Joe Board's
resume reads like an endorsement for frequent flyer
programs
Since coming to Union in 1965, Board
has been a visiting professor or guest lecturer at the
Sorbonne in Paris, the London School of Economics, the
Universities of Umea and Lund in Sweden, the University
of California at Berkeley, Brown, the City University of
New York, Indiana, and a number of others.
He has also been a cohost for the 1976
National Public Radio broadcast of the Nobel Prize
ceremonies from Stockholm, a consultant to the U.S.
Department of State and the Smithsonian, chair of the
U.S. Selection Committee for NATO Fellowships, and a
member of numerous other national and international
committees.
With all this, he says that the major
source of gratification during his career came right here
at home — building the Political Science Department and
advising nearly every Union graduate who has gone onto
law school.
Board, the Robert Porter Patterson
Professor of Government, is retiring from full-time
service this year, although he will continue to teach a
couple of courses a year. He also will continue to teach
at Albany Law School, where he has been an adjunct
faculty member since 1970, and he plans to write and
spend some time fly fishing.
“I'd go bonkers if I did nothing
but fish,” he says. “I had a sextuple bypass
operation four years ago and have become acutely
conscious of the need to use time well and stay
active.”
Board graduated from Indiana University
with highest honors and went on to earn a B.A. and M.A.
at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, a J.D. from the Indiana
University School of Law, and a Ph.D. in government from
Indiana. He was hired at Union, he says, with the happy
mandate of building the Political Science Department. The
idea, he says, was to hire individuals who were great
classroom teachers and keen research scholars.
“When I arrived, we had three
faculty members with twenty or twenty-one majors in all
classes,”he says. “By the time I left the
chairmanship in 1972, the department had grown to nine
and a half faculty members and fifty-three senior majors.
By the early 1970s, this was the best small college
Political Science Department in the country. We taught
well, published regularly, and were visible at national
and international meetings.”
The department, he says, was marked
with an “extraordinary esprit de corps and a strong
sense of loyalty from students.” He recalls many of
his students with anecdotes. He remembers, for example,
that Phil Robinson '69 did his senior thesis in the form
of a fifty-minute videotape documentary on the breakdown
of the old New Deal coalition of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
“Phil got a grant from the GE
Foundation and then wrote, produced, directed, and
narrated his thesis,” Board says. “He went to
Washington to interview Larry O'Brien, then head of the
Democratic Party. I'm very proud of that thesis.”
Robinson, who went on to direct and
produce such films as Field of Dreams and Sneakers,
remembers Board as his first producer.
“I went into his office with this
idea, figuring he would say no and I'd have to write a
paper,” Robinson says. “He enthusiastically
said yes, and that was my first film. Every once in a
while he would show up dressed very well, and instead of
a casual discussion, he would do a lecture that would
knock your socks off. When I'm in the middle of a
project, I still call him and I always learn something
new.”
Although Board's internationalism (he
speaks seven languages) has taken him around the world,
he has been a specialist on Sweden. Supported by a
Fulbright Fellowship, he spent the 1968-69 academic yeart
lecturing at the University of Umea and the University of
Lund. It was then that he mastered Swedish well enough to
lecture in the language; he received an honorary Ph.D.
from the University of Umea and was elected to the
Academy of Sciences at Lund. To this day he contributes
articles on a regular basis to Swedish newspapers.
“A lot of what I've written over the years explains
Sweden and other parts of Europe to Americans — and vice
versa,” he says.
One of his writing projects will be an
examination of the political views reflected in Norman
Rockwell's paintings. The topic is a natural; Rockwell's
studio in Vermont is about 200 yards from Board's house.