Former Sun Columnist & 
Political Science Professor 
Howard Reiter Dies at 66

By Richard B. Hoffman '67

Howard L. Reiter '67, a Sun columnist in the mid-1960s, died January 10, 2012. He was Professor Emeritus and former Chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Connecticut, where he had taught for 35 years. He served as President of the New England Political Science Association last year after retiring from his university post. Howard’s specialty was American electoral politics and in his several books—including Selecting the President (1985), Parties and Elections in Corporate America (1993), and Counter Realignment: Political Change in the Northeastern United States (with Jeffrey M. Stonecash) (2011)—and his many published articles, he emphasized paying attention to electoral statistics, which he plumbed in search of data to explain political trends and developments. In this, he followed the approach favored by his advisor at Harvard, Professor Seymour Martin Lipset, as well as his teachers at Cornell, where he received his BA, having studied with such notables in then-renowned government department as Andrew Hacker and Allan P. Sindler. 

Howard came to Cornell as a conservative, having grown up in East Meadow on Long Island, home of the then-powerful Nassau County Republican machine. However, by the time he was a senior, he played a major role in the activities of the foremost moderate Republican group of the 1960s, the Ripon Society; as the GOP moderate and liberal wings disappeared, he moved on and headed the Northeastern Connecticut Civil Liberties Union in the 1980s. In 1967, he received the John F. Kennedy Memorial Award presented by the Cornell Class of 1964 each year to a top student aiming for a career in public service.

In 2001 he was named to the Uppsala Chair in American Studies, sponsored by the Fulbright Distinguished Chairs Program at Uppsala University in Sweden. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Essex in England and the University of Tartu in Estonia, as well as delivering many lectures on American politics under the banner of the U.S. Information Agency in many countries. He often served as a commentator on Connecticut politics for broadcast stations there and in the Hartford Courant and New Haven Register.

Howard enjoyed answering questions on radio call-in programs, where he would summon up relevant data to respond calmly but precisely to ideologically-based inquiries. Perhaps his greatest legacy to his students at UConn and elsewhere was his insistence that they back up speculations and theories of political behavior with hard evidence and data, of which he was a master.