On June 4, Professor Sidney Verba was one of ten outstanding individuals to receive an honorary degree at Harvard’s 2009 Commencement ceremonies. The degree--Doctor of Laws--is a tribute to Verba’s lengthy and notable career, during which he distinguished himself both as a political scientist and as director of the Harvard University library system. He is the author and co-author of a number of books on American and comparative politics, including Small Groups and Political Behavior (1961), The Civic Culture (1963), Caste, Race and Politics (1969), Vietnam and the Silent Majority (1970), Participation in America (1972), The Changing American Voter (1976), Injury to Insult (1979), Participation and Political Equality (1979), Equality in America (1985), Elites and the Idea of Equality (1989), Designing Social Inquiry (1994), Voice and Equality (1995), and The Private Roots Of Public Action (2001); as well as many articles on those subjects. Participation in America won the Kammerer Prize of the American Political Science Association for the best book on American politics, and The Changing American Voter won the Woodrow Wilson Prize for the best book in political science. He has received a number of other honors including the James Madison Award of the APSA, given every three years for a career contriution to political science, and the Johann Skytte Prize, the leading international prize in political science. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1994, he was elected President of the American Political Science Association. His current research interests involve the relationship of political to economic equality, mass and elite political ideologies, and mass political participation.

The nine other individuals chosen to receive honorary degrees at the 358th Commencement ceremony include Energy Secretary Steven Chu, filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, author Joan Didion, religious historian Wendy Doniger, legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, immunologist Anthony S. Fauci, anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, engineer Robert Langer, and musician Wynton Marsalis.

When asked to comment upon the occasion, Professor Verba stated, "It was an honor to be so honored in the company of a most distinguished group of scholars from various fields -- but especially in the company of honorands Joan Didion and Wynton Marsalis. The high point of my thirty-five years of teaching at Harvard was going to a dinner for honorary degree recipients a number of years ago and meeting one of the honorees, Ella Fitzgerald. Hearing Marsalis open the ceremony by playing America the Beautiful -- he makes the trumpet talk like Louis Armstrong did -- and being honored along with him and the others topped even that."

The following was compiled by Corydon Ireland, Alvin Powell, and Colleen Walsh for an article in the Harvard University Gazette on the honorary degrees awarded at Commencement:

Political scientist and library innovator Sidney Verba ’53 retired from Harvard in June 2007, where he had been Carl A. Pforzheimer University Professor as well as director of the Harvard University Library. While an undergraduate at Harvard, he was a history and literature concentrator --in an era when the faculty included, among other luminaries, e.e. cummings, Archibald MacLeish, and Samuel Eliot Morison.

After graduating, Verba earned master’s and doctoral degrees at Princeton University (in 1957 and 1959), then joined the political science faculty there (1960-64) --getting tenure before the age of 30. Enroute to his teaching career at Harvard in 1972, Verba made stops at Stanford University (1964-68) and the University of Chicago (1968-72).

At Harvard, he was associate dean for undergraduate studies from 1981 to 1984. Then came the surprise: Verba leapt from one career to two. He served as director of the Harvard University Library from 1984 to 2007.

Verba --a specialist in political participation -- never left political science scholarship and teaching behind. He continued to rack up a list of books that runs to four pages, and to collect prizes for his work. But Verba also led the University’s library system through its most transformative decades.

He coordinated access to Harvard’s vast collections; established the Harvard Depository system; boosted preservation staff and facilities; and helped pioneer the Library Digital Initiative to create a Harvard infrastructure for collecting, archiving, and offering digital materials.

Verba also encouraged ways to share Harvard’s library resources more widely with scholars worldwide. One is a project with Google to digitize the public-domain books in Harvard collections. Another is Harvard’s Open Collections Program, designed to digitize and make available University resources on a given theme. (One example already available is "Women Working: 1800-1930," an online digital archive of materials related to women’s participation in the U.S. economy.)

Verba is characteristically lighthearted and modest about his contributions as library director -- professing that early on he was aware of the information revolution "only in the vaguest way." But under his direction, the Harvard library system has become a digital model for the world.

Upon Verba’s retirement, Library of Congress associate librarian Deanna Marcum offered, "I don’t think the library world has ever had a better friend."