About

Biography

Bob Lawrence joined CSU in 1971, but even before that, he had already launched a distinguished academic and professional career. After receiving his B.S. in Journalism at Kansas State University in 1954, Bob served in the Air Force, reaching the rank of First Lieutenant with the 326th Fighter Squadron. He then earned an M.A. (1959) and a Ph.D. (1962) in Political Science from the University of Kansas. After grad school, Bob was a Research Staff Member for the Hudson Institute in 1962-1963. The Hudson Institute was best known for the work of its director, Herman Kahn, a noted author on military strategy. In 1963, with Kahn and three others, Bob co-authored "A Study of Escalation: The Use of Force in Peace and War." Lawrence then taught at Texas Tech, where he was tenured in 1966, as a Research Staff Member for the Strategic Studies Center of the Stanford Research Institute, and then as a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Arizona. After joining the Political Science department in 1971, Lawrence was promoted to the rank of professor in 1973. A long list of scholarly books, textbooks, and scholarly articles, book chapters, monographs, and studies followed, as Bob became well known in the region and nationally as an expert on nuclear weapons strategies, arms control/disarmament and other topics of acute interest during those Cold War years. He would tell his students it was not the Soviets who were ten feet tall, but the U.S. His latest journal article, published in 2004, is titled “The Preventive/Preemptive War Doctrine Cannot Justify the Iraq War.” Bob is also a long time member of the Fort Collins Rotary Club. Over the years, media outlets frequently relied on his expertise on national security matters. He was a faculty sponsor for the ROTC program on campus, and for many years, he served as CSU’s Pre-Law advisor. Bob’s outstanding teaching in classes on American politics, U.S. foreign policy and security policy made him one of the most popular professors in the department. Past students keep in touch with him frequently; a sure sign of the impact he had on them. In recognition of this service, he received the department’s Outstanding Teacher Award, as well as the College of Liberal Arts’ Stern Award for Teaching and the campus-wide Lory Award for Excellence in Teaching.