Professor Juggles, Mediates

In February 1973, Sidney Verba ’53 walked into a classroom in Harvard Hall, ready to teach his first government class as a Harvard professor.

Verba was eager to return to Cambridge and teach in the same classrooms where he had studied history and literature as an undergraduate 20 years before.

But instead of finding a group of equally eager undergraduates, Verba greeted an empty room.

No one showed up to his first class, which had failed to make it into the course catalogue due to his mid-year arrival.

This disappointing debut, however, would be an anomaly in Verba’s career here, where he has been embraced as a funny, amiable and brilliant professor.

Verba, who is Pforzheimer University professor and director of the University Library, has served as associate dean of undergraduate education and chair of the government department. And over the last 25 years, he has been tapped to lead a handful of the most controversial Faculty committees.

Verba’s success as an administrator led many to consider him a frontrunner for dean of the faculty when Henry A. Rosovsky stepped down from the post in 1984. And it’s the reason he has been chosen to head so many committees with challenging mandates.

“Whenever there’s a hot potato, an administrator somewhere in Harvard looks for Sid,” says Markham Professor of Government Kenneth A. Shepsle. “And with good reason.”

The white-haired academic has pioneered a quantitative approach to political science and is recognized as one of the foremost authorities on political and civic participation.

He has garnered a spate of prestigious awards—including several for career contributions to political science—but is most proud of being named one of the nation’s “tweediest” professors by M Magazine.

“That is the high point of my career,” he quips. “It was the first time I really got any respect from my kids.”

Friends and colleagues describe a brilliant man who is overburdened with commitments but manages to tackle them all with a wise-cracking sense of humor and a friendly attitude.

Reclining in an office chair with his legs propped up on his wrap-around wooden desk, Verba nonchalantly acknowledges his hectic schedule.

“I’m half-time teaching, half-time researching, and half-time administration—and the rest of the time I take it easy,” he jokes.

The Diplomat

Verba, already a distinguished political scientist upon his arrival at Harvard, began his rise through the University’s ranks in 1977 when he became chair of the government department.

Impressed by his performance as department chair, Rosovsky named Verba associate dean of undergraduate education in 1981. As dean, Verba oversaw the implementation of the last curricular review, which created the Core requirements.

He also led an unsuccessful push for preregistration, that, much like this year’s plan, died due to faculty opposition and student uproar.

“I now have come to understand that anything that looks like preregistration represents something like a violation of the Helsinki Treaty on Human Rights are far as undergraduates are concerned,” Verba says.

Despite that failure, he rapidly became one of the most influential administrators in the College because of his talent for resolving intractable conflicts.

He was considered to replace Rosovsky as dean of the Faculty in 1984, although Verba maintained that he did not want the job because it would make it impossible for him to teach.

Instead, then-University President Derek C. Bok appointed him director of the Univesity Library—a part-time administrative position that would allow him to continue teaching.

Verba jokingly relates the library directorship offer to a New Yorker cartoon—which he sent Bok at the time—that pictures a CEO with his arm around a middle-manager. The CEO says, “Boswick, you did so well on that last miserable, thankless job we gave you that we have an even more miserable and thankless job for you.”

But Verba insists that the library job is perfect for him.

“I’ve always been a scholar all my life,” he says. “Instead of a usual mid-life crisis, I had a mid-life change to take on the library.”

Verba has continued to teach graduate students as well as the Core class, Social Analysis 58, “Representation, Equality and Democracy,” which he calls the highlight of his job.

And despite this already full plate of teaching and library duties, administrators have continued to look to Verba for leadership on difficult College issues.

In the past 20 years, he has chaired committees that have created sexual harassment policy, increased affirmative action for female and minority professors, forced the Reserve Officers Training Corps off campus, and added the Quantitative Reasoning requirement to the Core curriculum.

Although Verba self-deprecatingly refers to himself as “wishy-washy” and says his diplomacy “drives his family nuts,” Florence Professor of Government Gary King says Verba’s ability to see both sides of an argument makes him an ideal committee chair.

“Sid is one of the best natural politician-diplomats I have ever met,” King writes in an e-mail. “He can put people completely at ease, get together warring factions with a few disarming comments, and settle disputes before anyone realizes they’re over.”

Colleagues and friends say Verba’s thoughtful demeanor and constant stream of congenial quips on the tip of his tongue only make him a better administrator and professor.

MacFarquhar describes Verba as a “raconteur.”

“Sid is a repository of anecdotes,” Shepsle says. “He has a humorous story for every occasion—and I’ve heard them all at least four times.”

True to form, Verba has transcended political differences through his friendship with conservative Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield ’53.

The wave of commentary on Verba’s replacement of Mansfield as government department chair in 1977 illustrates the immense difference in style and ideology between the two.

Many students and colleagues were relieved to see Mansfield go because of his war on grade inflation. Verba opposed tampering with grading procedures.

Verba’s relationship with Mansfield dates back to their days as undergraduates when they shared a Leverett House entryway.

While they were not close in college, the pair—which Verba describes as a “knee-jerk liberal” and a “dyed-in-the-wool conservative”—now jokingly needle each other about their political differences.

Go Crimson

Verba says it was partly a loyalty to Harvard, formed during his undergraduate years, that brought him back to Cambridge. He returned after getting his Ph.D. at Princeton University and teaching there, at Stanford University and at the University of Chicago.

“He has this tremendous, almost inexplicable, loyalty to Harvard, going back to the fact that he was in the College,” Shepsle says. “His coming back to Harvard as a professor...was a homecoming for him.”

Verba grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., and attended James Madison High School. Senior year he decided to attend Harvard over Princeton, a choice he in retrospect calls “the smartest thing I ever did.”

“If I had gone to Princeton as a naive, more-than-slightly awkward Jewish kid from Brooklyn, it would have been a disaster,” Verba says.

He knew so little about Harvard that he was surprised to discover you could get to the University by subway.

“I thought colleges like Harvard were out in the country surrounded by cows,” he says. “It took me six months to figure out that maybe I didn’t belong here, but by then I felt like I belonged here.”

According to his high school classmate Jerome I. Levinson ’53, the transition was difficult for Verba because they were part of the first wave of Jewish students and public-school students to enter Harvard. No more than two students in any year had ever matriculated to Harvard from James Madison until four did in 1949, Levinson says.

“[Verba] has always felt a deep debt to Harvard for taking this kid out of New York and making him what he is today,” Shepsle says.

Although Harvard may have been a culture shock for Verba, he immediately fit in intellectually.

Donald M. Gleason ’53, a classmate of Verba’s at James Madison, describes him “a brilliant young man [and] a very hard worker.”

Gleason, who roomed with him freshman year in Thayer 23 and later in Leverett House, recalls their late-night intellectual arguments. These conversations were marked by Verba’s sense of humor, Gleason says, which often relied on “esoteric” academic references.

Gleason and Levinson both say they are not surprised by Verba’s success.

“He was ticketed for success, because of his superior intellect,” says Levinson. “We all knew that—it wasn’t as if anyone was surprised.”

Out of the Office

The accomplished academic insists that he does not have any hobbies.

“One of my recreations is sitting at my computer doing statistical analysis on social science data,” Verba says.

But he does manage to escape the Yard to spend time with his three middle-aged daughters and wife of 49 years.

Verba married his wife, Cynthia, during his first year of graduate school after meeting her at a summer camp between his sophomore and junior years at Harvard.

He says he enjoys hiking and traveling with her to see their two daughers who live in California.

And—as befits a library director—he is an avid reader. The four walls of his Littauer office are lined with shelves overflowing with books.

Verba says he prefers to read novels in his spare time, mixing contemporary fiction with classics. He went through a phase where he would devote each summer to reading a thick Charles Dickens novel like Bleak House.

He says he spends little of his time reflecting on his own life, making a Socratic allusion as “esoteric” as some of his late-night College quips to Gleason might have been.

“I’ve always believed in the philosophy that the unexamined life is well worth living,” he says.

And for now Verba says he has no plans to reflect—or retire.

Instead, he will keep on juggling his academic, administrative and family life as he has at Harvard since 1975.

“Before Bill Gates wrote Windows, Sid invented multitasking,” Shepsle says. “Most of the rest of us are bound by trade-offs, but he isn’t.”

—Staff writer Stephen M. Marks can be reached at marks@fas.harvard.edu.