GERALD POMPER is Board of
Governors Professor of Political Science at the Eagleton Institute of Politics
of Rutgers University (Emeritus). A specialist in American elections and politics,
he is the author or editor of nineteen books, including Passions and Interests, Elections in America, and Voters’
Choice. His most recent books are The Election of 2000, the seventh volume in a 24-year series on
U.S. national elections, and The Future of American Democratic Politics, a
year-long symposium he developed while Interim Director of the Walt Whitman
Center at Rutgers. His book on Ordinary
Heroes and American Democracy will be published by Yale University
Press in 2004..
Educated at Columbia and Princeton, Dr. Pomper also
has been a Fulbright or visiting professor at Tel-Aviv University, Oxford, and
Australian National University, and held the first Tip O'Neill Chair in Public
Life at Northeastern University. He has been honored for career achievement by
the American Political Science Association and has served as an expert witness
on campaign finance, reapportionment, and political party regulation. At
Rutgers for over forty years, he was chairman of the University and Livingston
College political science departments and chaired a select committee that
proposed major changes in undergraduate education on the New Brunswick campus.
His civic activities include eight years on his local
board of education, current membership on his local zoning board, summer
institutes for high school teachers, evaluations for New Jersey's former
department of higher education, and service as chair of the Free Speech
committee of the American Civil Liberties Union.