Henry Matthew Drucker (29 April 1942 – 30 October 2002) was an American political scientist and university fund-raiser, who spent the entirety of his professional career in the United Kingdom.
[2] Upon receiving his degree he moved to the United Kingdom to begin postgraduate research under the supervision of Maurice Cranston at the London School of Economics, graduating in 1967 with a PhD in political philosophy.
[4] Spurning the opportunity to return to the United States, Drucker was appointed as a lecturer in politics at the University of Edinburgh in the same year he completed his doctorate.
Drucker's lectures were well attended and he was noted for introducing new teaching techniques, such as leading groups of students on reconnaissance missions during important parliamentary by-elections to gather on-the-spot data and meet party campaigners.
[2][6] In the 1970s and early 1980s he was also a regular commentator on BBC Scotland's election night television programmes, where his Scots-inflected American accent and mutton-chop whiskers distinguished him from his fellow guests.
Arriving the following year, Drucker was initially installed in a small room in the university's Agricultural Economics Unit, with only two desks and a filing cabinet as furnishings.
"[11] All of these were serious shortcomings: the university was at that time facing a "severe financial crisis",[2] and without even a database of alumni (due in no small part to its collegiate structure) it was difficult to envisage how it could emulate its American Ivy League rivals in raising the amount of money it needed from donations.
[13] Despite its success, however, Drucker's reputation in Oxford was not necessarily positive: reservations about "American" methods of fund-raising, together with a common belief that his public pronouncements went beyond his remit, made him an "outsider" among the university's dons.
[19] It was Drucker's continuing support for Labour, alongside his fund-raising expertise, that led to him being appointed by the party in 1996 to raise money for its general election campaign the following year.
Drucker suffered increasing health problems throughout his final decade, and two heart bypass operations encouraged him to scale down his professional activities.
It was while attending a meeting at the offices of the housing charity Shelter on 30 October 2002 that he suffered a cardiac arrest, dying shortly thereafter at the Royal London Hospital.