Theodore Mitau Lecture

Theodore Mitau was born in Berlin in 1920 to a well-established Jewish family. By the age of fourteen, he had to adorn the Star of David to the clothes he wore to school, and soon thereafter realized that further educational possibilities would be severely constrained by Nazi policies toward the Jews. During the mid-1930s, German Jews primarily feared increased discrimination and exclusion; no one had yet thought of genocide. Accordingly, he left for the United States, where he completed his undergraduate studies at Macalester College, and earned a doctorate in Political Science at the University of Minnesota. No other member of his family survived the Holocaust. Despite all efforts to get his mother to safety in the United States, Rosel Mitau eventually perished in the Theresienstadt concentration camp near Prague.

Though he buried within himself much of this personal tragedy, even from his wife and children, his daughter Andrea Mitau Kircher notes “ It made him that much more determined to accomplish something, to try to make the world a better place.” No doubt, the energy and passion with which he threw himself into his teaching and research stemmed from this intensely personal sense of mission. One can see it captured in photographs of Mitau the teacher; one can sense it in the anecdotes alumni recount of this small, wiry man with boundless enthusiasm who, in a probing but joyful Socratic manner, invariably managed to elicit from them the best, individually and collectively. Under Theodore Mitau’ s leadership, Macalester’ s new Political Science Department flowered into one of the most preeminent at the College, and soon generated both state and national attention, given its association with Hubert Humphrey, Mitau’ s colleague, and Walter Mondale, a student of both.

Unlike older German academic expatriates who were formed in a tradition at once culturally brilliant but politically and pedagogically autocratic, Mitau fully embraced American democratic institutions and values. His scholarly interests largely centered on U.S. Politics, primarily the areas of state and local government, and the Supreme Court. His major books include: Politics in Minnesota (1960); Proximate Solutions: Case Studies in State and Local Government (1964); State and Local Government: Politics and Processes (1966); and Decade of Decision: The Supreme Court and the Constitutional Revolution (1967). He addressed similar topics in numerous articles published in professional journals of law and the social sciences. Mitau’ s intense commitment to democratic institutions was also reflected in an active public life quite unusual for otherwise busy and engaged academics. He was a consultant to governmental agencies, commissions, and committees, as well as to public service associations (U.S. Civil Service Commission; U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare; U.S. Senate Committee on Constitutional Revision; Minnesota Legislative Commission on Election Laws; and the Minnesota Historical Society). In March 1968, he left Macalester to become Chancellor of the Minnesota State University System where he instituted innovative methods of teaching and reached out to a broad spectrum of non-traditional students. In 1976, he was appointed a Distinguished Service Professor by the Board of Trustees of the state system, recognizing his manifold contributions as well as his desire to pursue his teaching and research interests. That same year, he returned to Macalester College as an adjunct professor of Political Science. At the time of his untimely death in 1979, Mitau was working on a new volume entitled Constitutional Frontiers in Personal Privacy.