Weissberg, Robert 1941-

PERSONAL:

Born May 25, 1941, in New York, NY; son of Herbert (a realtor) and Frances (a homemaker) Weissberg; married Georgeanne Hume (divorced); children: Max H. Ethnicity: "White." Education: Bard College, A.B., 1965; University of Wisconsin— Madison, Ph.D., 1970. Politics: Republican. Religion: Jewish.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. E-mail— rweissbe@uiuc.edu.

CAREER:

Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, assistant professor, 1969-75; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, professor, 1975-2003.

MEMBER:

National Arts Club, Philadelphia Society.

WRITINGS:

(With Herbert Jacob) Elementary Political Analysis, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1970, 2nd edition, 1975.

(With Mark V. Nadel) American Democracy: Theory and Reality, Wiley (New York, NY), 1972.

Political Learning, Political Choice, and Democratic Citizenship, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1974.

Public Opinion and Popular Government, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1976.

Understanding American Government, Holt, Rinehart & Winston (New York, NY), 1980, 2nd edition, Random House (New York, NY), 1986.

Political Tolerance: Balancing Community and Diversity, Sage Publications (Thousand Oaks, CA), 1998.

The Politics of Empowerment, Praeger (Westport, CT), 1999.

(Editor) Democracy and the Academy, Nova Science Publishers (Huntington, NY), 2000.

Polling, Policy, and Public Opinion: The Case against Heeding the "Voice of the People," Palgrave (New York, NY), 2002.

The Limits of Civic Activism: Cautionary Tales on the Use of Politics, Transaction Publishers (New Brunswick, NJ), 2005.

Contributor to professional journals, including Public Opinion Quarterly, Journal of Politics, Public Interest, Critical Review, Political Behavior, Society, and American Political Science Review.

SIDELIGHTS:

Robert Weissberg told CA: "My research ideas ultimately derive from personal observations, often of everyday life. My civic activism book, for example, drew on what I witnessed among college students—rushing from cause to cause with scarcely any idea of what they were joining. Just ‘being active,’ it would seem, outranked content. I further observed that groups that stressed politics as the remedy for their ills often failed in their quests but still insisted on politics as the best solution.

"My work on tolerance comes from seeing schools pushing this idea as the cure for social discord despite zero evidence that ‘appreciating differences’ has any benefit for anything. I am writing a critical analysis of the current infatuation with tolerance: a short book arguing that what is being advanced has little to do with the historic meaning of tolerance and is really about imposing an ideological agenda."