I regard it a special privilege to be invited to participate in this volume honoring Professor Kağıtçıbaşı, whose distinguished career I have followed with admiration since its early stages. In the 1950s, I knew her first as an able graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley. Çiğdem Çizakça, as she was then called, shared my interest in the important though faulted study of The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al. 1950), which had been carried out at Berkeley more than a decade earlier. She thought the negatively valued correlates of authoritarianism in American society would not hold for authoritarianism in Turkey, where authoritarian attitudes were supported by traditional social norms.

In due course, I supervised her doctoral research, in which, against my cautious advice, she undertook a cross-cultural study comparing the responses of Californian and Turkish high school students to the F-scale, the measure of authoritarianism developed by Adorno et al. (ibid.). Before she had completed the analysis of her data, she married Oğuz Kağıtçıbaşı and returned with him to Turkey to take charge of the secondary school in Bursa that her father, just deceased, had established. Her challenges were heightened by the birth of their first child. Naturally, I could not be hopeful about the prospect of her completing the dissertation. Most doctoral students could not have done it under such circumstances. But I didn't really know Çiğdem yet. To my pleasant surprise, she sent me excellent drafts by mail for my comments.