Harry Friedman Conference Room (Saunders Hall 624)
On 16 January 2004 the department met to determine use policy for the new conference room. For this semester the following uses will be considered appropriate:
* Department meetings
* Candidate talks
* Committee meetings
* Colloquia
* Dissertation defenses
* MA Culminating experiences
* Graduate student presentations to other graduate students in non-course settings
* Evening graduate seminars
Laurie Onizuka is the keeper of the keys; keys must be returned to Laurie ASAP. The room must remain locked at all other times. We also agreed that food should not be eaten in the room.
Who is Harry Friedman?
The conference room is named for Harry Friedman, two-time chair of the
political science department and architect of its modern incarnation. He was
a consistent civic innovator in shaping the academic and political practices
and the ethos that distinguishes our department today.
In the early 1960s, the department initiated a PhD program. Nevertheless, there were two contending ideas for how that program could be organized. One was to promote localism, encouraging the department to remain focused on state politics, particularly legislative and administrative politics. Another idea was to promote the PhD program as an opportunity to become a professional "political science" department (it had been the department of Government) with scholarship and graduate training aspirations—in short, the kind of department that belongs at a research university. It was Harry (with the collaboration of Bob Cahill) that successfully defended this vision. And subsequently, Harry played a major role in recruiting much of the department’s faculty, including some of our now-retired and deceased colleagues.
Apart from Harry's role in shaping the intellectual/scholarly orientation of
the department, he was central to the development of the department's
political orientation. He was virtually alone among the senior members of
the department in his support for full student participation in departmental
affairs, and, while many senior members were wary of pressuring the UH
administration in order to acquire new positions or to ward off
administrative and political interference, Harry hung tough on every issue.
Harry retired and died in 1996.