Carole Uhlaner
I was Sid’s doctoral student at Harvard. He arrived from Chicago for the spring semester of my first year, and I will always be grateful to the faculty graduate advisor (Stephen Krasner) for suggesting I take Sid’s class that spring (on the methodology of comparative politics). That led to working as an RA on the Changing American Voter (charged with finding the pre-ANES data from Roper). It also led to a very small role helping with the Seven Nations book (where I was able to sit in on working discussions between Sid, Norman, and Jae). I drew from that latter experience the idea that political systems with deep-seated cleavages based on ascriptive characteristics were the ones where group-based forces would be more powerful in reducing the power of economic and education resources to increase participation. This thought inspired my dissertation research on Canada.
About the time I came up with the dissertation idea, I met a Canadian with whom I became romantically involved. He repeatedly and convincingly explained why Canada provided the perfect site to explore this idea. So I went to see Sid and tell him about my great idea for a dissertation, setting out all the scholarly reasons why Canada was the perfect site. He nodded sagely. Then at the end I confessed to the personal reasons. He laughed and smiled, and said it was always a romance when a student suddenly got interested in researching a country they had never mentioned before.
After a while, I moved up to Ottawa to work on the dissertation (and pursue the romance), but I kept my studio in Cambridge so that I could come back periodically. About the time I was deep into estimations, I took a trip back to Cambridge to consult with Sid. The differences between French Canadians and English Canadians were key to my study, but I was getting tangled in knots understanding the behavior of French Canadians outside of Quebec and English speakers in Quebec. Shortly after getting to Cambridge, and before seeing Sid, I got a very bad flu. I really couldn’t take care of myself, so ended up in the infirmary at Harvard Student Health. But I still wanted to talk with Sid about my results! Sid takes care of his students. He came to the infirmary and sat with me going over tables, in this highly unconventional setting. His advice at the time characterizes a small part of his genius, namely his ability to cut to the core. After patiently hearing out all of the exceptions and complications I was raising, he gently told me to forget those and to focus on the big picture. What I remember him saying was to “pay attention to the forest, not to the trees,” though I suspect the memory does not do justice to the actual words he used.
