The Charles A. McCoy Career Achievement Award recognizes a progressive political scientist who has had a long, successful career as a writer, teacher, and activist.
2026 Nomination Deadline: April 1st, 2026
Committee: Joseph Peschek and Kenton Worcester
Contact: Joseph Peschek (Chair) jpeschek@hamline.edu
2025 Recipient: Dr. Marvin Surkin
Nomination by Clyde W. Barrow:
Dr. Surkin exemplifies every aspect of the award’s purpose in recognizing “a progressive political scientist who has had a long, successful career as a writer, teacher and activist.” Marvin Surkin (1938–present) was a founding member of the Caucus for a New Political Science (CNPS) in 1967. In 1967, Surkin was a graduate student at New York University, studying under H. Mark Roelofs and Bertell Ollman. During the 1967 annual business meeting of the APSA, members expressed their dissatisfaction that there were no panels on the Vietnam War, poverty, or urban riots, but the main source of dissatisfaction was that Article II of the APSA Constitution was being used by officials to block votes on any resolutions that took political positions on these issues. In addition, microphones had been placed on the podium so that APSA officials could address the audience, but no microphones were made available to the audience for purposes of public discussion and deliberation. This arrangement drew the ire of New Left political scientists, who saw it as an arrogant affront to participatory democracy and revelatory of Behavioral Establishment’s oligarchical control of the profession. When a microphone was finally provided to the audience after much protest from the floor, the moderator turned it off to silence demands by audience members that the business meeting discuss a resolution opposing the Vietnam War.
It was at this point that Marvin Surkin raised his hand to declaim that everybody who opposed what had just happened in the meeting should reconvene in the room next door. With that spontaneous call to action, the Caucus for a New Political Science came into being as a rump convention of the APSA. It can truly be said that there would not be a Caucus for a Critical Political Science today without Dr. Surkin’s courageous act in defiance of what at the time was a powerful APSA oligarchy. Surkin was elected to the first Executive Committee of the CNPS, and he was an active leader in CNPS until the early 1980s. In 1971, he founded the Caucus’s first journal, Politics & Society, with Ira Katznelson.
Surkin received his B.A. in Political Science from the University of Florida, Gainesville (1960). He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science at New York University (1972) and wrote his dissertation on “Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenological Critique of Political Science.” He is a specialist in comparative urban politics and social change.
Surkin began his academic career as a professor at Moravian College (1966–68) and the Borough of Manhattan Community College (1968–69), but thereafter he became something of an itinerant professor with adjunct and visiting positions at Adelphi University (1969–71), LaGuardia Community College (1971–74), Autonomous University of Barcelona (1972–73), Fairleigh Dickinson University (1976), and The Union Institute and University (1978–2005), Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Morelos (2003–06), Long Island University, and Ramapo State College of New Jersey (2011). For a period of time, Surkin practiced clinical acupuncture in private practice (1987–93) and St. Joseph’s Hospital (1988–93).
Surkin (1968, 179) wrote one of the first articles explaining the origins and purpose of the CNPS, which condemned “the expansion of cold-war oriented research in the social sciences” through an expose of the ties between two top APSA officials and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (the so-called Kirkpatrick/Kampelman Affair). Surkin described the new Caucus as “composed mostly of young liberals – graduate students and faculty – who had begun to feel estranged by the unwillingness of the APSA to take stands on issues of critical importance to the country and the world.” Surkin (1968, 180) noted that a sprinkling of the Caucus’s founders were “young radicals who were still breathing the tumultuous air of the National Conference for a New Politics,” which had also convened in Chicago a few days earlier for the purpose of forging a unified political program among white and black radicals of the New Left. Surkin described the young radicals as leaning “toward socialism and progressive politics, anti-imperialism, and so on” and he identified himself as “more into that orientation” than into liberalism. It is likely that the Caucus took its name – “New Political Science” – from the young radicals who had attended this conference the previous week. Surkin (1969) followed up on his expose by initiating a debate with Ithiel de Sola Pool (1966, 1970) on whether political scientists should work as consultants to corporate and government organizations, which Surkin claimed infused their scholarship and teaching with the ideological biases of ruling elites, while implicating political scientists in the exploitative, and even criminal, practices of these organizations.
Surkin helped lead the CNPS in a more radical direction when he co-edited (with Alan Wolfe) An End to Political Science: The Caucus Papers (1970). The book was a collection of essays, which proclaimed the end of political science as it was currently taught and practiced in the United States. According to Surkin and Wolfe (1970, 5): “To change political science will require a critique of the current [behavioral-pluralist] paradigm and the development of alternative modes of research, theory, and social practice. The only way this is possible is by ending the hegemony of political science over its students.” The essays in “The Caucus Papers” were largely authored by newly minted assistant professors working at the periphery of the academic establishment, and many of the chapters previewed a wave of forthcoming books that were highly critical of the behavioral-pluralist paradigm and the political science discipline generally. Most of the essays advanced a radical critique of political science, including essays written by self-proclaimed Marxists, socialists, phenomenologists, and radical democrats. Clyde W. Barrow (2017, 454) has called An End to Political Science “the manifesto” of the emergent Caucus for a New Political Science.
Surkin remained an active leader in the CNPS until the 1980s, when he began to drift out of academia to pursue community organizing, urban politics, and adult education. Surkin observes that by this time he “was moving more to the left, no longer teaching political science and very involved in the work I was doing related to the publication of my co-authored book (with Dan Georgakas), Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, A Study in Urban Revolution (1975). Detroit is Surkin’s most influential work even though he wrote it after he left academia. The book recounts how black autoworkers organized their own auto union in the 1970s – the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) in opposition to the white-dominated, and sometimes racially discriminatory United Auto Workers. The book served as the inspiration for the 1999 Film, Finally Got The News-Revolutionary Black Unions in Detroit. Detroit is considered by many to be one of the best books written on the black liberation movement and, as a result, it has gone through three editions in the United States, a British edition, and it was translated into French (2015). Counterpunch listed the book as one of the top 100 books of the twentieth century.
Since 2008, Surkin has been a professor at the Intercultural Open University Foundation, an international non-profit charitable organization that provides distance learning courses to master’s and Ph.D. students in developing countries. Surkin conducts workshops on Workplace and Community Organizing, Urban Political Economy, and Urban Renewal in the U.S.A. and its Significance for Development in the Third World. Dr. Surkin has served as consultant to the New World Foundation, which seeks to help progressive community activists in the United States, Mexico, and around the world build stronger alliances to social justice, civil rights, economic, and electoral issues.
Past Recipients:
2024: Nancy Love, Appalachian State University
2024: Bradley Macdonald, Colorado State University
2023: Adolph L. Reed, Jr., University of Pennsylvania
2023: Victor Wallis, Berklee College of Music
2022: Clyde Barrow, University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley
2022: Judith Grant, Ohio University
2021: Cornel West, Union Theological Seminary
2020: Rosalind Petchesky, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York
2019: Joseph Schwartz, Temple University
2018: Cynthia Enloe, Clark University
2017: Mark Kesselman, Columbia University
2016: V. Spike Peterson, University of Arizona
2015: Terrell Carver, University of Bristol
2014: Timothy Luke, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
2013: Deborah Stone, Dartmouth College
2012: Sanford Schram, Bryn Mawr College
2011: George Katsiaficas, Wentworth Institute of Technology
2010: John Berg, Suffolk University
2009: Laura Olson, Lehigh University
2008: John Ehrenberg, Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus
2006: Carl Boggs, National University
2005: Stephen Bronner, Rutgers University
2004: Frances Piven, CUNY Graduate Center
2003: Michael Parenti, independent scholar
2002: Philip Green, Smith College
2001: Bertell Ollman, New York University\