Walking through the Woodrow Wilson School, it’s not unusual to hear the name of the late Donald E. Stokes ’51 fondly evoked. Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School for 18 years, Stokes, one of the giants of 20th century social science, was a distinctive, colorful presence on campus and in state and local politics.

A specialist in public opinion research, Stokes worked with Oxford colleague David Butler in the early 1960s on the first-ever nationwide study of the British electorate. The books he co-authored, Political Change in Britain, The American Voter and Elections and the Political Order, became required reading for students of politics on both sides of the Atlantic.

“Reading one of his books or papers, one knew one was in the presence of a master,” British political scientist Anthony King recalled two years ago in The Guardian, following Stokes’ death from leukemia at the age of 69. “Gracious and invariably well-dressed, Stokes, had he been British, would have been a grandee, and he took great pride in being a ‘Princeton man.’”

Appointed Woodrow Wilson School dean in 1974, Stokes led the school, one of the foremost centers of public and international affairs, through one of its most vibrant eras of expansion. Under his tenure, the faculty doubled, and the size of the graduate program, the number of interdisciplinary courses and participation by the world’s public affairs leaders were greatly increased.

Throughout such fast-paced change, his colleagues say, Stokes maintained his magnanimity, enthusiasm, wisdom, kindness, unquenchable optimism and affection. “In all the years I knew Don, I don’t think I ever saw him lose his temper or heard him say a harsh word against anyone,” says Northwestern University Law Professor Leigh Bienen, whom Stokes hired as undergraduate dean of the Woodrow Wilson School. “He was warm, caring, and such a wonderful, broad and principled thinker. He was strong on affirmative action and women, and he could appreciate a wide variety of approaches to academic work, which is all too rare.”

In addition, Stokes was fun. Like others, Princeton Professor and Director of the Office of Population Research T. James Trussell *75 recalls Stokes’ baroque, distinct and often hilarious use of language. “A tangible benefit of knowing Don was a considerable expansion of my vocabulary,” says Trussell. “Who can ever forget words such as moiety, Ptolemaic, psephological, Copernican, and especially, spatchcocked, all rendered in pear-shaped tones during perfectly ordinary, everyday, often one-to-one conversation?

"Don taught me an extraordinary number of things,” Trussell says. “The intricacies of the love life of Edward VII, whose mistress’s daughter’s flat we shared during a wonderful year of leave in London, and the value of patiently waiting as some crisis unfolds when my natural impulse is to do something.”

“Don was a gentle person,” says Northwestern University President Henry S. Bienen, who not only followed Stokes as dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, but also once traveled with him by horse and camel to the pyramids in Egypt. “Don usually got his way; he was persistent. But he also had a great capacity to laugh at himself and to have fun. He was a serious person who wanted to do well in the world, and he did.”

Anthony King recalled the sweetness of Stokes’ relationship with his wife, Sybil, who still lives in Princeton. “They held hands in public,” King wrote. “When someone described him to Sybil as ‘the man with the golden voice,’ she replied, ‘That must make me the woman with the golden ear.’”

Reprinted with permission from Princeton: With One Accord, Spring 1999, by Kathryn Watterson published by Princeton University's Office of Development Communications.

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