O. P. Dwivedi

It is with great sadness that the department of political science at the University of Guelph announces the passing of O.P. Dwivedi (January 20, 1937–January 29, 2013) after a courageous battle with cancer. Dr. Dwivedi was a much loved and respected professor in the department of political science, having served as chair of the department from 1979 to 1990. He was known internationally for his research and scholarship in the areas of public administration and environmental politics. Dr. Dwivedi retired from the university in 2003, but remained an active member of the department, teaching both undergraduate and graduate courses until this year when his illness precluded it.

Professor Dwivedi was a University Professor Emeritus, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a member of the Order of Canada, and most recently the recipient of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee medal. He had received honorary degrees from the University of Lethbridge and the University of Waterloo. He had served as president of the Canadian Political Science Association in 1986–1987 and was elected vice-president of the International Association of Schools and Institutes of Public Administration (IASIA) in 1989, a position he held for a decade. In recognition of his contributions the IASIA, in 2008, established the O.P. Dwivedi Award to honor a distinguished international scholar or practitioner for significant contributions to public administration and public policy.

Dr. Dwivedi was a friend and mentor to faculty and students across the world. He was also very active in charitable and humanitarian projects, having established a school, medical clinics, and an eye hospital in India. He also served as the campus Hindu priest and was an active member of the University Multi-Faith resource team at the University of Guelph.

A memorial service was held February 4, 2013. In lieu of flowers the family has requested that donations be made to D.D. Foundation, which was established by the Dwivedi family in 1993 to aid the poor in India. Donations and condolences can be sent to www.gilbertmacintyreandson.com.

Robert L. Lineberry

Robert L. Lineberry was born on May 4, 1942 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He died in Houston, Texas, on December 5, 2012. Bob completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Oklahoma in 1964 and his doctoral work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1969. He was an assistant and then associate professor at the University of Texas from 1967 to 1974. He then moved to Northwestern University obtaining the rank of full professor of political and urban affairs. In 1981 he became dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Kansas serving until 1988. While at the University of Kansas, Bob led the college through a series of difficult budget crisis and directed a rewriting of the core curriculum. Bob joined the University of Houston in 1988 to assume the position of University of Houston senior vice president for academic affairs/provost. After his term as provost he became a full-time member of the department of political science, where he taught core courses in policy and American government, at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and mentored many dissertations.

Bob was a specialist in urban politics and public policy. While still in graduate school, Bob and Terry Fowler published “Reformism and Public Policies in American Cities,” in the American Political Science Review. His first book was with Ira Sharkansky, Urban Politics and Public Policy published in 1971. He would author, coauthor, and edit a dozen books, many through numerous editions. His publications included The New Urban Politics (with Louis Massotti), Crime in City Politics (with Anne Heinz and Herbert Jacob), and multiple editions of Government in America: People, Politics and Policy (later editions with George Edwards III and Martin Wattenberg). During his seven years at the University of Texas, Bob developed a working relationship with Charles Bonjean with whom he coauthored numerous papers and helped co-edit a then-struggling journal, the Social Science Quarterly (SSQ). After joining the University of Houston, Bob succeeded Chuck as editor of the SSQ, lifting its standards and enhancing its reputation during a 17 year editorship.

Bob was a wonderful colleague and student mentor. He often said that teaching was his greatest passion. He was an avid reader and world traveler who loved sharing his experiences and insights with students and colleagues. To spend time with Bob meant enjoying a good conversation about world events and politics, national cultures, art, and literature. He guest lectured at many American, European, and Chinese universities. He and his wife Nita visited more than 50 nations. Bob had a special affection for Egypt, China, and South Korea, and loved repeated trips to Paris, London, and Montreal.

Bob is survived by his wife Nita, his children Mary Nicole and Robert Keith, six grandchildren and one great grandchild, and hundreds of grateful colleagues and students in America and abroad.

—Harrell Rodgers, University of Houston

David J. Olson

David J. Olson, emeritus professor of political science at the University of Washington, died from a cerebral hemorrhage on September 15, 2012, while at his cabin on Orcas Island, Washington. He was 71 years old. He is survived by his wife, Sandra Olson; daughter and son-in-law, Maia and Cole Peterson; and granddaughter Stella, all of Seattle; and by three brothers and two sisters.

Professor Olson was born in a farmhouse in Brantford, North Dakota, on May 18, 1941, and was raised from an early age in West Fargo, North Dakota. He was triple-sports star in high school (baseball, basketball, and football). He received his BA degree (1963) from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. While there he was on the debate team and was elected president of his senior class. Concordia College awarded him a Distinguished Alumnus Award in 1998 and named him to their National Alumni Board in 2008, on which he served until his death.

He received a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to attend Union Theological Seminary in New York City (1963–1964). During his fellowship year, he decided his true passion was the study of politics. Graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, Madison followed. He earned his PhD in 1971 with a dissertation “Racial Violence and City Politics: The Political Response to Civil Disorders in Three American States.” To help him complete his studies he was awarded a fellowship in governmental studies at the Brookings Institution in 1970.

Professor Olson's first academic appointment was as an instructor and then assistant professor at the University of Indiana (1969–1974). He won a distinguished teaching award while at Indiana. In 1974 he accepted a faculty position at the University of Washington, where he rapidly was promoted through the academic ranks. He held visiting appointments at various points in his career at the University of Bergen, Harvard University, University of Hawaii, University of California, Berkeley, and as the Montague Burton Visiting Professor in Industrial Relations at the University of Wales at Cardiff.

He was a noted scholar of state, local, and labor politics and a pioneer in the study of the governance of public ports. He coauthored/edited four books: Black Politics: The Inevitability of Conflict (with Edward S. Greenberg and Neal Milner, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), Theft of the City: Readings on Corruption in Urban America (with John A. Gardiner, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), To Keep the Republic: Governing the United States in its Third Century (with Philip Mayer, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975 & 1978), and Commission Politics: The Processing of Racial Crisis in America (with Michael Lipsky, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1977). He also authored numerous articles, book chapters, and reports. He consulted on many issues including service as an expert witness for cases that included the challenge to the Washington State blanket primary and a similar case in California.

Professor Olson's scholarship on urban and black politics consistently emphasized the biases and conflicts within the urban arena, punctuated by his deep understanding of how big city mayors responded to the urban riots of the 1960s. He and his coauthors compiled the readings, Black Politics, to fill a gap between what they had learned about this topic in graduate school and what they observed was going on around them from their activism in the civil rights movement. None of the coauthors had enough expertise at the time to write a book on the subject, so they decided to compile a set of readings that would make a good teaching contribution. In retrospect, as reported by Neal Milner, the coauthors wanted to get students to examine and question the assumptions of pluralism and what later the Civil Rights Commission reports of 1960s riots called the myth of peaceful protest. Milner notes three well-meaning but inexperienced white academics could do such a book at that time because there was so little good literature on the subject and because the question of who could teach black studies was just beginning to arise.

Professor Olson's coauthored book with Michael Lipsky, Commission Politics: The Processing of Racial Crisis, followed a path blazed in political science by their friend and colleague at the University of Wisconsin, Murray Edelman. Edelman's work was devoted to understanding how the meaning of political phenomena is constructed. The book pursues this line of inquiry with respect to the urban violence that preoccupied American politics in the 1960s. It focused on the pattern of practice, throughout American history, of convening riot commissions that take note of grievances while postponing immediate policy responses and deferring actions to a time when the pre-riot balance of interests prevails. Historically, riot commissions were local affairs. Professor Olson's field research on elite responses to the 1960s riots in Milwaukee, Newark, and Detroit was central to the analysis.

To earn money during high school and college Professor Olson drove trucks all over the country, mostly to the West Coast and back, delivering farm machinery. He became a member of the Teamsters Union and proudly maintained his membership in the union throughout his life. He “walked the talk” of unions and labor, participating in numerous demonstrations to support union recognition and in opposition to employer and government policies with which he disagreed. He became a national expert in the study of labor politics and was called on regularly for commentary by both local and national news outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Economist, and National Public Radio. Coauthoring with Margaret Levi, Professor Olson published two labor studies-related pieces in Politics & Society. The first assessed the “battle in Seattle” during the 1999 World Trade Organization Ministerial meetings and considered the difficulties confronting labor coalitions with environmentalists and other non-labor activists. The second drew from a working group on “Union Democracy Reexamined” with Jon Agnone and Devin Kelly as additional coauthors. The project involved collection of original data and coding of labor convention debates by a large group of undergraduate and graduate students, led by John Ahlquist, now an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin. In other labor-studies scholarship involving Olson, funding from the Russell Sage Foundation made possible an interdisciplinary investigation of living wage campaigns and laws that resulted in three publications, co-authored with Levi and then-student Erich Steinman.

Professor Olson's commitment to the labor movement found expression in his central role in helping to found the Harry Bridges Labor Studies Center at the University of Washington. His credibility with longshoremen and their wives and widows resulted in extraordinary rank and file contributions to the Center's endowment. He was the Center's first director and the inaugural holder of the Harry Bridges Chair in Labor Studies. He was named “1994 Distinguished Lecturer in Labor Studies” by the Labor Archives and Research Center at San Francisco State University, the first non-Californian selected. He also received special recognition from the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) on his retirement.

Professor Olson became interested in the governance of public ports in the mid-1980s, when he spent a sabbatical interviewing and observing top officials at the Port of Seattle. Subsequently, he wrote a number of articles about port development and governance. He consulted on many port-related matters and was recognized as one of the leading authorities on public ports in the United States. Among other roles, he served on multiple occasions as a consultant to the chief executives of the Port of Seattle, to the Washington State Transportation Commission, and to the Washington Public Ports Association. His work on port governance led to what for many years was referred to as the “Treaty of Pier 66,” a critical document defining the division of duties between the Port of Seattle's chief executive and the Port's commissioners.

Professor Olson was especially proud of his Norwegian heritage. He was known to express dismay that the spelling of his last name led acquaintances to think he was Swedish. He would explain that the surname Olson was selected by immigration officials at Ellis Island when they could not pronounce the name of his forefather, John Tobiassen, who emigrated from Norway.

In furthering the ties originating from his Norwegian heritage, he became very active in the faculty exchange program between the University of Washington and the University of Bergen. He served on the Faculty Exchange Committee for this program from its beginning in 1979, and then chaired the program from 1996 until 2002. In 2006 he was knighted by King Harald of Norway, who elevated him to the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit, First Class for “outstanding service in the interest of Norway.” This was a pinnacle event in his life.

Professor Olson was deeply committed to civic education. Through the University of Washington state legislative intern program he tutored generations of students over nearly 30 years in the ways of legislative politics in Olympia. He also supervised numerous interns who worked for political campaigns and for city and county government. He was regularly sought after for his opinions on state, local, and labor politics by representatives of local and national media.

His contributions to civic education were recognized with numerous awards: the University of Washington S. Sterling Munro Public Service Teaching Award in 2005, the State Senate Outstanding Civic Educator Award in 2007, special recognition by the King County Council in 2005, a proclamation of “David Olson Day” by Governor Christine Gregoire upon his retirement, and more recent recognition by members of both the State Senate and House for his long-term stewardship of the Olympia Legislative Internship Program. He was a tireless mentor to many a student including some 25 PhD candidates for whom he either chaired or served on their dissertation committees.

Professor Olson had a remarkable gift for putting people at ease. As one long-time associate stated: “He moved so easily, confidently, and graciously among us all—academicians, politicians, labor educators, rank and file union members. We benefited so much from his special interest in ports and shipping—and his wonderful affinity with the men and women who worked there. He served his constituencies with such great insight and integrity—and with that warm twinkle in his eye.” As noted by his wife, “He could relate to anyone, no matter what their station in life or where they came from. He always found a personal connection with anyone he crossed paths with.”

Professor Olson cared deeply about the University of Washington, where he mentored and inspired many faculty who came up the ranks, staff members who worked with him in his many roles on campus, and thousands of undergraduate and graduate students. He served in numerous roles at the University of Washington, including service on the College of Arts and Sciences College Council and, notably, Chair of the Department of Political Science from 1983 to 1988. He was an avid Husky sports fan, particularly for football and basketball and attended games regularly for many years. At his retirement, friends arranged a ceremony at which legendary University of Washington football coach Don James presented him with a signed football.

He was also very active in the political science profession. He served as president of the Western Political Science Association in 1984–85 and was a regular participant in the Western meetings as well as the APSA national meetings.

Upon his retirement, a number of his colleagues and friends established the David J. Olson Endowed Fund to recognize his considerable achievements and impact on others. The endowment fosters research in areas that were central to Professor Olson's civic and scholarly career, with an emphasis on funding research by students whose scholarly interests focus on state, regional, city, and labor politics.

David Olson was a consummate raconteur of politics. Whether he was recounting the machinations of politicians, port personnel, or university administrators, he could be counted on to draw bright lines in describing their positions and discerning their intentions. In this he ennobled public life for friends, colleagues, students, and those with whom he came into contact.

—Peter J. May, Donald Matthews Distinguished Professor of American Politics and Department Chair, University of Washington

—Edward Greenberg, Professor of Political Science, University of Colorado, Boulder.

—Margaret Levi, Jere L. Bacharach Professor of International Studies, University of Washington; and Chair in U.S. Politics, United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney

—Michael Lipsky, Distinguished Senior Fellow, Demos, Washington DC, and Research Professor, Georgetown University.

—Neal Milner, Professor of Political Science, University of Hawaii.

James R. Soukup

James “Jim” R. Soukup, Professor Emeritus of SUNY Fredonia, died May 26, 2012, of natural causes in Troy, Virginia, at the age of 83.

Professor Soukup earned his BA at Wayne State University, where he represented the school at the United Nations Institute conference at Mt. Holyoke College (and, in a career-inspiring moment, met with the conference's founding influence, Eleanor Roosevelt, then chairperson of the newly created UN Commission on Human Rights). Between semesters, he studied French language abroad at the Sorbonne. He earned an MA in political science at the University of Minnesota (1952) and a PhD (1956) in the same field at the University of Michigan, focusing on East Asian politics under the direction of Robert E. Ward.

He began his teaching career with the department of government of the University of Texas (1956–1970), where he was a three-time Fulbright Scholar to Japan for the study of that country's labor politics, and eventually served on the Fulbright National Selection Committee. At Texas, he authored the book, Party and Factional Division in Texas (1964), a seminal work in its field, and numerous research articles in The Journal of Politics, Asian Survey, and Studies on Asia. He was instrumental in the development of the school's Asian studies program and its supporting library. In 1969, he contributed, along with Harold Deutsch, Seymour Martin Lipset and others, to the Staff Report of the National Task Force on Assassination and Political Violence, chaired by Milton S. Eisenhower as directed by Presidents Johnson and Nixon.

Jim left the University of Texas to chair SUNY Fredonia's department of political science during what would become a transformational point in its history, 1970–75. He increased the number of faculty and courses within the department, particularly in international relations and area studies, created the Washington Semester Program, and taught new offerings in four different subject areas: the politics of East Asia; energy and the environment; the politics of labor; and business and regulation. He was also instrumental in creating a number of cocurricular public service concentrations to supplement SUNY Fredonia's academic majors. In the remainder of his tenure with the department, he was a regular participant in labor relations conferences at Cornell University, introduced geographical studies to Fredonia's curriculum, and made a regular adventure of driving students of his East Asian politics class to Toronto to tour that city's Chinese cultural offerings. Jim always found new ways to become involved in the school, including participation in a number of its administrative, ecumenical, and labor relations committees and organizations. Both the J.R. Soukup Pi Sigma Alpha Scholarship (for the outstanding junior majoring in political science) and J.R. Soukup Award (for outstanding first-year student in political science) were generously endowed by Jim and his family on his retirement in 1991 to Professor Emeritus.

Not least among his devotions was his fondness for baseball. We remember him as a stalwart and knowledgeable Detroit Tigers fan, an allegiance from which he could not be shaken. Not wishing to displace his colleagues and students on the softball field during the department's annual, end-of-year picnic, he graciously consented to play the position of pitcher at our gatherings, though he pined to hit the field as second baseman. Generous man that Jim was, he refused to pull rank.

His generosity was deeply appreciated by his colleagues, especially those of us who, like me, were starting our careers. He was always willing to assist young colleagues with their teaching and research by counseling us on grant applications, alerting us to funding and travel opportunities, and working hard to see that our teaching schedules left us adequate time to pursue our fields of study. He believed very strongly in the importance of the service faculty members owe to the university and it students, a conviction he demonstrated by his own example. And we remember Jim, and his dear wife Marge, for the many occasions on which they opened their home to us and our families.

Throughout his career, Jim applied his knowledge outside the classroom in many ways, such as serving as an expert legal witness on Chinese government, and advising municipalities from Texas to New York on electoral matters (including brief involvement with Lyndon B. Johnson and his campaign staff). In his retirement, he established Habitat for Humanity in Roane County, Tennessee, advised political campaigns in that state, served as president of his local Rotary International club, and was involved in several other philanthropic and environmental causes.

Jim Soukup is survived by Margaret B. Soukup, fellow Wayne State alum and his wife of 61 years, sons James E. of Troy, Virgina, and Jeffrey A. of Austin, Texas, daughter Susan J. (Soukup) Wilson of Sugar Land, Texas, sister Marian (Soukup) Levin of Springfield, Illinois, and four grandchildren.

—James R. Hurtgen, Distinguished Teaching Professor, SUNY Fredonia