George A. Lanyi Papers

George Albert Lanyi, political scientist and educator, was born in Budapest, Hungary on April 30, 1913 to Zsigmond Sziegfried and Renee Sturm Lanyi. He attended Heidelberg, Berlin, and Zurich Universities, and received a B.Sc. (Economics) from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1937. He received an M.A. degree in 1941 and a Ph.D. degree in 1949 from Harvard University in Political Science.

Lanyi served as a teaching fellow and tutor at Harvard from 1941-43 and from 1946-47. World War II, which interrupted his education, led to Lanyi being made a regional expert for Hungary and Yugoslavia in the Office of War Information (OWI) in Washington, D.C. from 1943-45. He resumed teaching at Brown University (1947-50), and he also taught briefly at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (summer 1949) and the University of Vermont (summer 1950). He joined the Arts and Sciences faculty of Oberlin College in 1950 as an Assistant Professor of Political Science; he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1952 and became a full professor in 1958. Dr. Lanyi served as Chairman of the Government Department from 1970-71 and from 1974-76.

Professor Lanyi spent the summer of 1953 in West Germany on behalf of the United States Department of State with the Educational Exchange Program, where he lectured extensively throughout the country. He returned to Germany in 1955 under the program of the American College Council for Summer Study Abroad. In 1955-56, Lanyi did research in England on the actions of Neville Chamberlain and the British policy of appeasement prior to World War II, under a grant from the Fund for the Advancement of Education.

Lanyi was a specialist in both international relations and comparative governmental systems. In 1966 he co-edited (along with William C. McWilliams) the book Crisis and Continuity in World Politics: Readings in International Relations (New York: Random House, 1966).  He wrote extensively, with articles appearing in the American Political Science Review, World Politics, Commonwealth, and the Christian Science Monitor. His teaching at Oberlin covered a wide area of the discipline of political science; courses taught included American governmental systems, comparative parliamentary governments, comparative communist systems, totalitarian governments, and Soviet internal politics. In his later years at Oberlin Lanyi also taught courses concerning the Middle East and its role in world politics. Dr. Lanyi also lectured outside the college classroom, speaking to groups such as the Rotary Club, Women's Club, and the Lorain County Bar Association.

Lanyi consistently carried a heavier-than-average load of classroom instruction. He was also heavily immersed in committee work, serving (using January 1975 as an example) on the Honors at Graduation, Law and Society, Luce Scholarship, Jaszi Lectureship, and Student Assemblies committees. His peers remembered Lanyi as possessing a fierce intellectual desire for truth, combined with an equally fervent respect for diversity of opinion.

On November 10, 1937, George Lanyi married Susan Ann Zsuzsanna Polya (1916-2009) in their native city of Budapest. George and Susan Lanyi had one child, Anthony, who was born in 1939. Educated at Harvard, Anthony Lanyi later became an economist with the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. George Lanyi died in Oberlin, Ohio on February 20, 1981, following a brief illness.