Calvin Mackenzie '67 to Receive 2019 Distinguished Educator Award

By Bowdoin College
For his extraordinary contributions to the field of government as an inspiring teacher, influential scholar, engaging writer, and skillful practitioner, Calvin Mackenzie, a member of the Bowdoin Class of 1967, has been honored by the Bowdoin College Alumni Council with the 2019 Distinguished Educator Award.
Calvin Mackenzie ’67

Over his four-decade career as an educator, Mackenzie, the Goldfarb Family Distinguished Professor of American Government Emeritus at Colby College, has made a deep and lasting impact on generations of students, public servants, and the American public at large. 

After graduating from Bowdoin cum laudewith honors in government, he began a PhD program at Tufts University, but his educational pursuits were interrupted when he was drafted into the Army for service in the Vietnam War. MacKeenzie served fourteen months with the First Cavalry Division in Vietnam. He later entered Harvard University, where he earned a PhD in 1975. He was appointed to the faculty at George Washington University, and, after three years teaching there and working on Capitol Hill, he joined the faculty at Colby in 1978.

A beloved teacher whose courses in government, particularly on the American presidency, were among the most popular across the curriculum, he balanced excellent teaching, influential scholarship, and meaningful public service at the highest level over a career spanning forty-one years. The federal government has frequently tapped his expertise in presidential transitions and appointments, and, in addition to educating presidential staffers, congressional committees, the US Department of the Treasury, and the Internal Revenue Service on these topics, he has served as senior advisor to both the Presidential Appointee Initiative and the National Commission on Public Service and as a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. In Maine, he served as chair of the Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices and as an alternating chair of the Maine Board of Arbitration and Conciliation. Mackenzie also served on the Bowdoin College Board of Trustees from 1986 to 1998.

He has authored and edited more than a dozen books, including The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s, a book he coauthored that was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History. He has served as the John Adams Fellow at the Institute of United States Studies at the University of London, as a Fulbright professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University in China, and as a Fulbright lecturer at the Vietnamese Academy of Social Sciences in Hanoi, and he has been elected a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. In 2015, he published Independence, a novel about the American Revolution.

The Distinguished Educator Award was established in 1964 to recognize outstanding achievement in education (teaching or administration) by a Bowdoin alumnus or alumna in any field and at any level of education.

The award will be among those presented Saturday, June 1, 2019, during Reunion Convocation. Read about the other award recipients.

Registration for Reunion 2019 (May 30-June 2) begins in March.