Michael P. Riccards (born October 2, 1944 in Elizabeth, New Jersey) is an American political scientist, writer, administrator, and professor.
Riccards grew up in New Jersey and received his bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. in political science from Rutgers University; he finished his formal studies in 1970.
From that work, he authored the monograph, The Making of the American Citizenry (1973) and an article in the bilingual Belgian journal, Lumen Vitae.
Riccards secured funding for a new science and technology building and planned the Senator Robert C. Byrd Center as part of a renovation of the library.
Riccards convinced then-Governor William Weld to support construction of a new physical education building and committed it to community use.
Riccards wrote a history of the College Board, and successfully lobbied Congress to increase its Advanced Placement subsidy to $25 million.
He published a volume of his collected plays, and one of them on Lincoln became a musical produced by Genevieve Fraser on behalf of the Drama Circle in Massachusetts (2012).
He has written four volumes of fiction on Italian American life, later compressed into The Ordinary Duties of the Day and Growing Up Jersey, generally set in his hometown of Madison, NJ.
One of his books on the early presidency was cited in an opinion by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
His son, Patrick, is an education reform advocate and CEO of the Driving Force Institute, having formerly served as an aide to three U.S. senators and one U.S. representative.