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Robin M. Williams Jr. Lecture
This
annual lecture honors the late Robin M. Williams Jr. a past president
of the American Sociological Association, and a member of the National
Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophic Society, who was a
commanding figure in 20th century Sociology. Williams was for much of
his career a named chair at Cornell, then for two decades a Visiting
Professor in UCI’s Sociology Department. He died in 2006 at the
age of 91, an active teacher and publishing scholar to the very end of
his life. Robin was much beloved at UCI. The course he was teaching the
quarter he died was “Altruism and Cooperation,” a course
whose title was synonymous with his nature. Among his most important
professional contributions:
The American Soldier: Adjustment During Army Life (1946), of which he was a co-author (with Samuel Stouffer and others),
The Reduction of Intergroup Tensions (1947),
What College Students Think (1960), and his last and magisterial book,
The Wars Within: Peoples and States in Conflict
(2006). As chair of the National Research Council’s Committee on
the Status of Black Americans, he coauthored with Gerald Jaynes
in 1989 the major report on the NRC’s findings,
A Common Destiny.
This lecture series brings to campus a very senior academic scholar who
is among the world's leading experts on some theme directly related to
Robin’s interests in ethnic conflict, race and inequality, and
military sociology. The inaugural event in this series took place in
academic year 2008-9, a joint lecture on “Race and
Inequality” by two of the nation’s leading African-American
scholars, a past President of the American Sociological
Association, Troy Duster, and Dianne Pinderhughes, a past
President of the American Political Science Association.
