On September 27, 2007, Lee Sigelman sent an e-mail message to a large number of coauthors, friends, and colleagues. The message began: “Friends: I'm sorry to burden you with the news that follows …” What followed was Lee's report that earlier in the day, he had received a diagnosis of stage IV colon cancer, that it had spread beyond the colon, and that he had six to twelve months (soon revised upward to almost two years) to live. For the next 27 months, Lee taught his colleagues and friends about how to approach both life and death.

On December 21, 2009, the diagnosis came to fruition, and Lee Sigelman, George Washington University's Columbian College Distinguished Professor of Political Science, passed away. Between the diagnosis and his passing, Lee published one book, edited another, and wrote a dozen articles. He co-founded one of the most successful academic blogs in the country (www.themonkeycage.org); directed GW's honors program; chaired two different university professor searches and the department's chair selection committee; served as a member of the department's Appointment, Promotion, and Tenure Committee and American Politics Search Committee; and took the lead in coordinating numerous academic program reviews throughout the college. Two months before his passing, Lee purchased Carol, his spouse of forty years, a second engagement ring. During the final two weeks of his life, Lee was confined to a hospice bed at his home and regaled family and colleagues with stories and sage advice. He also renewed his wedding vows. In his last week alone, Lee had two articles accepted for publication and one rejected. The day before Lee died, Michael Brintnall, executive director of the APSA, brought Lee a pre-release copy of his forthcoming book The Wit and Humor of Political Science. The day Lee died, we and many others cried.

Lee was born on March 28, 1945, in Watertown, South Dakota, the son of an Irish mother and a Russian Jewish father. Lee's father and uncle owned a store that sold auto parts and rebuilt engines, primarily tractors. During his youth, he worked in the family business by stripping engines to their blocks for repair. When not working in the family business, Lee frequented the Watertown library in search of contact information for people whose autographs he wanted to collect. Lee stopped collecting autographs when he went to college. But until his last days, Lee delighted in showcasing the extraordinary collection of signatures from America's mid-twentieth century “A-list.” Helen Keller, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Alfred C. Fuller, John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, Diego Rivera, H. L. Mencken, and Joe DiMaggio are but a few of those included.

Lee graduated from Watertown High School and Carleton College, where he met Carol. They were married in 1969. He earned his Ph.D. in political science at Vanderbilt in 1973 and commenced his academic career at Texas Tech University, where he quickly rose from assistant to full professor. In 1979, he moved to the University of Kentucky (accepting a demotion to associate professor), became department chair in 1981, and then moved on to the University of Arizona as dean of social and behavioral sciences in 1987.

Lee was hired to chair GW's political science department in 1991. His mandate: build a premier research department. Lee relished the challenge, because he always felt that the second best job in a university was hiring young scholars. The best job was assistant professor. Lee preferred hiring young people, because these were the scholars who were most susceptible to the mentoring he so relished, and because he felt productivity, not reputation, was a better indicator of academic excellence. Although Lee spent part of his first year at GW invalided as the result of a sciatic nerve problem, by 1995, transformation of GW's political science department already was well underway, with ten new assistant professors since his hire. During his tenure at GW, Lee was awarded two of the university's highest honors, for scholarship in 1999 and for service in 2008. Throughout his life, Lee took seriously a commitment to service, collegiality, mentorship, and research. He was the proud former editor of both the American Political Science Review (APSR) and American Politics Quarterly. He served as president of both the Midwest Political Science Association and the National Capital-Area Political Science Association. His editorial board memberships are too numerous to mention. From 1985 to 1987, he served as director of the political science program at the National Science Foundation.

As the editor of the APSR, Lee was particularly proud of his ability to assist first-time APSR authors. When selected to be editor, Lee was convinced that there was first-rate research that was simply being excluded from the journal because scholars did not know how to present their findings in an accessible manner and because the journal had inadvertently embraced policies that excluded work by less recognized scholars. To rectify the situation, Lee reached out and encouraged new authors to submit their work and began the practice of allowing authors to submit lists of potential referees. He felt at liberty to aggressively copy-edit manuscripts that received verdicts of revise and resubmit. On one occasion, an author complained about Lee's heavy-handed copy-editing. Lee's response: “You are under no obligation to make the manuscript more readable and I am under no obligation to publish it.” The author decided that readability was a small price to pay for APSR publication. While Lee wanted to broaden the nature of the submissions, he was adamant in not compromising the quality of the journal. When a member of the profession told Lee that he was being irresponsible by not filling every page that Cambridge University Press had allocated, Lee was amused. He was not interested in editing a journal for which he was obligated to fill pages.

Prior to assuming the editorship of the journal, Lee was constantly referred to on the “Perestroika” listserv as the “well-intentioned” incoming editor of the APSR. Within a few years of assuming the editorial helm, Lee's success was widely recognized. In 2007, he was awarded the APSA's Frank J. Goodnow Distinguished Service Award. At a memorial service (available on the Monkey Cage) held for Lee, Henry Brady, president of the APSA, noted, “In a crucial moment in the history of American political science, a moment when there were fissures within the organization about what we were doing, especially what we were doing at the APSR, Lee became editor of the Review…. Through his energy, decency, grace, and reaching out to different parts of the discipline, he helped put us back together…. He made us a better discipline.”

Lee's commitment to collegiality stemmed in large part from his belief that the profession and its departments could exceed the sum of their parts. It was this recognition that led Lee to coauthor so aggressively. He was proud that, in over two hundred articles, he had coauthored with 129 different people. And he was particularly proud that a large proportion of these coauthors were department colleagues. Early in his tenure at GW, he helped recruit new faculty by highlighting the fact that when he was at Kentucky, he had coauthored with every colleague. Coauthorships were in Lee's mind more than an opportunity to expand one's influence. They were a collegial bond that helped unite the profession.

Lee refused to take his own work so seriously that he could not put it aside. Thus, he was never too busy to review and comment on a colleague's manuscript or grant proposal. When manuscripts were placed in his box with a simple notation that comments were welcome, they were returned at light speed with neat (the penmanship always was amazing), clear, insightful comments. The argument sharpened. The writing immeasurably improved. Its import determined. Its prospects discerned. He was a stickler on form, as all would attest. But he was not pedantic or mean. His comments and edits improved, abbreviated, livened, and clarified. He abhorred what he called, borrowing from Veblen, “conspicuous citation.” That and which were not to be confused. Nor were composed and comprised. And the list goes on.

Meals to Lee were another important opportunity to bond and connect. At Texas Tech, Kentucky, and GW, Lee regularly ate communal lunches with colleagues and brainstormed research ideas. In GW's lunchroom, Lee's typical fare consisted of a cookie—which constantly changed in size, texture, and quality—and a diet Coke. Lee both started the lunchroom tradition at GW and played a leading role in enforcing its norms. One should not be too loud. One should not be too serious. And one should never, ever be self-important. Lee was always thrilled when he could convince a grad student to sit in on the lunch. The chat was eclectic, at turns trivial, serious, or totally obscure. It was pets, kids, the size of yogurt containers, basketball, baseball, university rumors, the Tour de France in season, political science, and food. Always food. Important articles were birthed in the lunchroom—on papal succession, education earmarks, death in Congress, the role of law clerks on the Supreme Court, the use of one-minute floor speeches in the House, vice-president selection, and gambling on the Supreme Court. Lee saw lunch as an important bonding and binding device that went a long way toward cementing collegiality in the department. In May 2010, the GW board of trustees voted to name the room after Lee.

One day in 1997, Lee walked into a routine gathering of departmental brown baggers and announced, “I want to read you a review I just wrote.” It went something like this:

The assembled group stared at him in disbelief. Had Lee lost it? Is this what happens when you turn fifty? He then proceeded to tell us that the review was for a manuscript that he, Janet Box-Steffensmeier, and Kathleen Knight had coauthored. Jan was the corresponding author and the editor (David Lowery) had mistakenly sent Lee his own manuscript to review. Two months later, Jan received four reviews rather than the customary three. Lowery wrote to Jan: “You will see there are four reviewers. While R3 [who was Lee] suggested that the piece reaffirmed his faith in mankind, it is apparent that R3 knows nothing about the subject.” In many respects, the review Lee wrote of his own manuscript was more than a biased and humorous assessment of his own work. It articulated Lee's commitment to never leaving projects unfinished, providing public goods (in this particular case, an anonymous review), and having fun. Although Lowery reports that sending Lee his own manuscript was a mistake, years earlier, Lee himself had sent Lowery his own manuscript to review when Lee was the editor of American Politics Quarterly.

Throughout his academic career Lee was a remarkably prodigious and diverse scholar with an intellectual inquisitiveness that is truly without parallel. Lee published 280 articles and authored six books. Many of these appeared in the some of the discipline's top journals. Seven of his articles appeared in the APSR, 12 in the American Journal of Political Science, and 19 in the Journal of Politics. He published his first book in 1971 and his first APSR article in 1972, both prior to receiving his doctorate.

While Susan Welch and Emmett Buell were the coauthors with whom Lee did his most substantial work, his favorite coauthor was his wife Carol, a psychology professor at GW. Their first collaboration began at Texas Tech. Their first coauthored study explored the differential behavior of drivers at intersections when “authorities” were present or absent. The research, based on an experiment involving a uniformed Tech ROTC student, became an article, “Authority and Conformity,” measuring the violation of traffic regulations.

Although Lee always considered his research on campaigns, and especially on race, his most important contributions to the discipline, he was remarkably eclectic. He wrote about the intersection of major college athletics and fundraising, about its affordability, and about Title IX. He wrote about popular culture, including Raymond Chandler. For this wordsmith, the words of others were a constant attraction. Thus, using textual analysis, he wrote extensively about texts in a variety of forms—state of the union addresses, veto messages, campaign rhetoric, impeachment statements, presidential radio addresses, Supreme Court opinions, and more. As a prolific coauthor, he even wrote about coauthoring. And he published numerous humorous pieces focusing on topics such as the correlation between a president's astrological sign and success in office, whether voters discriminated against bald men (they do not, a point Lee rejoiced in), and the success of politicians from South Dakota. Lee loved figuring things out, and he loved sharing what he learned. This is what made being with Lee so interesting and so amusing.

As a dean, department chair, or National Science Foundation program officer, Lee embraced a relaxed approach to administrative responsibilities and a commitment to building first-tier institutions. Never a formalist, what was right was more important than what the rules called for. He was an astute practitioner of the “oops” strategy of management. “That's against the rules? Oops, I didn't know that. But it's the right thing to do.” He also had an uncanny ability to focus immediately upon the crux of any issue or problem. Sage advice would quickly follow. Unless, of course, character building was in order, in which case one got: “I don't know. You decide.” While Lee was always happy to give advice, his advice was advice, not a mandate. He believed that those he worked with would do the right thing if empowered. In Lee's mind, micromanaging, not slacking, was more likely to undermine administrative capacity. The wisdom of administration never failed him.

Outside of his professional life, Lee had two passions—pets and bikes. Lee was a lover of all four-legged creatures. He and Carol adopted their first basset hound when he was a graduate student at Vanderbilt, and he loved his cat Gooseberry as if he were a dog. While an assistant professor at Texas Tech, Lee became president of the Lubbock Humane Society. At that point, the society was engaged in a fierce battle between those who believed euthanasia was the proper course of action for homeless animals and those who felt that every cat and dog was too adorable to be put to sleep. Lee always maintained that university politics were trivial when compared with humane society politics.

Lee's second passion was cycling. He was an aggressive and active bike rider who loved long-distance racing. By all accounts, he excelled at climbing. In 2005, he came in third in the over-60 category in the 21st Annual Bobby Phillips Turkey Day Bike Race. Third prize was a twenty-pound frozen bird; Lee gave it to the woman who came in fourth. As important to Lee as riding fast was biking in style. Thus, he collected biking outfits (with hot pink a particular favorite) as assiduously as he collected autographs as a child, and he made sure that his miscellaneous paraphernalia and his bike complemented each other.

Lee's sense of style went far beyond his life as a biker. He had strong views about food (barbeque and chocolate chip cookies were good; peanut butter and coffee, bad); music (Enya and Kraftwerk were good; James Taylor, not so much); and color (pink was good; everything else, not). Although Lee was someone who was willing to trust others, he was never shy about articulating his own sense of style. Prior to his passing, he prepared a seven-page set of instructions on what he expected at his memorial service. The instructions included the bike jerseys and photos to be displayed, the food to be served (barbeque and Doris Sigelman's chocolate chip cookies), and the music to be played—including the Watertown High School, Texas Tech, and GW fight songs. (If you were Lee's colleague at Kentucky or Arizona—take it upstairs!) They also mandated that his wife Carol arrive in a Rolls Royce. Lee was a mensch with a style of his own.

On the evening of December 7, 2009, Lee was brought home from the George Washington University Hospital via an ambulance to receive home hospice care. On December 8, Lee appeared to be extremely weak and very tired. He talked slowly and appeared to be reflecting on his life. During a conversation, he stated that he was thinking about “small towns.” When told that thanks to his leadership, GW's political science department was like a small town, Lee smiled and said, “That is good.”

Carol and the hospice workers anticipated that Lee might pass away as early as that evening. But on the morning of December 9, Lee woke up and asked Carol to pull out a pad of a paper and write down what needed to be done on about a half-dozen manuscripts that were not yet accepted. He also asked that a visit from one of GW's recent junior hires be arranged so that Lee could hand off a manuscript. There was work to be done, and another mentoring opportunity awaited.

To his colleagues in the department and well beyond, Lee was the perfect colleague and role model. He frequently said that he loved three things. He loved Carol. He loved his cats. And he loved political science. He was fond of the quip about the South Dakota farmer, emblematic of the reserved Midwesterner, who loved his wife so much that he almost told her. As a good South Dakotan, Lee didn't cotton much to sentimentality or over-seriousness. But he passed away knowing he was loved.