Theodore Mitau Lecture

Theodore Mitau was born in Berlin in 1920 to a well-established Jewish family. By the age of fourteen, he had to adorn the Star of David to the clothes he wore to school, and soon thereafter realized that further educational possibilities would be severely constrained by Nazi policies toward the Jews. During the mid-1930s, German Jews primarily feared increased discrimination and exclusion; no one had yet thought of genocide. Accordingly, he left for the United States, where he completed his undergraduate studies at Macalester College, and earned a doctorate in Political Science at the University of Minnesota. No other member of his family survived the Holocaust. Despite all efforts to get his mother to safety in the United States, Rosel Mitau eventually perished in the Theresienstadt concentration camp near Prague.

Though he buried within himself much of this personal tragedy, even from his wife and children, his daughter Andrea Mitau Kircher notes “ It made him that much more determined to accomplish something, to try to make the world a better place.” No doubt, the energy and passion with which he threw himself into his teaching and research stemmed from this intensely personal sense of mission. One can see it captured in photographs of Mitau the teacher; one can sense it in the anecdotes alumni recount of this small, wiry man with boundless enthusiasm who, in a probing but joyful Socratic manner, invariably managed to elicit from them the best, individually and collectively. Under Theodore Mitau’ s leadership, Macalester’ s new Political Science Department flowered into one of the most preeminent at the College, and soon generated both state and national attention, given its association with Hubert Humphrey, Mitau’ s colleague, and Walter Mondale, a student of both.

Unlike older German academic expatriates who were formed in a tradition at once culturally brilliant but politically and pedagogically autocratic, Mitau fully embraced American democratic institutions and values. His scholarly interests largely centered on U.S. Politics, primarily the areas of state and local government, and the Supreme Court. His major books include: Politics in Minnesota (1960); Proximate Solutions: Case Studies in State and Local Government (1964); State and Local Government: Politics and Processes (1966); and Decade of Decision: The Supreme Court and the Constitutional Revolution (1967). He addressed similar topics in numerous articles published in professional journals of law and the social sciences. Mitau’ s intense commitment to democratic institutions was also reflected in an active public life quite unusual for otherwise busy and engaged academics. He was a consultant to governmental agencies, commissions, and committees, as well as to public service associations (U.S. Civil Service Commission; U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare; U.S. Senate Committee on Constitutional Revision; Minnesota Legislative Commission on Election Laws; and the Minnesota Historical Society). In March 1968, he left Macalester to become Chancellor of the Minnesota State University System where he instituted innovative methods of teaching and reached out to a broad spectrum of non-traditional students. In 1976, he was appointed a Distinguished Service Professor by the Board of Trustees of the state system, recognizing his manifold contributions as well as his desire to pursue his teaching and research interests. That same year, he returned to Macalester College as an adjunct professor of Political Science. At the time of his untimely death in 1979, Mitau was working on a new volume entitled Constitutional Frontiers in Personal Privacy.

Lectures

2023 Mitau Lecture

Adom Getachew

“The Universal Race: Garveyism and the Practices of Pan Americanism.”

2022 Mitau Lecture

John Ikenberry

“Does the Liberal Order Have a Future?”

2021 Mitau Lecture

William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen

“From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-first Century”

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard

“I’m Really Sorry about What Happened to You but, You’re Not One of Us, You’re a Foreigner’: A History of Afrophobia in Contemporary South Africa”

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Previous Mitau Lecturers

2020

• Patrick J. Deneen
  The Case for Illiberal Democracy

2019

• Cathy Cohen
  Race, Race, and Vulnerability: The Politics of millennials in the Era of Trump

2018

• Jill Locke
  The Trump Presidency and the Death of Shame

2017

• Jennifer L. Hochschild
  Here They Treat Us Like a Different Race: Political Implications of Class-in-Race Inequality

2016

• Ian F. Haney López
  Trumpeting Racism: Race, Politics, and Economic Jeopardy for All

2015

• Adolph Reed
  How The Left Redefined Social Justice: Capitalist Class Power and Inequality from FDR to Obama

2014

• Alfie Kohn
  Many Children Left Behind: “School Reform” and Corporate-Style Education Policy

2013

• Harold Hongju Koh
  International Law As Smart Power

2012

• Lani Guinier
  Rethinking Race and Class

2011

• Rogers Smith
  Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

2010

• Paul Light
  Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service, NYU Wagner

2009

• Wendy Brown
  Professor of Political Science At University of California, Berkeley

2008

• Alexander Wendt
  Mershon Professor of International Security At The Ohio State University

2007

• Derrick Bell
  Visiting Professor of Law At New York University School of Law

2006

• Ann-Marie Slaughter
  Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs At Princeton University

2005

• Kathryn Sikkink
  Arleen Carlson Professor of Political Science At the University of Minnesota

2004

• Orlando Patterson
  John Cowles Professor of Sociology At Harvard University

2003

• Michael Ignatieff
  Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy At Harvard University

2002

• Jeffrey Rosen
  Associate Professor at the George Washington University Law School

2001

• Michael Walzer
  UPS Foundations Professor and Executive Officer of the School of Social Science, Institute for Advance Study, At Princeton University

2000

• Martha C. Nussbaum
  Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at The University of Chicago

1999

• Michael J. Sandel
  Professor of Government at Harvard University

1998

• Randall Kennedy
  Professor at the Harvard Law School

1997

• Jean Bethke Elshtain
• Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics, University of Chicago

1996

• Theodore J. Lowi
  John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions, Cornell University

1994

• Nancy Fraser
  Professor or Philosophy, Northwestern University

1993

• Andrew Ross
  Professor of American Studies, Princeton University

1992

• Richard Mohr
  Professor of Philosophy, University of Illinois

1991

• Sylvia A. Law
  Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law, Medicine, and Psychiatry, New York University Law School

1990

• Benjamin R. Barber
  Professor and Walt Whitman Chair of Political Science, Rutgers University

1989

• Robert Ellis Smith
  Editor, The Privacy Journal

1988

• Frances Olsen,
  Professor or Law, UCLA and
• Patricia Williams
  Professor of Law, City University of New York at Queens

1986

• Philip B. Kurland
  Professor of Law, New York University

1985

• Howard Zinn,
  Professor of Political Science, Boston University

1984

• Ruth Macklin
  Professor of Bioethics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine

1983

• Fred W. Friendly
  CBS Broadcast Journalist

1982

• Alan F. Westin
  Professor of Law and Government, Harvard University

1981

• Arthur R. Miller
  Professor of Law, Harvard University

1980

• Stephen K. Bailey
  Professor of Public Policy and Education, Harvard University

1979

• The Honorable Walter F. Mondale