“I suspect there was some reservations about promoting Bob because of his individuality and his reluctance to march to the drum beat of the department seniors at the time. Maybe Jim Burns might’ve had reservations, but I never heard them expressed. And Vince Barnett may have found Bob let’s say headstrong, not easily harnessed to a departmental need or program. And then my own record was one of taking on whatever the department needed, whether it was comparative or international or American. And then I’m not sure where Tauber fit into the tenure rank. It’s fair to say the department was stocked with more people at a certain rank than it probably expected to get permission for. So there was an excess of young untenured assistant professors and that didn’t resolve itself through the normal process but through attrition and people going elsewhere.

–MacAllister Brown,
Former Political Science Professor