Ragsdale Appointed Dean of Social Sciences at Rice

Lyn Ragsdale, former head of the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has been appointed dean of Rice’s School of Social Sciences. She will oversee the departments of anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology, as well as the managerial studies and policy studies programs. She also has been named the Radoslav A. Tsanoff Chair of Public Affairs and professor of political science. She succeeds Bob Stein, who, during his 11 years as dean, helped make the School of Social Sciences highly sought by city and business leaders seeking urban research.

Lyn Ragsdale

Ragsdale says her interest in politics stems from her childhood in Milwaukee. “I come from a very political family,” she notes. “That’s what we talked about at the dinner table. I knew I would either go into politics or study politics.” Her husband, Jerrold Rusk, shares that professional interest and will join Rice’s faculty as a professor of political science.

She began her academic career at the University of Arizona, where she served on the faculty for 19 years, starting as an assistant professor of political science in 1982 and then becoming an associate professor with tenure in 1987 and a full professor in 1994. She directed the University of Arizona Survey Research Center for three years.

Her research interests—the presidency, electoral behavior, and Congress—are reflected in the books she has written: The Elusive Executive: Discovering Statistical Patterns in the Presidency; and Presidential Politics; and Vital Statistics on the Presidency, Washington to Clinton, which won the American Library Association’s Choice Award for the best reference work in 1996 and will be published in a third revised edition next year.

During her University of Arizona era, Ragsdale spent a year as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow in Washington, D.C., where she was named the William A. Steiger Fellow (best fellow of the year), one year in London as an honors professor for the Arizona–Iowa Consortium Study Abroad Program, and a year in New York as a fellow for the Russell Sage Foundation.

She left Arizona in 2001 to head the political science department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she implemented a project-planning style of management. One of her projects entailed working on the establishment of a master’s degree in global affairs that combines the University of Illinois at Chicago’s courses with those at a university in Europe or Asia along with an internship in an international organization, foreign government, or nongovernmental organization. Another project focused on strengthening the graduate program by establishing a fellowship to recruit top students, making travel funds available for students to attend major political science conferences, creating a course to educate students on how to publish their seminar papers, enhancing the methodology curriculum, and devising an exit survey to solicit valuable feedback from graduates. She also developed a project called the Politics Forum, which brings political science alumni together every two years with political figures to discuss national and state election results.

At Rice, Ragsdale hopes to combine her project-planning style with strategic planning. “One project that I would envision is to create a center for social science research that would make the social sciences as visible as possible, not just on campus but nationally and internationally,” she says.

She also advocates that the School of Social Sciences be a leader in diversity. “Core parts of the curriculum and research in the social sciences involve topics of race, ethnicity, and gender as well as social movements and cultural identity,” Ragsdale says. “This is important not only in matters of faculty hiring and retention, but also in how people at all levels—faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students, and staff—view their daily experience on campus.”

Ragsdale had ample opportunity to develop her organizational, interpersonal, and budgetary skills during her four years as editor of Political Research Quarterly and from her year as president of the Western Political Science Association, for which she planned two annual conventions for more than 1,100 participants.

In addition to carrying out her duties as dean, Ragsdale plans to finish writing two books over the next two years—one about the tough choices presidents make on major decisions and one about America’s nonvoters.