Department of Government Newsletter — June 2017 Contents Greetings

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 [email protected]

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 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; Hye Young You 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 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- Shauna Shames 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

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 Something where we could sing along And led the whole profession Sidney, we want another song! But if you ask him to be frank He’d deserve to be a gloater He’ll give you a confession Harmonizing with The Changing American Voter He’s pretty good at Poli Sci Sidney, we want another song! That judgment is empirical We won’t mask our attraction But he really would have made a mark Humming Private Roots of Public Action If his job let him be lyrical Sidney, we want another song! Let’s end this somber mood you had us in So while he’s still in his prime Sit down and write We’d love to hear him rhyme… Then reunite Imagine how he would floor us With your quintet from James Madison* If we all could sing The Unheavenly Chorus We’ll never have to figure what went wrong Sidney, we want another song! Sidney, we want another song! Just think of all our jollity So before he becomes a centenarian If we could raise our Voice and Equality We want more tunes from the Harvard Librarian th Sidney, we want another song! Happy 85 !—You’ve made us wait too long Instead of reading all that esoterica Sidney, we want another song— Wouldn’t it be neat Sidney, we want another song! If you could find a beat in Participation in America? *(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