"He made more of an impression on me in one class"

They say we only retain ten minutes of our university education.

While I hope I retained more than that, I can say that Professor Lowi accounts for a significant piece of what I retain, and that in spite of the fact that I only experienced him for one lecture period. He was either on sabbatical or part of the Cornell in Washington program the semester I took Introduction to American Government — then normally co-taught by Professors Lowi and Ginsberg. Professor Ginsberg taught by himself that semester, except for one class session when Professor Lowi lectured. He lectured on the bureaucracy of the federal government and he told a story of a memo being circulated and initialed and then circulated and re-initialed by the same people so that they could acknowledge for the record that they should not have been sent the memo in the first place.

While I was pretty conservative at the time and not in favor of big government, his explanation of how this demonstrated accountability and what was good about bureaucracy has stuck with me. I have thought of it many times in the nearly three decades since I heard that lecture and especially in the past year when the civil service has been under attack.

I ended up focusing more on international relations and never took a full class from Professor Lowi, but he made more of an impression on me in one class period than some professors from whom I did take full classes.

Alice Anne English

College of Arts and Sciences

Cornell Class of 1993