The NAS mourns the passing of James Q. Wilson, its friend, long-time advisor, and monumental figure in American social science.
Jim’s accomplishments were daunting. A graduate of the University of Redlands in California, he received his M.A.(1957) and Ph.D (1959) in Political Science from the University of Chicago. From 1961 until 1987, he taught in the Department of Government at Harvard University, where he held the Henry Lee Shattuck professorship, and where he trained an entire generation of younger scholars. In 1987, he returned to the Southern California of his youth to take up the Collins chair in Management and Public Policy at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management (and pursue his love of scuba diving). Somewhat later he became the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at nearby Pepperdine University.
In 2003 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, returning in his last years to Boston where he served as the first senior fellow at the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy at Boston College.
Jim’s support from our earliest days was no small factor in attracting many other scholars to our banner. A founding member of our California affiliate, he served actively during its formative years as one of its directors and through his wise counsel and interpersonal statesmanship helped it to survive and grow in influence.
Jim, a past president of the American Political Science Association, was never a prisoner of conventional wisdom, but when he spoke established opinion listened. In one case, his famous 1982 “Broken Windows” essay in the Atlantic, which stressed the importance of communal self-perception in law enforcement – one unfixed broken window inevitably leading to others – had an instant impact on American police practice.
Jim was also the author of one of the finest introductory texts in political science that I used when I taught American government courses at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the 1980s. I not only assigned it but learned from it. The section on interest groups in which Jim explained how concentrated interests usually outweighed general ones not only provided a lasting insight for me, but led one of my better students, a seasoned, hard-bitten member of the NYPD to exclaim, “now I finally understand why politics works as it does.” It was one of my greatest moments of teaching satisfaction, thanks to Jim.
Like many I stood in awe of James Q. Wilson, but he was always approachable and unfailingly gracious. Indeed, in career and person he modeled all that American academe once was and might again be, broadly learned, broadly minded, and constructively consequential. For me, and so many others, he lighted a path.
Photo: PBS.org
