John Rensenbrink

John C. Rensenbrink (August 30, 1928 – July 30, 2022) was an American political scientist, philosopher, journalist, conservationist, and political activist.

Rensenbrink was born in 1928 in rural Pease, Minnesota, one of seven children of Dutch-American farming parents.

His mother, Effie (Aafje Kooiman), was born in the Netherlands; his father, John Rensenbrink, was the eldest son of Dutch immigrants.

Rensenbrink and his brother Henry operated the dairy farm upon their father's death in 1943.

Unable to attend high school, Rensenbrink took a correspondence course conducted by the American School in Chicago.

He left the farm in 1946 to attend Calvin College, an evangelical college in Grand Rapids, Michigan; his mother and siblings moved to that city the following year.

Rensenbrink studied history, English and philosophy at Calvin and was editor of the college newspaper during his junior and senior years.

He graduated with a BA in 1950.

He then enrolled at the University of Michigan wher he focused primarily on political philosophy, and received a master's degree in political science in 1951.

This was followed by a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the University of Amsterdam from 1951 to 1952.

Shortly after, at the University of Michigan in 1951–52, he joined the Young Republicans, but found himself disgusted with the politics of Joseph McCarthy.

Thereafter, he studied at the University of Chicago, concentrating on political philosophy, American politics, and constitutional law, and completed his Ph.D. in political science from that university in 1956.

His Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Technology and Utopia: the Structure of Freedom".

Rensenbrink began teaching at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1956.

After a year at Coe teaching history and international relations, he taught political philosophy and American government at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, for four years (1957–61).

As he prepared for his first class at Williams in the summer of 1957, Rensenbrink met Carla Washburne in her father's college bookstore in Williamstown.

Carla was a rising Junior at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

They married in June 1959, shortly after her graduation.

They moved to Maine in 1961.

Rensenbrink taught political philosophy and history at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, for one year before taking a job in 1962 for three years as education advisor to the governments of Kenya and Tanzania, sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

He and Carla and their daughters Kathryn and Margaret, (born in Dar es Salaam), aged three and one respectively, returned to Bowdoin College in 1965.

Rensenbrink was promoted to the tenured position of associate professor in 1968 and to full professor in 1974.

The Rensenbrinks' third child, Elizabeth, was born in January 1968.

Rensenbrink spent the first six months of 1983 in Poland, accompanied by his wife and three daughters, as a research professor at the Marie Sklodowska University in Lublin, sponsored jointly by that university and Lock Haven State University in Pennsylvania.

This was during the suppression of the Solidarity movement.

Eluding the watchful eye of the Communist regime's secret police, he researched and studied the sources and shape of social change as represented by Solidarity.

He initiated many organizations, the most prominent of which are the Maine Green Party (1984); the Green Party of the United States (1984–87) for both of which he was a principal founder; and the Cathance River Education Alliance (2000), a hands-on ecological education project for local schools, schoolchildren and high school students in mid-coast Maine.

He wrote his first book, based on that experience, in 1988, published by the University of Louisiana Press, "Poland Challenges a Divided World."

In it he accurately predicted the non-violent overthrow of the Communist regime and the victory of the Solidarity movement, events which surprised the world in 1989 and led rapidly thereafter to the demolition of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Communist regime in Russia.

Following semi-retirement in 1989, Rensenbrink continued teaching at Bowdoin for several years, creating an interdisciplinary seminar for majors in Black, Women's, and Environmental Studies.

Starting in the 1990s, Rensenbrink participated in the International Society for Universal Dialogue (ISUD), founded by Janusz Kuczynski, head of the philosophy department at the University of Warsaw.

He presented several papers at their world Congresses, held every two years, and served as its secretary and vice president before being elected president at the Helsinki Congress in 2005.

Serving as president for two years, he organized the 7th Congress of ISUD at Hiroshima in Japan in 2007.

His presidential address was on cross-cultural dialogue as a major factor in the search for peace.

Rensenbrink delivered one of three keynote addresses to the 11th Congress of ISUD in Warsaw on July 11, 2016.

It was titled, "Co-Evolution—Basis for Inter-Active Dialogue."

Rensenbrink's first foray into politics was a letter-to-the-editor at the age of 14 praising Minnesota's political leader Harold Stassen.

The letter appeared in the Minneapolis Star Journal.

It was the first of many letters to the editor in that newspaper during the next several years.

While in college Rensenbrink participated in a popular campaign to unseat the mayor of Grand Rapids.