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1 JUNE 1913 * 28 AUGUST 2003
DAVID BICKNELL TRUMAN, who died on 28 August 2003 at the age of ninety, distinguished himself in two different areas. First, he was a pioneering political scientist. His most important book, The Governmental Process, is still in print after fifty-five years and has recently been translated into Chinese. He rose to the top of his discipline as president of the American Political Science Association in 1964-65.
Second, Truman had a brilliant career in academic administration, initially at Columbia University. While at Columbia, he was regarded as one of the "hot properties" in that area, with many offers, or at least investigations, of possible high positions at other universities and colleges. He capped his career as president of Mount Holyoke College.
David Truman taught in a number of northeastern colleges and universities: Bennington, Cornell, Harvard, Williams, and Yale. He was a visitor at Columbia in 1950-51 and was invited to stay, which he did for nineteen years. He helped to build the Department of Public Law and Government (what is now the political science department) into the leading department in the country. He did this quite brilliantly, hiring such people as Richard E. Neustadt and Wallace Sayer to join William Fox, Herbert Deane, and others. In an oral history interview, he described Columbia in the 1950s and 1960s as "a democracy of intellect. . . . One was what one had to say. You knew you were being listened to if you had something to say, and if you didn't have anything to say it didn't make any difference what your rank was."1
In 1962, Truman became dean of Columbia College, an entity at Columbia that had been neglected for many years; he later referred to it as a stepchild of the university. His success as dean was quite extraordinary in the five years in which he held that job. He liberalized unpopular rules, spoke out for civil rights, and defended the liberal arts curriculum for which Columbia College was famous. He was popular with students; at a college assembly in 1966, the students gave him a standing ovation.
In 1967, he was named provost and vice president at Columbia, and shortly was at the very heart of...