Politics and Wilson School professor Larry Bartels will leave the University to teach at Vanderbilt next fall, two politics professors confirmed to The Daily Princetonian.
Bartels, who has been a professor at the University for 20 years and is the founding director of the University’s Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, is widely considered to be one of the nation’s leading political scientists.
“It’s going to be a pretty big loss,” politics and Wilson School professor Markus Prior said. “He’s widely respected as someone who is doing groundbreaking work — and work that is relevant not only to academia but beyond that as well.”
The American Political Science Association recognized “Presidential Primaries and the Dynamics of Public Choice,” the first of Bartels’ three books, as the best book on government, politics or international affairs written in 1988.
Since then, Bartels has received many other honors including one of seven fellowships awarded by the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2010.
Many other professors and public figures have also described Bartels’ influence as extending past academia.
Former president Bill Clinton recommended Bartels’ book “Unequal Democracy” in a Daily Beast post in 2008, and a piece in The New Yorker later that year mentioned that Obama had read the book as well.
Bartels contributed an opinion piece to The New York Times that same year, and economics professors Alan Blinder ’67 and Paul Krugman have referred to Bartels in their own pieces for the Times.
Because Bartels has been a professor at the University for 20 years, he will be named a professor emeritus after his departure, in accordance with University policy.
“It has been a great pleasure having him as a colleague,” politics and Wilson School professor Charles Cameron GS ’88 said in an email. “I learned something from every conversation we had. Replacing him will be a challenge.”
Prior and Cameron both declined to comment on the circumstances leading to Bartels’ departure.
Prior and Cameron are both members of the executive committee of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics along with Bartels and politics professor Amaney Jamal.
Bartels declined to be interviewed for this article.
Politics department chair Helen Milner and Dean of the Wilson School Christina Paxson did not respond to requests for comment.
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