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Department of Government
Newsletter — June 2017
Contents
Greetings from the Chair 2
Faculty News 3
New Faculty Appointments 3
Accomplishments and Achievements 4
Augmentations 11
Student and Alumni Achievements 12
Dissertation Prizes 15
Graduate Placement 16
Twitter and blogs 17
Event Highlights 17
Happy Birthday Sid Verba! 18
Sidney, We Want Another Song! 19
Sidney Verba: Dayenu 20
Toast 21
Greetings 22
Department of Government
Newsletter
June 2017
Greetings from the Chair
Hello,
I am delighted to welcome you to the second bi-annual (almost) newsletter from the Department of Government. We have had fun collecting interesting pieces of news, ranging from two new departmental babies to publications and honors—and we hope you have fun reading them. We have a pretty impressive set of colleagues, students, and alumni, if I do say so myself.
It has, of course, been a busy and intense spring. In addition to the usual breakneck pace of teaching, advising, participating in committees, traveling, and attempting to do a little research and writing in the interstices, we have all been mesmerized by the political goings-on in the United States, Great Britain, France, North Korea, Syria, Brazil, and elsewhere. Whatever else one can say about the contemporary political environment, it is generating full employment for political scientists both inside and out of academia. It gives me some gratification even in this complex political moment to realize how many of us there are in various locations, and how well we have been taught and continue to absorb and disseminate ideas, values, and information.
I was pleased to hear from some of you after the first newsletter, so it would be great to hear more. Several people suggested some sort of mechanism for Gov Department PhD alumni to be directly in touch with one another. That is a great idea, and if any of you want to take it up and create that mechanism, please let me know. If we get no volunteers, we will try to spend some time this summer setting up an easy, maintenance-free way to connect you with one another (but see previous paragraph…).
Two stalwarts of the department’s staff are retiring this summer—Joanna Lindh and Diana Wojcik. We will greatly miss them, and their help and expertise, but we wish them the best in retirement. Some faculty retirements are also on the horizon, but luckily none right now.
Best to all,
Jennifer
Faculty News:
New Faculty Appointments
Katrina Forrester
o Katrina Forrester is a lecturer in political thought at Queen Mary University of London. In the summer 2017, she will become an assistant professor of Government and Social Studies. Katrina took her BA, MPhil and PhD at the University of Cambridge. During her PhD, she spent a year at Harvard University. In 2012-14, she held a Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College, Cambridge, and in Spring 2015 she was a visiting scholar at NYU Gallatin. In Spring 2016 she was a program director for the intercollegiate MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History. She will teach feminist theory and contemporary political philosophy; she has also written on climate change, American intellectual history, and pornography (in The New Yorker).
Katrina’s first book is Reinventing Morality: A History of American Political Thought since the 1950s (Princeton University Press, forthcoming).
Pia Raffler
Pia Raffler is a Fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization
and Governance and the Center for the Study of Democratic
Politics at Princeton University; she joins the Government
Department as an assistant professor in the fall of 2017. She
studies the political economy of local governance, in particular in
Sub-Saharan Africa. Her dissertation research focuses on
political oversight of bureaucrats and implications for public
service provision in local governments in Uganda. It has won the
Best Fieldwork Award and an honorable mention for Best
Graduate Student Paper on African Affairs from the American
Political Science Association. Pia uses experimental, quasi-
experimental and qualitative methods to measure causal effects
and seek to disentangle the underlying mechanisms. She holds a
Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University.
Pia will teach in the fields of political economy of development,
African politics, and experimental methods.
Accomplishments and Activities Daniele Allen
Danielle Allen, University Professor of Government, and her colleague Emily
Sneff announced a discovery of a previously unknown early handwritten
parchment of the Declaration deep within a provincial archive in Britain.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/arts/a-new-parchment-declaration-
of-independence-surfaces-head-scratching-ensues.html?_r=0
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/04/declaration-different-
from-any-copy-we-had-seen/
Timothy Colton
Professor Colton was a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences
(Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen), Vienna, September–
December 2016, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor, National University
of Singapore, January–June 2017. He recently published Russia: What
Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, September 2016), and
Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet
Eurasia (Adelphi Books, International Institute for Strategic Studies, January
2017) (with Samuel Charap), as well as a special issue on “Russia Beyond
Putin,” Daedalus (spring 2017) and “Who Defects? Unpacking a Defection
Cascade from Russia's Dominant Party 2008–12,” American Political Science
Review (May 2017) (with Henry E. Hale).
Tim was awarded the Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship, Harvard
University, 2017, “for distinguished accomplishments in the fields of
literature, history, or art, broadly conceived,” with reference to Russia:
What Everyone Needs to Know.
Carlos E. Diaz Rosillo
Harvard government lecturer and Dunster House resident dean Carlos E.
Diaz Rosillo accepted a position in President-elect Donald Trump’s
administration to serve as the Director of Policy and Interagency
Coordination in the Office of the Senior Advisor to the President for Policy
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/1/19/diaz-rosillo-trump-
administration/
Jorge Dominguez
Professor Dominguez and his co-editors published a book Social Policies
and Decentralization in Cuba: Change in the Context of 21st Century Latin
America. Among many other elements, it “had also a brief description of
my being investigated by the US government for paying for coffee and
cookies in Cuba under the Bush administration without a prior specific
license for this purpose.”
Ryan Enos
Professor Enos received an award for his project on intergenerational
mobility from Russell Sage Foundation
https://www.russellsage.org/new-small-awards-intergenerational-mobility-
united-states
Do Public Works Programs Increase Intergenerational Mobility? Evidence
from the Works Administration
Enos will investigate the extent to which the state can facilitate
intergenerational mobility by studying the implementation of the Works
Progress Administration (WPA) between 1935-43. He hypothesizes that
increased individual-level participation in the WPA program and county-
level exposure to WPA spending should increase intergenerational mobility
at the individual and county levels, respectively. Enos will utilize a micro
and macro level research design. He will collect original data on WPA
participation; link them to the 1915 Iowa State Census records and the
1940 Federal Census. He will then use machine learning algorithms to
automate the record linkage process. At the county-level, Enos will use data
on WPA spending combined with data from the Equality of Opportunity
project. For causal identification, he will leverage age eligibility
discontinuities in individual-level WPA participation and topographical
features to produce exogenous variation in the individual propensity to sign
up for the WPA program and the county-level demand for WPA spending.
A former undergraduate made a gift to the Harvard GSE in Ryan’s honor
through the “Applaud an Educator Initiative.” Its goal was to recognize the
professor’s many contributions to her own education.
Ryan also finished his book “The Space Between Us: Social Geography and
Politics”; it will be published this fall by Cambridge University Press.
Jennifer Hochschild
Professor Hochschild posted two blogs - at the Brookings Institution on
“What happens next? A tour of social scientists’ predictions for the Trump
presidency” and at e-International Relations, on “What will Americans,
Britons, or Hungarians do in the name of nationalism?”
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/01/06/tour-of-trump-
predictions/
http://www.e-ir.info/2017/05/31/what-will-americans-britons-or-
hungarians-do-in-the-name-of-nationalism/
She was a Visiting Lecturer for Phi Beta Kappa in 2016-17, spending about
three days at each of eight colleges and universities. She taught classes,
met with terrific students and faculty across the social sciences (and
occasionally humanities), and gave a public lecture at each school.
Jennifer hosted the Cambridge-Harvard-Oxford workshop on “Inequality,
Politics, Policy, and Culture in the Post-industrial World”. The theme of the
meeting was “populism, old and new, left and right.” It brought together a
fantastic set of scholars on contemporary and historical manifestations of
populist politics; they came from the United States, Britain, and France.
Thanks to the Weatherhead Center and the HKS Weiner Center for support,
and to Ph.D. student Kaneesha Johnson for her intellectual and
organizational contributions.
In June, Jennifer is presenting “Misinformation: Putting Trump’s Alternative
Facts into Context” at the Alumni Affairs and Development Summer All-
Staff Conference at Harvard University.
Jennifer was one of the dozen or so participants in a series of New York
Times’ Upshot columns, in which the reporters “asked experts across the
ideological spectrum . . . to rate news events for importance and
abnormality.” The first article in the series is at:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/02/27/upshot/whats-normal-
whats-important-a-ranking-of-20-events-in-the-trump-
administration.html?mcubz=0&_r=0
Torben Iversen
Professor Iversen was elected into the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences
https://www.amacad.org/content/news/pressReleases.aspx?pr=20274
He received the Rigmor and Carl Holst-Knudsens Science Prize - one of
Denmark's oldest awards, conferred annually by the University of Aarhus to
honor two researchers, across disciplines. It comes with a 100,000 kroner
cash prize.
Torben was awarded the BP Centennial Professorship in the Department of
Government at the London School of Economics for the academic year
2016-17.
Steven Levitsky
Professor Levitsky’s co-authored work with Professor Ziblatt was featured
in the New York Time’s article “Comey’s Firing Tests Strength of the
“Guardrails of Democracy”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/upshot/comeys-firing-tests-
strength-of-the-guardrails-of-democracy.html?_r=0
Paul E. Peterson
Paul E. Peterson published a Letter to the Editor in the Wall Street Journal
on “American Exceptionalism Isn’t a Modern Idea”. After all, Alexis de
Tocqueville concluded in the 1830s that “the situation of the Americans is
entirely exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will
ever be put in the same situation.”
https://www.dropbox.com/s/tu25hnvxepq48r1/05.02.17%20WSJ%20Amer
ican%20Exceptionalism%20Isn%E2%80%99t%20a%20Modern%20Idea.pdf?
dl=0
Michael Sandel
Speaking at the Law School, “Justice” professor Michael Sandel examined
the forces that lifted Donald Trump to the presidency: “To understand
Trump, learn from his voters: How Trump seized the moment.”
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/02/to-understand-trump-
learn-from-his-
voters/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaig
n=02.23.2017%20%281%29
Michael’s articles and interviews on what progressives can learn from
Brexit, the election of Trump, and the populist uprising include:
Interview at World Economic Forum, Davos:
https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-
meeting-2017/sessions/an-insight-an-idea-with-michael-sandel
Lecture at Harvard Law School:
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/02/to-understand-
trump-learn-from-his-voters/
Article in The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/01/theme
s-of-2016-progressive-parties-address-peoples-anger-in-2017
and others:
http://justiceharvard.org/news/
“Michael Sandel and Chinese Philosophy” was an international symposium
in Shanghai exploring points of contact between Sandel’s philosophy and
the Confucian and Daoist traditions:
http://english.ecnu.edu.cn/16/40/c1703a71232/page.htm
Michael also gave an invited address at the Supreme Court of Brazil
(Supremo Tribunal Federal) on “Public Ethics and Democracy” (begins at
37:15): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZiU6WnZkoI
Theda Skocpol
A new research project directed by Theda Skocpol along with Katherine
Swartz at the School of Public Health and Mary Waters in the Department
of Sociology aims to track civic, economic, and policy developments over
the next two to four years in eight non-big city counties located in four
states – North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Researchers
will repeatedly interview and keep in touch with, not only a cross-section of
everyday citizens, but also key local leaders – public officials, business
group leaders, hospital administrators, heads of political parties and civic
groups. As partisan divides sharpen and abrupt policy changes happen in
Washington, how do people in smaller cities and towns understand and act
on new challenges and opportunities – and who do they credit or blame for
unfolding shifts they like or find problematic? Key parts of the research will
focus especially in shifts in health care and education, the local economy,
movements around the two political parties, and relations between natives
and immigrants.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/t1tb81sp5rvd2lo/Harvard%20Counties%20Pr
oject%20short%20description%20spring%202017.pdf?dl=0
Daniel Smith
Professor Smith was promoted to Associate Professor (beginning July 1,
2017)
Dan’s first book, Dynasties and Democracy, has been accepted for
publication by Stanford University Press. He is now working on a second
book project about electoral and legislative coalitions in Japan. He received
a Clark award from FAS to support his research.
Jim Snyder
Professor Snyder recently published three articles and two book chapters;
several of his co-authors are current or former Harvard PhD. Students. One
article won the Hicks-Tinbergen Award for the best article published in the
Journal of the European Economics Association for 2015-16
https://gov.harvard.edu/news/prof-james-snyder%E2%80%99s-paper-
balanced-us-press-has-been-awarded-2016-hicks-tinbergen-award
Jim delivered the keynote address at the NICEP Political Economy
Conference, Nottingham UK, June 2016
https://nicep.nottingham.ac.uk/inaugural-conference/
He also gave the keynote address at the Barcelona GSE Summer Forum,
Barcelona Spain, June 2017 http://www.barcelonagse.eu/summer-forum
Dustin Tingley
Professor Tingley was invited to serve on the Editorial Committee of
the Annual Review of Political Science.
http://www.annualreviews.org/journal/polisci
Dustin’s recent publications can be found here,
https://scholar.harvard.edu/dtingley/publications:
Daniel Ziblatt
Professor Ziblatt published—“Conservative Parties and the Birth of
Democracy (Cambridge University Press):
How do democracies form and what makes them die? Daniel Ziblatt revisits
this timely and classic question in a wide-ranging historical narrative that
traces the evolution of modern political democracy in Europe from its
modest beginnings in 1830s Britain to Adolf Hitler's 1933 seizure of power
in Weimar Germany. Based on rich historical and quantitative evidence, the
book offers a major reinterpretation of European history and the question
of how stable political democracy is achieved. The barriers to inclusive
political rule, Ziblatt finds, were not inevitably overcome by unstoppable
tides of socioeconomic change, a simple triumph of a growing middle class,
or even by working class collective action. Instead, political democracy's
fate surprisingly hinged on how conservative political parties - the historical
defenders of power, wealth, and privilege - recast themselves and coped
with the rise of their own radical right. With striking modern parallels, the
book has vital implications for today's new and old democracies under
siege.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0521172993/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF
8&qid=1489940545&sr=8-
1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=ziblatt&dpPl=1&dpID=513yTjcRb
XL&ref=plSrch
Many current or former Government Department faculty and students participated in a book in honor
of David Mayhew, Governing in a Polarized Age: Elections, Parties, and Political Representation. The
editors were Alan Gerber and Eric Schickler; authors included Stephen Ansolabehere, Katherine Levine
Einstein, John Mark Hansen, Jennifer Hochschild, Maxwell Palmer, James Snyder, and Benjamin Schneer.
Augmentations
We’ve had two new babies in the department this year.
Congratulations to the families of Professor Ryan Enos and Professor Dustin
Tingley on the arrival of their new baby girls!
Get ready for laughter, big noise and lots of hugs!
Student and Alumni Achievements
Becca Goldstein
Hye Young You
Becca Goldstein, PhD student
Becca together with Hye Young You, PhD ’14, published an article, “Cities
as Lobbyists” In the American Journal of Political Science:
Although almost all scholarship on lobbying focuses on the lobbying
activities of corporations, state and local governments make up over 10%
of all of the federal lobbying disclosure reports that have been statutorily
mandated since 1998. Becca and Hye’s paper analyzes a novel data set of
over 13,000 of these reports submitted by large cities from 1998 to 2012;
they find that cities that lobby the most are politically liberal cities
situated in politically conservative states. Additionally, using the existence
of a direct flight from the city to Washington, D.C. as an instrumental
variable, they show that a 10% increase in lobbying spending increases the
awarded dollar amount of earmarks and Recovery Act grants by 10.2%
and 4.7%, respectively.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajps.12306/full
Alisha C. Holland
Alisha C. Holland, PhD ’14, Assistant Professor in the Politics
Department at Princeton University
Her article “Forbearance” received the 2017 Heinz I. Eulau award for
the best article published in the APSR during the previous year
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
core/content/view/3BE0D1D5085F962CE168D8891519AC60/S0003055
416000083a.pdf/forbearance.pdf
Gabrielle Malina
Gabrielle Malina, PhD student
Gabrielle’s articles in the New York Times and the Atlantic discussed the
dataset that she had compiled with Eitan Hersh, PhD ’11 (currently Assistant
Professor of Political Science at Yale). It links American clergy across forty
Judeo-Christian denominations to their voting files, giving us their party
affiliation and turnout, along with basic demographic information. The Times
article was a descriptive look at their data on clergy's political affiliations and
demographic trends. The Atlantic summarized their findings, putting into
perspective the main result that American pastors are even more polarized
than their congregations. That is important, but perhaps distressing, finding to
those who would prefer religion and politics to remain separate spheres.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/12/upshot/the-politics-of-
americas-religious-leaders.html?src=twr&_r=1
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/churches-and-
partisanship/530013/?utm_source=atlfb
Melissa Sand
Melissa Sand, Harvard University researcher, PhD student was identified in a
Los Angeles Times article on “seven science stories we can't wait to follow in
2017”:
“Rallying support for economic fairness? A new study tosses some fresh
experimental findings: Among the affluent people a clear reminder of
others’ poverty does not induce a show of generosity”
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-income-inequality-
psychology-20170109-story.html
Shanna Weitz
Shanna Weitz, PhD student
Shanna Weitz co-authored an article on “Challenging Group-based
Segregation and Isolation: Whether and Why.”
It will be published in a book on A Shared Future, through the auspices of
Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.
Tess Wise
Shauna Shames
Tess Wise, PhD student and Shauna Shames, PhD ‘14
Tess Wise (a consummate methodologist) and Shauna Shames (gender expert
and now at Rutgers University, Camden) worked for several years on the
problems of gender-linked trends, patterns, and culture/hegemony as seen
through the use of complex statistical methodologies in political science. Their
findings appear in “Gender, Diversity, and Methods in Political Science: A
Theory of Selection and Survival Biases” in PS: Political Science and Politics
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ps-political-science-and-
politics/article/gender-diversity-and-methods-in-political-science-a-theory-of-
selection-and-survival-biases/9AB3B75F3F6E47C3650ECFFB4872E69F
Tess also received a research award from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing
Studies.
Jinyan Zang
Jinyan Zang, PhD student
Jinyan was a 2017 recipient of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New
Americans https://www.pdsoros.org/meet-the-fellows/jinyan-zang
Dissertation Prizes
The Edward M. Chase Prize for the best dissertation
on a subject relating to the promotion of world
peace was awarded to Tae-Yeoun Keum for “Plato
and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought.”
The two Senator Charles Sumner Prizes for the best
dissertations “from the legal, political, historical,
economic, social, or ethnic approach, dealing with
any means or measures tending toward the
prevention of war and the establishment of
universal peace” were awarded to Volha Charnysh
for “Migration, Diversity, and Economic
Development: Post-WWII Displacement in Poland”
and Mike Hankinson for “Why is Housing So Hard to
Build? Four Papers on the Collective Action Problem
of Spatial Proximity.”
The Robert Noxon Toppan prize for the best
dissertation upon a subject of political science is
shared by Jonathan Bruno for “Democracy Beyond
Disclosure: Secrecy, Transparency, and the Logic of
Self-Government” and
Sole Prillaman for “Why Women Mobilize:
Dissecting and Dismantling India’s Gender Gap in
Political Participation”
Yue “Iza” Ding has been selected as the recipient of
the 2017 Virginia M. Walsh Dissertation Award from
the Science, Technology, and Environmental Politics
(STEP) section of the American Political Science
Association for “Invisible Sky, Visible State:
Environmental Governance and Political Support in
China.”
Graduate Placement
The department has an excellent record of graduate placement. Recent PhD’s have obtained positions
at leading universities and colleges, and at leading organizations in government, nonprofits, and
industry. These are the placement results so far, for 2016-17:
LAST FIRST SUBFIELD PLACEMENT
Alfaro Adriana Theory TT, ITAM Mexico
Charnysh Volha Comp/IR TT, MIT
Clough Emily Comp TT, Northeastern
Dasgupta Aditya Comp TT, UC Merced
Gidron Noam Comp TT, Hebrew University
Hankinson Michael Amer Post-Doc at Oberlin
Harpham John Theory TT, Middlebury College
Javed Jeffrey Comp 2yr post-doc at Michigan
Keum Tae-Yeoun Theory 4yr post-doc at Oxford
Khosla Madhav Theory Harvard Society of Fellows
Lall Ranjit IR Post-Doc, Princeton
Pamuk Zeynep Theory Post-Doc, Oxford
Prillaman Soledad Comp/Methods TT, Stanford
Rios Viridiana Comp TT, Purdue
Sands Melissa Amer/Methods TT, UC Merced
Zacka Bernardo Theory TT, MIT
Follow us on Twitter and check out our blog postings:
Muhammet Bas, Associate Professor Twitter: @muhammet_a_bas
Ryan Enos, Associate Professor Twitter: @RyanDEnos
Jacob Hoerger, PhD student https://medium.com/@jacobhoerger
Tyler Jost, PhD student Twitter: @tcjost
Joshua Kertzer, Assistant Professor Twitter: @jkertzer
Gary King, Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor Twitter: @KingGary
Christopher Lucas, PhD student Twitter: @cd_lucas
Daniel Smith, Assistant Professor Twitter: @smith_harvard
Event Highlights
On March 7th the Government Department held the second Faculty panel to discuss
The Trump presidency: the first 100 days
Participants were Daniel Carpenter, Ryan Enos, Jennifer Hochschild, Iain Johnston, Harvey Mansfield,
Theda Skocpol, Daniel Ziblatt
The video recording can be found here:
https://spaces.hightail.com/receive/Dh8eV/fi-930ac12c-1233-47be-b80f-e21eaee15683/fv-d3919c4f-
6109-4302-8c4f-1bef36b208df/20170307-Gov_Dept_Panel-First_100_Days.mp4
And, last but not least…
On June 3, Professor Verba’s family and friends gathered together to wish him a happy
birthday!
The festivities broke out into song and poetry:
Sidney, We Want Another Song!
Words and music by Allen Feinstein
Premiere performance by Andrea Campbell
Sure he wrote a hundred books
And led the whole profession
But if you ask him to be frank
He’ll give you a confession
He’s pretty good at Poli Sci
That judgment is empirical
But he really would have made a mark
If his job let him be lyrical
So while he’s still in his prime
We’d love to hear him rhyme…
Imagine how he would floor us
If we all could sing The Unheavenly Chorus
Sidney, we want another song!
Just think of all our jollity
If we could raise our Voice and Equality
Sidney, we want another song!
Instead of reading all that esoterica
Wouldn’t it be neat
If you could find a beat
in Participation in America?
Something where we could sing along
Sidney, we want another song!
He’d deserve to be a gloater
Harmonizing with The Changing American Voter
Sidney, we want another song!
We won’t mask our attraction
Humming Private Roots of Public Action
Sidney, we want another song!
Let’s end this somber mood you had us in
Sit down and write
Then reunite
With your quintet from James Madison*
We’ll never have to figure what went wrong
Sidney, we want another song!
So before he becomes a centenarian
We want more tunes from the Harvard Librarian
Happy 85th!—You’ve made us wait too
long
Sidney, we want another song—
Sidney, we want another song!
*(James Madison High School alums Ruth Bader
Ginsburg, Charles Schumer, Bernie Sanders,
Carole King, and Sidney Verba)
Sidney Verba: Dayenu! (Congratulations from Robert and Rosemary Putnam)
June 3, 2017
Rosemary: If he had only pleased his parents as the brightest boy in his graduating class at
James Madison High School, dayenu.
Bob: If he had been the brightest boy at James Madison High, and not gone to Harvard
College, dayenu.
If he’d gone to Harvard College and had not in his sophomore summer seduced the cutest, smartest
camp counselor, dayenu.
If he’d seduced that camp counselor and she’d not turned out to be a world-class expert on Rameau,
dayenu.
If she’d become a Rameau expert and they had not co-parented three wonderful daughters and two
exceptional grandchildren, dayenu.
If the two of them had not co-parented such talented off-spring, and he had not written the
foundational volume on experimental political science half a century before experiments became
fashionable, dayenu.
If he’d founded experimental political science, but not become a protégé of one of the best political
scientists of the 20th century, dayenu.
If he’d become a protégé of Gabriel Almond, but they had not co-authored The Civic Culture, which
(through an accidental encounter at Blackwells in Oxford) introduced me to political science, dayenu.
If he’d written the Civic Culture, but hadn’t won every top honor in the world for social science, dayenu.
If he’d won every top honor in the world for social science, but hadn’t been named by M Magazine one
of the best-dressed professors in America, dayenu.
If he had been celebrated for his tweediest attire, but hadn’t been a phenomenal mentor and teacher to
hundreds of students and colleagues over more than half a century, dayenu.
If he’d been a phenomenal mentor, and not read my doctoral dissertation and suggested that it be cut
by one-third (quoting Sen. Aikens’ incisive advice on how to get out of Vietnam: “by boat”), dayenu.
If he had enabled Bob to publish his first book, but hadn’t recruited us to Harvard by taking us to the
best cannoli shop in the North End, dayenu.
If he had recruited us to Harvard, and hadn’t been Mr. Fix-It for Harvard’s most difficult administrative
problems for three decades, dayenu.
If he had fixed all of Harvard’s problems, but not put new emphasis on sexual harassment, dayenu.
If he had highlighted sexual harassment, but hadn’t become one of the most creative librarians in the
world, dayenu.
If he had become one of the world’s top librarians, but didn’t have the best sense of humor this side of
the Catskills, dayenu.
And if he had been the Al Franken of political science, but hadn’t, with Cynthia, hosted the largest,
longest running seder in the North East – Dayenu!
Toast from Kay L. Schlozman (J. Joseph Moakley Professor, Department of Political Science, Boston
College)
Four score and five years ago Morris and Recci Verba brought forth on this continent, a political
scientist, conceived in Brooklyn, and dedicated to the proposition that all participants are created
equal.
Now we are engaged in a great methodological war, testing whether that political scientist, or any
political scientist who cannot code in R, can long endure. We are met in an elegant Cambridge
apartment. We have come to celebrate a wise and witty colleague who has devoted his life that the
discipline might prosper. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot appreciate -- we cannot celebrate -- we cannot adulate -- this man.
The academic world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget the
many things Sid did here. It is for us his colleagues and collaborators, rather, to be dedicated here to
the unfinished work which Sidney so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the
great task remaining before us -- that we here highly resolve that Sidney’s numerous scholarly inquiries
shall not have been conducted in vain -- that this nation’s democracy, under Trump, shall have a new
birth of academic scrutiny -- and that analysis of government of the people, by the profession, for the
people, shall not perish from the earth.
Greetings from Jeff Frieden
Jeff Frieden
June 2017
Sid and I lived in Brooklyn in very different epochs
Separated by decades and 120 blocks
For him a Dodger championship was nothing but a dream
For me a god-awful Yankee team made me want to scream
When I left UC for Harvard my chair Lenny Binder
Took me aside one day and gave me a reminder
If you need advice you can rely on my friend Sid
Stick with Sid Verba and you'll always wear diamonds, kid
We've been colleagues 20 years and if some sentiment is allowed
I can truly say that one of the things of which I am most proud
Is that I’d like to believe I can call Sid Verba a personal friend
Even as quite deservedly he heads off to his own garden tend
Hegel wrote, “The Owl of Minerva flies at twilight”
By which dictum he meant, I think, to highlight hindsight
But when it comes to wisdom and political insight
None can hold a candle to this quiet Brooklynite
The Owl of Minerva
Ain't got nothin’ on Sid Verba