IU professor’s family, friends gather to celebrate Prize

Elinor Ostrom hasn’t had a vacation since 1973.

Her current trip to Europe is no different as she delivered a lecture Tuesday morning, will receive the Nobel Prize for Economics on Thursday in Stockholm and will meet with global leaders at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen on Sunday.

“She doesn’t take time off. She just doesn’t,” said David Price, front office receptionist at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, which Ostrom co-founded with her husband Vincent in 1973.

“As much as she travels, it’s never for pleasure ... Mostly she’s working – because that’s what she loves,” Price said. “That’s what makes her happy.”

Ostrom and her husband own a cabin in Canada where they used to spend one or two months in the summer, Price said. But this was only what Ostrom called a “writing retreat.”

Since winning the Nobel Prize in October, Ostrom has made working and staying involved at the workshop a priority.

“She’s very grounded in what has contributed to her success and what is important to her. Teaching is a huge priority. ... She is interacting with her students in both learning from them and teaching them what she knows,” said Jacqui Bauer, assistant director at the workshop.

The time Ostrom has put into the workshop shows on the Tuesday morning of her Nobel lecture. A basement classroom in the workshop is filled with people sitting in the old wooden chairs.

However, there isn’t the usual scribbling of notes. The blackboard still shows models from Monday’s lectures. Instead, friends and colleagues have gathered to watch Ostrom deliver the 30-minute speech to summarize almost half a century’s worth of work.

“I remember that morning waking up and hearing that she’d won. ... They had already been dealing with it for a couple hours,” Bauer said. “While I knew that it was going to be a little hectic and there would be some excitement, I did not at all anticipate that it would change the whole content of my day, and my week, and my next two weeks. I didn’t understand how much that would impact me personally. All of us didn’t anticipate it.”

Fourteen colleagues traveled to Sweden with Ostrom. They include IU President Michael McRobbie, co-directors of the workshop political science professor Michael McGinnis and economics professor Jimmy Walker, and long-time co-worker Patty Lezotte.

One person noticeably missing from the trip is Vincent Ostrom.

Instead, the 90-year-old sat conspicuously in the middle of the crowd of students and colleagues Tuesday wearing a bright red windbreaker and hat. His fingers are curled around the edge of the wooden table, knobbed cane lying across it, as he watched his wife deliver her Nobel Prize lecture via live feed from Stockholm.

“I’m used to seeing her on the stage, and she does a marvelous job. She won the Nobel Prize,” Vincent Ostrom said, clapping to demonstrate his support. “She just does better work than I do. She had a book called ‘Governing the Commons.’ She did the book; I suggested the title.”

Students laughed at Vincent Ostrom’s quip because he is his own celebrity at the workshop as students ask for photos with him after the lecture. He has served as co-director of the workshop, a professor of political science and founding director.

Elinor Ostrom dedicated her most widely recognized scholarly work “Governing of the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action” to her husband. It reads “To Vincent, for his love and contestation.”

“We’ve always been colleagues, and we’re still colleagues. She’s not only a wife, she’s a colleague and we work together,” Vincent Ostrom said, raising two fingers to represent their bond. “We work together and I think that her work is going to amount to more in our lifetime than my work.”

“But it’s two together,” he said, leaning his knobbed wooden cane against his leg and raising his two fingers again.