Abstract
The intellectual realm of public administration has lost some of its luster and vibrancy with the passing of Ralph Hummel. Ralph and I were operating in different “ intellectual realms” when we first met, but somehow we never got into a discussion of those differences. Ralph told me of his boyhood in Germany during World War II and how his family had migrated to Detroit after the war, where his father worked in an automobile manufacturing plant. I found myself telling Ralph about growing up on a farm in Nebraska, and how my family migrated to California where my father worked in an aircraft plant. We never got to a discussion of our paradigmatic differences. That encounter left an indelible impression on me. It taught me a great deal about what relationships among us academicians can be if, like Ralph, we see one another first and foremost as fellow human beings in the greater drama called life, and only secondarily, and coincidentally as paradigmatic adversaries in what is, after all is said and done, no more than a subplot. I believe Charles Goodsell’s tribute to Ralph makes that same point and does it far better than I can.
Ralph’s wife, Camilla Stivers, has characterized the relationship between Ralph and me as “special.”
That is so true. The days before we met face-to-face, we were intellectual enemies. We exchanged stinging mutual analyses of one another’s work in our respective books on bureaucracy. Professors would assign both of them as opposing polemics to generate student discussion. Whole articles would be published analyzing our differences. Were we really confronting each other? Or were our fervid exchanges just a matter of “paradigms passing in the night”?
Then, at a conference one time at a hotel in Washington, I happened to walk into a panel where Ralph was speaking. When it was over, I went up to him and introduced myself. For a moment, he stood silent with eyebrows raised and finally said, “So you are that guy.”
The first thing he wanted to know is where I grew up. I told him a small town in southern Michigan. “That explains it,” he said.
It was arranged to meet that evening for a conversation. The night was mild, so we decided to take a walk outside the hotel. For the next 2 hr, we covered miles of Northwest Washington streets.
I will never forget that walk. We quickly realized that although we were at opposite poles in many ways, in many other ways we had much in common. We agreed on the field’s weaknesses and needs. We both found ourselves blurting out outrageous ideas without a moment’s hesitation. We both actually listened to what the other person was saying. We learned where each other was coming from and respected that difference.
Hence, in a matter of hours, the famous Hummel-Goodsell intellectual duel became, secretly, good-natured jousting between two close friends. We debated amicably in public. We complemented each other on the skill of our respective jabs and thrusts. We enjoyed the stir of conflict and book sales that were generated by our little war. Eventually, he married my most brilliant dissertation candidate. At David Carnevale’s home in Norman, one evening, we delightedly arranged to have photos taken of us strangling each other by the throat.
In our later years, the friendship ripened further. He hailed me one time from across a hotel lobby because of a cover photo he liked that I had published of rocking chairs on the porch of the Maine statehouse. When he was finishing his fifth edition, he asked me to write a dust cover endorsement. I said his treatment of postmodernism was a welcome sign of even hotter fire in the belly. After the massacre at Virginia Tech in 2007, he wrote an article on the heroism of Professor Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor who sacrificed himself to save the lives of his students. I provided him with a photo of the campus monument to Librescu. In the last few days, without realizing Ralph’s time was near, I was drafting a summary of his fifth edition, for inclusion in my own fifth. It was the last outpouring of his splendid mind and will be a great and lasting legacy to our field.
In short, in a way we were still taking that evening walk in the streets of Washington. I will miss him. Charles Goodsell.