People in Political Science

scientists from smaller colleges to-
gether with colleagues from the
large research universities so that
both could refresh their knowledge
of current research findings and
give and receive tips about effec-
tive teaching. Since that initial
foray into educational improve-
ment, the Association, under the
leadership of Sheilah Mann, has
developed an extraordinarily rich
array of education programs,
funded by private foundations and
public agencies, designed to im-
prove the quality of teaching and
learning at all levels from K-12 to
undergraduate, graduate, and con-
tinuing professional education.

Kirk also secured a number of
grants to support other Association
activities. For example, he negoti-
ated a large multiyear grant from
the Ford Foundation to support
one of the Association's most suc-
cessful ventures, the Congressional
Fellowship Program. Years later,
under Cathy Rudder's leadership,
the Association received a large
grant from MCI for a permanent
endowment of the program.

During Kirk's tenure the Associ-
ation also won grants to fund such
activities as the orientation pro-
grams for newly elected members
of Congress, seminars for leaders
of state legislatures, selection of
journalists for excellence in politi-
cal reporting and bringing them to-
gether in summer seminars with
leading political scientists. Other
grants won by the Association un-
der Kirk's leadership funded for-
eign political scientists' travel to
and participation in APSA's annual
meetings.

When Kirk took office, the Na-
tional Science Foundation's pro-
gram of fellowships and grants for
the social and behavioral sciences
did not include political science.
Kirk, with the help of many politi-
cal scientists and members of Con-
gress who had benefited from the
Congressional Fellowship Program,
persuaded NSF to include political
science. Consequently, since 1960,
doctoral candidates in political sci-
ence have received NSF grants for
dissertation research, political sci-
ence faculty members have re-
ceived NSF research grants, and
several multi-institutional grants

have been made, notably for the
establishment and continuing sup-
port of the National Election
Studies.

His experience with NSF
prompted Kirk to have regular con-
sultations with his counterparts in
the national offices of other social
science associations, and after sev-
eral years of informal consultation
the associations joined in establish-
ing the Consortium of Social Sci-
ence Associations (COSSA), which
has since played a major role in
advocating continued federal sup-
port for teaching and research in
the social sciences.

Thus, Kirk had remarkable suc-
cess in his many efforts to improve
the quality, support, and public vis-
ibility and reputation of political
science. No small part of his suc-
cess came from the able and expe-
rienced staff he recruited for the
national office. His style as an ad-
ministrator was to choose good
people, give them full responsibility
for their assignments, refrain from
peering over their shoulders when
they were carrying out those as-
signments, and give them full psy-
chological and logistical support.
Walter Beach, Mark Ferber, Mae
King, Sheilah Mann, Tom Mann,
Nancy Ranney, John Stewart, and
Maurice Woodard, among others,
found working for him profession-
ally enriching and personally re-
warding. They and other staff mem-
bers speak warmly of their loyalty
and affection for him. Indeed, it is
widely said that under Kirk's lead-
ership the APSA national office be-
came a model for its counterparts
in other disciplines, several of have
which adapted Kirk's policies for
the reorganization of their own of-
fices and operations.

One of the sources for Kirk's
great success as Executive Director
was his experience and success as
a teacher. During his service at the
University of Minnesota (1935-
1948), Kirk inspired a number of
talented students not only to study
political science but also to take an
active part in politics. The best-
known of these students was Hu-
bert Humphrey, who often called
on Kirk for counsel and support
throughout his long and distin-
guished career. The list of Kirk's

Minnesota students also includes
such eminent public figures as Or-
ville Freeman, Max Kampelman,
Arthur Naftalin, Richard Scammon,
Elmer Staats, and Eric Sevareid,
and such eminent academics as
Herbert McClosky and Howard
Penniman. Many other political sci-
entists who never took a course
from Kirk nevertheless regard
themselves as his students as well
as his friends—a group that cer-
tainly includes Heinz Eulau, Tom
Mann, Warren Miller, Nelson
Polsby, Jack Peltason, and Austin
Ranney.

So every political scientist should
remember Kirk's great contribu-
tions to our Association and profes-
sion. Those of us who were fortu-
nate to know him personally will
also remember Kirk's rich human
qualities: his love of good food (es-
pecially provencal), good wine (any
burgundy), good football teams (the
Redskins), and good books (any-
thing by Karl Popper and Harold
Lasswell, but especially Popper's
The Open Society and Its Enemies).
We will also remember his unflap-
pable disposition through many dis-
ciplinary disputes and organiza-
tional crises (it helped, someone
once observed, that he was deaf in
one ear). Perhaps most of all, we
will remember how generously he
gave us good counsel, warm friend-
ship, and unfailing support.

In his essay On Self-Reliance,
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "An
institution is the lengthened shadow
of one man." Of no institution or
man is that more true than of the
American Political Science Associ-
ation and Kirk. Much of what is
good about teaching and research
in political science and satisfying in
the careers of political scientists is
Kirk's legacy to us. We will never
forget him.

Austin Ranney
University of California, Berkeley

James D. Cochrane
James D. Cochrane was born in

1938 in Cherokee, Iowa. He died on
March 23, 1995, in New Orleans,
after a long illness. He received his
B.A. degree at Morningside Col-
lege, in Sioux City, and his M.A.

544 PS: Political Science & Politics



In Memoriam

and Ph.D. at the University of
Iowa, where he was a student of
Vernon Van Dyke.

Jim came to Tulane in 1966, after
a year as Fellow at the Brookings
Institution and another year at
Western Michigan University. He
was promoted to associate profes-
sor in 1968, and to professor in
1974.

He published extensively, partic-
ularly in his main fields of Latin
American international relations .
and economic relations. A mono-
graph, The Politics of Regional In-
tegration: the Central American
Case, appeared in 1969. He was
co-author of Political Culture and
Foreign Policy in Latin America, a
book published in 1991. He wrote
more than fifty articles, for such
journals as the Latin American Re-
search Review, the Journal of
Latin American Studies, Interna-
tional Organization, the Journal of
Common Market Studies, and Cur-
rent History. Some of his work was
in Spanish, for Latin American
publications. In spite of his poor
health in recent years, he main-
tained his writing and research. At
the time of his death, two articles
were under submission.

Particularly in his earlier years,
Jim was active in academic gover-
nance. In the political science de-
partment he served on many com-
mittees, as the undergraduate and
graduate advisor, and as acting
chair. In the (then) College of Arts
& Sciences he was elected to the
Executive Committee, the Promo-
tions and Tenure committee, the
Grievance Committee, the Curricu-
lum Committee, and a Constitution
Revision Committee. At the Uni-
versity level, he served many years
on the Student Conduct Commit-
tee. He was appointed JYA Profes-
sor-in-Charge in London during
1972-73.

Jim was a popular and effective
teacher of both undergraduates and
graduate students. He supervised
numerous honors essays and M.A.
theses, and more Ph.D. disserta-
tions than any other person in the
department. Foreign students, par-
ticularly, often expressed their grat-
itude for his intense concern for
their academic progress and for his

readiness to spend long hours on
the supervision of their writings.

Those of us who knew Jim dur-
ing his many years at Tulane will
remember him as a good colleague
and a fine academician.

Henry L. Mason
Tulane University

Lewis Anthony Dexter
Lewis Anthony Dexter died

March 28, 1995, at Durham, N.C.,
overtaken by illness while in the
midst of new projects. Few social
scientists have made telling impacts
on so many different topics. Dexter
is widely known among political
scientists as co-author, with the
late Raymond Bauer and the late
Ithiel de Sola Pool, of American
Business and Public Policy, which
won the Woodrow Wilson Award
in 1963. He employed for the book
his special skill and tact as an inter-
viewer of political leaders, tech-
niques described in his Elite and
Specialized Interviewing (1970);
and he contributed to it his special
knowledge of the ways in which
Congressmen allocate their time
among constituents, interest groups
and others.

Dexter's intimate knowledge of
these matters figured again in How
Organizations are Represented in
Washington (1969) and The Sociol-
ogy and Politics of Congress
(1969). He published several nota-
ble articles on local politics and a
small book on politics in Water-
town, Massachusetts (1981). But,
he was also a pioneer in the study
of the media, co-editing, with
David Manning White, People, So-
ciety and Mass Communications
(1964), and a pioneer, too, in the
sociology of mental retardation,
producing his highly original Tyr-
anny of Schooling: an Inquiry into
the Problem of Stupidity (1964).

This research record, enlarged by
a host of perceptive and innovating
articles on other topics that led
Nelson Polsby to describe him as
"one of the eight 'exemplary' so-
cial scientists of the last two gener-
ations," would normally have im-
plied long tenure for Dexter in a
peak academic post. However, as

one friend (David Riesman) has
said of him, he was as "careless of
his great talents" as he was of his
material possessions—he had no
use for excess baggage. He did not
maintain a permanent home any-
where, although he had ample
means to do so. His kit of clothes
and personal effects was one that a
graduate student would have found
too scant and informal. He moved,
almost throughout his career, from
one university to another, as a self-
described "itinerant visiting profes-
sor," at Hobart, the University of
Florida, MIT, Harvard, Dalhousie,
Brock and Guelph Universities in
Canada, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins,
and the University of Massachu-
setts at Boston, among other insti-
tutions. In 1972, he temporarily
gave up his itinerant status to be-
come a tenured Professor of Politi-
cal Science at the University of
Maryland in Baltimore, a position
he retained for a decade before re-
suming his travels.

His path was not random or un-
principled. He taught at Talledega
long before teaching at black col-
leges was a common liberal activ-
ity; he taught at Howard. Working
for the Federal Government in
Washington at the time of Pearl
Harbor, he recruited Riesman to
try to prevent the expulsion of Jap-
anese-Americans from the West
Coast. Often his strong principles,
and undiplomatic tactics that belied
both his political sophistication and
his admiration for Lord Halifax,
("The Character of a Trimmer")
brought him into conflict with cam-
pus authorities and accounted for
some of his mobility. In academic
crises, the tact he showed as an
interviewer often gave way to his
fierce sympathetic interest in
causes and people he saw as under-
privileged.

His principles included loyalty to
friends and disinterested (and
sometimes surprising) ideas about
how universities should be run.
The principles also were evident in
his teaching: he gave enthusiastic
encouragement to undergraduates
with educationally limited back-
grounds. He was as utterly without
snobbery as he was without defer-
ence to power.

Dexter was born November 9,

September 1995 545