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Analysis Of Robert E. Lane

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“Eric, come right inside,” a note posted on the door of Robert Lane’s apartment informs me. The air-conditioning clicks on as I enter. Two large bookshelves line one wall while faded posters supporting Howard Dean and Barack Obama are tacked up in the adjacent kitchen. “Professor Lane?” I ask the empty den. No answer. I drop my backpack on a chair and walk down a hallway, past a modern-looking painting, toward the one room with the lights turned on.

“Professor Lane?” I ask again.

“I’ll be right with you,” a quiet voice responds, “I’m just finishing up now.”

Robert E. Lane is the Eugene Meyer Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the Yale University. He arrived at Yale in 1950, where he taught full-time until 1987. In 2003, Lane and his wife Helen moved into an apartment in the Whitney Center, a continuing care retirement community in Hamden, just a few miles from Yale’s campus.

When I meet him, Lane is wearing a gray cardigan; he has thick, saucer-like glasses and a hearing aid in each ear. As he guides me back to the den, he moves with a sure-footedness that belies the 96 candles on his last birthday cake. “Tell me again,” he says as he takes a seat at the kitchen table, “what exactly you’re looking for. You want to talk about Yale’s political science, and the department after all of these years?”

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The Whitney Center is a large, curving, red-and-purple brick building. The first floor has a cafeteria and a spacious lobby filled with high-backed

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