He was very anxious to get contemporary works on his syllabus. So we’d go down to the bookstore and he’d buy a bunch of recently published books in our field and he would find a way to incorporate these in the syllabus, and making some kind of a coherent syllabus that had a beginning, a middle and an end. He often put in books that were not necessarily written by political scientists, books that were written by sociologists, historians, dealing with important topics of the day that clearly had political implications to them. Bob would often say that he was a teacher, an educator, first and a political scientist second.

In PoliSci 101 you would deal with the presidency, the congress, the judiciary and the American political system with some emphasis on the historical roots. We usually read The Federalist Papers. It was that kind of a thing. But you could either take a more textbook approach or you use one of these books as sort of an exemplar. I remember one of the books we used was Anthony Lewis’s Gideon’s Trumpet dealing with the courts in the United States. By that time the department had largely dropped using textbooks. Except for constitutional law, textbooks were hardly used in any of our courses.

David Booth,
Former Political Science Professor