The Staff Behind the Scholarship: Honoring Pam Greene’s 35 Years at Yale’s ISPS

Rick Harrison
Pam Greene speaks at a lectern next to a projection screen with a photo of her holding flowers at the front of a class

After helping to organize countless presentations, Pam Greene delivers one of her own as a fairwell.

If you have visited Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies in the last 35 years, you have almost certainly met Pam Greene.

Greene has organized countless events stuffed with even more countless details — from international flights to dietary restrictions to online slide presentations. As a senior administrative assistant, she has cultivated lasting relationships with faculty, fellows, students, and visiting scholars. She has collaborated with colleagues in procurement, grants and contracts, accounts payable, printing, human resources, IT and classroom support, video production, and catering. And coordinated with contacts at hotels, limousine companies, restaurants, vendors, and more.

“Pam is the most meticulous and hardworking person I have ever met,” said Jacob Hacker, former ISPS director and Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science. “She truly is a master, and I don’t know how we’re going to have an ISPS without her. But I do know that her legacy is going to live on through the flourishing of this institution.”

Hacker joined three other current, acting, and former ISPS directors last week in a room filled with colleagues and admirers to celebrate Greene’s retirement at the end of May.

“This has been a golden age,” Hacker said. “I long ago realized that the staff are what make ISPS what it is. And Pam has been a strong foundation of that community.”

Greene traced her path to Yale, discussing how she earned a graduate degree in dance before working as a choreographer, lighting designer, and stage manager at the University of Iowa. The experience taught her how to run events, handle technology, manage complex productions, and deal with the unexpected.

She spent two-and-a-half years in Mali with the Peace Corps, working on fuel-efficient wood-burning stoves, water projects, and a tree nursery.

She studied ethics and public policy at Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics before applying for a job at Yale she found advertised in the New Haven Register. She arrived on campus in 1990 for a position supposedly expiring in 1993. Instead, she stayed for more than 35 years, raising a family and building a personal and professional home.

“This is really rather surreal for me, I have to say,” Greene said, looking at a room filled with current and former coworkers. “This moment means so much to me.”

Alan Gerber speaks at a lectern in a classroom

Alan Gerber stresses how ISPS’s mission relies on a community committed to high standards.

She reminisced about typing carbon-paper expense reports, sending documents through interdepartmental mail envelopes, and organizing events with visiting scholars through phone calls, snail mail, and FedEx. She spoke of how many more female scholars fill conference rooms than when she began at Yale. And how she felt privileged to attend dinners with distinguished speakers holding extraordinary conversations.

“I always feel a little like Cinderella, you know, who got to go to the ball,” Greene said. “Because it was just so much fun.”

Gregory Huber, acting ISPS director and Forst Family Professor of Political Science, credited Greene for her skill in research administration.

“Behind the scenes, Pam has been an administrative warrior who has facilitated our ability to do our jobs and for this to be, I think, the best place on campus to work,” Huber said.

He commended Greene’s efforts to ensure that people arrive at workshops and conferences prepared to participate and focused on ideas instead of logistical details.

“The mission of ISPS is to conduct research and disseminate it,” Huber said. “Pam and our other staff serve a key role in making ISPS a fantastic work environment directed to scholarly excellence.”

Donald Green, former ISPS director and Burgess Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, praised Greene’s skills as a research manager, describing her role in rescuing a twice-failed field experiment to test civic education curriculum in Connecticut schools.

“Not only was the study done to a T, but it was done at a very high level of technical sophistication,” Green said, noting how Greene conducted diplomacy with schools and teachers, organized the project, tracked technical details, oversaw the randomization, and archived the data. “Why in the world did it take me three years to figure out that if you just put Pam in charge, you’d have the study done?”

Alan Gerber, ISPS director and Sterling Professor of Political Science, stressed how ISPS’s mission relies on a community committed to high standards.

“Pam sees things around her and wants to make them excellent,” Gerber said. “That is hard work. That is demanding. That requires effort. It requires conscientiousness.”

He estimated that Pam has been responsible for hundreds of significant events and perhaps 1,000 workshop presentations, noting that the events represent more than mere logistics. They serve as the infrastructure through which scholars encounter work at the research frontier, how they can improve their papers, disseminate their knowledge, and train the next generation.

“All of those things are done much better when we have members of our community who are as exceptional as you,” Gerber said to Greene. “I salute Pam with tremendous gratitude and a challenge for us to continue her work and her legacy.”