Remembering Professor Emeritus Theodore Marmor, 1939–2026
Emeritus professor Theodore Marmor was a leading authority on welfare state politics and author of the seminal book The Politics of Medicare.
An internationally recognized authority on healthcare and social policy and a pioneer in the field of welfare state politics in North America and Western Europe, Theodore “Ted” Marmor died on July 24, 2026. He taught at Yale SOM, Yale Law School, and the university’s department of political science.
Marmor joined the Yale faculty in 1979 and was appointed to the SOM faculty as Professor of Public Management and Political Science in 1982. For four years, he and his wife Jan lived in Calhoun College (now Grace Hopper College) as resident faculty, and mentored students under the administration of Charles T. Davis and Dean Eustace Theodore. After retiring from Yale in 2007, Marmor taught public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government from 2007 to 2009. Earlier in his career, he was a professor at the University of Chicago, from 1973 to 1979. And he served as a centennial visiting professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science from 2001 to 2003.
Born in New York City on February 24, 1939, Marmor earned his bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1960; attended Wadham College, Oxford, from 1961 to 1962; and then returned to Harvard, earning his doctoral degree in 1966. He began his career as a special assistant to Wilbur Cohen, the U.S. secretary of health, education, and welfare, in the mid-1960s, and was a member of the team that launched Medicare under President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966. The program’s history and politics would animate Marmor’s scholarship for the rest of his life.
Over the course of his distinguished career in public service, Marmor advised Vice Presidents Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale, served as a senior policy advisor to Mondale during the 1984 presidential campaign, and was a member of President Jimmy Carter’s Commission for a National Agenda for the Eighties. He was a Fellow of the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and the British Academy.
Marmor authored or co-authored 13 books and nearly 200 scholarly articles and book chapters. But he was best known for The Politics of Medicare, first published in 1970, with a second edition in 2000 and a third forthcoming in 2027. As Jacob Hacker, the Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science and a resident fellow at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies, observed, the book continues to be “one of the best books ever written about public policy.” He added that, with it, Marmor “essentially created the field of health politics” and attracted scholars like Hacker himself to pursue degrees and research at Yale. In addition to being a “brilliant scholar,” Hacker reflected, Marmor was also a “generous mentor.”
As a teacher and mentor, Marmor “urged his students to question ‘fads, fallacies and foolishness’ (the name of another of his landmark books) in policy making and probe deeper in an issue by encouraging lively debate and fresh thinking,” said Dane Neller, a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School. Marmor was also generous with his time. John Pakutka ’92 recalled that Marmor “opened up his office, his dinner table, even his spare bedrooms to students and colleagues who wanted to learn from and collaborate with him.” With his help, “hundreds got jobs or gained admission to higher levels of education,” he said.
Jerry Mashaw, Sterling Professor Emeritus and professional lecturer at Yale Law School, remarked that Marmor’s work with students has had an enduring impact, noting that his mentees’ scholarship “bears his imprint.” He said, “The energy that he poured into paper and thesis supervision and into commentary on work in progress long after those students embarked on their own careers is legendary.” Hacker concurs, adding: “Through what he wrote and what he taught, the publications he authored, and the people he guided, Ted will continue to cast a bright light on fundamental questions of politics, policy, and precarity well into the next century.”
At SOM, as one of its earliest faculty members, Marmor contributed to the school’s evolution, noted Jeffrey Garten, who served as the school's dean from 1995 to 2005. “He was enormously helpful to me when I arrived as an inexperienced dean, and I’ll always be grateful to him for that,” said Garten.
In addition to his scholarly pursuits, Marmor co-founded the Crescent Group, a consulting firm, with former student Pakutka, and often served as an expert witness in cases ranging from the constitutionality of the Canada Health Act to asbestos disputes and drug pricing fraud. He was known to his friends and colleagues as a lover of wine, squash, and fly fishing.
Marmor is survived by his daughter, Sarah Marmor, his granddaughters, Nina and Ava Holl, his sister, Barbara Marmor, and his second wife, Kieke Okma. Jan S. Marmor, his wife of over 40 years, died in 2003, and his older daughter, Laura Marmor, died in 2025. A celebration of the life of Theodore R. Marmor will take place in New York City in September.
