"A force of nature emanating energy and joy"

I don’t know whether I would ever have finished my doctorate were it not for Ted Lowi. Certainly I would not have engaged the same intellectual questions -- themes inspired by my exposure to his way of thinking about politics. These questions fascinate me still, and continue to propel my scholarship.

In the fall semester of 1990, as I began my second year in graduate school in the Government Department at Cornell, I returned to campus expecting my first child. Other students in the program greeted this news with surprise, some with trepidation. One asked, “Wow, did you get permission from your dissertation advisor to have a baby while you are in the PhD program? Are we even allowed to do that?” These questions had not occurred to me, but they made me nervous. Had I been foolish to imagine that I could have a child and complete a doctorate simultaneously? Even if it were, in theory, possible (other students directed me to the one lone woman, an advanced student in the program, who had actually borne a child a few years back), would the faculty regard it as inappropriate and therefore not lend me their support?

I need not have worried. No one could have been happier to hear my news than Ted, or “Professor Lowi,” as I knew him at that time. He reacted with his characteristic ebullience, congratulating me enthusiastically and extolling the wonders of pregnancy and the joys of raising children. And without me even raising the subject of how I would manage to balance parenting with professional demands, he proceeded to explain how being a parent had forced him to focus as a scholar, clarify his priorities, and meet deadlines. Then we began to plan for what lay ahead, deciding that I should take my qualifying exams in advance of the baby’s due date, and then proceed to work on the dissertation proposal. At that point Lowi, now brimming over with excitement and confidence that all would proceed well, quoted the late Samuel Johnson, proclaiming, “There’s nothing like a hanging in the morning to concentrate the mind!”

That was just the beginning.

Over the years, Ted’s influence shaped the questions I ask in my research, how I advise graduate students, and most recently, to my surprise, my undergraduate teaching.

It was an immense privilege and honor that Ted felt willing to hand off to me the teaching of his beloved course, GOVT 1111 (previously 111), Intro to American Government and Politics. I had served as Ted’s teaching assistant for the course in the early 1990s. It seemed apparent that Ted greeted each new day ready and eager to storm into that cavernous lecture hall, and over the next hour, in his booming southern drawl, to give a challenging, complex lecture that tantalized the hundreds of students gathered there. I cannot overstate how much my own personality differs from Ted’s incredibly extroverted self; in fact, when I stepped up to teach GOVT 1111, I thought perhaps it was my version of a midlife crisis. For months in advance of the first semester of teaching it, I woke up every day with a pit in my stomach, wondering what I had taken on. When the first day of class finally arrived and I walked across the Arts Quad to give my introductory lecture, I thought about Ted, and did my best to channel his energy and passion, if not the southern drawl. By the time I reached the classroom, I felt ready. I’ve continued to summon his presence, lecture after lecture, semester after semester, for six years now. For me, Professor Lowi still inhabits GOVT 1111, and his inspiration has helped make that course become for me, as it was for him, a commitment and a joy.

Ted’s ideas and the force of his character inspired students of politics at Cornell, throughout the discipline of political science, and well beyond. His scholarship, teaching and mentorship were consistently characterized by an ability to analyze politics from an original point of view, one with a sharply critical edge that deeply questioned assumptions and was ever mindful of the public interest. That intellectual sharpness was embodied within a personality of tremendous warmth, vibrancy, and verve.

A stalwart critic, an ever-creative thinker, a force of nature emanating energy and joy -- this was Ted Lowi as scholar, teacher, mentor, and colleague. How fortunate we are to have our encounters with his ideas and with the man himself.

Suzanne B. Mettler

Clinton Rossiter Professor of American Institutions

Cornell