said he was a leader who could “navigate the issues of the day while, at the same time, mak[ing] sure that the institution keeps moving forever forward.” This was a “passionate champion—for UCI and his beloved Anteaters, for the University of California, and for public higher education in general. When he spoke, higher education leaders listened.”

Retirement from the UC presidency did not mark an end to Jack’s contributions. Returning to Irvine, and even after encountering health challenges that would have gotten the better of mere mortals, he stayed engaged with life and with the life of the mind. As observed by Norm Ornstein, for whom Jack served as a mentor, even when Jack had difficulty speaking, being with him “was an intellectual feast.” In particular, Jack worked to develop the capabilities of the Center for the Study of Democracy for research, graduate training, and community outreach. As Professor Russell Dalton has observed, “Working with Jack was an amazing experience because it was like playing baseball with Babe Ruth or taking a course from a Nobel Prize winner.” The Peltason Fellowship, funded by Jack and his wife Suzie and which has been received by some two dozen PhD students, has enabled young people to come to UCI to study the democratic process and to devote their careers to teaching and research about the subject. In addition to the Peltason Lecture on Democracy created at the Center, the Jack W. Peltason Endowed Chair at UCI was created through an anonymous donation. Jack himself and his wife also provided funding for merit-based awards to assist UCI political science majors advance their educational careers.

All agree that Jack Peltason profoundly shaped the institution that has become UCI as we know it, and an observer asserts that Jack “set forth the groundwork for the success which was to come to the campus.” His presence on campus was such that going with him to an Anteater basketball game was “like being with a living legend” on that campus. Throughout his service as an administrator, he demonstrated what his son called “his sense of judgment, the calm and clear-eyed instinct to see the right thing and the strength of character to do it.” As a successor as chancellor, another of “our own,” Howard Gillman, has observed, “He brought to [UCI] a strong and clear vision of excellence, implemented with shrewd judgment and tempered with that famous sense of humor.” And in carrying out his administrative tasks, he was, as observed by University of California President Emeritus David P. Gardner, “always ready to help, offering wise and thoughtful advice, seeking at all times to discover, not unworkable answers to our problems but workable solutions instead,” which Gardner called “traits of character, courage, and wisdom.”

THE PERSON

Jack Peltason not only demonstrated high achievement as a scholar and administrator; he was also a wonderful person. A friend’s initial impression of Jack was that he was “smart, funny, blunt in a good way, and exuded good sense and general goodness”; this infused Jack’s dealings with his academic colleagues and those with whom he worked while an administrator. His son Tim talks of his “extraordinary combination of exceptional achievement with exceptional decency and modesty.” The UC Board of Regents recognized this on Jack’s departure from the UC presidency when it described him as a man of “honesty, decency, and manifest integrity, . . . the hallmark of a long and illustrious career dedicated to the highest principles of duty and public trust.”

Jack exhibited humility in a world where pretentiousness seems ever-present. In addition to his modesty was his kindness, which showed in his understanding deeply that “other people were the center of their own worlds, that they had equal claim—every one of them—to consideration,” as Tim put it. Jack also constructed a larger university community that included the people who lived and worked around UCI; he was someone who built bridges between town and gown to the benefit of both.

Closely related was his tolerance of views with which he disagreed and his fairness to others. He treated faculty, staff, and students within the university with full respect and in an egalitarian way. One of us gratefully remembers being particularly impressed that, shortly after he arrived on campus, Jack reached out to him to talk about politics and on many occasions his visions and hopes for UCI as a campus. He was surprised—but none of us who know Jack would be now—to find himself having lunch on a somewhat regular basis with Jack at the so-called “Chancellor’s Table” at the University Club.

A hallmark characteristic of Jack’s persona was his Midwestern charm, a sharp contrast to the elitism often found in academia. Nor did he ever take himself too seriously. The story is told that, after he returned to UCI after the UC presidency, Jack walked into the office of the chair of the political science department, holding a trash can, to ask, “How do I get rid of my trash, the can is full?” When the chair looked surprised, in a quintessential Peltason moment, former Chancellor and UC President Jack explained that it had been decades since he had needed to empty his own trash can.

Nor could one miss his self-deprecating humor and his wit, which, in Tim’s words, was “easy, fast, spontaneous, utterly his own, often incisive in its way of capturing a small or large truth on the fly and in a genuinely new way; but never mean-spirited, never deployed as a form of attack or exclusion.” One friend has called Jack “the Yogi Berra of higher education,” using as an example Jack’s observation that “if an academic stood still in thinking about issues, they would be on the cutting edge of their discipline at least twice during their career.”

Difficult as it is to sum up Jack Peltason, his long-time friend Norm Ornstein perhaps said it best: “Jack was a model human being, a man of great vision, great accomplishment, great common sense, great humor, including about himself. He was a genuine Mensch.” Nowhere was this better shown than how he acted under the personal adversity of his Parkinson’s Disease, which showed his mettle as he fought against its limitations. During Jack’s long, increasingly more difficult, and trying experience, he showed all of us how to live courageously, well, and purposefully with a debilitating illness. He was not afraid to be out in public with it, even as it went through many stages and even as he was adapting to it. He weathered this long illness the way we suppose we all might wish we would under similar circumstances. Indeed, his courage and fortitude in dealing with Parkinson’s will be as much a part of Jack’s legacy as anything he ever wrote as a scholar, said as a teacher, or built as an academic administrator.

* * *

Jack is survived by his wife, Suzanne Toll Peltason, his life partner for 68 years of marriage and his critical supporter in his administrative positions; his children Nancy Elliott, Timothy, and Jill Redding; seven grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.

In closing, we would have you recite the Hebrew proverb:

Say not in grief, “He is no more,”

but live in thankfulness that he was.

Jack lives on in the hearts and minds of those who cherish his memory.

—Stephen L. Wasby, Eastham, Massachusetts

—Russell J. Dalton, University of California, Irvine

—Mark P. Petracca, University of California, Irvine

^— William R. Schonfeld, University of California, Irvine

Joseph A. Schlesinger

Joseph A. Schlesinger, professor emeritus in the department of political science at Michigan State University, passed away in Lansing, Michigan, on June 25, 2015, at the age of 93. Joe was born in Boston on January 4, 1922, attended Hobart College beginning in 1940, and earned an AB from the University of Chicago in 1942. Joe served as an enlisted man in the US Army between 1943 and 1945, landing on Utah Beach on D-Day, fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, crossing the Ludendorff Bridge (the Bridge at Remagen) before it collapsed, and serving with the US occupation forces in Germany. He often joked about being part of the Greatest Generation. Abramson, Aldrich, and Rohde are willing to accord him this honor. After the War he earned an AM from Harvard in 1947 and a PhD from Yale in 1955.

Joe joined the political science department at Michigan State University (MSU) as an instructor in 1953, was promoted to assistant professor 1955, associate professor in 1958, and professor in 1963. He retired in 1992 and remained in East Lansing. Joe won grants from the Social Science Research Council in 1955–57 and in 1968–69, and received a Distinguished Faculty Award at MSU in 1976. He won a Senior Fulbright award for research in France in 1990 and won the Samuel Eldersveld Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1993. He was a visiting professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964–65, the same year Abramson took his PhD comprehensive examinations. This had the serendipitous result of Abramson being interviewed at MSU in 1967.

Joe published an important monograph, How They Became Governor (1957), which was followed by two major books on political parties, Ambition and Politics (1966) (which has been cited more than 1,000 times according to Google Scholar) and Political Parties and the Winning of Office (1991). His theory of political ambition did a great deal to shape the study of American political parties. Abramson, Aldrich, and Rohde draw heavily upon Schlesinger’s ambition theory in their studies of who runs for office. Both of Aldrich’s Why Parties? books owe a heavy debt to Joe, as Aldrich acknowledges. Joe also published four articles in the American Political Science Review. They are “A Two-Dimensional Scheme for Classifying the States According to Degree of Inter-Party Competition” (December 1955); “The Primary Goals of Political Parties” (September 1975); “The New American Political Party” (December 1985); and “The Affirmation of a Multiparty System in France” (December 1990), which he coauthored with his wife Mildred. He also published a widely cited article, “On the Theory of Party Organization” in the May 1984 Journal of Politics. Joe and Mildred continued their research on French politics after his retirement, publishing articles in Party Politics (July 1995) and Comparative Political Studies (February 1998), as well as an assessment of Maurice Duverger’s contribution to the study of political parties in French Politics (April 2006).

Joe was a delight to have as a colleague (he was our colleague for twenty-five, seven, thirty-four, and twenty-one years, respectively), and was Press’s close friend. He had a firm commitment to high academic standards and to encouraging younger colleagues to participate in shaping the direction of the department. He had a great sense of humor (for example, always jumping at the chance to move for adjourning faculty meetings) combined with strong professional opinions, especially when it came to the study of political parties. As Michael S. Lewis-Beck writes, Joe “was a straight ahead fair-minded man willing to exchange his ideas about politics with a younger guy he did not know; he was serious minded about his work, but not closed; he possessed great dignity along with a modest sense of humor; he worked on his political science projects into his last days. I honor his name.” He had strong political opinions as well, being a committed Democrat maintaining that Warren G. Harding, the president at the time of his birth, was the worst president ever.

Joe is survived by his wife of 63 years, Mildred, as well as two children, Betsy and Jake, and four grandchildren. Contributions in Joe’s honor may be made to MAZON, A Jewish Response to Hunger, by going to its website http://mazon.org/, by telephone, 1-800-813-0557, or by mail, PO Box 96119, Washington, DC 20090.

—Paul R. Abramson, Michigan State University

—John H. Aldrich, Duke University

—Charles O. Press, Michigan State University (Emeritus)

—David W. Rohde, Duke University

We are grateful to William G. Jacoby, Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Charles W. Ostrom, Jr. and Brian D. Silver for their comments.

Benjamin W. Smith

Benjamin W. Smith, emeritus professor of political science at California State University, Los Angeles, died at home in Redlands, California, on June 24, 2015, at the age of 76 from lung cancer that had metastasized into brain cancer. He had lived in Redlands since the 1980s.

Ben grew up in Austin, Texas, where his father, Rev. Blake Smith, was pastor of University Baptist Church, and one of the church members was Lyndon Johnson’s mother. Ben and his father visited Johnson’s ranch several times. He graduated from the University of Redlands in 1959, majoring in history and minoring in government. He returned to Texas and completed his PhD in 1969 at the University of Texas, Austin, where his dissertation, “The Political Theory of Institutional Economics,” combined his love for political theory with political science and political economy. He taught all three subjects throughout his career.

Ben first taught from 1960 to 1963 while getting his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. He came to Cal State LA in 1963, retiring in 2000 and doing several subsequent years in the early retirement program. However, he spent several stints as a visitor to other campuses. He went on leave to teach full time at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Cortland in 1971–1973. He negotiated Cal State LA’s first faculty exchange through a national faculty exchange program, going to Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1986–1987. He also did a faculty exchange with John Korey of California State Polytechnic University, Pomona for two quarters, one during 1992–1993 and the other in 1994–1995.

Ben loved teaching and was dedicated to his students. He taught 27 different courses at Cal State LA, ranging from the introductory course in American and California government to courses in classical, modern, and American political theory; political psychology, sociology, and socialization; environmental politics, campaign finance, and political development; and public policy and the economy. At the graduate level, he taught courses on political philosophy, the environmental movement, the structure of power in the US, and science, technology, and society. The range of courses was truly amazing, even in an era when many faculty taught several different subfields in the discipline as a matter of course.

He presented papers at political science meetings throughout his career. The topics ranged from students and academic freedom to power structure research, corporations and US foreign policy, and social network analysis. He was active in a reform movement in the discipline and the Caucus for a New Political Science, and he used to tell stories of his and Ed Malecki’s work in Caucus meetings in southern California. He received a grant from the SUNY research foundation to do a history of the Social Science Research Council in the 1970s. He strongly supported department representation on the CSU Social Science Research and Instructional Council, going to some meetings himself.

His committee service on campus was truly legendary during the 1970s and 1980s, where he served on every committee in the department, school personnel committees, the school assembly, and selection committees for administrators. He chaired many of these and served as chair of his department from 1983 to 1986. When he was chair, his desk was famous—over six feet long and three feet wide, covered with papers and documents in a pile that was almost a foot high in the middle—and he could pull out any particular document almost at will! While he was chair, he bought the department’s first computer, a Macintosh, the beginning of three decades of a strong contingent of Macintosh advocates in the department.

At the university level, he was a long-time academic senator and member of the educational policies and resources committee. He was a strong advocate of the liberal arts and a traditional approach to general education, where students are exposed to a wide variety of disciplines and schools of thought. All of this university activity must be tempered by the fact that at one point he lived in San Luis Obispo, some 200 miles from campus, commuting weekly, and since 1987 he had lived in Redlands, 60 miles from campus unfortunately on the San Bernardino freeway (Interstate 10), famous for its stop and go traffic. Fortunately, shortly after he moved there, Southern California’s commuter rail service, Metrolink, began service from next door San Bernardino to a stop on campus, making his daily endurance sessions on I-10 a thing of the past.

Ben was an excellent athlete. In 1957, while an undergraduate working as an instructor at a summer gymnastics camp in Texas, he was ordered by the camp owner to perform an exhibition for parents of some midair moves he had mastered. Because Ben had been ill with the Asian flu, he told the camp owner he did not want to attempt the exhibition, but the man said he could not keep his job unless he performed. Because Ben felt he needed the money to attend college, he attempted the demonstration. However, his co-ordination failed, and he finished with his head in the wrong position, resulting in a broken neck, a badly bruised spinal cord, and nerve damage to his right leg. He was paralyzed for about three weeks and ill with a high fever. Doctors feared he would not walk again.

Not only did he recover, but his tenacity, skill, and competitive nature enabled him to excel at tennis, racquetball, and squash. Then, after moving to Redlands in 1987, he began playing golf. As a member of the Redlands Country Club his handicap became competitive as well. And, following a day on the links, he loved to have dinner at the club with family and friends and look out the huge dining room window at what he called “Those Green Fairways of Indifference.”

He is survived by his college sweetheart and second wife of 30 years, Alice, and by an older brother and five children, two from his first marriage, and three from Alice’s previous marriage.

—J. Theodore Anagnoson California State University, Los Angeles