“The Robert L. Gaudino Memorial Fund started the day he died. He was a mentor to people who at that time had been out of college for six, seven, eight years, nine years, ten years, who were young professionals. So when he died they immediately said we want to perpetuate not only the memory but the kind of intellectual work that Gaudino represented, which was intellectual work of the most extreme seriousness they had ever encountered. That was then helped by the Gaudino family, a family that didn’t understand what the hell he was doing. When I was doing alumni work out in California I visited with them and met them. I think a well-off Italian family. I think conservative in a Republican sense. Non-academic in the conventional sense. He would go out to spend time with them, spend vacations with them, short. Not very long. I remember once picking him up from Albany when he came back. The family was amazed when he died and suddenly discovered that the son, who they knew nothing about, was considered to be sort of a saint-like person by a bunch of people who were milling around at the time of the funeral collecting funds and so on and so forth. So the family contributed money themselves.

–Kurt Tauber,
Former Political Science Professor