Colleagues

My role model in my undergraduate years at Cornell for empirical social science and an influential public intellectual. He seemed to have another article in the New York Times magazine every other Sunday in those days. More recently in the New York Review of Books.

 Andrew Hacker

Herb was the senior guy on the Social Indicators Political Alienation Project at the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center with Paul Sniderman, Jack Citrin, and Merrill Shanks. Pretty good company for us grad students trying to learn the ropes.

 Herb McClosky 

 It was a distinct honor and privilege to work with Marvin at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard. One of Murrow’s boys and a journalist to the core, he was amused by the rituals and tribulations of the academy.

Marvin Kalb

Everybody should have Stinchcombe as their dissertation chair. He was mine at Berkeley. Always thoughtfully encouraging, let you make your mistakes, and then show you how to learn from them.

Arthur Stinchcombe

“A technology of freedom aims at pluralism of expression rather than a dissemination of preferred ideas.” A scholar and a gentleman. He defined what being a professor was all about to many of us starting out in faculty ranks at MIT. He made it look easy, although it must not have been easy to be the son of a world famous rabbi. 

 Ithiel Pool

Hard to believe my official undergraduate advisor at Cornell was Allan Bloom who was amused at my struggles to integrate behavioral social science with Straussian insights into the human condition. He was working on a new translation of The Republic then. I took him to McDonalds for lunch to celebrate his draft of the long introduction. He made me promise not to tell anybody he loved their double cheeseburgers.

 Allan Bloom 

Charlie always knew exactly what he was doing. Paul Lazarsfeld was so furious when Charlie left Lazarsfeld’s shop at Columbia to teach at Berkeley Sociology Lazarsfeld wouldn’t talk to him for years. Charlie wanted his independence. Then Charlie finished his eighth book and retired with his wife to the woods of Idaho where he took up serious wood carving. Charlie wanted his independence. 

Charlie Glock

Phil is a role model for just about every political science grad student in American politics in my generation (and a few of us sociologists too). As a grad student himself, he stayed up late at ISR in Ann Arbor reading the actual handwritten notes of interviewers on questionnaires as respondents volunteered explanations and answered open-ended questions. Phil puzzled over the process by which half-attentive citizens crafted reasonable answers to these strange questions. His thinking on the curious character of political attitudes in the mass public turned scholarship in the field in new directions. I still remember reading at a kitchen table in Berkeley in awe when I first discovered Phil’s work.

 Phil Converse

Students and PostDocs

Colleagues