"Ted Lowi was Cornell. Lucky for us."

I am Jason R. Gettinger, Class of ’64.  I majored in Government. I took Government 101 in Fall 1961. It was a non-Freshman section taught by Mr. Berns and Mr. Lowi. My recollection is that Mr. Lowi covered Congress and the electoral system. In those days, Mr. Lowi’s view was that the Electoral College, winner-take-all system, favored urban, liberal constituencies because it forced presidential candidates to seek support in large cities. Then, this meant going there frequently and caring about urban issues in public discourse. This truth held as long as the large states in which those cities were located were at least contested. That is not now the case of course, except perhaps for Pennsylvania and Ohio, Florida in the South.

At some point in early 1962, Mr. Lowi was kind enough to offer one of those great Cornell traditions, the all-campus evening lecture. The one I remember sought to review the first year of the Kennedy Administration. Lowi began with his impish grin and slight Alabama accent, tempered by years at Michigan State, Yale and Cornell:  “I see you all are here to hear about the boy king.” [laughter] Lowi made the point that in order for Kennedy to succeed with his legislative program, he had to challenge the House power structure, which meant trying to reform the Committee on Rules, headed by one of those senior southern members known as ‘Judge Smith.’  I cannot remember the outcome of that fight. I recall some discussion about achieving results through executive orders, now seemingly a dubious practice due to the exercise of that power by the current and previous administrations.

In the spring semester of 1962 I also took Mr. Lowi’s course, The Congress. I well recall his great admiration for the Senator from Alabama, Lister Hill, for Hill’s positions [were] out of sync with the other senior Southern Democrats of the time. I recall reading classic works on political parties and political sociology. I did write a paper about a NY Republican member of Congress who was, along with John V. Lindsay, one of the more liberal members of the House. The paper entailed a study of Congressional Quarterly, utilizing its reports on key votes.  The paper, though probably late and typed by a Navy ROTC cadet in my Collegetown building, was well-received.

Let us skip ahead over 20 years:  A friend from the College of Engineering, who was our newly selected alumni class president, asked me to work on reunion. Our class up to that point had set records for bad attendance. Having the idea that we should invite some favorite professors to one of our cocktail parties, I naturally invited Mr. Lowi. He wrote back a very kind letter that said in effect he preferred to avoid Ithaca during reunion time in favor of going to Paris with his wife. Well, that seemed less than a Hobson’s choice, but I fondly remember his saying that he remembered me and thought our class and perhaps the next one, 1965, were the last in that era with which it was possible to conduct civil discourse on the issues of the day (i.e., the war in Vietnam, Black Power, and so forth). I referred to this exchange in my essay for the Class of 1964’s 25th Reunion publication edited by my friend, Carolyn Neuman. I think I had the authority to invite faculty to one more reunion, but again, Mr. Lowi graciously cited his sojourn in Paris. It seems that one year, however, he did remain at his Collegetown abode, because I recall his speaking about politics at a panel discussion in Ives Hall. Possibly, this was at a Homecoming Weekend, prior to the 1984 or ‘88 elections.

I know that Mr. Lowi disparaged what he viewed as the clientelism of both our major political parties. He is cited in the rather gloomy second volume of Francis Fukuyama’s survey of political order and disorder. Lowi, therefore, advocated a new third party and in his writings contended that such an enterprise could succeed. I rather like the duopoly, but I don’t think I ever got to tell Mr. Lowi that in her last presidential vote, my mother -- a New Deal Democrat who actually worked in the Roosevelt Administration -- voted for John Anderson.

Despite a brief period at the University of Chicago, truly the greatest American university west of the Appalachians, and one of the greatest anywhere, Ted Lowi was Cornell. Lucky for us.

Jason Gettinger

College of Arts and Sciences

Cornell Class of 1964