Deborah Stone

Professor Emerita, Brandeis University

I'm a political scientist who came of age in the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the burgeoning of a new field of called Public Policy. Since I hate conflict, I'm a bit puzzled how I ended up in political science. The short answer is that in my first course, we read political philosophy, so I thought the field was about the pursuit of justice and the good society, not conflict. About morality, not science. For my undergraduate thesis, I interviewed Czech intellectuals during the Prague Spring and wrote about their vision of a New Socialism. For my Ph.D. thesis, I went to (then) West Germany to study its national health insurance because I thought it was the most politically feasible model to attain universal insurance in the U.S. 

After finishing my Ph.D., I began teaching and never left school. Once I toyed with a year-long fellowship in the Department of Health and Welfare, but a day of interview conversations that revolved around arcane regulations and legislative maneuvers drove me to hide forever in a world of big ideas and lofty ideals. I had real jobs at Duke University, M.I.T. and Brandeis University, and fairy-tale visiting gigs at Tulane (New Orleans), University of Bremen (Germany), National Chung Cheng University (Taiwan), Aarhus University (Denmark), and in Kathmandu, Nepal, where I helped set up a public policy research and advocacy institute.

My most satisfying writing work was creating and editing a community quarterly magazine for the town of Lempster, NH (pop. 1200). In a small town with the New England Town Meeting form of government, it's easy for one person to have influence without holding political office and spending your life in meetings. Through working with my neighbors on the magazine, I learned how my skills as a writer could be potent political organizing tools. We created a sense of community in a hard-scrabble town where there had been none. If I've had any impact on making the world a better place, it was in Lempster. And you've never heard of it, right?

Beyond writing, I'm into music and nature. I took up flute late in life to be able to play chamber music and go to a summer music camp for grown-ups. I hike as much as I can, stop to contemplate the living and non-living beings who share the natural world, and turn my musings into nature essays.