Alumni Hall of Fame
Robert H. Salisbury
Robert H. Salisbury is a native of Wheaton, Illinois who completed his undergraduate work at Washington and Lee, a small liberal arts college. He began graduate study at UIUC in 1951. While the campus seemed enormous to him, there were only about a dozen faculty members in the Department and not many more graduate students. He recalls the atmosphere as being intimate and extremely collegial. American politics was the core of the department's strength at that time and he completed his doctoral dissertation under Jack Peltason in 1955.
In 1955 Dr. Salisbury joined the faculty at Washington University. At that time Washington University was a good undergraduate institution but it had a very small graduate program. The university made a commitment to build strong graduate programs and Professor Salisbury was central to the development of the Political Science Department into one of the discipline’s leading departments. He served as Department Chair for seven years (1966-1973). After the Department suffered from a series of faculty losses, he was asked to serve a second term of six years (1986-1992). In recognition of both his scholarship and his contributions to the department, Professor Salisbury was named the first Sidney W. Souers Professor of American Government in 1982. He held that position until he retired in 1996.
In the early part of his career Professor Salisbury’s scholarship focused on state and urban politics. Some of this was linked to the analysis of education policy (Masters, Eliot and Salisbury, State Politics and the Public Schools, 1964) but he also did work on more general questions of policy analysis. He used schools as laboratories to examine aspects of citizen participation in both theory and practice (Citizen Participation in the Public Schools, 1980). Beginning in the late 1960s, he started to publish work that dealt explicitly with interest groups. Most of what he has done since has focused on interest groups: Interests and Institutions (1992) and The Hollow Core (1993).
Throughout his career Professor Salisbury has been active in professional Associations. He has served as Founder and President of the Missouri Political Science Association, as President of the Midwest Political Science Association, and as Vice-President of the American Political Science Association. He has also served on assorted editorial boards and as book review editor for the APSR. He has been the recipient of research support from the National Science Foundation, the American Bar Foundation, the Olin Foundation, and the U.S. Office of Education, and fellowship awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1997 he received the Eldersveld Award for Career Achievement from the Political Organizations and Parties Section of the American Political Science Association. Moreover, that group twice (1989, 1998) awarded him the Jack Walker prize for "an article of unusual significance to the field."