Deborah Stone

Professor Emerita, Brandeis University

In my first political science course, we read political philosophy, so I thought the field was all about the pursuit of human welfare, justice and peace through designing good government. That's the only way I can explain how someone who hates power struggles and conflict became a political scientist. In college I majored in Russian Studies (truth be known, so I wouldn't have to restrict myself to one discipline). For my undergraduate thesis, I interviewed Czech reformers during the Prague Spring and wrote about their vision for a New Socialism. 

As graduation loomed, I was afraid to leave school and get a real job, so I punted and applied to graduate school. 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 for universal insurance in the U.S.  Jimmy Carter's Department of Health, Education and Welfare gave me a contract to design the physician-reimbursement piece of its national insurance proposal, based on the German model. A couple of months after I submitted my report, Ronald Reagan was elected. You all know the end of that story, but for a brief moment I came close.

With a new field of "Public Policy" in the making, I found myself considered a policy person. Duke University's brand new Institute of Policy Sciences hired me to teach courses on "Health Policy” and "The Politics of the Policy Making Process." I pretty much had to invent both from scratch. After Duke, I taught at M.I.T. and Brandeis, with some fabulous gigs in Germany, Taiwan, Denmark, Poland, and Nepal, where I helped set up a public policy research and advocacy institute. 

If you'd like to watch me summarize my career in three minutes, here's a video I had made for Aarhus University in Denmark when they awarded me an honorary doctorate in 2023:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7hAz3zoNz0https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7hAz3zoNz0

Since retiring, I've been indulging all my passions, writing chief among them. I scratched a long-time intellectual itch in a book about the pitfalls of trying to count the uncountable (Counting: How We Use Numbers to Decide What Matters). I'm now working on a memoir about how the eight foreign languages I've studied shaped my life trajectory and taught me about the magical powers of language. I re-started flute lessons, and, not having played while in school, I never dreamed I'd be able to play in an orchestra until fellow Examiner Kristo Kondakci invited me to join his Kendall Square Orchestra. 

I'm an avid amateur naturalist and hiker, often take to the woods for peaceful contemplation, and turn my rambles into literary nature essays. During the first summer of the pandemic, my local arts center in New Hampshire suspended its summer classes for kids and solicited ideas for teaching creativity outdoors. I made a video about finding fantasy creatures in the woods, doing my best imitation of Mr. Rogers. You can watch it here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzzef-g1LDshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzzef-g1LDs