[Jgfamembers] Professor Nelson Polsby died Feb. 6. 2007

[Marjorie Alfs]

>>Friends:
>>
>>  Daniel and Emily Polsby have asked me to pass along the following
>>  information, for those who might want to attend the memorial
>>  services for their father.
>>
>>  The service will be held this Sunday, February 11, at 1 pm
>>  at Congregation Netivot Shalom, which is located at
>>  316 University Avenue, Berkeley CA  94702-1711
>>
>>  Additionally, this is a link to Nelson's obituary in the Times of London,
>>which just appeared on the Web. It wonderfully captures his spirit as
>>well as detailing his many accomplishments.
>>
>>  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article1350297.ece
>>  --  Janeen M. Jackson	 Program Coordinator Institute of Governmental
>>Studies University of California, Berkeley 103 Moses Hall # 2370
>>Berkeley, CA 94720-2370 phone: 510-642-4608 fax: 510-642-3020


 From The Times
February 08, 2007

Professor Nelson Polsby
American political scientist who became director of the Institute of 
Government Studies at Berkeley

For more than 40 years Nelson Polsby was a leading figure in American 
political science. For seven years he was editor of the subject's 
premier journal, the American Political Science Review, and his 
friendships and books and articles on US political parties, 
elections, Congress and the media made him a mentor to generations of 
graduate students.
Naturally warm and gregarious - if also at times cantankerous - he 
helped to build strong communities, at his beloved University of 
California, Berkeley (UCB), at its Institute of Government Studies 
(IGS), which he headed for ten years, and in the wider political 
science profession. An Anglo-phile, from his years at the London 
School of Economics and as Olin Professor of American Government at 
Oxford, he had many friends in Britain.
Nelson Woolf Polsby, born in 1934, came from Yankee Jewish farming 
stock, based in Con-necticut. His family encouraged his precocious 
interest in current affairs. In the early 1900s a great-uncle ran for 
the mayoralty in New Haven as a socialist.
His father, a successful businessman, died after a surgical mishap 
when Nelson was 11. At prep school (there were not many Jewish farm 
boys, and even fewer at prep school) he was a brilliant student, 
turning down offers from Yale and Harvard universities to attend 
Johns Hopkins. This enabled him to sit in the Senate galleries and 
observe that institution at work.
His academic breakthrough came from his association with Robert 
Dahl's pathbreaking study of political power in New Haven in the 
1950s, Who Gov-erns? (1961). His doctorate was published as Community 
Power and Political Theoryin 1963 and was quickly regarded as a 
masterpiece. He argued that rather than a single dominant elite 
running things, there were different elites in different areas and 
that this pluralism was compatible with democracy.
Polsby spent six years at Wesleyan University, becoming a full 
professor in 1967. That year he moved to UCB, where he remained for 
the rest of his career, in spite of offers from other universities, 
including Yale and Harvard. At an early stage, therefore, he had 
developed his two chief interests; the theory of democracy and how it 
operates in practice.
He also developed his lifelong interest in Congress, particularly the 
House of Representatives, in the 1960s. He showed how it had become 
institutionalised and how the seniority system for allocating key 
roles developed. He also analysed how the large contingent of 
Democrats ("Dixie-crats") from the segregationist and more 
conservative South, in contrast to the more liberal Democrats from 
the North, prevented that party using its nominal majority to give 
effective leadership to Congress. Later, in How Congress Evolves 
(2004), he explored the decline of the South in the House and the 
emergence of sharper partisanship in its operations.
In 1964 he and his dynamic UCB colleague, Aaron Wildavsky, published 
Presidential Elections. Revised and published quadrennially - its 
11th edition was in 2004 - it remains the standard text on the topic. 
After Wildavsky died in 1993, Polsby was the sole author and claimed 
that: "The only difference since Aaron's death is that I win the 
arguments." His prose was highly readable and marked by wide reading 
and incisive analysis. He was ambitious and worked very hard to 
maintain his reputation and keep up with UCB colleagues; he confessed 
that his insomnia was caused by noticing that the lights in the rooms 
of colleagues in the early hours of the morning - they were still at 
work! He quipped: "While Polsby sleeps, Wildavsky publishes."
He also wrote witty pieces on politics under an assumed name, Arthur 
Clun (borrowed from Angus Wilson's Anglo-Saxon Attitudes). They 
prompted a publisher to offer a book contract to the mystery author. 
A keen observer of the British political scene, he collaborated with 
Geoffrey Smith, a political commentator on The Times, to publish 
British Government and its Discontents in 1981.
At 37 he received the accolade of the editorship of the APSR.For six 
years he successfully managed, in a relaxed style, a large staff and 
coped with pressures from authors and reviewers.
Polsby was a popular choice to become director of the IGS in 1988. He 
seemed to know everybody and to have read almost everything. He 
invited visiting scholars and politicians to talk about their work 
and their experiences - his good friend, Chris Patten was a regular 
visitor. He did much to create a friendly atmosphere, and a high 
point was the afternoon tea at which he presided. But he was less 
successful as a fundraiser because he could be overbearingly 
opinionated when faced with the deeply held views of potential donors.
Having basked in the acclamation for his work he was desolate when 
his term expired in 1999, a consequence of the university's ten-year 
rule for tenure. The institute had meant so much to him.
His Consequences of Party Reform (1983) was sharply critical of some 
of the effects of the reforms the Democratic Party made to the 
presidential nominating process in the late 1960s. These gave 
increased representation to some minorities (race and gender) but not 
others, and increased the influence of single-issue groups in the 
party's deliberations. But they also weakened the party's ability to 
nominate presidential candidates representative of the broad American 
public and to win elections. Polsby was always concerned about good 
government and citizenship.
Polsby had a dominating physical presence; a mountain of a man, he 
looked like an American footballer gone to seed. Dressed in a T-shirt 
and corduroys, he shuffled rather than walked and breathed heavily, 
and friends constantly worried over his health (he had a number of 
angioplasties). But the flow of epigrams, witticisms, attacks on the 
higher nonsense of political science, and stimulating ideas 
continued. He was constantly judg-mental about other politicians and 
academics. But if he argued with someone it was a mark of his 
approbation. Speakers who assumed that Polsby, eyes shut and snoring 
in the audience, was asleep could quickly be confounded when the 
"sleeper" made a pertinent, or ferocious, intervention.
He received many honours, including honorary degrees from the 
universities of Liver-pool and Oxford. He had the respect of 
political reporters, and many politicians, for his understanding of 
the constraints under which they worked, and he drew readily on his 
encyclo-paedic knowledge of US politics to provide wise counsel. He 
regarded his frequent contributions to "round tables" and oped pages 
as part of a professional obligation to inform the public, 
entertaining "the delusion that too few of my opinions were available 
to the world at large".
At home, Polsby and his wife Linda provided rich hospitality for 
their many Berkeley and overseas friends. Both loved food - in spite 
of constant diets - and for a time they jointly wrote a column on 
restaurants for Californiamagazine. He was a keen follower of the 
local Oak-land Athletics baseball team. But most of all he loved 
passionate argument with friends.
Polsby is survived by his wife, Linda, and by their two daughters and son.
Professor Nelson W. Polsby, political scientist, was born on October 
25, 1934. He died of heart trouble on February 6, 2007, aged 72
-- 

Marjorie M. Alfs
Campus Coordinator Stanford in Washington/
John Gardner Public Service Fellowship Coordinator
Haas Center for Public Service
Stanford University
562 Salvatierra Walk
Stanford, CA  94305-8620
Phone:  (650) 725-2870
Fax:  (650) 725-7339
E-mail:  mmalfs at stanford.edu

http://haas.stanford.edu
Stay informed! All information about Haas Center Public Service 
Fellowships is distributed through our listserv. To subscribe, send a 
message to majordomo at lists.stanford.edu with "subscribe service4all" 
in the body of the message.

>




                           
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.lmi.net/pipermail/jgfamembers/attachments/20070208/fe17d731/attachment.html