Betty Zisk

Areas of Specialization: Social Movements; Environmental Politics; Political Communication

Professor Zisk earned her Ph.D. at Stanford and taught in the Political Science Department at BU from 1965 until her retirement in 2011.  In her early years, Professor Zisk was one of the few women in a male dominated profession. Eager to help other women follow the trail she had helped blaze, she served on bodies such as the APSA’s Committee on the Status of Women.  Her first journal publication appeared in 1965: her last (a book review) in 2013. In between she produced many articles and four books. Her scholarship focused on topics of continuing significance today and resulted in books on interest groups, money and politics, the media and politics and social movements especially those focused on peace and the environment. Professor Zisk was both open minded about methodology and attentive to methodological issues. Four decades ago, she coauthored an article on the use of simulations in our discipline; experimental work using simulations has become much more common in political science research this century. However, she was also willing to deflate our pretensions as in a Political Research Quarterly article “The Compleat Jargoner: How to Obfuscate the Obvious Without Really Trying.” http://prq.sagepub.com/content/23/1/55.citation

Professor Zisk’s teaching reflected her scholarship with courses on interest groups, social movements, environmental politics, public opinion and political communication. She was both rigorous and caring as a teacher; she would spend two hours talking with an undergraduate, moving from her office to a coffee shop and back again while the conversation continued. She visited her students if they were in hospital. She taught in BU’s program through which prisoners can earn a BA.

The thread running through all her life and work was her devotion to ideals such as social justice, compassion and the environment. In addition to inspiring her teaching and research, these ideals prompted her to be one of the founders of the Massachusetts Green Party and to be involved in the women’s movement and many other causes. Professor Zisk thus lived a life both as a professor and as a citizen that embodied the ideals of the Quaker faith.