James David Barber, the political scientist who revolutionized America�s perception of its presidents and challenged Duke�s attitude toward its faculty, died at his Durham home Sunday. He was 74.
James David Barber, the political scientist who revolutionized America’s perception of its presidents and challenged Duke’s attitude toward its faculty, died at his Durham home Sunday. He was 74.
Barber left Yale University for Duke in 1972, the same year he published The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House, which brought him and Duke’s political science department national attention. By the time Barber faced Alzheimer’s disease and retired in 1995, he had already championed faculty governance, shot down the possibility for Richard Nixon’s presidential library to be established at Duke and butted plenty of heads in sticking by his principles.
“He was fun, funny, humane and willing to stand up for things that he thought were right and proper,” said political science professor Tom Spragens, who worked with Barber during his tenure.
In The Presidential Character, Barber said a candidate’s character, worldview and political style “resonates with the political situation the President faces.” The predictive approach and its psychological undertones had particular relevance to Nixon’s ensuing scandal and maintained its appeal as the book went through four editions and Barber became an everyday media pundit.
“[The book] was important in assessing our presidents and helping journalists learn how to evaluate presidents. The whole range of qualities you look for in a president, David had a very unique perspective on that,” said Rep. David Price, D-N.C., who read drafts of The Presidential Character while Barber was his dissertation advisor at Yale before Barber recruited Price to become a political science and public policy professor at Duke.
Price’s addition to the faculty was one of several moves Barber made in helping pave the way for the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, where he also served as director for the Center for Communications and Journalism. But Barber also took Sanford to task in the then-president’s push to house the papers of Nixon, Law ’37, in a library at Duke.
Barber won that battle, as he did when he took a stand on several campus issues in the 1980s and ’90s. Barber called for a louder faculty voice in University decision-making policy. “He took faculty governance very seriously, and he was a wonderful balance to those of us in the administration,” former President Keith Brodie said.
Colleagues said Barber stood up for what he believed was just, and nowhere did he make his convictions more audible than in a high-profile academic spat in 1991. Barber was involved in developing a local chapter of the National Association of Scholars, a group committed to traditional Western standards in education. But progressive English chair Stanley Fish, Duke’s other prized professor and vocal faculty presence, contended that the NAS was “racist, sexist and homophobic.”
The two would remain occasional adversaries, but Price said it was Barber’s nature not to back down. “He could assert himself when he needed to, but he was a very gracious person whom people liked,” Price said. “There never seemed to be any lingering animosities after these scrapes.... That’s because underneath it all he was a very fine person who could get along with almost anybody.”
Barber also served as chair of Amnesty International U.S.A. in the mid-1980s. After his retirement, he developed a program for blind people in Durham and continued to raise money for a local soup kitchen through his church, St. Philip’s Episcopal, where Barber’s funeral is scheduled for 3 p.m. Sunday.
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