He had a very, in my view, salutary and positive effect on the Political Science Department because we were a very, very disparate group of people with very different political ideologies, different pedagogical approaches, different uses of political science, and Bob had this way of sort of juxtaposing all of this. Everybody’s at the table, right? Everybody has something valuable. I never heard Bob say anything nasty or negative about a colleague, including colleagues that were very different from him. And so if you did that you were setting somebody outside, you know, outside the circle. Everybody needed to be in the circle. I’ve talked to several of my colleagues about this after he died. The Political Science Department really wasn’t the same because we were missing that guy who was constantly saying “He said so-and-so,” “He had said so-and-so,” sort of holding this together around a common project.

David Booth,
Former Political Science Professor