THEODORE J. Lowi

I met Ted Lowi at the U of Chicago in 1965.  He was different from other U of Chicago professors.  He was young, friendly, chatty and had the only Alabama accent on the faculty. The Lowi family has deep roots in the South.  As some of you may know, the city of Marks, Mississippi was named for Ted’s great-uncle so it might be said that when he moved to East Lansing to attend Michigan State, Ted effectively rejected Marksism.

 

I worked with Ted as a student, a colleague, co-teacher of Gov. 111 here at Cornell,  and for many years we were the coauthors of a textbook whose title I have trouble remembering except as Lowi and Ginsberg.  The book was launched 32 years ago and in its various incarnations it remains the leading text in American politics.

 

Those of us who knew Ted are familiar with his many eccentricities.  My favorite is Ted’s decades-long effort to hide the fact that he could not figure out how to use email.  He engaged in an elaborate subterfuge to conceal this fact. Email sent to Ted was printed by his secretary and picked up by Ted in his daily “drive by” to the back of McGraw Hall. Ted would dictate his responses into an ancient contraption called a dictaphone.  His secretary would transcribe the responses and send the email on its way. Those of us who knew this secret would begin emails to Ted by saying “Hi Jackie, how are you?”

 

The importance of Ted’s scholarship is self-evident but, in many respects, Ted’s most important contribution was as a teacher.  Ted inspired many generations of graduate students and undergraduates. Quite a number of Ted’s former students are here today and many others contributed to the Lowi Festschrift that Wendy Mink and I edited and that, thanks to Roby Harrington, was published a few years ago by WWNorton under the title Political Science as Public Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Theodore J. Lowi. The distinguished list of contributors attests to Ted’s influence as a teacher.

 

What is interesting about the volume is that every paper is different in terms of subject matter and intellectual perspective.  Yet, collectively they represent the Lowi school–a school of thought in which people think for themselves and intellectual differences are celebrated.  Ted never sought disciples and never even asked his students to agree with him. Instead, Ted encouraged his students to venture forward on their own and to believe that they were capable of doing something important in the realm of scholarship.  To say that Ted offered encouragement is an understatement. Ted was a cheerleader–but instead of pom poms, Ted waved his famous aphorisms.

 

To students he saw as slavishly adhering to some school of thought, he would say “Be your own Aristotle.”

 

To those struggling to write the perfect dissertation, Ted liked to say, “Don’t get it right, get it written.”

 

To those who thought they needed to spend years immersing themselves in a literature before they could begin writing, Ted would declare, “read as a producer, not as a consumer.”

 

And to students who feared giving talks, Ted’s advice was “Get in there and bullshit.”

 

Ted was a larger than life figure and it is hard to believe that he is not here at Cornell.  But, many years ago I remember Ted musing about mortality. As we were walking through the old card catalogue room at the Olin library, Ted looked around and said, “This is immortality.”  But Ted was wrong. The card catalogue is gone. I look at Ted’s family and students and think that his immortality is here.

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Benjamin Ginsberg

David Bernstein Professor of Political Science

Chair, Center for Advanced Governmental Studies

Johns Hopkins University