Haveman’s loss felt deeply by La Follette School, UW–Madison colleagues
Robert Haveman, professor emeritus and former director of the La Follette School of Public Affairs at UW–Madison, died June 18 at age 85. Colleagues are mourning the loss of a scholar, teacher, mentor, and public servant who always found time to help others.
A member of the UW faculty since 1970, Haveman served as the second director of the La Follette School from 1988 to 1991. He was director of the UW–Madison Institute for Research on Poverty from 1971 to 1975 and chair of the Department of Economics from 1993 to 1996.
“Bob is the one person who has had the most influence on my academic life and career,” says Tim Smeeding, a La Follette School professor who, as a grad student here, had Haveman as his dissertation advisor. Haveman “remained my friend, guide, and mentor through the ups and downs of the next 51 years,” says Smeeding. “Thanks to his gentle nudges and outright pushes, he gave me both inspiration and dedication to the craft of academia in research, teaching, and in life more generally.”
Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Haveman was a first-generation college student who received a BA in economics from Calvin College and a PhD in economics from Vanderbilt University. Before joining the UW–Madison faculty, he worked at Grinnell College and in the U.S. Congress as senior economist on the Joint Economic Committee’s Subcommittee on Economy in Government.
Haveman was an award-winning teacher and prolific scholar who wrote about public finance, the economics of environmental and natural resources policy, benefit-cost analysis, and the economics of poverty, inequality, and social policy. He was a research associate at Resources for the Future from 1964 to 1965 and 1969 to 1970, a fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation from 1991 to 1992, and a fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study from 1975 to 1976, 1996 to 1997, and in 2007.
Haveman’s research evaluated the adequacy of older workers’ retirement savings, the effects of health shocks on retirees’ assets, the impacts of the Section 8 housing voucher program, and methods to determine how public policy measures affect employment.
Sheldon Danziger, president of the Russell Sage Foundation, met Haveman in 1974 when Haveman hired him for a postdoctoral fellowship that encouraged early career scholars to become poverty researchers. “At the time, there were few graduate school courses on poverty research and little empirical research,” says Danziger. “Fifty years later, there are several generations of poverty researchers who are professors at universities across the country.”
La Follette School professor Geoffrey Wallace, who was mentored by Haveman as a graduate student and later co-taught with him, recalls “an exceptional instructor” from whom he learned “to be patient, go slow, check my ego, and not assume much in the way of prerequisite knowledge.”
“As an academic colleague, Bob was exceptional,” says Wallace. “Feedback from Bob usually came with more questions from him. Sometimes it wasn’t clear where he was going with these questions, but they always seemed to lead somewhere that provided insights that I hadn’t thought about.”
“Bob really took an interest in all the people who worked at La Follette, irrespective of their position,” says Wallace, who remembers Haveman as kind, charming and humble — with a great sense of humor. “I wasn’t using my La Follette office much, and he either put up (or conspired with people to put up) a full-sized poster of the wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin on my door. The thing was on there for a week before I even noticed.”
Haveman was an award-winning teacher and prolific scholar who wrote about public finance, the economics of environmental and natural resources policy, benefit-cost analysis, and the economics of poverty, inequality, and social policy.
Haveman in his office in 2001.